Radhika Malhotra discusses her experience on the feeling of otherness, and how vocalising her thoughts and examining her own assumptions has allowed her to embrace herself more fully.
This article is about my experience of feeling othered as an Indian woman, a counselling trainee, and a practitioner. It is the story of how I began to bridge an internalised cultural gap that had quietly shaped my identity, my relationships, and ultimately my work with clients.
On my first day at the Psychosynthesis Trust, I noticed I was the only Indian woman in the group. I did not know if I was allowed to voice my feeling of otherness as the only Indian in the room. I was not sure how welcome such conversations would be. At the time, I was used to repressing my Indian heritage and colluding with those around me to agree with Western cultural norms, despite them grating against my own beliefs. At home, however, I navigated a different reality, immersed in an Indian household where the values and beliefs I’d grown up with were simply the air I breathed.
As the training continued, I found myself increasingly torn. On one side, I was learning new ways of being through the counselling training. On the other, those same frameworks felt impossible to carry home, where the norms were so different that applying them would have felt like an imposition. I was living between two worlds that didn’t yet know how to speak to each other. This difference was brought to light in many group discussions, but one example that spoke very loudly to me at the time was on forming our own boundaries.
At the time, I was struggling with adjusting in my marital home due to certain family politics. When I explored these with the training group, the response was almost unanimous: “why don’t you just move out with your family?” I could feel the group’s empathy for my situation and their support. There was no ill intent in their seemingly straightforward logical response. Yet, I felt missed and invisible. My internalised Western subpersonality agreed with them, and the war in me erupted when my louder Indian subpersonality wholeheartedly disagreed. And yet there was a part of me that stood apart from both, watching, aware, not fully claimed by either side. I did not have a name for it then but upon studying Psychosynthesis, I realised this is my ‘I’. Two things were missed by the group: the underlying currents of patriarchy and power dynamics within a joint Indian family household, and a fundamental difference in what “family” even means. To them, family meant my husband and children. To my husband and I, it includes his parents too.
For me to move out with my husband and children would mean breaking bonds with the larger family. It would have ramifications for my husband within his extended family in India as well. These are essential reasons holding me back from a decision I know would bring me peace, but at what cost?
This sense of being missed and feeling invisible was echoed when my white therapist asked me the same question. As a client, I felt a very strong sense of being let down, exhausted at having to sit with this invisibility, and so I ended my therapy with her and took some time to heal from that experience on my own.
In that time, I came to an understanding. Yes, if I were to leave, I would feel peace. I would have a home run on my own terms. But I would lose the richness my children gain from having grandparents to care for and coddle them. I would lose a husband who feels he can fulfil his duty as a son, keeping his parents happy and cared for. I would lose the support that comes from having elders to rely on when things get tough. It dawned on me that I come from a collectivistic society, and that is integral to my identity.
Sitting with this realisation, I began to notice a shift in my client work. From working with predominantly white clients, new enquiries shifted to mainly clients from South Asian heritage. As this was happening, I became more aware of my own cultural assumptions as a counsellor, an easy mistake to make, I recognised, and one I had been making myself. When sitting across from a client from a different cultural background, it is tempting to assume that concepts such as boundaries, family relationships, and power dynamics carry the same meaning as they do in your own culture. They rarely do.
To sit with this more honestly, I started asking my clients more about their resistance to making different choices, choices that might support how they dreamed of living. My aim was to begin to truly see the world through their lens, rather than through my assumptions of their lens.
It made a difference. When I sat across from a white client who missed her mother and wondered why she couldn’t simply call her, I stopped myself from acting on that assumption. Instead, I empathised with her sorrow and gently explored what was stopping her from reaching out. This opened up a whole new area for our work together, one that could easily have been shut down had I acted on my initial response.
Even when working with South Asian clients, I do not assume to know their experience of a shared heritage fully. My experience of being an Indian woman is my own, and another’s will be different. However, I knew that having these realisations was one thing. I was still fearful of voicing the differences I felt from my peers. Until I crossed that bridge, I would not be able to bring this integral piece of experience, both my clients’ and mine, into my work. So, I began attending various workshops and CPDs on culture and heritage.
Through these workshops, a lot of self-exploration, and successfully searching for a therapist from Indian heritage, I started gaining some confidence in voicing my experience. The first chance to use my voice to name my difference arose when I assisted two white male colleagues at the Psychosynthesis Trust. It was a repeat of my experience of being the only Indian in a group and I was scared. At the time, I was also working through my feelings of living in London while carrying the weight of ancestors who had lived through the British Raj. The history of that erasure was not abstract to me. It lived in my body, in the very hesitation I felt before speaking. And yet, despite my shaky knees, racing heart, and sweaty palms, I voiced my experience of feeling different. Looking back, I recognise this as my first act of will by taking action despite the fear I felt.
A part of me expected to be dismissed and invalidated. Instead, I was received with warmth and empathy. This gave me the courage to continue voicing my experience of being different. All of this came to a crescendo when I attended a two-day workshop on culture and identity facilitated by an Indian woman. It felt as though all of my repressed Indian-ness was given permission to be.
This came to a head in a supervision session following the workshop, where my supervisor, a white woman, and I were exploring my work with a self-harming client of Indian heritage. We got onto the topic of suicide in relation to the client, and I listened to my supervisor’s point of view. As she spoke, I found myself doing what I had always done, nodding and feigning agreement while my inner Indian subpersonality was screaming a different point of view, one stemming from Indian cultural belief systems.
So, again, despite shaky knees, racing heart, and sweaty palms, I voiced my point of view to my supervisor. Instead of being silenced or invalidated, I was heard. We had a collegial exchange of ideas on the cultural differences around suicide and, for the second time, my Indian-ness felt welcome. This time, the act of will came more quickly. The fear I felt was familiar as was the courage it took to voice what had so far been hidden.
It was from this place of feeling more fully myself that I began to bring this awareness more deliberately into my client work. For example, a longstanding client from South Asian heritage living in the UK and I have been exploring her beliefs about her own worthiness in relationships. She has a close friend from a different cultural background whose communication style differs from what my client prefers in her friendships. We have been working with her grief and discomfort regarding these differences. Her tendency is to internalise the problem and believe that something is wrong with her. As we were exploring this in a particular session, I realised that perhaps my client’s need for a particular communication style could partially come from her South Asian heritage. Coming from a collectivistic society, friendships are experienced very differently than they are in the West. I raised this to highlight that her preferences in friendship could have cultural roots too, whilst being careful not to pin it fully on culture, as that could move us away from her grief and potentially invalidate her experience. She sat with this and felt there could be truth in there being a cultural dimension to her needs. This, for me, is what culturally attuned practice looks like in action.
Now, I stand at a new threshold where I feel I have navigated a balance between my Indian identity and living in a Western world. A great deal of work has gone, and continues to go, into maintaining this balance, checking my assumptions, reading and learning more about my heritage, engaging with the Western culture I am immersed in, and in finding my voice to raise awareness to this navigation in a counselling practice. One of the biggest realisations I have had in starting to use my voice is this: by keeping quiet, I was colluding with my internalised racism and echoing the repression faced by my ancestors during the British Raj.
Naming that, even to myself, was its own form of liberation.
If you are sitting in a training room feeling the weight of your difference, not knowing if you are allowed to name it, I hope my experience shows that you are. And perhaps those who hold that room might find, as my colleagues and supervisor did, that welcoming that difference enriches the work for everyone in it. My journey from silence to voice has taught me that Psychosynthesis has the capacity to hold all of who I am. But that capacity needs to be actively cultivated, through training, through supervision, through the courage of both practitioners and institutions to ask whose experience is centred, and whose is left at the door.
Those two worlds have not merged, but I have stopped asking them to. I have found a way to stand in both (in Psychosynthesis terms, experiencing my sense of I) by learning to hold my Indian and Western subpersonalities and gently aligning with my Self.