Noha Alshugairi

Noha Alshugairi is an American licensed marriage and family therapist and the practitioner behind Sakina Counseling, a private practice in Orange County, California, focused on the Muslim community. She teaches Islamic parenting through the Positive Discipline method, in which she is a certified lead trainer, and she publishes her workshops and talks on the Sakina Counseling YouTube channel. ^{1 2}

She was born in Cairo, Egypt. Her life journey took her through Nigeria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, where she attended elementary, middle and high school, before she settled in the United States. ¹

She received a B.A. in Zoology from Rutgers University in 1986, an M.S. in Counseling from California State University, Fullerton, in 2007, and a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the Graduate Theological Foundation in 2018. Before becoming a therapist she worked for five years as a teacher and a principal in Islamic schools, and she led a high school girls' study group for four years. ¹

Sakina Counseling is her private practice, based in Newport Beach, California. The practice's own description states that its mission is to help the global Muslim community, and she works there with individuals, couples, families and teens. Her areas of work include parent-child relationships, women issues, couple dynamics, identity formation and parenting. ^{2 1}

She became a Certified Positive Discipline Trainer in 2008, and her website describes her as the first to teach Islamic parenting through the lens of Positive Discipline; she conducts parenting classes and school-wide training for teachers and administrators, and frequently lectures on issues related to women and family. In 2017 she co-authored, with Munira Lekovic Ezzeldine, the book Positive Parenting in the Muslim Home. Her YouTube channel carries her parenting workshops and talks in English and Arabic, among them a series on the self-soothing child and talks on marriage and on raising Muslim children. ^{1 2}