wellnesswithkini, Oakland, CA (2025)

09/26/2025

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It’s been a rough couple of weeks…
…couple of months…
…couple of years…
…decades…

And if you’re anything like me, you have the following thoughts keeping you up at night:
- is this it for our world?
- will this ever get better?
- are we doomed to live in a world full of hate, forever?
- how much worse can this get?

Lately, I feel every emotion taking turns bombarding my spirit: fear, anger, grief, hope, repeat.

Trying to survive political, societal, and cultural climates like the one we are in is exhausting at best, soul crushing at worst. (Let’s be real—it’s always the soul crushing. I’d take “just exhausting” atp.)

It is taking everything in me to not melt into a puddle of despair and hopelessness—allowing the hatred of this world to have its way with me.

This is why it is imperative to have a strategy for surviving these times and keeping yourself fueled for this continued fight.

When you feel helpless, hopeless, and like nothing you do matters because hatred (and white supremacy) will continue to have its way, refer back to this post. (Save it now!) Remind yourself if the power you do have—not only in how you care for yourself, but how you show up in community.

The power remains in us. Every day we show up committed to community, joy, rest, and activism is resistance. We must believe that resistance WILL lead us to victory someday—even if we aren’t here to see it.

My book, We’ll All Be Free, helps with this, too. If you’re looking for practical, tangible ways to break up with this toxic society personally AND collectively, this book will equip you to do just that. (Available wherever books are sold.)

At the very least, save this post, share with your community, and comment more strategies and encouragements below. We will get through this.

09/17/2025

YESSSSS to all of this!! And the absolute necessity to share this information that is not talked about enough.

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🧬 Epigenetics is Ancestral Science
What Western researchers now call epigenetics…the way trauma and resilience are carried in our DNA our ancestors already knew as blood memory.

✍🏾:
🎨:

09/04/2025

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Simple, powerful, & true🫶🏼

08/29/2025

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It’s okay if you don’t always know what you need; that’s part of being human.

When you’re overwhelmed, your brain can go blank. These questions help you gently reconnect to yourself and figure out where to start.

Clarity doesn’t always come right away, but small moments of self-compassion often point you in the right direction.
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08/26/2025

.maalouf
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The DSM is often treated like the ultimate authority on mental health. But it is not neutral. It reflects Western, white, and capitalist values, and that makes it deeply flawed.
• Built on research with white men as the “default”
• Excludes cultural healing because it is not funded or “approved”
• Labels coping and grief traditions in non-Western cultures as “disorders”
• Focuses on getting people “functional” for capitalism instead of addressing systemic harm
• Erases colonial and collective trauma by focusing only on individuals

The DSM can be a tool, but it is not the truth.
Real healing must also include:
• Cultural wisdom
• Collective care
• Systemic awareness
• Practices beyond Western frameworks

Save and share if you know mental health cannot be defined by just one cultural lens.

08/20/2025

I am honored to be this year’s Washington Marriage and Family Therapy Conference Keynote in Seattle 9/19-9/20.

This year’s theme is: Systemic Futures: Creative Approaches to Dialogue and Healing
Conference Workshop Tracks (50-minute sessions)
1. Expanding Systemic Therapy
2. Healing the Healers: Self-Care, Resilience, and Growth
3. Advocacy, Justice, and Systemic Change

Get a sense of what to expect at this years conference from the keynote speakers: https://lnkd.in/gvqWD6DM

08/18/2025

❤️ A heartfelt thank you and appreciation to CMH core faculty and Academic Administrative support team for their presence, connection, contribution to our annual CMH retreat and new student orientation in the Santa Cruz Mountains!

💎 Our students were able to lean in, reflect, release, and allow nature to hold them in care and respite. There were so many gems from the weekend- beautiful story telling, gentle moments of acknowledgment, individual bonding moments with one another, laughter and joy, and uplifting lightness. And most importantly a container of reciprocity that facilitated compassionate learning and listening. I was very moved by the way cohort 19 showed up with cohesion and care for one another.

📕 As we moved into Sunday afternoon, we welcomed our INCOMING FALL 2025 COHORT 20!! The day consisted of a cross-cohort luncheon mixer, faculty and student community builder, and new student orientation essentials. I was impressed by cohort 20 right off the bat! They were insightful, collaborative, engaged, eager to learn, and asked great questions!!

💖 In addition we had some alumni attend through work exchange. The purpose is for alumni to be able to receive the benefits from the retreat while in service.
Victoria(cohort 15) and Ehlan(cohort 15), our alumni were incredible! Both ran beautiful and resonate workshops on Saturday. Dani(cohort 9), came for work exchange to help with meals and necessary tasks. Dani expressed that she really needed this and was feeling more relaxed and ready to go back and tackle her work in community mental health.

I hope all will be able to get some rest this next week as we ease into a beautiful start to the semester!!!! ♥️🌲✨

07/29/2025

is absolutely right that this is typically how graduate school and training goes for counseling psychology.

I am so proud of the fact that our graduate program Community Mental Health Program integrates developmental trauma, intergenerational trauma, systems based trauma, attachment wounding, colonization and land displacement trauma, and more as part of our core curriculum in training students through a liberatory lens. Students get the opportunity to learn through didactic and experiential skill development to tap into the dedicate and nuanced challenges of various forms of trauma. They are also equipped to work with diverse populations particularly BIPOC & LGBTQ+ children, teens, adults and families.

Our graduates leave the program ready to work in Community Mental Health to serve and support clients with the highest need.

06/23/2025

Make a stand. We have been and continue to be in turbulent times. The trajectory looks bleak, but we have to maintain hope and keep fighting. ....................................................................
I know we all have days when we hit a WALL.
When we just wanna give up cause we feel like we have tried our best in the RESISTANCE,
When we FIGHT,
HOLD our ground,
do what is RIGHT,
SPEAK up,
take ACTION,
LOVE and nurture,
take CARE of ourselves,
GRIEVE losses,
TOLERATE disappointment and rejection,
STAY on our path,
stay POSITIVE,
stay CONNECTED,
be AUTHENTIC and EMBRACE our TRUE selves,
see our own BEAUTY even when the WORLD shuts it down.
It is just too damn much and I wanna give up and say “F**K IT!” BUT THEN I remember... this is bigger than me or you. This is for our future generations and for the world 🌎. I won’t give up until I die. Long live the revolution Viva la revolucion! 革命萬歲

06/21/2025

Food for thought on Liberation Psychology and Transformation

Liberation psychology was first articulated in the 1980’s by Ignacio Martín-Baró, a Spanish born Jesuit and social psychologist working in El Salvador. He framed this orientation as one that seeks to develop and encourage understanding and practices that can support people’s desires and actions to create a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world (Rosado, 2007).

Martín-Baró envisioned a psychology that would acknowledge the psychological and community wounding caused by war, racism, poverty, and violence; a psychology that would support historical memory and critical reflection; and a psychology that would aid in the emergence of possibilities where people could creatively make sense of and respond to the world. What we reach for, according to Martín-Baró, “is an opening—an opening against all closure, flexibility against everything fixed, elasticity against rigidity, a readiness to act against all stagnation” (Rosado, 2007, p. 183). When I visualize elasticity, it has a structure that is containing and also has the ability to extend.

Who we are in the present moment contains a kernel of something ideal in the future: “hunger for change, affirmation of what is new, life in hope” (Rosado, 2007, p.183). Psychology should be able to support this opening and learn from the all sides(past and present). It isn’t always easy to maintain hope when we are surrounded by suffering. How do you stay connected in your purpose to pave the path for this hope?

Raúl Quiñones Rosado. (2007). Consciousness-in-action : toward an integral psychology of liberation & transformation. Ilé Publication

06/21/2025

.therapist
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Attachment styles are something I LOVE looking at in my relationships as well as within my client’s relationships. They can be a wildly helpful framework for understanding our wounds, behavior and feelings in the context of relationship and even within ourselves. HOWEVER. I have always felt like it was a little incomplete. Yes, our caregivers and their parenting styles impacted us. But what drove those parenting styles? What shaped their attachment style to us? Was it inherent, systemic, or both? Read through these slides and tell me what you think below.⁠
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Let’s center justice in our healing work.⁠
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06/16/2025

There are very few counseling psychology programs that are foundationally embedded in liberatory and decolonizing psychotherapy pedagogy. We prepare students and graduates with the clinical counseling skills necessary to create systemic and individual social change and healing.

I chose to be the chair of the Masters in Counseling, Community Mental Health concentration because healers are needed now more than ever in this political climate.

Sometimes people ask me, is psychotherapy political? If you are doing systems based psychotherapy which I think all therapy should be, yes. And for those most deeply impacted by systemic and institutionalized oppression, ABSOLUTELY. And for those who are not directly impacted, it is worth considering the privilege that comes with the choice to be silent.

We don’t live in a vacuum, trauma is not in a vacuum. Healing is not in a vaccum. We are interconnected and impacted by capitalism, patriarchy, inequality, discrimination, racism, xenophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, etc. It is embedded in US culture.

So yes, I absolutely feel strongly about our program because it is psychotherapy, activism, and resistance. It is one way we can combat the current climate and heal wounds. We as a collective, need to heal together and take care of one another.

wellnesswithkini

09/26/2025

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