The Shadow of Shared Trauma: Bahareh Sahebi on Authoritarianism, Grief and the Iranian Diaspora
Therapist ConfidentialShow Notes
Before Dr. Bahareh Sahebi checks her calendar each morning, she checks the news from Iran, and so do many of her clients. In this episode, host Travis Heath talks with Dr. Sahebi, a clinical psychologist, licensed marriage and family therapist, and co-author of the Integrative Systemic Therapy Handbook, about how collective trauma and authoritarian systems don’t just harm people, they reorganize them: their nervous systems, relationships, identities, and sense of the future.
Dr. Sahebi explains why the old clinical question, “what happened to you?”, increasingly needs to become “what is still happening around you?”, and why realities like war, political violence, and forced migration don’t stay outside the therapy room, they enter with the emotional climate clients carry in. Drawing on her own experience as an Iranian American, she makes the case for a systemic, politically aware model of trauma-informed care.
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