Dr. Marwa Assar is a Doctor of Psychology (PsyD), psycho-spiritual teacher, and founder of The H.O.M.E Institute. She specializes in heart-centered psycho-spiritual wellness through an Islamic psychological lens. Dr. Marwa utilizes her 10+ years of studies in psychology, her 15 years of navigating Islamic Psychology, her studies of Islam, her diverse and extensive clinical training and experience as a therapist, and her explorations and research in navigating the merging of Islam and psychology to bring you the courses, programs, and retreats that will empower you not only spiritually, but also mentally, and emotionally! 

Emotional freedom and inner peace are the greatest treasures God can gift us with, but unhealthy attachments and codependency can be great barriers to us experiencing those treasures. Infact, codependency and unhealthy attachments can be great psychological barriers to our ability to practice tazkiyah and purify the heart.

Codependency is the struggle to see your worth, needs, emotions, and identity outside of  people and your relationships.  It is not knowing where you end and others start. It is the struggle of being overly reliant (in an unhealthy way) on people and your relationships for the complete fulfillment of your spiritual, mental, and emotional needs.  It causes a disconnect from one’s true self, true emotions, true needs, leading the codependent self to attach to others for their identity, worth, and sense of self.  

For so many Muslims, it is hard to identify and heal codependency, because it is often masked with cultural and spiritual beliefs that keep one stuck in the mentally and emotionally draining cycle of codependency.  But Islam at its core does not promote codependency, a lack of individuation or an absence of identity that is separate from others, and it doesn’t promote us maintaining attachments, roles, and over-responsibility for others, that negatively impact our spiritual, mental, and emotional wellness!  Islam promotes the opposite.

Islam empowers us to know who we are, to live from a truthful place, to have a healthy balance between independence and interdependence, and to experience emotional freedom from the expectations, approval, and actions of others!  But to experience this, we have to not only address codependency within the context of our faith, but we also much deeply understand the psychology of codependency and attachment, its roots, its signs, and the Islamic psychological view of tackling such an issue! 

And this is what this 2 day psycho-spiritual educational program aims to achieve!