How I can Help

Hi, I’m Lara, and I offer somatic therapy and emotional release. I have worked with clients worldwide to help them navigate the challenges of migration. It has been a recent calling of mine to start offering these sessions in groups.

If you are interested to learn more about the modalities I work with, kindly click the button below.

The Challenges of Migration

First-Generation Migrants(Those Who Moved Countries Themselves)

People migrate for various reasons and face a wide range of complex challenges. Common experiences of moving countries include:

• Constant adaptation to new systems, norms, and expectations

• Culture shock, or feeling split between two worlds.

• Overworking or overachieving to create stability or security because of Visa insecurity, bureaucracy, legal stress, or financial instability.

• Code-switching between languages, identities, or behaviours.

• Language barriers affecting confidence, communication, or self-expression.

• Navigating racism, xenophobia, or discrimination.

If this is you, then you’ve probably experienced:

• Grief, for example grieving a homeland that may have changed or no longer feels accessible).

• Difficulty feeling safe, settled, or fully at home. Maybe you feel homesick, uprooted or disconnected from home. You never truly feel rooted or rested because of financial or legal uncertainty.

• Hypervigilance and chronic stress from survival mode. At the root of it is fear of uncertainty, and chronic worry about the future. You feel emotionally exhausted from constantly adapting and the pressure to succeed to make “the sacrifice worth it”.

• Loneliness and social isolation because at the core of it all, The process of rebuilding social networks and support systems from scratch feels taxing.

• Feeling unseen, misunderstood, or “othered” you have lost a sense of belonging, ritual, cultural rhythm, and community connection.

• Guilt for leaving family, culture, or community behind. Survivor’s guilt …

• Identityconfusion as you’ve learnt to suppress parts of yourself to assimilate or “fit in”. Maybe you’ve needed to repeatedly reinvention yourself in new environments to survive.

• Shame or embarrassment around language barriers or cultural differences.

• Overburdened by responsibility because you’ve stepped into the parentified role and carry the emotional/financial responsibility for family back home.

• Somatic symptoms such as tension, fatigue, digestive issues, insomnia, or nervous system dysregulation, or other health issues.

Second-Generation Migrants (Children of migrants born or raised in the host country)

There are specific challenges if you are second-generation migrant. If this is you, then you’ve probably experienced:

• Cultural Polarisation within you from growing up between two cultural worlds simultaneously. You’ve probably felt pressure to remain connected to your roots while also adapting to the dominant culture you live in. You may feel “not enough” for both cultures at the same time.

• Guilt when desires, lifestyle, or values differ from family expectations. For example, when navigating internal conflict from polarisation between individual freedom and collective/family duty, or when navigating intergenerational clashes around relationships, career, sexuality, autonomy, or emotional expression.

• Carrying the emotional weight of parents’ sacrifices and family expectations, feeling responsible for making the migration “worth it” through achievement or success.

• Struggling with your sense of identity as separate from family survival narratives.

• Carrying unspoken family grief, fear, or trauma without always understanding its origin because you’ve inheriting survival-based coping mechanisms while living in a different social reality than parents.

Third-Generation Migrants (Grandchildren of migrants)

If this is you, then you’ve probably experienced:

• Longing for a sense of lineage, continuity, or deeper belonging. You’ve probably romanticised or idealised ancestral culture because of distance from lived reality

• Grief from intergenerational silence around displacement, war, migration, or survival experiences, and loss of language, rituals, stories, traditions, or direct connection to homeland, or cultural and ancestral disconnection.

• Identity struggles from growing up with fragmented or incomplete family history, or questioning what parts of identity were lost, adapted, or assimilated across generations, and so you try to reclaim or reconnect with heritage later in life.

• Feeling emotionally distant from cultural identity while still shaped by it, or feeling rootless despite being geographically settled.

No Matter Where You Belong Here, The Imprint Of Migration Still Lives Within You.

Epigenetic Studies

There is growing research on the epigenetic of humans and animals that highlight the effects of stress on future generations.

A longitudinal study (Smeeth et al., 2024) followed 1,507 Syrian refugee children and adolescents living in tented settlements in Lebanon, aged 6–19. They were assessed twice, about a year apart, and saliva was collected for DNA analysis.

They found that children exposed to more war had different patterns of DNA marks, and these patterns were mostly different from those previously found in studies of childhood trauma.

Another research from the Dutch Hunger Winter study (Tobi et al., 2014) followed women who were pregnant during the famine in the Netherlands during World War II. These women experienced extreme starvation.

What researchers discovered was that the children, and even grandchildren, who were not born during the famine itself showed higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, metabolic conditions, and emotional or psychological difficulties. The offsprings bodies were still responding as though scarcity and danger were still present.

This means that your stress, trauma, safety, nourishment, relationships, and environment in your environment might activate the expression of genes you’ve carried within your DNA across generations. In simpler terms, if your environment is stressful or you are experiencing ongoing stress, this will activate the stress response you have inherited from your family lineage. This includes how the body responds and adapts, emotionally, physically, as well as behaviourally.

Inheriting unconscious family nervous system patterns around safety, scarcity, belonging, or emotional suppression linked to survival states from migration or displacement is real.

But here’s the catch. The study also revealed that when future generations were raised in supportive environments, with access to safety, connection, and care, many of these epigenetic patterns shift. Stress-free and healing environments changed gene expression not only for individuals, but potentially for future generations as well. The body could adapt again.

While we may inherit patterns of survival, stress, or trauma, we hold the capacity to break the pattern through nurturing environments, relationships, communities, and developing a strong capacity for repair after rupture.

This means that you don’t need direct experiences of trauma from war and migration to show biological changes associated with those experiences. However, these changes can be reversible.

The Lebanese, Palestinian, & Syrian Diaspora - The Why Behind This Work

The people of Lebanon, Palestine, & Syria have lived through an immense amount of stress from years of wars and conflict. Life experiences and environments influence the expression of our genes. This is the essence of epigenetics.

I am focusing my work on Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian diasporas because these communities have experienced prolonged histories of war, displacement, occupation, political violence and forced migration, while also maintaining strong connections across generations and across borders.

This makes them particularly important communities for understanding the somatic imprint of migration, for example, how experiences of displacement, loss, rupture and adaptation may be carried and expressed through the body over time. My work explores how these experiences can shape the ways people feel safety, belonging, connection and threat in their bodies, while also creating space for somatic approaches to healing and resilience.

Additionally, most major migration and displacement forecasts currently expect global migration pressures to keep increasing overall during the next decade, although rates will vary by region and type of migration. In the UK and worldwide, there is support available, mostly for the extreme cases, but many organisations and researchers say it is not enough for the scale and complexity of need.

There is little to no support for those migrants with experiences that are quieter. I know it from my own experience, there was nowhere to go when I needed it most. This is my WHY behind this work.

This is why I am passionate about this work, this is why one of my purposes is to create such environments for you.

We have the ability to influence not only our own lives, but the lives of those who come after us.

If you are ready to join these monthly group sessions, fill in the intake form by clicking the link below

Group Sessions for Migrants

About

I am opening therapeutic group spaces, online and in-person, to support those with experiences of migration of different walks of life.

For this round, this space will be dedicated to people from the Lebanese & Palestinian diaspora. If this is you, and you have experiences of immigration, whether first, second, or third-generation migrants. If you have struggled to adjust, no matter how long it has been, the imprint of this movement is still carried in your body.

These spaces are for the people whose experiences of migration from these countries that are less visible, whose stories often go unnoticed, but no less real.

Together, we will explore the themes that live within us: home, belonging, and the cultural polarisation within, and other common themes I covered here. This is a space to be witnessed by others who share the same emotional weight.

This is also a space that caters to your emotional process. We will tend to our collective grief, feel our rage and helplessness, and combat loneliness through community.

I want to explore with you how migration expresses itself through the lens with which you see yourself and the world. How it shapes your sense of home, belonging, and safety. How we hold the polarity of cultures within us, and whether we can build a unifying bridge through. How migration lives in your body. And how we can navigate a polarised world together.

What to Expect?

You can expect:

• a space for story telling. Storytelling can be healing in trauma spaces because trauma often fragments our experiences. Sharing a story in a safe and attuned environment can help create meaning, and restore connection, voice, and a sense of shared humanity.

• a creative writing process with words meant to awaken the themes we will be covering.

• a growing community of people building a sense of home together. Sessions of shared stories, and spaces for group emotional releases and somatic practices that meet whatever themes arise.

• a space to express and connect with your mother tongue, as I speak three languages and am able to hold space for people who speak in English, Arabic, and French. There is nothing more powerful than to share our pains in our mother tongue. The part of me that speaks my mother tongue is screaming to be heard.

• group emotional releases and group somatic therapeutic approaches.

• a WhatsApp community to stay connected with others on the same journey.

About the Sessions:

This is a series of 4 sessions starting November 2026. Each session will last about 2 hours. I highly recommend you join the full series. Each session explores a different theme, and together they build on each other, making the experience deeper, more meaningful, and more beneficial than attending individual sessions.

We will be in communication to decide what days / times suits the group.

What is The Exchange For These Sessions?

I want to make this work affordable, and want to offer a sliding scale.

The value for each session is

Standard Ticket £100 for the 4 sessions

Supported Tickets - £80 for 4 sessions

Bring a Friend Ticket - £60 each for 4 sessions (£120 total)

Pay it Forward Tickets - If you are feeling extra generous and would like to support others, you are more than welcome to pay it forward for an added £20.

What is The Intake Form Used For & Why Is It Important To Complete It Before Joining?

Each person comes to these spaces with different migration experiences, cultural backgrounds, languages, nervous system patterns, and reasons for migrating. The intake form helps me better understand your story, needs, preferences, and lived experience so I can place you in groups that feel supportive, resonant, and aligned with you.

The form also includes reflections based on the Needs Dimension model that I work with, which explores our core human needs, our core wound, nervous system responses, and the relevant somatic imprints held in the body. This helps me understand how to best support you within the group space, including the themes covered above, and the wounds, adaptations, or survival patterns that may be present.

Completing the form also supports the wider research and exploration I am doing around migration, displacement, identity, belonging, and intergenerational experience. All information is approached with care, sensitivity, and confidentiality.