Rate Nicholas Reynolds

Hi! My name’s Nauser. It rhymes with “saucer.” (Yes, I’ve said that since I was in kindergarten.) In Arabic it means “helper granting victory.” I was named after my paternal grandfather, who was from Iran. When I was 11, I started using the name “Nick,” because many people couldn’t pronounce my given name. In Greek, Nicholas means “victory of the people.” I didn’t learn of the etymological similarities between my two names until much later in my life, and I find the coincidence fitting, as I’ve always been passionate about helping others achieve their goals, and movements for social justice. My top three values are love, humor, and justice. I’m half-Persian, half-“white,” half-blind, and half convinced that we can save the world. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist in California (LMFT# 123099) and a spiritual life coach using tools and strategies from personal development, psychological healing, and spiritual growth to help heart-centered leaders discover their power and build the better world that our souls are yearning for.

My passion for helping clients bridge the gap between personal growth and social change arose from paradoxical elements of my upbringing: I grew up in a multicultural extended family beset by addiction, abuse, and divorce, all the while receiving a robust social justice education from the Berkeley public school system as well as from members of my own family. As I grew older and did my own personal healing work, I began to see the connection between humanity’s collective pain and systems of injustice. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, said, “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” Yes, it is true that “hurt people hurt people,” but isn’t it also true that hurt people let hurt people hurt people? I began to recognize the silence of good people as a trauma response, and consequently I began to see healing work as essential to social justice work.

I believe that all people have a piece to the puzzle of life. This conviction shows up in the way I treat all people with respect and open-mindedness. My clients have told me that I challenge them and help them look at their problems differently, but always with compassion and acceptance. We also tend to laugh a lot.

In my work with clients, my first commitment is to listen with patience, curiosity, and care as they tell the story of their pain. My second commitment is to honor their pain while providing education about its purpose and its causes, in order to help my clients become aware and let go of their story of not-enoughness that has become fused with the pain over the course of their life. My third commitment is to give my clients tools and strategies to start using their pain as a guide that can lead them back to their true selves. My favorite comedian Hari Kondabolu says that therapy is like taking a college-level course about yourself. You better believe that my course has homework.

When my clients begin to see how their pain is connected to the pain of people all over the world, and to the pain of the planet itself, the story of not-enoughness that they have been telling themselves their whole lives becomes less convincing. Once the story loses its authority, they are free to begin their healing work in earnest, inspired to be the change that they want to see in the world.

I see mainstream medicine and mental health care as part of a larger system that produces the very problems that they purport to solve. I’m very sensitive to dehumanization of any kind, and I will not stand for it. If society is my clients’ abusive partner, I see myself as my clients’ enraged but understanding best friend. I can’t wait to help you see how much more you deserve from life and what you can do to get it, and how that’s just the start.

I received my MA in Integral Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. I’m currently seeing clients through telehealth in California.