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Right in the middle of lockdown in 2020, after much deliberation, I decided to take up therapy based on a mentor’s recommendation. The next year was the most transformative year of my entire life. It opened up the inner world that was hidden within me and gave me tools and techniques to manage my emotions and daily living better.
To my social and professional circle, I am a fairly accomplished person. However, I have struggled for a very long time in managing my own self esteem. There have been countless days of self doubt and anxiety which stole the happy moments which I could have experienced otherwise. Over many years, I have spoken to many individuals and have found this phenomenon to be more common than we are ready to accept. Seemingly happy and accomplished individuals struggling dealing with demons in their own heads leading to an unfulfilled and unhappy life.
The general advice a person who is going through this and decides to speak about it gets is to be stronger and face the problems head on. Any talk of therapy is frowned upon, laughed away or taunted at which makes the person feel even more miserable and lost. The people who do all this have no clue on the objective, process and results of therapy and just whisk it away from their daily conversations because of taboo.
There is hardly any talk on acceptance of the current state of emotions and make that a starting point to make progress. This leads to a gap between your actual self and a made up self and this causes friction because rather than accepting, you are striving. Many times mental health issues are hyphenated with madness or weakness.
When I started to work with my therapist, we covered a lot of ground about my life so far and the areas that I would like to work and get better at. There were weekly sessions where we would discuss various topics such as self esteem, self confidence, inferiority complex, comparisons etc. Apart from discussions, there were other techniques he employed which helped me with a better understanding of these topics and tools to understand and manage my emotions.
There is such a lack of understanding of the issue because just like sex, topics related to mental health are hushed away and never find space in public discourse. According to some estimates there are 56 million people in India who suffer from mental health issues and way too less mental health practitioners and hospitals.
Fortunately, lately there has been some talk happening in social media on this topic, thanks to celebrities like Deepika Padukone and Virat Kohli coming out and speaking about it in public. Looking back at my own experience, I have overcome so many limiting thoughts and feelings that I wrongly assumed to be the core part of my personality. I now feel more free, expressive and enjoy my daily life. I sincerely wish that more discussions and sharing happens on the topic of mental health and therapy as a way to work on them.
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