For Pauline Yeghnazar Peck, an Iranian Armenian American licensed psychologist, helping individuals and couples navigate the many competing needs of family life, career, relationships and self-care with more clarity and ease didn’t come about by a long-term plan.
Peck was born in Iran during a time where the country had just gone through a major regime change which included “a lot of instability happening,” she says.
“And then my family because of those reasons moved to Los Angeles, where my mom’s side of the family was,” according to Yeghnazar Peck. “So I kind of grew up with these various cultural influences, the Iranian influences, and my parents were pastors of a church, so they continued to sponsor different refugees, seeking political and religious asylum.”
At the same time, she still felt connected to her Armenian roots.
“Armenians who are so diasporic, coming from different places — Lebanon, Syria, all sorts of different places, Turkish,” she says.
Add to that what Yeghnazar Peck calls her “Americanness, which was this new identity and being almost 4 years old when we came here and having no memories of Iran, I really was, I’d say, one of the first in my family to get the language, figure out the system — my brother was seven, and my sister was born here.”
DIFFERENT CULTURES, DIFFERENT STANDARDS
Consequently, she “really grew up with that multicultural experience and very early on as a perceptive kid, as a kid that was always interested in relationships, seeing how different environments kind of demanded different versions of me and how the language was very different, and sometimes I’d use a word here that didn’t translate over to the other world.”
Yeghnazar Peck grew up with an “understanding” that different cultures carry different standards, norms and ways of being, beyond just the literal things like language differences.
“When my mom died in my early 20s, it was the first experience of therapy that I ever had,” she says.
“Growing up Middle Eastern, nobody was telling you to go see a therapist, especially 20 years ago at this point,” Yeghnazar Peck adds. “A friend of mine said, ‘You should go see somebody.’ I was really deeply depressed, overwhelmed by all the family dynamics, the grief, and everything that kind of ensued as my mom passed away.
“And the second I got into therapy, I remember having this experience where I was like, this is amazing,” she continues. “Things can change by talking to somebody. And all of a sudden I was like, ‘Oh, a lot can change. talking to a stranger about your life.'”
When my mom died in my early 20s, it was the first experience of therapy that I ever had.
At the same time, Yeghnazar Peck says she also felt like certain things during her sessions weren’t applicable to her culture or weren’t nuanced enough.
“I found myself holding back from bringing in things because my therapist at the time, this first therapist was white. And so there’d be times where he’d say something, or I just felt like, ah, ‘He’s not gonna get this.'”
That discord between what she felt and how her therapist was interpreting it resulted in Yeghnazar Peck changing career tracks and going into school for therapy.
“I like to say I never had a psychology class before being in a master’s program to become a therapist,” she says. “People were like, ‘Tell me what internships you thought of, or what experiences did you do to major in this?’ I was in a psych major. I was a sociology major. I looked at patterns, macro level things with people. I was very into cultural anthropology and looking at things over time. And that very much influences what I do now. And so, really, it was chasing that thread of my own healing and trying to understand myself as a multicultural being” where “school” didn’t give her all the answers.
That led Yeghnazar Peck to go beyond a master’s and earn a PhD in counseling psychology.
“Even throughout my PhD program, I felt like I was the kid always asking questions about for whom, and actually, this doesn’t work with this client,” she says, adding that one of her clients is from the indigenous Cherokee tribe who might not know how to adjust to being part of more than one culture.
“Because maybe they’ve grown up, and I would constantly be either dismissed or told, ‘Just apply the theory, we’ll talk about that later,’ and then the later never came,” she says. “So I’ve done a lot of learning after grad school plus my own unlearning of things I was told.”
The work Yeghnazar Peck does now is because of the self-discovery process she has been going through within herself and the ways that even after getting formal education, “the answers to the questions I was asking were not there.”
Consequently, she continued looking elsewhere.
“I looked at my own history, my own family story, and I started to share with people what had worked for me, what came from my lived experience, and that’s when I became emboldened, and now I’m on social media talking about this stuff all the time,” she says. “And truly co-learning about these things alongside people because I’m constantly deepening my knowledge.”
All of this, according to Yeghnazar Peck, is to say that she “didn’t set out to do this, I didn’t set this out as my goal in life. I really got here serendipitously by listening to my intuition and trying to honor my own healing as it came about, and then trying to share that with my communities through greater understanding of, again, where I’ve come from, what has influenced me and recognizing if I’m asking these questions, I must not be the only one. So that’s how my curious brain kind of caught me here.”
(Stay tuned for Part 2, where we delve into Peck’s growing up as an immigrant child.)
