An ode to therapy - pt. 2

The story of how I began to embrace that we are all just having a human experience by embracing that I was just having a human experience

At some point after an undefined and amorphous time of barely living through my slow-motion breakdown, I realised I had stopped being a feeling-and-sensing-person. 

I felt like I was under the weight of a heavy grey cloud that I could barely carry. Yet, the weight itself felt like it lived in my chest while filling all of me as I turned into a shell of myself. All I wanted was to return to feeling and sensing anything at all… 

Enter stage left: a star therapist. A rare gift, and one of the greatest things to have happened to me as an adult. 

Going beyond my parts

At therapy, I often spoke about my fears as an adult woman. They felt alive to me. They were current, they were burning me up, and they needed ventilating. 

But the first time I sensed something breaking open in me – and the first time I realised I was performing only a part of my whole self –  was when I heard my therapist say, “I see you acknowledge yourself as a perpetrator for the first time, today.” 

Right away, I began to see that I overwhelmingly related to myself only through stories of victimhood. Infidelity, the way I remembered Kris and Hassan. Unequal opportunities, the way I remembered my parents’ marriage. Social roles in the family, the way I saw myself at home. 

These stories of victimhood had become my only entry point into my conscious being. That is to say, these stories had me embodying the ‘angry woman’ part of me as if it were all of me. 

The downside of this was that the stories of victimhood obscured reality. The parts of me that did not find expression through my stories of victimhood, the parts of me that knew power, or the uglier one that my therapist identified as a “perpetrator”. 

Therapy taught me to reach for these other parts of me that had shown courage, displayed autonomy, acted out of generosity, broken cycles, and biggest of all… wielded caste-privilege. Therapy also taught me there was a dark underbelly to these parts of me. They were often in need of validation, sometimes mean and vengeful, and occasionally indifferent to another’s human experience. 

My sense of victimhood was so alive – thanks to the stories that held those parts of me together – that my sense of power had gone radio silent. I hadn’t chosen to write any stories about them. 

But there was an upside too. The stories of victimhood were so much a part of my conscious being that noticing them and processing them took little work. 

As I began to recognise these stories, I began to explore the rest of me. The parts of me that were unencumbered by stories, the parts of me that I’d alienated, and the parts of me that I could choose to write empowering stories about.  Much of which was in my unconscious being.

Learning to see my stories of victimhood, I learned to recognise that they were just stories. They did not reflect the truth about reality.

Reality lay elsewhere… beyond the stories.

Going beyond the stories

The hard work began when I tried to discover the rest of me beyond the stories I was so familiar with. There was one problem though. You don’t know what you don’t know. 

What I did know for sure was that there was something to discover. My body had been giving me plenty of signs. Like the panic, the hazy watering eyes, the breathlessness and the bitter taste (which I learned were fight or flight responses on overdrive) or the numbness, the apathy, and the heaviness (which I learned were freeze responses overstaying their welcome). 

So I set out on what felt like an archaeological expedition through the wreckage and rubble of my childhood, without any idea about what to look for or even so much as a clue about what lay buried there.

The way into the rubble for me was through my body. And thus began my project to make conscious what was unconscious. 

After years of digging, unearthing, unpacking, and excavating, I found that my unconscious sense of myself was unworthiness. It stemmed from a place in my childhood when I was scared, unable to process the conflict around me at home.

This sense of one's unworthiness was also all around me: in my family, in my community of elders, among the people I considered my people. My aunt worried about wearing a sari when she went abroad. My uncle worried that his daughter fell in love and married a man of her choice, far from the ideal of arranged marriage he held dear. And my dad worried that he failed to build a life worthy of his children because my friends’ dads drove better cars. We all carried our unworthiness in our bodies like it was our heritage from one generation to the next. 

I was on my way to being no different.  

I also learned that every story I believed was a story that confirmed my own sense of unworthiness. Anything I experienced neatly slotted itself into data points that further proved to me that I am indeed unworthy. 

Not a wonder then that I was partial to a view of Raj that confirmed my own view of me. 

When I looked at him, I saw about 1% of him: his words, his straight shooter style, his ignorance of my work and his indifference to my inner world. Those things about him that confirmed to my subconscious self that I am unworthy. Except I understood them as objective “facts” because they confirmed the stories of my conscious mind’s story-making machine. 

The reality of my whole self 

I wanted urgently to disown these ugly parts of me that tripped me up. But therapy taught me that I couldn’t disown them, because they made me who I am. 

They were my weaknesses, but they were also my strengths. They were my performing self but they were also my backstage self, the human being in me that was compassionate, generous, open to the world, connected within and without.

They were the good, and they were the bad, and they were also, sadly, the ugly.

This insight left me with little choice. The only way forward was to pick up the tools to accept the parts of me I wasn’t proud of, understand them, and release them from their roles in my life.

Slowly, I began to let the angry woman Malavika and the scared child Malavika breathe, instead of suffocating them with the grand narratives I was so married to, of virtue and victimhood. This became my practice of self-compassion. 

I learned that seeing only 1% of Raj’s personality was me having a human experience, coping with things I didn’t have the tools to resolve about being a child and then a teenager unprepared for the hard-knocks. 

The more I let myself breathe, the more I discovered the rest of me.

The parts of me that fit no neat story. I love water in any form: from drinking it to bathing in it to being in it in swimming pools and lakes and oceans. I enjoy observing a room: the way people carry themselves, move, speak, act and interact. I live for comedy, nonsense, empty banter, playing silly games, and the imaginary world I yearn to build. 

These parts of me just were. They made me but they came with no story.

They showed me a place to live beyond my grand but made-up narratives of my womanhood and childhood. 

As I let these other parts of me come out and see the light of day, I found a new wholeness to myself. 

Coming together, these other parts of me could really see Raj when I met him this fortnight. The 99% of him I never saw ten years ago. His tone. His gestures. His ideas of fun. His lopsided smile. His fidgeting thumbs. His twinkling eyes. His sense of style. His conversations with his 10 year old. The way he would avert his gaze or the way he would meet mine.

By teaching me to see that I was just having a human experience, therapy taught me to see that everyone was having a human experience. 

By teaching me to see the whole in myself, therapy taught me to see the whole in the world.

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Postscript: Therapy as a way to get to know yourself, or “we are all a little mad”

I could write a whole book about the reason we could all use therapy. But for now, let me just say this. 

Somehow, therapy is a place – in the minds of many – that is reserved for the “mentally ill.” I can’t count the number of times people have said, in shock, some version of this to me: “You look formidable/held together/on top of your game! Why do you need therapy?!”

I want to say we are all a little mad, and there’s no guarantee we won’t get a little madder. It’s only the stigma against “mental illness” that makes it hard to confront that. But you already know that and I hate to preach.

So I will say this instead. 

Therapy is rewarding even if you don’t think of yourself as mad. A therapist offers a trustworthy, consistent and predictable relationship that can steer you through the mission that everyone advocates, from Socrates to Ramana Maharshi. To know yourself. 

My therapist never used any labels with me. I never once heard her say depression or anxiety or trauma or disorder. I never officially found out what was ‘wrong’ with me (which is just as well; a diagnosis would have just been another story in my head full of stories). 

What she did do was co-regulate me out of fight, flight, and freeze states, into a state of long-term embodied calm in my nervous system. All the while showing me a mirror, to help me see how I get in my own way. This process has been so rewarding for me that on most days now, I wonder if I really need a session. 

I am no expert on psychology or psychotherapy but I am by far the world’s biggest expert on my journey of self-knowledge. And these are my expert thoughts to conclude my ode to therapy:

• Therapy taught me that we are born into and raised with stories. Stories that may be useful, but are seldom true. Stories that our families and communities inherited, and lived, and breathed, and fulfilled. Stories about status, identity, power, prestige, role, duty, virtue and morality. Stories that fill our bodyminds and become our identity, if left unchecked long enough. 

• These stories can hurt us as much as help us. They can form the core of what we identify with, and they can empower us, but they can also limit us, and they can seize up our bodies, keep us in perennial fight/flight/freeze mode and even cause literal dis(-)ease. 

• For me, therapy was the relationship that helped me see these stories, and work my way out of them. 

I don’t know that we can ever be fully freed of our stories. After all, this story of how therapy has freed me is a story I am not free of. 

But it is a story I wrote, a story I chose, and a story I am consciously hitching my wagon to. 

Thank you for reading my story about my journey with therapy.  

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This is Part 2 of a two-part personal essay on my bodymind wellness journey with the able guidance of my therapist. Part 1 is here.

Feedback is the greatest love language. This essay's got a ton of love, support, structural and stylistic editing from

Nic Hurrell

, for which I will be ever grateful.