INTEGRATION
As part of the Feel PODEROSA experience, we offer integration therapy sessions designed to integrate with the transformative photo session. These psychodynamic therapeutic sessions explore the emotional patterns and beliefs that shape how you see yourself, helping you release limiting thoughts and heal past wounds. By working and talking through these layers with a professional, you’ll gain deeper self-awareness and a stronger connection with your true self. This approach supports your empowerment journey, providing tools to build a healthier relationship with yourself and enhance the impact of your photo session.
Unpacking Emotional Reactions: The vulnerability of being photographed, especially when addressing body image and self-worth, can bring up a range of emotions—shame, fear, or discomfort. Through therapy, you’ll have the opportunity to explore these feelings in a safe space, gaining insight into where they stem from and how they’ve influenced your self-perception.
Releasing Limiting Beliefs: Many of us carry deep-seated beliefs about our bodies and our worth. Therapy helps you identify these internal narratives and guides you in reframing or releasing them. This emotional work allows for a more empowering experience during the photo session, where you can step into the process with greater confidence and self-acceptance.
Enhancing Self-Awareness: The therapeutic sessions encourage deeper self-reflection, helping you uncover the connections between your internal world and how you present yourself externally. As you gain clarity and understanding of your emotions, the photo session becomes an extension of this journey, capturing the changes in how you see and relate to yourself.
Bridging the Inner and Outer Experience: Psychodynamic therapy connects the inner emotional experience with the outward expression during the photo session. The therapy supports you in aligning your feelings and thoughts with the physical act of being photographed, creating a more authentic and empowered representation of yourself.
Sustaining Transformation: After the photo session, the therapy helps process the experience, allowing the emotional shifts to settle in and become a lasting part of your personal growth. It ensures that the empowerment you feel during the session is not fleeting but integrated into how you continue to see yourself and navigate your life.
In essence, psychodynamic therapy helps make the photo session not just a moment of empowerment, but a transformative experience that resonates deeply within you, leading to lasting personal growth and self-acceptance.
Meet SUYANA HANDMAN
is a biracial Peruvian-American, trauma-informed, psychodynamic therapist in New York City.
I specialize in working with women who are seeking their own unique paths of healing to reconnect to and find their inner sense of security, liberation, and balance. As women, we all hold, and often must play, multiple roles and identities in our relationship with the world, the people around us, and sometimes even within ourselves. This can create conflict within ourselves, leaving us feeling anxious, and out of place, neither here nor there, not “this” enough or “that” enough.
In my therapy practice, I strongly believe that our wounds and anxieties can serve an adaptive purpose, revealing reserves of inner strength and resilience.
My goal is to support you through self-doubts and along your healing journey by helping you uncover limiting beliefs and by enfranchising your innate wisdoms. Together, we will unearth these reservoirs, overcoming challenges from a place of self-compassion instead of guilt or shame to awaken our self-attunement and honor our authentic whole selves.
In addition, rooted in my own personal work with plant medicines and expanded states of consciousness, I also work with those interested in integrating plant medicines and psychedelics into their therapeutic journey. While it is not yet legal in New York to provide or administer most plant medicines and psychedelics, I work from a Harm Reduction and Integration approach to create an intentional plan and supportive space that empowers my patients in utilizing these medicines to activate their inner healing capacity.
Suyana lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Suyana’s Story
A little bit about me and my own healing journey…
I am daughter to a courageous and resilient Peruvian mother, who immigrated to New York City from Peru, where she came to meet my father, a shy Jewish American man from Brooklyn. Together, they produced me, a fairly shy yet courageous, biracial therapist in New York City.
I think my healing journey started at an early age when I began to feel lost and conflicted about who I was. At the time, this confusion was mostly around my racial identity, as I struggled to find connection to the various parts of what made me, me. I always felt ni de aqui, ni de alla – neither here, nor there, which left me feeling like I was never enough, shapeshifting to present a version of myself that would “make sense to” and please the people around me.
And for so long I carried this inner conflict as a burden, meanwhile the whole time, it was this conflict that gave me a gift. It gave me the gift of holding space for this confusion, to become curious about myself and to learn from it so that I could one day, feel whole, fulfilled, and proud of the woman that I was. And it was through this exploration of self, that my passion for working with people was born.
I started my first job in social work at a legal defense organization. It was here that I knew I had found my calling. I was working with women and adults who had experienced so much trauma in their own lives, that they found themselves repeating cycles of abuse they experienced as children and struggled to face their own wounds that were so deep and internalized. Many of the women I worked with were survivors of intimate partner violence and sexual abuse, which was an added layer of trauma they had to hold on top of the oppressive systems they navigated that actively traumatized and retraumatized them.
From there I went to work at a youth organization in New York City working with young people to migrated to New York City. It was here that I was given the privilege to work with and empower the young people who shared that similar conflict, of feeling neither here, nor there, as they acclimated to a new life while processing incredibly traumatic experiences in their home countries. It was working with these young people, that I truly saw what it meant to be resilient, and to have the strength to rewrite our stories and narratives.
All of this ultimately is what led me to become a therapist. I realized that I did in fact have a gift and strong passion for supporting people as they navigated their own inner conflicts, processed their own experiences, and rewrote their stories. That is what truly brought me joy and gave my passion for the work I do now.
And as a therapist, I believe the therapist must also be in therapy. So I embarked on my own path of healing, trying different modalities of therapy, and eventually, integrating plant medicines and psychedelics into my own therapeutic work. I have sat with these medicines in various settings, from being alone in my apartment in Brooklyn, to traveling to the Amazonian jungles of Peru to learn from indigenous curanderos and grandmother medicine, Ayahuasca.
And all of this landed me at an integration event in NYC, where I met Chiara. We had an instant connection when we shared our stories and found so much of our own path of struggling and healing, mirrored in one another. We parted ways, knowing that that meeting was not the last in our journey. One day, I received an invite from Chiara to participate in a Feel Poderosa group, which I attended, and well, the rest is history.
Now we have a melting of the minds, with Chiara’s artistic background and my mental health background, to build the Feel Poderosa project.