Description
What does it mean to find your voice when your culture demands your silence?
For many Iranian and Iranian American women, this is not a metaphor. It is a lived reality. Intergenerational trauma, patriarchal expectation, religious constraint, and family loyalty create a powerful web of silence that shapes identity, limits autonomy, and profoundly affects the therapeutic relationship. For clinicians working with this population, cultural awareness alone is not enough. Deep understanding is required.
In this rich and clinically grounded session, Dr. Charlyne Gelt and Dr. Vida Nikzad bring together film, poetry, mythology, and case material to illuminate the inner world of Iranian and Iranian American women in therapy. Through the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad, Iran's most courageous female voice, films such as A Separation and Shadya, and the transformative myth of The Handless Maiden, they trace the psychological journey from silence and submission toward voice, agency, and individuation.
Using Jungian, feminist, and multicultural frameworks, the presenters examine how shame, duty, relational dependency, and fear of self-expression shape the goals Iranian women bring to therapy, and how those goals often differ from those of the general population. Clinicians will gain practical, culturally sensitive tools to recognize barriers, interrupt destructive patterns, and support their clients in building resilience and reclaiming their sense of self.
Even a trapped bird, given the right conditions, can learn to fly free.
Learning Objectives: At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:
Identify cultural, patriarchal, and familial barriers that impact therapeutic engagement and treatment outcomes with Iranian and Iranian American women clients.
Discuss patterns of toxic abuse common in the general population and distinguish them from culturally specific dynamics within Iranian culture.
Apply culturally sensitive, Jungian, and feminist clinical interventions to foster resilience, agency, and transformation with Iranian / Iranian-American women clients.
Barriers to Treating Iranian/American Women Clients: Giving Voice and Transformation to the Silenced Feminine, Vida Nikzad, PsyD & Charlyne Gelt, PhD (1 hr)
Charlyne Gelt, PhD, CGP is a licensed clinical psychologist, certified group psychotherapist, and educator based in Encino, California, with over 30 years of experience working with individuals, couples, adolescents, families, and groups. She holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and brings a rich integrative approach to her work, drawing on cognitive-behavioral, depth psychological, family systems, and self psychology frameworks.
Dr. Gelt is the author of "Hades' Angels: The Transformative Journeys of Women Who Love Lifers and Death Row Inmates," a groundbreaking exploration of the psychological dynamics of women in committed relationships with incarcerated men. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Psychologist, The California Therapist, and numerous professional publications, and she contributes a monthly Cinema Therapy column to the San Fernando Valley CAMFT newsletter.
Dr. Gelt’s interests span the intersection of cinema, therapy, relationships, and the transformation of consciousness. Her clinical workshops, Women's Empowerment Groups, and Men-Only group series focus on moving individuals from emotional dependency and destructive relational patterns toward emotional independence and mature interdependency.
Her clinical specialties include women's relationship and empowerment issues, grief and loss, family therapy, and children with special needs, particularly those on the autism and Asperger's spectrum. She has facilitated a College Survival Process Group for students on the autism spectrum through UCLA Extension's Pathway Program, and has volunteered for over a decade as a group facilitator for families with a loved one in prison through Friends Outside LA.
Vida Nikzad, PsyD is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist based in Los Angeles, California, with a private practice in Santa Monica. Rooted in an Existential, Humanistic, and Gestalt orientation, her work integrates depth psychology, somatic awareness, and evidence-based approaches to support individuals, couples, and families navigating trauma, mood disorders, addiction, and relational healing.
Dr. Nikzad holds a Doctor of Psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and a Master's in Marriage and Family Therapy from Phillips Graduate Institute. She is a Certified Gestalt Therapist, EMDR Certified Therapist, Certified Hypnotherapist, and EFT-trained couples therapist, with additional training in DBT, CBT, Jungian dreamwork, archetypal analysis, and mediation.
Her clinical career has spanned private practice, hospital, and residential treatment settings, including seven years as a Staff Psychologist at the Betty Ford Center, where she specialized in dual-diagnosis treatment, DBT and CBT-based addiction and relapse prevention, and family codependency therapy. She has also served as a program therapist at Mission Community Hospital, providing crisis intervention, geriatric psychiatric care, and dual-diagnosis group treatment.
A passionate educator and group facilitator, Dr. Nikzad has led ongoing clinical workshop series integrating dreamwork, Iranian and American fairy tales, myth, poetry, and film as pathways to archetypal and narrative trauma processing. She is fluent in both English and Farsi, and brings a rich multicultural perspective to all of her clinical and educational work.