Grief, Ancestry & the Unseen With Dania Balohé Lacourrège
Grief, Ancestry & the Unseen With Dania Balohé Lacourrège
In this episode of Mosaic Identity, I sit down with Lebanese grief therapist, death doula, and transgenerational analyst Dania Balohé Lacourrège for a conversation about grief, identity, family, intuition, and the parts of ourselves we may have been taught to distrust.
Dania shares what it was like growing up as the eldest daughter in an Arab family and how her cultural identity has shaped both her personal life and the work she does today. We talk about grief as something much bigger than the death of a loved one. Grief can also come through identity shifts, relationships ending, migration, family wounds, trauma, and becoming someone different from who we were expected to be.
Dania also takes us inside her work as a grief counselor and death doula including what it means to accompany people through death, loss, and major life transitions. And then the conversation goes somewhere we don't often openly go in Arab spaces: intuition, psychic experiences, spirituality, and the unseen. Dania shares her own experiences with psychic abilities and what it has meant to make sense of them within cultural and religious environments where these experiences may be dismissed, feared, or shamed.
We explore a bigger question: What if decolonization also means questioning which ways of knowing we were taught were legitimate and which ones we were taught to fear?
In this episode, we talk about:
Growing up as the eldest daughter in an Arab family Moving back and fourth between Lebanon and France
Lebanese identity and living within the diaspora
The responsibilities often placed on eldest Arab daughters
Grief beyond physical death
Becoming a grief counselor and death doula
What a death doula actually does
Intuition and psychic experiences
Cultural and religious shame around spirituality and the unseen
Decolonization and reclaiming ways of knowing that have been dismissed or pathologized
About Dania:
Dania Balohé Lacourrège is a Lebanese therapist based in France whose work centers grief, trauma, major life transitions, and transgenerational healing. She describes her work as Aliveness Therapy and works as a death doula and transgenerational analyst, incorporating grief therapy, body-based awareness, symbolic practices, and personalized rituals into her approach.
Learn more about Dania and her work:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dania.balohe/?hl=fr
Website: https://daniabalohelacourrege.fr/en
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWhc_U5PH9FUnWnUn83pzng
About Mosaic Identity
Mosaic Identity is a podcast exploring the complicated intersections of culture, identity, mental health, family, migration, belonging, and what it means to build an identity when you come from more than one world.
