Azzam Talhami, LMFT, CNVC
Mental Health Therapist
Azzam Talhami is a Palestinian trauma therapist, Certified Trainer with the Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC), and international peace builder specializing in specializing in trauma work and cultural competency. Originally from the West Bank, he now lives in California, where he works with immigrants and refugees, primarily from countries impacted by war, including Cambodia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Yemen.
He says, “Born into a marginalized community in the West Bank, Palestine, one of the most controversial places in the world, a conflict zone that has never seen or experienced complete peace, I have been grateful for the multitude of experiences that granted me resilience and curiosity about possibilities for healing. This grounding has afforded me the ability to search within every desperate situation for the possibility for transformation.”
Invited to the U.S. to teach NVC and sustainable peacebuilding, he officially immigrated to the States and co-founded the Bahebak Project, a grassroots nonprofit that educates about Islamophobia and Anti-Arab prejudice and facilitates recent Arabic-speaking immigrant families get the resources they need - from food to English language classes to social services, with a focus in the Bay Area and Southern California. Finding a lack of Arabic-speaking, culturally competent therapists for the refugees he was working with, he went to graduate school for that purpose. In 2022, he began working with Palm Care and the SCIRC to help launch the only mental health clinic in San Diego, California dedicated to trauma-informed, culturally and linguistically competent mental health care for Arab-American and Muslim-American immigrants and refugees. As needs in the community rapidly expand, he has served Ukrainian refugees new to San Diego, California.
He has trained hundreds of people across the Middle East, Europe and the US in peace-building and Nonviolent Communication (NVC), including at the MidEast International Intensive Training in NVC in Beit Jalla, Palestine. Dedicated to supporting historically conflicting communities towards a just peace, he has trained the students at the Peace Engineers School in Ukraine in sustainable peace and NVC, in partnership with PAX, the Netherlands, with the support of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Germany. Azzam founded the NVC Arabic Academy, leading in-person and online classes for Arabic-speaking journalists, psychologists, and aspiring peace-builders across the world, as well as creating programs that train international peace organizations, such as for forumZFD.
Devoted to sharing the story of his people through the lens of compassion, his interests as a guest speaker and teacher include deepening the conversation around power and privilege. He has served as an on-camera political analyst, news correspondent, documentary filmmaker, journalist, translator, and war-zone photographer for many Palestinian, Israeli, European, and American media outlets. Among these, he has been a translator and Middle East journalist consultant for the AT&T Original Documentary The Volunteers and reporter for Huffington Post Arabic.
More: What We Do
