Roula Hajjar, LMSW
Postgraduate Social Worker

Roula Hajjar (she/hers) is a Licensed Master Social Worker. She received her MSW from Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College in 2022. She is also a second-year candidate at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy’s Trauma Studies Center, where she was trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS) and somatic based interventions as well as narrative therapy. Roula has worked with families, couples, and as individuals across the life course.

Roula is interested in the intersection between psychoanalysis and trauma-centered interventions and has been trained in a trauma-informed psychodynamic approach. She believes that the therapeutic encounter can provide a relational home where parts of ourselves and our emotional pain that could not previously be integrated can be named, witnessed and contained in a safe enough space. Roula upholds patient agency and self-determination, believing that the patient will find in the therapeutic encounter that which they need. Her practice strives to be an open and expansive place that nurtures wrestling with emergent and unformulated tensions and questions as they come up. She believes that engaging emergent issues in both therapist and patient provides for the richest form of contact that leaves both individuals deeply changed.

Having been trained in the social work discipline, Roula endeavors to bring in an awareness to the material realities of the individuals she works with, recognizing structural violence and systematic oppression in the contextualization of their pain. Roula believes in attending to the symmetries and asymmetries of power in the therapeutic process and the ways in which dominant or oppressive norms might be enacted and reproduced.

Roula is interested in complex and developmental trauma, attachment injuries and interpersonal struggles, minority stress as well as first-generation concerns.

Prior to beginning her MSW, Roula worked in policy. She received and B.A. from the American University of Beirut in Political Studies and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science in Public Policy.

Roula is a first-generation Arab immigrant from Lebanon. She is a native Arabic and English speaker.