Many diaspora clients present as high-functioning, motivated, and outwardly capable. Yet, they carry a quiet, persistent sense of fragmentation that standard frameworks struggle to name. What looks like anxiety, avoidance, or flat affect in the therapy room may, in fact, be something else entirely: cultural dissociation: the internal rupture that occurs when parts of the self are exiled to survive the demands of belonging across cultures.  

Drawing on Welcome Home: Healing Trauma and Reclaiming Wholeness, this session introduces a culturally grounded, parts-based framework to understand how cultural dissociation presents, how it is often misread, and how narrative and parts work can offer a more attuned path to formulation and intervention.