Fragments to Wholeness: Rebuilding and Reclaiming Identity

September 13th, 2025
10 am – 11 am EST

Reclaiming Yourself After Trauma or Emotional Overwhelm

Feel like you’ve lost parts of yourself after chronic stress, trauma, or caregiving for others? Struggling to feel whole again? You’re not alone.

This free one-hour virtual workshop is for women and femme-aligned individuals navigating emotional fragmentation, identity loss, or burnout. Through expressive arts, storytelling, and body-based tools, we’ll gently explore how stress and trauma can scatter our sense of self and how to begin reconnecting the pieces with care and creativity.

This is a restorative, inclusive space for reflection, creativity, and reconnection. You don’t need to be an artist, or have it all figured out. Just bring your story and a willingness to begin.

Why Explore Identity Fragmentation in Trauma Recovery?

Why Explore Identity Fragmentation in Trauma Recovery?

Emotional fragmentation is not only a clinical idea. For many people who have lived through trauma or identity-based harm, it is a daily feeling of being split, muted, or far from the self that once felt whole. Fragmentation often begins when overwhelming experiences interrupt safety, belonging, and the ability to stay present in the body.

Understanding fragmentation and exploring gentle repair can help you:

  • Make sense of numbness, disconnection, or feeling “not like myself”

  • Reduce shame around survival strategies that once kept you safe

  • Reconnect with parts of identity that went quiet to endure harm

  • Learn body-based practices that settle the nervous system

  • Begin to re-author your story in community and with choice

Trauma often scatters attention, sensation, and memory. Polyvagal Theory helps explain why. When the nervous system does not feel safe, it moves into survival modes that narrow awareness and disconnect us from our bodies. Rhythmic movement, steady breath, and cues of social safety can invite the system back toward regulation. In practice, this means simple patterns like paced breathing, bilateral drawing, or gentle swaying may help the body settle enough to reconnect with feeling and choice.

Expressive arts also offer a research-supported pathway. Cathy Malchiodi’s work shows that drawing, movement, sound, and image can externalise inner experience when words feel far away. Creative processes help people witness parts of themselves with curiosity rather than judgment, which supports meaning making and integration.

Who Is This Workshop For?

This space is for you if:

  • You identify as a woman, non-binary, or femme-aligned person seeking reconnection with yourself after stress, trauma, or identity loss

  • You’ve felt fragmented, numb, or silenced and want a safe place to explore healing at your own pace

  • You’re curious about using creativity and body-based practices to support recovery when words feel heavy

  • You value care that affirms culture, queerness, neurodivergence, and lived experience

  • You’re navigating intergenerational trauma, cultural displacement, or systemic pressures that shaped how you show up

  • You’re looking for a gentle first step into therapy or group healing with others who understand

This workshop welcomes women, femmes, and femme-identifying people of all cultural and identity backgrounds.

Meet Your Facilitators

Pragati Jaiswal, M.A.

Associate Psychotherapist & Expressive Arts Therapist

Pragati is an expressive arts therapist and associate psychotherapist who brings a trauma-informed, creative, and culturally responsive approach to her work with teens and adults navigating anxiety, depression, trauma, OCD, eating concerns, and life transitions. As a first-generation immigrant from India, she understands how culture, identity, and belonging shape the way we carry both wounds and healing.

She integrates movement, visual art, drama, storytelling, and psychodrama with evidence-based practices, offering clients space to explore beyond words. Her use of expressive arts therapy helps externalize difficult emotions, shift internal narratives, and foster resilience, while her grounding in relational and identity-affirming care ensures clients feel seen in the fullness of who they are.

Pragati is especially passionate about supporting people at the intersections of culture and identity, particularly those navigating family expectations, systemic pressures, or internalized shame. Her work focuses on honoring complexity, nurturing self-trust, and creating space for self-expression and belonging.

Clients often describe Pragati’s presence as warm, collaborative, and imaginative. She believes therapy is not just about coping, but about opening new pathways for integration, creativity, and meaning. With curiosity and compassion, she meets each client where they are and walks with them toward reconnection with themselves and their story.

Yanyi Weng, MSW, LICSW

Founder, Clinical Director, and Psychotherapist

Yanyi is a licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and the founder of Dear Therapy. As a Taishanese Chinese immigrant raised in Boston’s Chinatown, Yanyi brings a deep commitment to community care, cultural responsiveness, and trauma-informed healing. Her specialties include anxiety, ADHD, racial identity, grief, sexuality, and mood-related concerns, with a focus on BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ clients.

With a background in psychodynamic and narrative therapy, Yanyi integrates humor, honesty, and creative practices into the therapeutic process. She believes in co-creating spaces where people can show up fully, unlearn internalized narratives, and build confidence in who they are. Her passion for improv stems from its power to soften social anxiety, nurture spontaneity, and help people access joy and presence in ways that traditional therapy sometimes can't.

Workshop Details

Workshop Length: 1 hour
Date: September 13th, 2025
Time: 10 am - 11 am EST
Check-in Time for Tech: We’ll share the zoom link to your email a day before the session.

Participant Info
Who Can Join: Women, non-binary, and femme-identifying individuals seeking healing and reconnection after emotional overwhelm, trauma, or identity loss. This space welcomes those navigating fragmentation of self, identity struggles, or burnout from carrying too much for too long.

Fee: Free Workshop

    • Brief warm welcome + land in bodies (2‑min breath + gesture)

  • • Mini‑presentation (screenshare slides)

    • “Self‑Fragment Map” (in breakout rooms of 4)

    • Draw or list 3 ‘parts’ of you that feel strong/soft/uncertain.”

    • Why did you choose these parts?”

    • Where do you sense connection or tension between parts?”

    • Invite 2–3 volunteers to share insights. No pressure if you’re not comfortable!

    • Brief summary: “Fragment → Notice → Weave”