today you woke up

looked at yourself in the mirror

and said:

i am a beautiful revolution

i am alive

and i can love myself,

and i can begin.

again.

AVA

hello! ¡hola! pialli. my name is Paloma.

I am a licensed clinical social (justice) worker (MSW, LICSW) and Registered Expressive Arts Therapist (REAT). I am an approved clinical supervisor and adjunct lecturer at the University of Washington. I teach BA and MSW level social work courses. I also offer immigration evaluations, end-of-life planning, community healing for non-profit community organizations, state and county social services providers, other healers, and Seattle high schools. 

I have over 27 years of experience in community and care work including, working in government and non-profit social services, community supportive living and caregiving, grassroots organizing, intimate partner/interpersonal violence/abuse shelters, vulnerable adult abuse investigation, community violence prevention, supporting unhoused and sexually exploited youth services and unhoused substance using folks, mental health court, psychiatric abuse awareness, disability services, disability justice, independent living centers, co-chairing a city human rights commission, restorative justice, victim/offender mediation, intergroup dialogues facilitator, mixed race, bi-cultural and intersectional identity exploration, queer, disability, neurodivergent affirming and cultura-centered healing, abolition, anti-oppression, and racial justice practices in social justice work

I am a queer-cis (she/ella) Xicana. A nepantlera. A deeply rooted Nuevamexicana, Indo-Hispaña Norteña, a borderlands mestiza con herencia de Mexicana, Tlaxcalteca, Chichimeca, Tēpēhuanih herencia. I spend my time traversing between Seattle, Washington and New Mexico, the tierra sagrada of mis raíces. I live with invisible disability related to a chronic and progressive autoimmune illness and find my kin in queerly disabled and healing justice grounded community. I am an artist, a weaver, writer, poet, a chistosa, a land tender, food grower, an animal nurturer, a collective dreamer, a deep thinker, a water protector and healing justice luchadora.

My own journey of healing continues and is my commitment to myself and other beings. Healing from complex trauma, medical and psychiatric abuse, and tending to the ways intergenerational and historical trauma has moved in my lineages is not a linear or simple journey. We are all journeying in our own ways and are guided deeply by our own wisdoms and connections. I take the work of my own healing and knowing my center and practicing my practices, healing as ceremony, as seriously as I take yours. Healing is a sacred space, a vulnerable space, that requires deep presence and intention, humility, and building trust with each other and our practices. I honor this unique space and relationship of healing with care and move in gratitude. and intention. I honor that showing up for you means I must continue to show up for me and be the practices, the values, the learnings that I offer and the words I speak. My cultural, somatic, and expressive art practices keep me humble, curious, centered, and connected to this healing I believe so deeply in the creative sometimes painful. also joyful, journeying our healing entails. Every being is deserving of healing and care.

Healing cannot a by-pass of our lived realities. Our lives and present experiences shape us, our wounds, and also our healings. We hold contradiction and we can learn to embody what is means to move with this while finding and trusting our centers of wisdom, while tending hope as we grieve, cultivating joy with rest, and meeting ourselves within and attuned to our bodies, minds, and spirits, just where we are at, without judgement and with playful and inquisitive curiosity. A healing journey has the potential to hold us in our deepest humanity and relationality with other earth kin and each other, as we as we struggle, challenge, voice up, truth tell, deconstruct, de/internalize and resist pathology, contextualize, imagine, dream differently and “(re)right, (re)write, (re)rite” (Cutcha Risling Baldy). I believe in healing as our deepest and fiercest resistance to oppression, it is survivance, it is a way to continue healing for our cultural and community thrivance that moves beyond survival, that leaves evidence of our power, and works towards liberation in the practices of embodied reclamation, metamorphic transformation, (re)membering and (r)evolution.

“Healing makes room for us to fight in the places where it is necessary and love in the places we long to” -Prentis Hemphill

What I Value and How I Practice

I am deeply to committed to and center my work with the communities that raised me, that call me kin, and lead me home, that I have grown and continue to learn with and hold me, and that I feel fierce with. I primarily support Xicanx, IndoHispañ@, Latine, Indigenous, Native, First Nations peoples, multiethnic and bi-racial BIPoC folks, people who move across many fronteras, crossing socio-political, geographies, experiences, and realities of unjust limitations or confinements and committed to people who find resource and grounding in their cultural practices, herencia, earth and other than human kin and people who find home in many places or have to leave homelands for survival and out of survivance. I am disability justice and anti-ableist centered healer, coming from my own experiences of disability, being raised by intergenerational disabled caregivers, and over 27 years of community love and activism in collaboration with disabled and neurodivergent peoples. As a cis-queer Xicana, I am a nepantlera, the geographies and wisdoms I have continued to traverse, while feeling rooted in the liminal spaces and waters as a unique learning space of being-ness. I am fierce in disrupting binaries and harms of heteronormativity, racism, ableism, and the existence/persistence of coloniality and its layered harms. I honor and am fiercely affirming of 2SLGBTQIA+ folx and in particular trans, gender fluid, non-binary, gender non-conforming, questioning folx and the gratitude of witnessing each individual in their unique journey and honoring as sacred the healing that occurs at the intersections of all the multiple identity experiences we may have.

I am grounded in the work of tending to all the ways coloniality has been and continues to impact wellness and healing. Tending to decoloniality in therapy and healing is a task I take up with support from mentors, elders, other healers, community, writers, artists and academics. At the root it is the way I hold and support the healing journey and support you in contextualizing your needs in health and wellness. I ground my self in pluriversal, interconnected and reciprocal knowledges, relational intentionality to continually disrupts and understand how coloniality takes shape and the ways we resist it for our healing. I resist and persist to dismantle the harmful systems rooted in racist, earth exploiting, colonial thinking. I follow guidance from Indigenous psychologies, liberation psychologies, community psychologist, non-academic brilliant thinkers, disability justice, abolition movements, cultura cura, barrio medicines, poets and artists, activists, earth and animal wisdoms, and ancestors.

I do not believe in pathologizing any aspect of our being or experiences, instead seek to understand and be with complexity and context by which our healing takes place. I practice healing that attunes to somatic wisdom, is creative and expressive, is founded in practices of slowing, listening, and deep curiosity. I seek to offer practices that I have been in practice of in my own healing. Healing that calls our wounded spirit home from wandering (dis-association, susto) and allows us to reclaim an embodied querencia the lands reside that live within, and we feel into our most authentic self, the places we find sanctuary, how we are able to connect with our deeper wisdom-strengths, and gifts, and the ways we honor the survivance, radical resilience, and healing within our lineages, our ancestors, our lands, at our multiple identity intersections, and among our cultura.

I am a fiercely politicized as a healer. This means we are holding healing in history and context. I am grounded in community wisdom and place my trust in the ever-evolving pluralvisions of our people and the earth. I practice generative practices that hold the sole intention to be for decolonial wellness. My work is Xicanx, Indigenous, and ecologies grounded, it is healing for liberation and you-oriented transformation. As a social justice worker and clinical activist, I have deep knowing of and do not believe in these systems that harm, only in their inevitable dismantling and new visions that will come of this. I view the healing journey as a birthright, an ancestral continuum; practices for individuals, connected to community, sacred, messy, complex, challenging, and beautiful, opening of the pathways towards both personal and collective transformative change.

I support healing in all the ways healing happens; tending to the personal, spiritual, somatic, expressive, creative, embodied, the forgotten, the re-membered, the silenced, what haunts, the loudness, the historical, political, economic, social, and tending to the awareness of how coloniality is insidious and how we navigate, refuse the oppressive contexts, by which we are living in and do our healing work in - all this and us in our unique healing wisdoms are the shapes of our journeys.

I offering healing that meets you - where you desire to be met. My offerings are multimodal, culturally integrative, somatically attuned, and creative, expressive centered. My approaches include plática/narrative/cuentista ways of telling, creative/expressive arts, somatic experiencing, somatic abolition, sensorimotor psychotherapy, EMDR, grounded in plural-wisdoms of Xicanx, Indigenous peoples, Liberation psychology, Community psychology and Eco-psychology. See some of the books and art that guides me HERE

Academics

Currently pursuing a PhD in decolonial Depth Psychology with a focus on Indigenous, Community, Liberation & Eco Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA.

Master of Social Work (MSW) focus on Community Centered Integrative Practice and Multicultural Mental Health, University of Washington, Seattle WA. June 2014,

BA in Ethnic Studies, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. June 2008,

BA in History, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. June 2008,

License

Licensed Clinical Social Worker, License # LW61167644, Washington State

Registered Expressive Arts Therapist, International Expressive Arts Therapy Association

Certifications

Body Trust Professional Training. Center for Body Trust (2024)

Expressive Arts Therapy Certificate, Northwest Creative and Expressive Arts Institute (2019)

Somatic Experiencing Somatic Experiencing International (3 years) (2020 – 2023)

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute (2 years) (2020 – 2021)

Somatic Stress Release, The Embody Lab (2023)

Embodied Transformation & Liberation, The Embody Lab (2022)

Somatic Attachment & Healing ,The Embody Lab 2022)

EMDR I & II Certificate, EMDR Institute (2019 - 2020)

EMDR and Expressive Arts Certificate, Institute for Creative Mindfulness (2022 - 2023)

WPATH Gender Affirming Letter Writing, Washington State Society for Clinical Social Work (2022)

Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, International Association of Trauma Professionals, (2019)

Psychodynamic Clinical Theory and Practice Certification, Wellspring Family Services, (1 year) (2017)

Lifespan Integration I & II, Lifespan Integration Institute (2019)

Professional Mediation Certificate, University of Oregon, School of Law (2006)

Crisálida is a metaphor for healing. I choose the name crisálida for my practice, meaning chrysalis in Spanish, because healing is a slow and steady and sometimes messy and disorienting, process of transformation. Mariposas or butterflies, engage in their process of transformation, while being held in their crisálida (cocoon). They transform, wholly, from one being into another, but maintain who they are of their deepest knowing. In their crisálida they are vulnerable and yet able to be in the mucky, messy, goo of change, to eventually become something different. Healing and transformation is not simple, it is rarely quick, and we cannot simply intellectualize it. The change through an embodied process helps us to learn to know (again, more) how to trust our own inherent power, and follow our ancestral and earth interconnected wisdom. Butterflies remain their essential self throughout the process, but also become something sweetly and powerfully different. A healing space should also feel like a crisálida; a place where the changes happening are centered on your needs, a place that is safe-enough, a space that allows you to attune to your ancestral. communal, embodied and unique wisdoms that unearth and remind you of what you need and have to make this radical and vulnerable transformation. Healing often feels like liminal spaces and can be difficult, confusing and uncomfortable. It is also sacred. While there tends to be a lot of grief leaving one way of being for another, and it often feels strange as it affects every part of us as we are learning new ways of being, we also have capacity to heal and to become who we are meant to be. Find a healer that can co-create a space with you that feels like your crisálida. Someone who you feel can hold that sacred, safe-enough, and you-centered, sentipensar (thinking-feeling), and homecoming to the embodied space, to be in your messy and muck as you become who you were meant to be, with the wisdom that you already know.