Ayesha Sharma (she/her)

All therapy is grief work. A process of confronting a life where you expect one thing and get another, a life that brings you the unexpected and unanticipated.” Edith Eva Eger #therapy #grief #expectations

A while ago, @nytimes ran article on how to choose a therapist. Some #IYI academic psychologist said most important question to ask prospective therapist is “What manuals do you use.” NO, NO, NO. Most important question is, “How much personal therapy have you had?”

The main principle of #neurodiversity affirmative #counselling and therapy is that we do not seek to correct or change a person’s inherent neurodivergent traits. We don’t see neurodivergence as deviance, defectiveness or pathology.

“Did you set a boundary or did you make a request?”

To demedicalise distress is not to delegitimise distress. One can honor, respect and care for profound suffering without labeling it as illness, pathology or disorder.

learn about our context. it is not on us to educate you.

Bio-psycho-social-spiritual-STRUCTURAL model of wellbeing.

Every session with your therapists doesn’t have to be heavy. I actually have clients who have met all of their treatment goals but want to continuously grow.

A key function of good psychotherapy is to reveal that which is hidden.

Therapists, help me out. What's the ICD code for: Nothing is clinically "wrong", patient is experiencing basic human emotions due to racism, sexism, homophobia, removal of rights, and a pandemic?

@BenMullingsPhD @ds_psych @Therapists_C Thank you for trying to understand more. I am not talking about culturally-competent therapy. I am talking about models of therapy that are developed locally to suit local populations and their cultural/spiritual/social experiences. Not just how Western therapy can be adapted.

@ds_psych @ayesharmaa @Therapists_C My question is genuine. I'd like to know what might look different if psychotherapy was more eastern in style. On the collectivism versus individualism axis, we might lean more towards family and group therapy perhaps? We do have those approaches, so I'm wondering what else?

As a POC, the more I think about how modern psychotherapy is essentially developed and applicable to the West, I feel there are gaps in it’s application locally across the world. Colonisation isolated colonised societies from their traditional therapeutic ideas #therapistsconnect

@ds_psych @BenMullingsPhD @Therapists_C That’s actually not what the post is about. It is about the limited ways in which most commonly accepted therapeutic knowledge was developed in the West and has a long way to go to be suited to the local contexts of non-Western clients.

@BenMullingsPhD @ayesharmaa @Therapists_C True. I often get confused by these kinds of posts which basically lay out why Western approaches formulated through western contextual factors (incl cultural factors) are inappropriate. I'm not even sure that's done.