Shared Space: Stories from our Therapists
Pull up a chair and enjoy our new series.
This series is an invitation to get to know the people who may sit with you in hard moments. You’ll find candid conversations, personal stories, and reflections on how each therapist approaches connection and healing. No clinical jargon, just real stories to help you discover who feels like the right fit for you.
Whether you’re exploring therapy for yourself or looking for a trusted place to refer someone you care about, we’re excited for you to get a feel for each therapist’s voice, values, and vibe before you ever book a session or make a recommendation. Enjoy!
Shared Space vol. 01
A Conversation with Mohamed Abdelaziz, MA, LMHC
Exploring identity, grief, and meaning in therapy
Q: What drew you to becoming a therapist?
Mohamed: I started by studying philosophy in college. I was always curious about why people behave the way they do, how we create meaning and how we move through the world. Eventually, I got into neuroscience, thinking that if I understood the brain, I’d get closer to those answers. But the more quantitative and analytical the work became, the more I felt something essential was missing. It felt impersonal. Disconnected.
Things began to shift when I found the Existential-Phenomenological Psychology program at Seattle University. That’s where I encountered an approach that prioritized lived experience, where the focus wasn’t just on symptoms or statistics, but on how people feel their lives from the inside out.
That opened something up in me. I realized I didn’t want to study people from a distance. I wanted to sit with them.
Q: You do a lot of work around grief, meaning, and identity. What’s at the heart of that focus?
Mohamed: A lot of people I work with are carrying layers of unresolved grief—some of it personal, some of it cultural or spiritual, and much of it unspoken. We often think of grief as something that follows a death, but I see grief in all kinds of life transitions: leaving a faith tradition, losing a sense of belonging, feeling disconnected from family or identity.
When someone begins to examine those deeper questions—Who am I? What do I really believe?—it can trigger a kind of existential unraveling. That’s not pathology. That’s a profound invitation. But it’s also painful. Therapy can be the space where we slow down, make contact with that pain, and begin to reorient without rushing to fix or replace what’s been lost.
Q: Religious trauma comes up a lot in your work. How do you define it?
Mohamed: Religious trauma often involves a deep disruption in how someone makes sense of the world. Many clients I see were handed systems of belief, identity, and morality that didn’t leave room for their full selves. Over time, that creates shame, fragmentation, and a loss of agency.
What I see is that people walk away not just from a set of beliefs, but from an entire way of seeing. They’ve inherited meaning-making structures that taught them how to view themselves, others, even how they view suffering. When those structures break down, it can feel like everything crumbles: community, identity, belonging, and purpose. That’s where therapy becomes a place to slowly rebuild, not with new dogma, but with spaciousness.
A place to ask: What do I want to carry forward? What can I lay down?
Q: What makes this kind of healing difficult to access for some people?
Mohamed: Therapy itself is still seen, in many communities, as a Western or individualistic practice. It hasn’t always felt accessible or culturally attuned for people dealing with things like religious trauma, generational pain, or cultural dislocation.
What I’ve noticed is that people often come to me either too early, still too afraid to name what’s really going on, or years later, after they’ve done most of the processing on their own. But the people in the middle—right in the thick of it—they often don’t know therapy can help. Or they don’t trust it yet.
That’s part of why I want to speak more openly about this work. To say: if you’re questioning, if you’re hurting, if you’re trying to figure out how to rebuild—you don’t have to do it alone. Therapy can hold that space for you.
Q: What do you want someone to feel when they sit with you for the first time?
Mohamed: Safety. Not just physical safety, but the kind that says, You’re allowed to bring your full self here. Your doubt. Your grief. Your contradictions.
I’m not here to steer someone toward a particular answer or belief system. I’m not trying to reorient them. I’m here to help them listen to themselves more deeply—to what’s already trying to emerge. My role is to be an advocate, a companion, and sometimes a mirror.
Q: Final question—what gives you hope in this work?
Mohamed: Honestly, just watching people come home to themselves. Even slowly. Even in fragments. When someone begins to trust their own inner voice after years of outsourcing it—that’s powerful. That gives me hope every single time.
Hi, I’m Mohamed Abdelaziz
I work with individuals dealing with trauma, anxiety, depression, loss of religion/culture, loss of a relationship, yearning for meaning and purpose, and feelings of being stuck or unfulfilled. As a meaning-based therapist, I will emphasize your agency and empowerment, helping you utilize your strengths to align your life with your values.