Iaa Doas stands for I Am a Descendant of American Slaves.

That is not a political statement. It is a biological one. It is the most accurate description of what I am and where I come from — and it is the lens through which everything on this site should be understood.

My name is Loren Dalbert, and I am the founder of Dalbert Design, a lived experience consultancy based in Contra Costa County. In the last five or six years I have been working in the homelessness space — on strategy, policy, and the centering of lived experience in systems that too often speak about us without us.

But before I was any of those things, I was damaged goods.

I did not know that for a long time. What I knew was that something was wrong. Not wrong with the world — wrong with me. That was the story I carried. That my responses were too big, my trust too small, my relationship with safety too broken to be explained by circumstance alone. That something in me was fundamentally deficient.

Then I was diagnosed with PTSD.

The VA sent me a packet. It had a list of symptoms — the clinical markers of post-traumatic stress. I sat with that list and read through it carefully. And somewhere in the middle of it, something shifted.

I thought: most of the Black people I know have most of these.

Not some. Most.

I said that out loud to my cousin. And he said — almost offhand, the way people say things that change your life — "You know there's a sister from South Central Los Angeles who wrote a book about that. It's called Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome."

That was the beginning. Not the beginning of my healing — but the beginning of the reframe. The shift from what's wrong with my people to it's not our fault.

I found Dr. Joy DeGruy's work. I explored it. And then I kept going — deeper into the science of trauma, deeper into the question of why these patterns persist across generations even in people who were never directly harmed. That search led me to epigenetics. To the research showing that trauma doesn't just wound the person who experiences it — it changes something in the biology that gets passed forward. To studies demonstrating that the children and grandchildren of people who suffered carry measurable traces of that suffering in their own nervous systems.

That is not a metaphor. That is biology.

And that biology — that inherited, measurable, not-your-fault biology — is what this program is built around.

I built IaaDoas Repair Shop because I needed it before I knew how to build it. Because I spent years FUBAR — fucked up beyond all recognition — before I understood what had made me that way. And because the path from FUBAR to SNAFU — situation normal, all fucked up, and at peace with that — is not a path anyone should have to find alone.

I am not a therapist. I am not a researcher. I am a descendant of American slaves who has done enough of the work to be able to show others where the door is.

I am also still doing the work. That matters. You will not be led through this program by someone who has arrived. You will be accompanied by someone who is still on the road — which means I know where the hard parts are because I am still in some of them.

That is the only credential that counts here.

Iaa Doas. I Am a Descendant of American Slaves.

That is where we begin. And this is my story.