Therapy for Immigrants, Refugees & People Living Between Cultures in Nashville and Across Tennessee
Moving between places can change your relationship with family, language, safety, work, identity, and home.
Healing Umbrella provides therapy for immigrants, refugees, children of immigrants, international students, multilingual families, and people whose lives stretch across more than one culture.
Online therapy throughout Tennessee
In-person therapy in Nashville
These experiences are not interchangeable.
Some people moved by choice. Others left because war, persecution, economic pressure, climate disaster, or family need narrowed the choices available. Some grew up here carrying the expectations, grief, and histories of places they may know closely, partly, or mainly through family.
Therapy should not measure how well you have adapted.
We can talk about what you are carrying now, what you miss, what has changed, and what you want to keep.
Life Between Cultures Is Not One Experience
An immigrant who moved for school, a refugee who fled violence, a child translating during appointments, and someone born in Tennessee to immigrant parents are not living the same story.
The meaning of home may have changed more than once. You may feel deeply connected to where you came from while knowing you cannot return. You may be building a life here while worrying about people somewhere else. Relief, grief, anger, loyalty, and distance can all show up together.
We begin with your actual life, rather than a ready-made story about what migration is supposed to mean.
What Might Bring Someone to Therapy?
Immigrants, refugees, and people living between cultures come to therapy for many of the same reasons anyone else does: anxiety, depression, trauma, grief, burnout, relationships, family conflict, or simply feeling worn down.
The conditions surrounding migration can add another layer. Sometimes several.
Therapy may offer support with:
Home & Belonging
Home, distance, grief and finding community
- Homesickness and grief that other people minimize
- Culture shock, isolation, or feeling unfamiliar with your surroundings
- Family separation, reunification, or caregiving across borders
- Building relationships and community while feeling far from home
Language, Family & Generations
Communication, family roles and growing across cultures
- Language fatigue, code-switching, and the pressure to communicate perfectly
- Translating for adults or carrying adult responsibilities at a young age
- Intergenerational differences around family, faith, gender, sexuality, or relationships
- Parenting children who are growing up within a different culture
Safety, Systems & Displacement
Discrimination, institutions and forced displacement
- Racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, or discrimination
- Immigration status, documentation, asylum, or fear of institutions
- Trauma connected to war, persecution, detention, or forced displacement
Work, Responsibility & Expectations
Pressure, responsibility and rebuilding stability
- Pressure to succeed, provide, or prove that moving was “worth it”
- Loss of professional status, financial stability, or recognition of qualifications
You Should Not Have to Explain Your Whole World Before Therapy Can Begin
People living between cultures are often misunderstood in therapy.
When culture is mistaken for a problem
Closeness with family may be labelled dependence. Responsibility to community may be described as poor boundaries. Caution around institutions may be treated as irrational, even when someone has good reason to be careful. A therapist may encourage independence without asking what housing, money, legal status, disability, childcare, or family survival actually depend on.
That kind of care removes people from the conditions surrounding their decisions.
What we want to understand
At Healing Umbrella, we want to understand what a response has protected, what it costs now, and what choices are genuinely available to you. No therapist can share every part of another person’s history. They can still listen without forcing that history into one narrow idea of family, freedom, success, or healing.
Our Approach to Therapy Across Cultures
Therapy for Children of Immigrants & Multicultural Families
Sometimes the person seeking therapy is not the one who crossed a border.
Children of immigrants may grow up learning several social worlds at once. You may have translated language, expectations, and emotions for the adults around you. Perhaps you carry a strong awareness of what your family sacrificed, making it difficult to want something different without feeling ungrateful.
You may feel too different in one space and not connected enough in another. Even the question “Where are you from?” can become tiring when the real answer needs more time than the conversation allows.
Therapy may support you with:
- Intergenerational conflict
- Family roles and caregiving responsibilities
- Racial and cultural identity
- Queer or trans identity within family and cultural expectations
- Religion, spirituality, and changing beliefs
- Dating or building relationships across cultures
- Creating boundaries without giving up connection
- Perfectionism and pressure to succeed
- Guilt about having opportunities others did not
- Trauma and grief carried across generations
- Deciding which traditions you want to carry forward
The goal is not to choose between your family and yourself. We can look more honestly at what connection, responsibility, safety, and agency mean in your particular life.
Find A TherapistMeet Therapists Supporting Immigrants, Refugees & People Living Between Cultures in Tennessee
The therapist who feels right for you may depend on language, migration history, race, faith, identity, disability, family relationships, cost, and what you actually want help with.
Our team brings different lived experiences and therapeutic approaches to the realities that can surround migration and life between cultures. Explore the therapists below, or contact us for help finding the best current fit.
Urielle Samis, LCSW
She/Her
Founder, LGBTQ+ & Trauma Therapist
Urielle works with immigrants and children of immigrants, Jewish clients, descendants of genocide survivors, LGBTQ+ adults, and people carrying complex or intergenerational trauma.
As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who later moved from the United States to France, Urielle brings personal understanding of how displacement, inherited history, identity, and the search for safety can shape a person across generations.
She may be a good fit if you want to explore migration, family history, trauma, anxiety, burnout, queer or trans identity, or what it means to build a life somewhere new without leaving every part of yourself behind.
- Approaches:
- EMDR, IFS-informed therapy, relational work, and somatic trauma therapy
- Available:
- Online across Tennessee
- Works with:
- Adults, couples, therapists, immigrants, and children of immigrants
Troy Morrow, MSSW
He/Him
Queer, Black & Neurodivergent Therapist
Troy works with people of color, LGBTQ+ people, neurodivergent adults and teens, people living with chronic illness or disability, couples, students, artists, activists, and survivors of complex trauma.
As a Queer Black man living with ADHD and Type 1 diabetes, Troy understands what it can mean to move through institutions that expect people to work against their own bodies, brains, identities, or needs.
He may be a good fit if racism, cultural expectations, disability, neurodivergence, relationships, or experiences of exclusion have shaped how you understand yourself and what feels possible in your life.
- Approaches:
- Narrative, cognitive, mindfulness-based, somatic, expressive, and exploratory therapy with EMDR training
- Available:
- Online across Tennessee
- Works with:
- Children, adolescents, adults, and couples
- Cost:
- Deep sliding-scale availability
Dani Neiderhiser, MA
She/Her
Bilingual LGBTQ+ Therapist
Dani offers therapy in English and Spanish for people navigating identity, culture, religious trauma, body image, relationships, and life between different communities.
Having spent her early childhood in Madrid and later lived in Argentina, Dani understands some of the complexity of growing up across cultures and not always feeling fully part of either.
She may be a good fit if you want therapy in Spanish or English, are working through family or cultural expectations, or are trying to understand who you are across different places, identities, and communities.
- Often works with:
- Spanish-speaking clients, Hispanic and Latina/o/e communities, LGBTQ+ people, religious trauma, body image, identity, and cultural belonging
- Languages:
- English and Spanish
- Available:
- In person in Nashville and online across Tennessee
Frankie
She/Her
LGBTQ+ & Neurodivergent Therapist Intern
Frankie works with LGBTQ+ adults and youth, trans and nonbinary people, neurodivergent adults, caregivers, parents of LGBTQ+ children, and survivors of trauma.
Having grown up in a small conservative community and later re-examined her relationship with faith, Frankie understands how family, religion, place, and community expectations can shape what someone is permitted to question or express.
She may be a good fit if you are navigating identity, anxiety, perfectionism, relationships, childhood trauma, religious harm, or the tension between belonging to a community and needing room to become your own person.
- Approach:
- Relational, grounded, transparent, and open to the complexity and messiness of healing
- Available:
- In person in Nashville and online across Tennessee
- Works with:
- Youth, adults, trans and nonbinary people, caregivers, and parents
- Cost:
- Deep sliding-scale therapy available
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Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to identify as an immigrant or refugee to receive this kind of therapy?
No. This care may also be relevant for children of immigrants, international students, people raised across several countries, multilingual families, people in intercultural relationships, or anyone whose sense of culture and belonging feels complicated.
You decide which parts of your experience are relevant.
Will therapy focus on migration every week?
Only if that is what you want.
Migration, culture, or identity may be central to why you are seeking therapy, or they may sit in the background. You can also receive support for anxiety, relationships, grief, ADHD, trauma, burnout, or other parts of life without having everything explained through migration.
Is therapy available in Spanish?
Yes. Dani provides therapy in both English and Spanish. Availability may change, so contact our team to ask about current openings.
Do you work with undocumented people or mixed-status families?
We welcome people across different immigration and documentation experiences.
You do not have to disclose information that does not feel relevant to your care. During your consultation, you can also ask about privacy and the limits of confidentiality before deciding what you feel comfortable sharing.
Can therapy help with trauma related to war, persecution, or forced displacement?
Yes. Several Healing Umbrella therapists work with trauma and may incorporate approaches such as EMDR, IFS-informed therapy, somatic work, and other relational trauma practices.
We will help match you with a therapist based on the experiences you want support with, the kind of approach you prefer, and current availability.
Do you work with children of immigrants?
Yes. Therapy can explore intergenerational relationships, family responsibility, identity, inherited trauma, cultural expectations, and the experience of growing up across different social worlds.
Contact us so we can match you with a therapist who works with your age group and concerns.
Is online therapy available outside Nashville?
Yes. Online therapy is available to clients located anywhere in Tennessee at the time of their session.
Healing Umbrella also offers in-person therapy in Nashville.
Do you accept insurance?
Therapy services are self-pay. If your insurance includes out-of-network benefits, Healing Umbrella can help you submit for possible reimbursement.
Lower-cost therapy may also be available through therapist interns. Visit our Rates, Payment, and Financial Assistance page for current information.
Whatever Home Means Right Now, We Can Begin There
Home may be Tennessee. It may be somewhere else. It might be a person, a language, a meal, a faith practice, or a place you cannot safely return to. It may also be something you are still trying to build.
You do not need a neat story about where you belong before reaching out. Therapy can make room for the life you have built, the people and places you miss, the parts of culture you want to carry, and the parts you are still questioning.
Whether you are seeking support for yourself, your child, your partner, or your family, our team can help you find a therapist who will take the full context of your life seriously.
In-person therapy in Nashville
Online therapy throughout Tennessee