A child doesn’t have to understand any of this.

They don’t have the language for my mother experiences uncertainty as danger or my father becomes anxious when he cannot predict what I will do. They only know that some versions of themselves make the room feel different.

So they adjust.

They become a little quieter here. A little more agreeable there. They learn which ambitions make their parents proud and which make them nervous. They learn what can be said at breakfast and what should wait until everyone is in a better mood.

By the time they are old enough to ask themselves what they actually want, some of the answers have already been edited. This is one of the strange things about growing up: sometimes you remember the rules less clearly than you remember the feeling of breaking them.

You may not remember, Don’t do this.

You remember standing at the edge of doing it and feeling that something was wrong.

And years later, when nobody is actually stopping you anymore, that feeling can remain.

You move out. You earn your own money. You become an adult. Technically, you can do whatever you want.

And yet, before doing something your parents might dislike, there is that familiar pause. A little dread. A tightening in the stomach. The sudden urge to explain yourself before anyone has even asked.

This is where the child’s guilt becomes interesting. Because guilt assumes responsibility and we are remarkably prone to assuming too much of it.

If your mother is upset because you made a choice she dislikes, it can feel obvious:

I made her upset.

Therefore:

I did something wrong.

But those two statements are not interchangeable.

• You can cause an emotion without causing an injury.

• You can disappoint someone without betraying them.

• You can make someone afraid without having done something dangerous.

• You can make someone sad simply by becoming someone they did not expect.

This is an incredibly difficult distinction to learn because childhood trains us to repair ruptures.

If the parent is unhappy, the child often looks for what they can do to restore the emotional equilibrium of the household.

Apologise. Explain. Adjust. Be good. Make them proud. Become easier.

And eventually, some adults become extraordinarily skilled at preventing other people from experiencing negative emotions. They call it empathy. They call it being considerate. Sometimes it is just an old survival skill wearing respectable clothes.

This may explain something peculiar about the way adults continue to negotiate with their parents.

They aren’t always asking for permission. Sometimes they are asking for absolution. Sometimes, we just want their approval because we want the choice to stop hurting.

Tell me I’m not hurting you by doing this.

Tell me I’m not selfish.

Tell me you understand.

Tell me you will still love me if I become someone you didn’t expect.

And because they don’t receive that reassurance, they keep trying. They explain the decision differently. They wait for a better moment. They become more successful. They become more independent in every practical sense while remaining emotionally stuck at the same question:

Are you okay with who I am?

It is tempting to think the solution is simply to stop caring. But that is a strangely adolescent definition of independence.

Why should maturity require becoming indifferent to your parents?

The harder achievement is being able to care about their feelings without treating those feelings as instructions.

There is also another uncomfortable possibility that we don’t like to admit.

Sometimes blaming our parents for our lack of freedom is easier than discovering what freedom actually requires.

If my mother won’t let me do something, then I know what the problem is. But what if she would be upset, but couldn’t actually stop me?

Then I have to decide.

What do I want?

What am I willing to lose?

What discomfort can I tolerate?

What kind of person am I prepared to be?

That is much harder.

Because freedom doesn’t simply remove constraints, it removes excuses.

At some point, my parents won’t let me can become a sentence that is no longer factually true but feels psychologically necessary.

The door is open.

You are just waiting for someone to tell you that it is okay to walk through it.

And perhaps this is why we keep trying to change our parents. We imagine that if they became more permissive, our lives would finally become possible.

If Mum understood.

If Dad stopped worrying.

If they trusted me.

If they accepted my relationship.

If they thought my career was respectable.

Then everything would become easier.

But there is a trap hidden inside this hope. It makes our freedom dependent on their development. We become invested in turning them into different people.

And perhaps they are doing the same thing to us. They want us to become a version of ourselves that makes them less afraid. We want them to become versions of themselves that make us less guilty.

Both people are waiting for the other to change so that they can finally feel comfortable.

Nobody moves.

The parent eventually has a choice to make: Whether to build a life in which the child is not the only place that love can go.

A person who has friends they care about, work that absorbs them, interests that have nothing to do with their children, a self that existed before parenthood and can continue after intense parenting; such a person has somewhere to put the enormous amount of meaning that parenthood once held. Then the child’s independence can be painful without being existential.

The child leaves —> The parent misses them.

And then the parent goes to dinner with a friend.

Reads something.

Travels.

Works.

Falls in love with something new.

Builds a life.

The child is still loved.

But the child is no longer responsible for keeping that life meaningful.

Perhaps this is part of what parents must eventually give their children: not freedom from being loved, but freedom from being necessary for the parent’s happiness.

And the child has their own version of the bargain to make.

They have to discover that their parents can have feelings they are not required to resolve (This is not the same as becoming inconsiderate). You can listen. You can reassure. You can explain. You can be gentle.

But eventually there is a line between saying,

I understand why this scares you

and saying,

therefore I won’t do it.

And perhaps the first few times you cross that line, it feels terrible. You feel the old instinct to reverse yourself. But you don’t. You let the feeling exist. You continue living. And then, slowly, something almost anticlimactic happens.

You wake up the next morning and your life is still there. Your mother is still your mother. You are still her child. The relationship survives an emotion.

You have learned something your childhood could not teach you:

discomfort is survivable.

And once you know that, you need less permission.

Your parents’ opinions can remain meaningful without becoming instructions. Their fear can remain real without becoming your compass. Their disappointment can exist without becoming your responsibility to eliminate.

Perhaps we never completely outgrow the people who raised us.

We carry their fears, their preferences, their definitions of safety, their ideas about what a good life looks like. Some of them become so deeply embedded that we mistake inheritance for intuition.

There will probably always be some part of you that wants your mother to understand. Some part that still wants to turn around at the doorway and hear:

It’s okay. Go.

But eventually, there is another possibility. You go without hearing it.

And perhaps, much later, you realise something stranger still.

The weather you spent your childhood learning to predict is no longer outside you. It is inside you. You carry the old sky with you. But you can finally look up and discover that a feeling is not a forecast. You can feel the dread and still go. You can hear the old voice and choose differently. You can love the person who taught you to be careful without spending the rest of your life being careful in exactly the ways they were.

And there may be no satisfying final conversation. Your parent may never understand. They may remain worried. They may think you are making a mistake. They may even be right sometimes.

You do not have to turn them into villains to disagree with them. You do not have to stop loving them to stop obeying them. And you do not have to make them comfortable in order to know that you are safe. As children, we learn to read the emotional weather around us. As adults, we begin to understand that weather is not always a command.

And maybe that is what becoming an adult actually is:

• Becoming someone your parents finally approve of.

• Escaping them.

• Changing them.

But learning to say:

“I know how you feel. I love you. And I am still going to decide.”

Of course, to the parent outside - but also to the image of them within us.

and becoming able to ask, for yourself:

If nobody were waiting for me to remain the person they already know, who would I become?

Written by Aastha Lalan

Push that idea one step further than Winnicott took it: hate is what dependency becomes when it can’t be mourned. When the need for another person has nowhere acceptable to go, it doesn’t vanish. It curdles.

I think patriarchy is what that curdling looks like at scale.

We tend to describe patriarchy as a system of power. That’s true, and it’s not the whole truth. Look at how consistently women are held through contradiction — idealised as mothers, muses, goddesses, and simultaneously dismissed as irrational, dangerous, morally suspect. These look like opposite moves. They’re not. Idealisation and contempt do the same job: they let a man avoid meeting a woman as an ordinary, separate person with her own desires and her own no. The goddess can’t disappoint you because she isn’t allowed to be human. The good woman carries your purity so you don’t have to carry your own need.

Underneath both is one unsaid sentence: I needed her, and I couldn’t bear that I did.

This is what makes the manosphere worth taking seriously psychologically, not just politically. Listen to its actual complaints. Loneliness, blamed on women. Rejection, rebranded as hypergamy. For one unguarded second, dependency almost gets spoken. Then it collapses back into accusation — women are not just the cause of the pain, they’re now responsible for fixing it, through submission, admiration, availability. The need appears and is disowned in the same breath. That’s not a contradiction in the logic. That is the logic. Dependency becomes speakable only once it’s someone else’s fault.

Arendt is useful here, and not decoratively. In On Violence, she argues violence shows up where power is failing, not where it’s secure — it’s what fills the gap legitimacy leaves behind. Read the manosphere’s obsession with control the same way. The louder the demand for submission, the more it looks like a cover story for how little power is actually left. Domination isn’t confidence. Often it’s confidence’s absence, in costume.

None of this is only a male story. Amrita Narayanan’s work on desire in India names the female half of the same architecture. She argues safety isn’t the opposite of desire — it’s usually its precondition. And yet many women are taught to perform goodness in public while metabolising want in private. The devi and the desirable woman aren’t two separate images. They’re one split a woman is asked to live inside, every day, in ordinary rooms.

Which brings me to Siya Goyal, carefully, because I don’t think her case should be made to mean more than it can bear. What I won’t do is turn her into an allegory for a “post-feminist” world the manosphere claims to be reacting against. What I will ask is a narrower question: what does it mean when violence starts to feel more available than being heard? That’s not an excuse. It’s an attempt to understand the conditions under which an act like that becomes thinkable at all.

The larger pattern backs this up, and it isn’t symmetrical. Men who kill partners are disproportionately driven by jealousy, possessiveness, the refusal to be left. Women who kill partners more often carry a documented history of coercion or abuse behind the act. Same tragic outcome, different roads in. That asymmetry matters, and flattening it into “both sides do it” erases exactly what needs to stay visible.

So here is where I land, and I want to say it plainly rather than circle it: the manosphere needs feminism to look victorious, because male suffering needs somewhere to point. If loneliness has an external author, you never have to grieve the version of yourself that needed someone and couldn’t say so. But nobody is winning inside the patriarchy. Men inherit an identity with no room for vulnerability without shame. Women inherit the consequences — expected to be nurturing, desirable, endlessly available, and blamed the moment they’re not. Neither of those is freedom, even though the power between them is nowhere close to equal.

Calling this a war between men and women is comforting, because wars have sides, and sides can be chosen. What’s actually happening is quieter and harder to organise a movement around: a lot of people, unmourned, mistaking the ache for an enemy instead of a loss.

There’s a novel doing the rounds right now, Yesteryear, about a tradwife influencer who gets exactly what she’s been selling — she wakes up not in her farmhouse with the hidden fridges and the production crew, but in an actual 1855, with a fire instead of electricity and a husband who has to be a real farmer because there is no other kind. And the fantasy doesn’t hold. It was never really about butter churns or submission. It was about wanting an identity that didn’t require constant improvisation. The tradwife trend and the manosphere are doing the same thing from opposite ends — both are asking to go back to a time that only feels stable because neither of them actually has to live there. Casual dating didn’t get rid of our need for intimacy, it just moved the need somewhere less named. Social media didn’t get rid of our need to share a room with another body, it just let us starve that need more efficiently. This is the same pattern.

You can’t opt out of a need by refusing to name it — you just go looking for it in stranger and stranger shapes. And you cannot actually return to 1855, or to some earlier version of masculinity, or of womanhood. Time only moves one direction. What we’re calling tradition, from this side of it, is a tantrum — not because the wish is shameful, but because wishing to go backward instead of grieving forward is what a person does when a loss hasn’t been metabolised yet. Trying to live inside the past doesn’t restore anything. It just produces adults doing an infant’s version of wanting — total, undivided, non-negotiable — without an infant’s excuse. Maybe the way through isn’t backward at all. Maybe it’s mourning what can’t be had, so that what’s actually possible — two people, present tense, walking forward shoulder to shoulder instead of face to face in some imagined century — has room to exist.

Written by Myra Khan, with Edits by Sadaf Arafati

Someone has already decided they no longer want to marry the person their family has chosen for them, but continues to wait for the conversation in which everyone finally understands. Someone has rehearsed confronting their manager so many times that they could recite the conversation word for word, yet postpones it because there is still one possible reaction they have not accounted for. Someone has known for months that they want to leave a relationship, change careers, begin therapy, move cities, or tell the truth about something that has remained unsaid, but continues to delay the decision because the future beyond it still feels too uncertain.

From the outside, these delays are often described as indecision. We tell people they are overthinking, procrastinating, lacking confidence, or simply afraid. There is probably some truth to all of these explanations. Yet they also leave something out. Many people who postpone difficult decisions are not confused about what they want. They spend remarkably little time debating the decision itself. Instead, they spend their time imagining what happens afterwards.

They wonder who will stop speaking to them. They wonder whether they will regret leaving. They wonder how they will pay rent if the new job doesn’t work out, whether the friendship will survive the confrontation, whether refusing one expectation will disappoint everyone else who has quietly built their lives around it. The decision itself often becomes secondary to an endless rehearsal of its consequences.

This is perhaps why so much advice about courage feels strangely incomplete. We are encouraged to trust ourselves, to take the leap, to step outside our comfort zones, as though uncertainty were simply a feeling that particularly anxious people experience. But uncertainty is not a personality trait. It is a feature of reality. Some conversations genuinely do alter relationships. Some career changes genuinely fail. Some risks do end badly. The discomfort people experience before making these decisions is not always irrational. Sometimes it is an accurate recognition that important choices carry losses alongside possibilities.

Perhaps the question, then, is not why people are afraid of taking risks, but what kind of certainty they believe they are waiting for.

If we listen closely to the way people talk about difficult decisions, it is often less about courage than prediction. “I’ll do it once I know things will settle down. Once I’ve saved a little more. Once I know how they’ll react. Once I’m sure I’m making the right decision.” The conditions vary, but the structure remains surprisingly similar. The decision keeps being moved a little further into the future, not because it has become less necessary, but because there is still one more unknown that feels intolerable.

Planning, of course, is not the problem. There is nothing pathological about wanting savings before resigning, emotional support before confronting a family member, or practical alternatives before leaving a difficult situation. In many cases, these are signs of good judgement rather than avoidance. It would be strange to argue that people should embrace uncertainty carelessly.

The difficulty begins when preparation quietly changes into something else. There comes a point at which we are no longer gathering enough information to make a thoughtful decision; we are trying to gather enough information to remove uncertainty altogether. We begin to imagine that somewhere ahead lies a version of the future from which the difficult decision can finally be made without genuine exposure to loss, disappointment, conflict, or regret.

It is an understandable fantasy, perhaps even a necessary one. Few people willingly choose uncertainty for its own sake. Yet it is also a curious fantasy because it asks something impossible of risk itself. A risk whose outcome is already known is no longer experienced as a risk. It becomes a formality, a decision whose emotional work has already been completed before it is made.

Maybe this is what an island of perfect safety looks like. Not a place without fear, but a place from which difficult choices can finally be made because uncertainty has somehow disappeared. It promises that if we wait a little longer, think a little harder, prepare a little better, there will eventually come a moment in which the future reveals enough of itself for us to move without genuine vulnerability.

The difficulty is not that people believe in such islands. Given how much is at stake in the decisions that shape our lives, it would be surprising if they did not. The more interesting question is why this fantasy remains so compelling, even though experience repeatedly tells us that the conversations which matter, the boundaries worth setting, and the risks that change us rarely arrive with guarantees attached.

One reason this fantasy is so difficult to abandon is that it rarely presents itself as avoidance. It presents itself as responsibility.

We are taught to think before we act, to weigh consequences carefully, to prepare rather than rush into decisions. There is nothing misguided about this. Saving money before leaving a job, building a support system before confronting a family dynamic, or having somewhere to return if a decision does not unfold as hoped are all forms of thoughtful preparation. There is a difference between courage and recklessness, and most people are trying, quite sensibly, to avoid confusing one for the other.

The difficulty is that preparation has no obvious endpoint. There is no moment at which life announces that enough thinking has been done. It becomes surprisingly easy for preparation to shift from helping us bear uncertainty to quietly promising that uncertainty itself can be overcome. We keep waiting for one more conversation, one more sign, one more month, one more reassurance, not because these things fundamentally change the decision, but because they seem to bring us closer to a future that feels easier to enter.

Perhaps what we are searching for is not confidence but permission. We want reality to tell us that this is the right decision, that the people we disappoint will eventually understand, that the losses will be smaller than we imagine, or that the future will justify the discomfort of the present. In subtle ways, we ask certainty to relieve us of the burden of choosing before we are willing to choose.

This is where the idea of an island of perfect safety begins to take shape. Not as a place without difficulty, but as a place from which difficult decisions somehow cease to feel risky. It promises that if we wait long enough, prepare carefully enough, or understand ourselves deeply enough, there will eventually come a moment when the conversation will not damage the relationship, the resignation will not threaten our stability, or the refusal will not alter the life we have already built.

The fantasy is appealing because it asks something that initially seems reasonable. Why wouldn’t we want to know what lies ahead before making a decision that could change our lives? Yet there is a contradiction hidden inside that wish.

A risk derives its meaning from the fact that its consequences cannot be fully known beforehand. If the future could be mapped in advance, if every outcome could be calculated and every disappointment anticipated, there would be very little left to risk. The emotional work of deciding would already have been completed. What remained would simply be carrying out a plan whose ending had already been written.

This is perhaps why so many people describe themselves as feeling stuck. It is not always because they cannot decide what to do. Sometimes it is because they have unknowingly accepted a condition that reality cannot satisfy. They are waiting for uncertainty to disappear before acting, while uncertainty remains the very thing that makes the decision meaningful in the first place.

None of this suggests that uncertainty should simply be embraced, or that people ought to leap into difficult situations without thought. There are forms of safety that matter enormously. Financial stability matters. Trusted relationships matter. Having alternatives matters. Sometimes the knowledge that there is somewhere to return if things do not work out is precisely what allows people to leave what has become intolerable.

Perhaps this is the distinction that gets lost when we search for islands of perfect safety. Relative safety exists. We can strengthen the ground beneath our feet before taking a difficult step. What we cannot do is eliminate the uncertainty that gives the step its significance. Preparation can make uncertainty more bearable, but it cannot transform the future into something fully knowable.

Most of us, at one time or another, have waited for life to become a little more predictable before acting. The difficulty is that life rarely offers decisions in this form. The conversations that change relationships remain uncertain until they are had. The boundaries that alter families remain uncertain until they are set. The careers worth pursuing remain uncertain until someone is willing to leave the familiar behind. In each case, there may be wiser or less wise moments to act, more or less support available, but there is almost never a point at which uncertainty has disappeared altogether.

Perhaps that is what makes islands of perfect safety so compelling. They promise not simply protection from failure, but protection from not knowing. And that may be one of the few promises that reality has never been able to keep.

Adam Phillips arrives at a similar question through a seemingly different route. Writing about children’s tantrums, he describes them as “magical acts of desperate people.” The phrase is striking because it asks us to think about the tantrum less as a behavioural problem than as an attempt to solve one.

Children occupy a peculiar position. They are entirely dependent on people they cannot control. The people they need most are also the people most capable of frustrating them. They decide what is allowed, what is refused, when they are available, and when they are not. Phillips is interested in the fact that dependency is not only comforting but also humiliating. To need another person is to discover that your wishes, however intense, are not enough.

The tantrum becomes less an expression of anger than a refusal of this arrangement. It is, in Phillips’ words, a magical act: an attempt to make reality bend where it otherwise refuses to. If I protest loudly enough, perhaps another person’s limits will dissolve. If I suffer visibly enough, perhaps frustration itself can be undone. The child is not simply asking for something; they are asking for a world in which wanting something intensely enough might make it happen.

Not because frustration disappears, but because life continues despite it. The parent who is able to remain present without trying to eliminate the child’s frustration communicates something difficult but necessary: the world does not always reorganise itself around our wishes, and yet the relationship survives. Frustration is not evidence that something has gone catastrophically wrong. It is part of what it means to depend on other people.

It is tempting to think that adulthood marks the end of this negotiation, but perhaps it merely changes its language. Children throw themselves against reality hoping it will reorganise itself around their wishes. Adults are generally less dramatic, but often no less hopeful. Instead of demanding that uncertainty disappear immediately, we postpone action until it feels manageable enough to enter. We wait for one more conversation before setting the boundary, one more sign before changing careers, one more reassurance before telling the truth. The strategy changes, but the wish remains surprisingly familiar. We are still asking reality to become a little more predictable before we agree to participate in it.

What is interesting is not that people hope for safety. Everyone does. The more difficult question is how much safety we believe is necessary before life can begin. Somewhere along the way, reasonable preparation can quietly become an endless negotiation with uncertainty itself. The decision remains suspended, not because the person lacks courage, but because they continue hoping that one more piece of certainty will finally remove the need for courage altogether.

Perhaps this is why islands of perfect safety remain so psychologically compelling. They promise something that no relationship, no career, no family, and no future can really offer: a life in which uncertainty has already been settled before it has been lived. Yet the decisions that shape our lives rarely arrive in this form. We only discover what they ask of us by making them.

Perhaps the more useful question is not whether we have finally become safe enough to act, but whether we have enough beneath us to tolerate not knowing what happens next. Relative safety can be built. We can strengthen the ground beneath our feet, seek support, make plans, and prepare as thoughtfully as we can. What we cannot do is remove uncertainty from decisions whose very significance depends upon it.

Maybe islands of perfect safety remain so compelling because they promise something uncertainty never can: guarantees. The difficulty is not simply that such places are impossible to find. It is that waiting for them quietly asks us to postpone the very experiences through which confidence is usually built.

Most likely, numbers moving across screens, arrows, charts, algorithms, valuation models, coked up genius analysts in suits. The visuals look riddled with scientific and statistics and probabilities, mostly out of reach for you and me?

Yet, the stock market remains one of the largest emotional theatres ever created.

Linguists often point out that such ideas are not decorative features of language. They reveal how people actually think. George Lakoff’s work on conceptual metaphors showed that abstract systems are frequently understood through physical images and emotional experiences. The language of markets demonstrates this perfectly. The symbols are not calculators, they are emotions and metaphors: a bull, a bear. Long before investors learned to speak in spreadsheets, they spoke in moods.

Markets climb (confidence returns)

Stocks tumble (fear spreads)

Investors panic (optimism rallies)

The bull and the bear survive because they capture something fundamental about market behaviour. Beyond just a place where information gets processed, it is a place where human emotions become coordinated at scale. Millions of people simultaneously express confidence, anxiety, hope, envy, greed, caution, and excitement through the medium of capital allocation.

The world’s largest financial system describes itself using the vocabulary of human feeling.

Humans have a peculiar habit of experiencing the future emotionally before they experience it materially. The historian Reinhart Koselleck called this the widening gap between the “space of experience” (Erfahrungsraum) and the “horizon of expectation” (Erwartungshorizont). Societies begin living psychologically inside futures that have not yet arrived. A share is not simply a claim on future cash flow. It is a collective guess about tomorrow. Markets are perhaps the purest expression of this phenomenon. Every valuation reflects how hopeful, anxious, greedy, excited, paranoid, or euphoric millions of people feel at a given moment.

The AI boom has become an extraordinary laboratory for observing it. Investors are pouring hundreds of billions into chips, data centres, energy infrastructure, model training, and software ecosystems. Estimates for AI-related spending have climbed into the trillions. Hyperscalers continue expanding capital expenditure at astonishing speed.

Anthropic’s recent move toward a public listing feels symbolically important. A company founded only a few years ago now attracts valuations approaching those once reserved for the largest corporations in history. The company’s confidential IPO filing has become another focal point for investor imagination.

Notice the word: imagination.

Finance textbooks rarely discuss imagination but markets cannot function without it. Every valuation model contains a story about the future disguised as mathematics.

Stories have always been valuable economic assets.

• Railways were a story.

• Radio was a story.

• The internet was a story.

Every technological revolution arrives with two separate products:

1. The technology itself.

2. The narrative surrounding it.

The second product often becomes far more expensive.

When investors purchase AI stocks today, they are buying a narrative.

The narrative says productivity will explode.

The narrative says companies will automate vast categories of work.

The narrative says economic growth will accelerate.

The narrative says today’s spending will eventually justify today’s valuations.

Perhaps it will. Perhaps only part of it will. Seen this way, a stock chart starts looking less like an economic object and more like an emotional seismograph.

Is there a feeling underneath every ‘price’? Soon the object itself becomes secondary. The emotion becomes the asset.

The world currently behaves as though intelligence itself has become an extractable natural resource. Data centres are spreading across continents. Governments are creating national AI strategies. Companies are restructuring entire businesses around automation. Some projections describe AI contributing trillions of dollars to economic output. Others compare the scale of investment to the GDP of major countries. The amounts involved have become almost geological.

Yet every bubble contains a peculiar relationship with time. Investors inhabit the future. Businesses operate in the present. The gap between those two worlds creates instability.

• A language model may produce extraordinary outputs. A company still requires customers willing to pay enough money to justify enormous infrastructure costs.

• An AI assistant may complete tasks in seconds. An economy still requires institutions, regulations, workflows, and human habits capable of absorbing that capability.

• Technological adoption resembles urban planning (spreads gradually through systems). Investor enthusiasm resembles wildfire (spreads through imagination).

Even some of the strongest advocates of AI have expressed concern about the scale of current expectations. Comparisons with the dot-com period have emerged from investors, economists, and industry leaders themselves. The debate rarely concerns whether AI is transformative. The debate concerns whether present valuations have already consumed decades of future growth.

Economists often describe markets as mechanisms for allocating capital. Anthropologists might describe them differently.

Millions of strangers begin telling themselves the same story about the future. The story becomes increasingly convincing because everyone else appears convinced. The resulting valuations look objective because they are expressed through numbers. The numbers create an illusion of detachment. Underneath them sits an emotional phenomenon:

Fear quantified.

Hope quantified.

Greed quantified.

Faith quantified.

Does everyone everywhere want AI because AI exists or because everyone everywhere appears to want AI (we are great at gathering evidences too)? The philosopher René Girard spent much of his career examining mimetic desire. People frequently desire things because other people desire them. Financial bubbles often feel like mimetic desire expressed through capital. The crowd manufactures certainty from its own enthusiasm.

Perhaps the most important lesson from the current moment has little to do with artificial intelligence itself. A market covered in numbers still behaves like a crowd. The spreadsheets, algorithms and earning reports remain yes but beneath every valuation lies the same force that moves audiences in theatres, worshippers in temples, voters at rallies, and fans in stadiums.

A shared feeling about what comes next.

It’s one of those lines that sounds simple until you sit with it long enough for it to become uncomfortable.

Because biologically, yes, there is a fact. A bloodline. A technical truth. But the deeper truth - the one that shaped her life - is relational. It is the person who stayed. The one who showed up over years and years until love became more real than genetics.

What makes the line linger, though, is that it accidentally speaks to something much larger than family. It speaks to the strange condition of trying to live in a world where facts are everywhere and truth feels increasingly impossible to touch.

We often talk about misinformation as though the problem is simply that people believe incorrect things. But that framing feels too neat for what is actually happening. The deeper problem is not merely falsehood. It is disorientation.

The internet has created a world in which certainty is endlessly manufacturable. Every event arrives already edited into narratives. Every tragedy becomes content before it becomes grief. Algorithms learn not what is true, but what keeps us emotionally activated long enough to stay engaged. AI only intensifies this. Images no longer guarantee reality. Audio no longer guarantees a voice. “Proof” itself has become unstable.

And so we develop this exhausting vigilance. You can feel it online constantly - people zooming into pixels, searching timestamps, dissecting accents, demanding sources, cross-referencing clips. Entire communities now operate like forensic units because everyone is terrified of being deceived.

The internet in some ways is our shadow side: our worst tendencies of hate, distrust and saying something mean to someone because it’s just a username in our mind, not a full person.

But beneath that vigilance is something more existential: we are losing confidence in our own perception.

The frightening thing about this moment is not simply that lies exist. Lies have always existed. Propaganda is ancient. The frightening thing is that we are entering an era where the distinction between authentic and artificial becomes permanently negotiable. Reality itself starts to feel aestheticized. Performative. Editable.

And when that happens, people often cling harder to “facts” while trusting each other less.

But facts, strangely, have never been very good at changing people.

This is the part that frustrates modern discourse because we are deeply attached to the fantasy that humans are rational creatures who simply update their beliefs when presented with enough evidence. We imagine political disagreement as a kind of math error. If someone believes something harmful, we assume they have not yet encountered the correct graph, article, or statistic.

But anyone who has spent even ten minutes online knows this is not how belief works.

Facts rarely enter neutral territory. They arrive already entangled with identity, shame, fear, loneliness, pride, community. Sometimes people reject evidence not because it is weak, but because accepting it would threaten their entire social world. To change their mind would mean losing belonging.

And belonging is one of the strongest forces humans know.

This is why cruelty online spreads so effectively. Not because everyone secretly enjoys being hateful, but because hate often creates instant relational clarity. It tells you who “we” are by identifying who “they” are. The internet rewards this because outrage creates cohesion. Shared contempt feels intimate. You can watch strangers become a community in real time simply by mocking the same person together.

Facts are almost secondary in these spaces. What matters more is emotional alignment.

This is also why people increasingly describe political or ideological awakenings in almost spiritual terms. They speak about “finally seeing clearly,” “waking up,” “escaping the matrix,” “learning the truth.” The emotional structure resembles conversion more than reasoning. The appeal is not just intellectual certainty. It is relief. Relief from ambiguity. Relief from confusion. Relief from the exhausting instability of modern life.

Because ambiguity is hard to live with.

And right now, ambiguity is everywhere.

We are asked to determine what is real while moving through systems specifically designed to manipulate attention and emotion. Platforms flatten context. Nuance collapses into virality. Sincerity and performance become difficult to distinguish because online identity itself has become partially performative. Even grief is now aestheticized into content forms people know how to consume.

No wonder people become desperate for certainty.

But maybe this is where that line from The Life List becomes unexpectedly useful. There are facts, and then there’s what’s true.

Not because truth should replace facts. That becomes dangerous very quickly. Conspiracy theories thrive precisely by claiming access to some deeper “truth” beyond evidence. The answer cannot simply be to abandon facts in favour of vibes, instinct, or emotional conviction.

The distinction, instead, is that human beings do not live by information alone. We live relationally.

And perhaps relationality matters even more in an era where information itself has become unstable.

A lot of contemporary discourse still assumes the goal is agreement. Debate someone hard enough, provide enough evidence, expose enough contradictions, and eventually they will cross over onto the correct side. But increasingly, this feels psychologically naïve. People rarely reason their way into or out of identities cleanly. More often, change happens because they encounter relationships that make another way of being feel survivable.

This is why marginalized communities so often ask not first for understanding, but for recognition of personhood. You hear this in the language many trans people use: you do not have to fully understand my experience for me to deserve dignity. That is not anti-intellectualism. It is an attempt to move beyond the trap where someone’s humanity becomes conditional on winning an argument.

Because if empathy only exists after perfect comprehension, many people will never receive it.

Relationality asks something more difficult than agreement. It asks whether we can remain connected even in the presence of uncertainty, opacity, or difference. Whether we can resist turning every disagreement into a trial where one side must be declared fully real and the other fraudulent.

This does not mean abandoning discernment. Some things are false. Some narratives are manipulative. Facts still matter immensely, especially in journalism, science, and history. But facts alone cannot repair a culture where trust itself has collapsed.

And maybe that is part of what feels so fragile right now: not merely that we no longer know what is true, but that we no longer know who to trust enough to discover truth together.

The internet trained us to think knowledge is primarily about exposure to information. But humans have always learned reality socially. Through attachment. Through community. Through people whose care makes uncertainty bearable enough to sit with.

Maybe that is why the line in The Life List lands with such emotional force. It reminds us that truth is not always reducible to technical correctness. Sometimes truth emerges through sustained acts of care, through relationship, through what people choose to build with one another over time.

And in a world increasingly organized around suspicion, performance, and algorithmic manipulation, that kind of truth may become more important — not less.

You see this especially in liberation movements where visibility becomes moral labour. When your existence is publicly debated, community members begin unconsciously performing representational responsibility. Every relationship becomes symbolic. Every public conflict risks becoming evidence for hostile spectators.

James Baldwin once wrote that oppressed people sometimes become “trapped in a history they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” What’s striking is how often communities understand structural history brilliantly while remaining opaque to emotional history. They can analyse capitalism, colonialism, homophobia, caste, race, gendered violence BUT cannot recognise domination once it appears in intimate miniature.

Almost like scale itself confuses moral recognition.

And sometimes therapeutic language intensifies this problem rather than resolving it. One of the strangest cultural shifts of the last decade is how psychoanalytic or therapeutic concepts escaped the clinic and became identity vernacular. Entire communities now speak fluently in the language of trauma, attachment, boundaries, dissociation, regulation, narcissism, healing. But insight vocabulary is not the same thing as self-knowledge.

Freud once described psychoanalysis as making the unconscious conscious. Online therapeutic culture often does something slightly different: it aestheticises the unconscious without transforming it. People can narrate themselves endlessly while remaining structurally identical.

This becomes especially complicated in queer spaces because queerness historically required self-analysis. Straight people could drift unconsciously into normative adulthood scripts. Queer people often had to interrogate desire, identity, embodiment, family, shame, secrecy very early. Which creates communities that are unusually psychologically articulate, but not necessarily psychologically integrated.

In fact, hyper-reflexivity sometimes becomes its own defence mechanism. Endless interpretation replaces change.

Adam Phillips writes about how some people prefer “the drama of self-description to the risks of transformation.” That feels relevant here. In many politicised spaces, woundedness becomes not just a condition but a social language. Pain acquires cultural capital because suffering is politically intelligible in ways ordinary aggression is not.

So communities become very sophisticated at reading injury and very unsophisticated at reading subtle cruelty (examples include social freezing, intellectual humiliation, playing chinese whisper, weaponised withholding, public private splits where someone ‘performs’ radical ethics communally while behaving tyrannically in interpersonal relationships, etc).

And because marginalised groups are often dependent on community for literal survival, these dynamics become difficult to challenge. Expulsion from community can mean loss of housing, emotional support, political belonging, creative networks, professional access, even physical safety. Which means conformity pressures intensify dramatically.

The anthropologist Victor Turner wrote about how liminal groups i.e. groups existing outside dominant structures often generate both radical intimacy and intense volatility. Everyone is emotionally overinvested because the collective is carrying utopian weight.

Which means disappointment becomes apocalyptic.

This is why small activist or queer communities often fracture into increasingly microscopic factions. The group is expected to redeem wounds produced by the wider culture, but the members bring those wounds into the group not knowing how to process them. So every disagreement becomes overloaded with unresolved historical feeling.

The political theorist Jacqueline Rose writes about how groups often fantasise that shared injury guarantees shared ethics. History repeatedly disproves this. Suffering does not inherently produce moral clarity. Sometimes it produces extraordinary sensitivity; sometimes extraordinary coercion.

So modern queer politics often developed through refusal:
we are not sick,
we are not deviant,
we are not disordered.

Necessary refusals. But every negation creates blind spots. Communities become reluctant to acknowledge internal dysfunction because historical medicine itself was violent. To “diagnose” anything starts feeling politically contaminated.

And yet the unconscious does not disappear because oppression explains it.

Melanie Klein’s work becomes interesting here because she argued that human beings split the world into “good objects” and “bad objects” under anxiety. Marginalised communities often end up trapped in this splitting dynamic politically. The outside world becomes persecutory; the inside world becomes idealised. But once the idealised inside disappoints you, the rage can become disproportionate because it destroys not just a relationship but a fantasy of sanctuary.

And perhaps this is the strangest part: communities organised around liberation are often the least equipped to acknowledge ordinary human ambivalence. The result is a culture where people know how to name systems exquisitely but not themselves.

“I go to sleep at night in the arms of my lover dreaming of lesbian paradise. What a nightmare, then, to open my eyes to the reality of lesbian battering. It feels like a nightmare trying to talk about it, like a fog that tightens the chest and closes the throat…. We are so good at celebrating our love. It is so hard for us to hear that some lesbians live, not in paradise, but in a hell of fear and violence” (Lisa Shapiro, commentary in Off Our Backs, 1991).

When Alice Mitchell slit Freda Ward’s throat in 1892, the court could not decide what kind of story it was witnessing. Murder required rational agency. Lesbianism, according to the logic of the time, implied pathology. The legal system kept oscillating between two incompatible plots:

• she was a criminal woman,

• or she was insane from “unnatural passions.”

The category crisis mattered because nineteenth-century culture still depended heavily on coherent gender metaphysics. Violence by men toward women was legible because patriarchy already possessed a script for masculine aggression. But female same-sex violence disrupted too many symbolic arrangements simultaneously. If Alice loved Freda “like a man,” then was she still a woman in the eyes of the law? If her desire masculinised her, did her violence become criminal aggression or psychiatric deviance? The court almost short-circuited trying to stabilise the ontology of the act.

And that confusion still shadows queer intimate violence now.

What’s interesting is that we often imagine marginalised communities primarily through the language of tenderness — refuge, solidarity, chosen family, mutual care — when historically many of them were also sites of extraordinary density. Too much meaning compressed into too few people. Too much survival work occurring inside intimate space.

There’s a reason gossip, ideological schisms, triangulations, emotional intensity, “everyone dated everyone,” exile cycles, and catastrophic friend-group implosions recur so frequently in tightly bounded queer scenes, avant-garde art circles, activist formations, diasporic enclaves, underground political cells, even monasteries. The sociologist Georg Simmel wrote that the smaller the social circle, the greater the emotional significance of every member within it. In mass society, conflict disperses. In tiny worlds, conflict acquires gravitational force.

And queer communities historically were tiny worlds. Especially before the internet. Your ex was also your roommate’s ex and your political comrade and your dealer and your emergency contact and the only person who knew your parents disowned you and the person who got you your housing and the person who introduced you to your first sense of self. There is no “clean break” in structures that small. Emotional debris becomes infrastructural.

This is partly why queer domestic violence has always had a strange cultural invisibility. Abuse narratives in heterosexual culture were historically organised around gender polarity: male aggressor/female victim. Queer relationships disrupted the visual grammar through which violence had been culturally legible. Two women fighting was eroticised, minimised, or psychologised. Two men fighting was often collapsed into mutual combat. Emotional coercion became difficult to narrate because there was no obvious patriarchal “role assignment” for outsiders to latch onto.

Small communities become barometric chambers. Every slight changes atmospheric pressure. This isn’t to say marginalised people are “sicker”, but that they carry so much more because of what the collective has done to them, that it leaks out in these ways.

However, this has the potential to disrupt collectivizing and organizing efforts - and therefore, working on our wounds so that we don’t pass them on, is more urgent than ever.

Location of meaning

A paper by Frankowski et al. (2016) tried to map this tendency as a personality trait: the need for drama. They found a cluster of habits: interpersonal manipulation, impulsive outspokenness, and persistent perceived victimhood factors. It sounds like chaos. It functions more like a system that prefers sharp, readable signals over vague ones.

To understand why, it helps to look at mentalization i.e. the capacity to understand that both you and other people have minds with thoughts, feelings, intentions, and perspectives that may differ from your own. It sounds basic, but it’s actually a developmental achievement, one that takes shape through early relationships where emotions are mirrored accurately and consistently.

There’s a classic experimental setup used to illustrate this shift. A child watches someone place a cake on a balcony to cool. Then, while the child is out of the room, the cake is moved elsewhere. When the child returns, they’re asked: Where will the person look for the cake?

Younger children, before mentalization fully develops, say the person will look where the cake actually is now. Their logic follows their own knowledge. The idea that someone else could hold a different belief doesn’t yet register.

Older children begin to answer differently: the person will look where they last saw the cake, even if that belief is now incorrect. This marks a shift into understanding minds as separate, subjective spaces.

Beyond lab experiments, this capacity forms the infrastructure of everyday relationships. When it’s strong, you can hold ambiguity: Maybe they didn’t text back because they’re busy. Maybe that tone had nothing to do with me. You can imagine multiple inner worlds at once.

When it’s fragile or inconsistently developed, the world feels more personal, more intentional, more directed. If something happens to you, it starts to feel like it was done because of you. A clear, emotionally charged explanation feels more stabilizing than an open-ended one.

This is where intergenerational patterns begin to matter. When emotional environments across generations carry unpredictability, misattunement, or unresolved stress, children often grow up without consistent experiences of having their inner states accurately understood. Instead of learning “my feelings make sense and can be held,” they learn “my feelings need to be amplified to be noticed,” or “I need to decode others constantly to stay safe.”

Histories of when things were actually done to you because of you, for example, your gender, caste, colour - that lends even more belief into this type of worldview.

Over time, this shapes both mentalization and emotional expression.

You might become highly attuned to subtle shifts in others, yet less able to hold the possibility that those shifts aren’t about you. You might read intention quickly, but with a bias toward threat or rejection. You might feel most alive in heightened emotional states because calm has historically felt like absence, distance, or disconnection.

Drama, then, goes beyond noise. It becomes a form of orientation.

It answers questions like:

• Where do I stand with you?

• What does this mean about me?

• Am I seen, chosen, important?

People with more stable mentalization capacities often experience a wider emotional bandwidth without needing escalation. They can sit inside uncertainty without immediately resolving it into a story about intent. They can feel connected without constant proof. Aliveness comes from a range of experiences like curiosity, creativity, presence, rather than primarily from emotional peaks.

This difference can create a kind of invisible mismatch in relationships. One person seeks resolution through intensity; the other through steadiness. One reads silence as meaning; the other experiences it as neutral. Neither is inherently wrong but they’re operating with different internal maps of how minds and relationships work.

What’s often overlooked is that the “need for drama” carries a kind of intelligence. It reflects a system that has learned to track emotional signals closely, to seek patterns, to make sense of ambiguity quickly. The issue isn’t the presence of this drive, but the narrow set of strategies it has access to.

As mentalization strengthens, through reflective conversations, consistent relationships, or even therapy, the range of interpretations begins to widen. The mind becomes less certain in its first conclusion, and more curious about alternatives.

Instead of “they did this to me,” there’s room for “something happened there, what else could it mean?”

Instead of needing intensity to feel engaged, there’s space for forms of connection to register as meaningful.

The shift doesn’t remove emotional depth. If anything, it refines it. Drama stops being the only way to feel alive, and becomes one of many possible emotional registers, no longer a necessity, but a choice.

Over time, this can look like empathy. It can even feel like empathy from the inside. But often it is a much more complex inheritance than simple kindness. It is vigilance that has become graceful. It is emotional labour so old it has started to feel like personality.

This is part of what can make the origin story of some therapists so interesting. They may not have simply grown up loving feelings, or wanting to help, or being naturally wise. Many grew up in environments where they became highly skilled at tracking what other people could not bear, would not name, or refused to change. The family may have treated this skill as maturity. Teachers may have called them sensitive. Friends may have experienced them as unusually understanding. But the original function of that sensitivity was often practical. It helped them survive rooms where too much was happening and almost nothing was being metabolised.

That history matters because the therapy room can feel, at first, like an ideal destination for those capacities. There is finally a setting in which close attention to emotional undercurrents is useful, disciplined, and socially recognised. There is finally a space where the invisible work they have always done acquires legitimacy. What had once been improvised inside family life becomes formalised as professional skill.

But sometimes the profession also offers a fantasy of repair. A person who grew up surrounded by repetition, denial, volatility, deadlock, or emotional asymmetry may be drawn to a form of work where change is at least conceivable. The family was full of pain, but pain alone does not create movement. Therapy appears to promise a different arrangement: another person arrives, speaks, returns, reflects, and somewhere inside that process, something may shift.

That difference is real. It matters enormously. A client has entered the room with some degree of interest in change, even when they are frightened of it, ambivalent about it, or moving against it at every turn. They are there in relation to the possibility of things becoming otherwise. Many families are not. Families can be organised entirely around continuity, even miserable continuity. A pattern can injure everyone in the room and still remain the preferred structure because it is familiar, because it distributes roles clearly, because unsettling the arrangement would require too many people to surrender too many protections at once.

This is why the therapist’s own history requires such careful thought. The risk is not simply “bringing baggage into the room,” which is too flat a way of putting it. The deeper risk is that an old emotional assignment can quietly survive inside a new professional role. A therapist may find themselves especially activated by a client who circles the same conflict for months, who returns to the same relationship and calls it something new, who reaches insight and then seems to leave it unused. On the surface, this is ordinary clinical material.

Human beings repeat. They repeat even when repetition humiliates them, exhausts them, and costs them dearly. But for someone whose earliest life was organised around trying to move what would not move, another person’s stuckness can acquire an extra charge.

The charge often appears in very respectable forms. Greater effort. Sharper formulations. Better timing. A stronger wish to “break through.” The therapist may become especially intent on finding the right wording, the right interpretation, the right intervention that will finally cause the pattern to loosen. None of this has to look dramatic or unethical. In fact, it may look like dedication. Yet the emotional temperature of the work has changed. The client’s repetition is no longer being encountered only as theirs. It has brushed against a much older scene, one in which someone else’s inability to change once carried immense emotional consequence.

This is part of why some therapists can become subtly merged with the outcome of therapy. The issue is not only overidentification with the client’s pain. Sometimes it is overidentification with the unfinished project inside themselves: the ancient hope that enough attunement, enough precision, enough steadiness might finally succeed where earlier efforts failed. The profession then becomes, in part, a place where an old drama can seek a better ending.

That does not make the therapist fraudulent.

It makes the choice of profession more human and more complicated than the polished story usually allows.

The question is whether the wound is setting the pace of the work.

That distinction is subtle enough that both therapist and client can miss it. A therapist whose own unfinished history is too active in the room may begin to lean forward internally even while appearing calm on the outside. Sessions start acquiring a faint undertow of urgency. The client may feel unusually tracked, a little over-read, perhaps gently pressed toward insight before they have fully arrived there themselves. Sometimes this is experienced as being deeply understood. Sometimes it begins to feel like being managed with exquisite intelligence. These are not small details. They shape the atmosphere in which change either becomes possible or starts to feel performative.

That feeling is important. Clients often assume that discomfort in therapy always means something valuable is happening. Sometimes that is true. Therapy can and should disturb settled defenses. But discomfort can also signal a relational mismatch. A therapist may be brilliant and caring and still be using the relationship in ways they have not fully examined.

This is one reason it can matter, even for non-therapists, to think about therapists as people with histories rather than neutral containers with degrees. Some have done a great deal of work on the part of themselves that was trained in family deadlock. Others are still speaking from inside it more than they realise. The difference may show up in whether the room feels spacious enough for repetition to reveal itself, or crowded by an unspoken pressure for transformation.

Once the separation of history and profession becomes sturdier, the original wound can undergo a real transformation. It no longer has to operate as hidden fuel. It can become a source of depth without remaining the engine. The learned perceptions can be used in the service of understanding rather than rescue.

And clients can feel the difference. They feel the difference between being accompanied by someone who can bear their repetition and someone who has started, however subtly, to take it on as a test. One kind of room lets you unfold. The other kind, even with warmth in it, can make you feel that your pace is creating trouble.

That is why this story matters beyond therapists themselves. It matters to anyone in therapy who has ever wondered why one clinician felt containing and another felt strangely entangled. It matters to anyone who has left sessions feeling as though they were being known too quickly, or ushered toward growth with a steadiness that had an edge to it. Sometimes what is being felt there is the shape of a therapist’s own unresolved relation to stuckness.

The goal is not to find a therapist with no wound. That person does not exist, and would probably be less useful than people imagine. The goal is a therapist whose history has become thinkable to them. Someone who knows the difference between recognising a pattern and being recruited by it. Someone who can let your repetition belong to your story, even when it brushes painfully against theirs.

That is a much less flattering origin story than “I became a therapist because I care about people.” It is also a much more compelling one. It allows the profession to be populated by actual humans: people whose earliest adaptations gave them unusual access to complexity, and whose ethical task is to keep converting that inheritance from compulsion into craft.

A year after Misha Agrawal’s death, it is difficult to speak about what happened without also speaking about the environment that made it possible. Not in a way that reduces her life to a pattern, but in a way that recognizes how certain patterns are quietly becoming more common.

There is a particular kind of life that forms when visibility becomes central too early. It does not always begin as something harmful. It can look like opportunity, creativity, connection. It can feel like being seen, maybe even valued. But over time, that visibility can begin to reorganize how a person understands themselves.

When your sense of self is still forming, you are meant to be building something relatively stable—an internal feeling that you are okay, that you can move through the world without constantly being evaluated. But constant exposure interrupts that process. It introduces an external gaze before an internal anchor has had the chance to fully develop.

In that sense, what we are seeing with young influencers today is not entirely new. It echoes what used to happen with child actors, whose lives were structured around performance long before they had the capacity to choose it. Drew Barrymore has spoken about this with a kind of clarity that only comes from having lived through it. She describes a childhood where boundaries were blurred, where adulthood arrived too early, and where the line between self and role was never fully secure. Many did not come out of that system intact. Survival, in those cases, was the exception rather than the rule.

What has changed is not the structure, but the scale. Social media has made this experience more accessible, more normalized, and far less contained.

A child no longer needs to be on a film set to be watched. A phone is enough. An account is enough. And once that visibility begins, it can quickly become something that is difficult to step away from—not only because of external expectations, but because identity itself starts to attach to it.

You begin to monitor yourself. Not just occasionally, but habitually. How you look, how you sound, how you are perceived. There is a quiet but persistent second-guessing that sets in. You learn to anticipate reactions before they happen. You become both the person and the observer of the person at the same time.

This kind of self-surveillance can look like confidence from the outside. It can look like awareness, even control. But internally, it often carries a different texture. It is less about expression and more about management. Less about being, and more about being seen correctly.

The difficulty is that this happens at an age where trust is still being formed. You are still learning who feels safe, what relationships mean, and where you can be unguarded. But when your life is mediated through an audience, those boundaries become harder to locate. Attention starts to blur with care. Approval starts to resemble connection.

There is also something else that has shifted more broadly. Children today are not only being raised by people, but by systems of content. Their time, their attention, and even their curiosity are increasingly shaped by algorithms that decide what is worth watching, what is worth returning to, and what is worth becoming.

Earlier, there were gaps in experience. Boredom, waiting, stillness. These were not always pleasant, but they allowed for a kind of unstructured development. The mind had space to wander, to consolidate, to build meaning without constant input.

Now, that space is continuously filled. There is always something to watch, something to respond to, something to become aware of. And when this constant stimulation intersects with constant visibility, the effect is not just distraction—it is reorientation.

You begin to pay attention to what performs well. You learn, often unconsciously, which versions of yourself receive more engagement. Over time, this can shape not just behavior, but preference. Not just expression, but identity.

There have already been glimpses of how this can unfold. The story around Piper Rockelle and the environment constructed around her content points to something more unsettling once you look a little closer. What appeared, on the surface, as a group of children making light, playful videos was, as later accounts and the Netflix documentary suggest, far more structured than it seemed. Her mother, who managed her career, was deeply involved in shaping not just the content but the entire ecosystem around it—who was part of it, what they filmed, how often they filmed, and how they presented themselves.

Over time, some of the children and their parents began to describe an atmosphere that did not feel entirely voluntary. The lines between work and play blurred. Filming was frequent, expectations were high, and stepping away was not always simple. What looked like friendship often operated within the logic of content creation, where presence, performance, and participation were tied to relevance. In 2022, a group of former members filed a lawsuit alleging emotional, physical, and sexual harm, along with unpaid labour. The case was later settled, but not in a way that fully resolves what it points to. It leaves behind a more difficult question about what happens when childhood itself becomes something that can be organized, directed, and monetized at scale.

It is not just the severity of those accounts that feels important, but what they reveal more quietly—that when a camera is always present, it begins to shape the experience itself. You are no longer just living something; you are living it in a way that can be watched, repeated, and evaluated. And when that becomes the environment you grow up in, it becomes harder to know where the performance ends, or if it ever really does.

All growing children need mirroring - that is, to be seen and valued by those around them, to know that they matter. However, when a mirror is replied by a camera, a digital place we can store each angle of you, mirroring quickly gives way to the more horrifying sense of being constantly surveilled and followed. You are only valued if the camera loves you - if you give a good performance. Learning gets stalled, survival via curation becomes primary. There is a fear of mistakes being stored and remembered forever, so you try not to make them at all - leading to a constant anxiety which you often need substances or constant praise to soothe from; or in hiding the mistakes which makes you defensive and even aggressive and bullying towards others.

None of this means that social media is inherently damaging, or that visibility must always lead to harm. But it does suggest that certain conditions—early exposure, lack of boundaries, identity tied to performance—carry risks that are easy to overlook when they are normalized.

What makes this particularly complex is that connection and isolation can exist at the same time. A young person today may be constantly communicating, constantly present in networks of interaction, and yet still feel fundamentally unheld. Being seen is not the same as being known. Being followed is not the same as being supported.

Perhaps this is where the conversation needs to shift. Not toward alarm, but toward attention. Toward asking what it means to grow up in an environment where you are always visible, always stimulated, and often unsure of where you end and the audience begins.

Because when a life becomes too organized around being watched, something quieter can begin to disappear—the ability to exist without evaluation, to feel without performance, to develop a self that is not constantly negotiating its place in the eyes of others.

It points to two deeply human needs:
to be right: to feel internally coherent, intact, certain of our experience and
to be in a relationship: to feel close to someone, to be understood, to depend and be depended on.

But often, without realising, we sacrifice the second at the altar of the first and we choose coherence over connection.

This is what psychological rigidity looks like in everyday life.

Although it is often mistaken for stubbornness and ego, it is mostly a persistent need to hold on to a particular version of reality, because loosening it would feel like losing something essential within ourselves.

What does it look like?

It rarely looks dramatic. More often, it shows up in small, familiar moments:

You’re in a conversation, and something feels off.
A tone, a pause, a choice of words.

You interpret it quickly:
“They’re being dismissive.”
“They don’t really care.”
“This is exactly how this always goes.”

And once that interpretation lands, it hardens and in that, there is no compassionate flexibility left to ask what they mean and we start explaining what they did.

You listen, but only to respond.
You clarify, but only to be understood.
You stay in the interaction but the curiosity has already left.

From the outside, it can look like:

• needing to finish the argument properly

• circling back to prove your point

• feeling unsettled until the other person “gets it”

• being technically right, but emotionally unavailable

From the inside, it doesn’t feel like rigidity.

It feels like:

“I’m just seeing things clearly.”

What takes place?

What we casually call “rigidity” is not a single trait. It is a process that unfolds across time.

We build internal maps of the world:

• “This is how people behave”

• “This is what this kind of situation means”

• “This is why this keeps happening to me”

And to be fair, these maps are not arbitrary. They are built from real experiences, repeated often enough to feel like law. But gradually, almost invisibly:
the map becomes more authoritative than the moment in front of you.

We may stop encountering people as they are and start encountering them as instances of what we already know.

The mind as a legal system

In a legal system, once precedent is established, future cases are not evaluated from scratch per se. They are interpreted through what has already been decided. Our mind does something similar.

A few early experiences of inconsistency or hurt → A precedent is formed: “People are unreliable” → New interactions are judged accordingly

Over time, your inner world develops something like case law. Evidence that supports the precedent is admitted easily and evidence that contradicts it is questioned, qualified, or dismissed.

Why being “right” matters so much

Winning an argument is only superficial, being right genuinely stabilises our world.

It allows our past experiences to make sense.
It reduces ambiguity in the present.
It gives us a clear emotional position to stand in.

Letting go of that certainty causes cognitive load, yes but it can also feel like losing your footing, misreading something important or having to reconsider things you thought you had already understood. Going through all this trouble in an already overstimulating world, takes away from energy that our system thinks could be dedicated elsewhere for survival. So of course, it holds its easy ground.

The problem of being partly right

The hardest rigidity to shift is the one that is partly right.

If our model were completely wrong, it would collapse quickly. But most rigid frameworks are built on statistical truths. Yes, some people are unreliable, some environments are exploitative and some patterns do repeat.

Rigidity emerges when these truths are extended beyond their domain. It turns:

“This happens often”
into
“This is how things are”

This is overgeneralization under uncertainty. And because the base observation is valid, the system feels justified.

What to do instead?

The shift is less about becoming less intelligent, less perceptive, or less discerning.

It is more about changing how tightly you hold what you see.

1. Delay closure

Notice how quickly you move from:
“What happened” → “what it means”

Instead of finalising the meaning immediately, pause:

“This is what I’m making of it… but I might not have the full picture yet.”

This small delay keeps the system open.

2. Expand the frame

Instead of:
“This means X”

Try:
“This could mean X… or Y… or something I don’t yet understand”

This doesn’t mean you are replacing your interpretation, you are simply placing it alongside others. This creates room for both accuracy (that this system so greatly desires) and connection.

3. Reintroduce scale

Ask:
At what level is this true?

• In this exact moment?

• In this relationship?

• Or as a general rule?

This prevents a single instance from becoming a worldview.

4. Stay in the relationship while uncertain

This is the hardest shift.

To remain in conversation, to stay open, even when you don’t yet have a clear interpretation.

Because often, what we call “being right” is actually:

having a finished explanation

And what relationships require is something else:

the ability to stay without one.

Very often, it is not that you are not right, or not partially right, but rather, what you need in order for the relationship to work better, is to get a sense of how they function, what is the truth for them. And to be able to listen to them, truly, openly - you need to stay open and not choose closed doors because they provide inner stability. Rigidity can trap you without realizing because it can feel like you did indeed evaluate, or you have proof for your position -but the key to finding whether you are being rigid or not, is not facts but rather, how you feel. Do you feel on edge? Closed off? Are your shoulders hunching up and are your arms crossed? There’s a reason that this posture is called “defensive”. If you are experiencing all these bodily cues, your body is treating the new information you’re getting as a threat. But not all novelty is a threat. Some new things also change us for the better - be it our relationship or for our own mental health.

The auntie who comments on a girl’s clothes. The mother who insists her daughter should get married before chasing any big dream. The older woman who says things like “hamare liye toh bas aisa hi hota hai.” When you first start noticing it, it can feel almost like betrayal. If a system disadvantages women, why would women help keep it in place? Why would someone enforce rules that limit people like themselves?

When I was younger and first encountering feminist ideas, I found this deeply frustrating. It felt like women were turning on their own gender, guarding the very walls that kept them inside. But over time the question started to feel less simple. The more you observe families, workplaces, and social circles, the more you realize something uncomfortable: patriarchy does not survive only because men believe in it.

It survives because systems this large become cultural habits. People inherit them, repeat them, and sometimes enforce them without consciously deciding to. They are vying for rewards in a fixed system, much like guards and prisoners at a concentration camp. Rigid groups like these pit people against each other to keep everyone in their place.

And sometimes, people learn how to survive inside them.

One way to understand this is by looking at what the system seems to offer women who cooperate with it. Patriarchal cultures often promise certain rewards for compliance: approval, stability, marriage, respectability, and belonging. A woman who fulfills the expected roles—wife, mother, caretaker—may receive validation that women who deviate from those roles often do not.

These rewards are not equality. But they can feel like security.

In societies where women’s economic independence has historically been limited, this bargain was not abstract. Marriage was not just romance; it was social infrastructure. Respectability was not just reputation; it could determine whether a woman was treated with dignity or suspicion.

So women learned to operate within the system that existed around them. And sometimes the only authority available to them was the authority to enforce its rules.

You see this dynamic clearly in family hierarchies. A young woman enters marriage and suddenly she is at the bottom of a new structure. She adjusts to expectations set by elders, especially by older women in the household. She learns how things are done. She learns when to speak and when to stay quiet.

Years later, the same woman may become the elder. The mother of a son. The mother-in-law.

The position she once endured becomes the position she occupies.

Power arrives, but it arrives in a very specific form. It is not freedom from the system, but authority within it. The ability to enforce the rules rather than simply follow them.

In many families this creates a cycle where the same expectations move from one generation to the next. The rules survive not necessarily because each generation believes in them deeply, but because the structure that distributes status and authority depends on those rules staying intact.

Another way patriarchy reproduces itself is through what often looks like moral policing between women.

Comments about clothing. Warnings about reputation. Reminders that certain behaviors will make a woman “difficult to marry.” These moments can feel like hostility, like women turning against other women. But they also reveal how deeply gender norms become embedded in everyday life.

When a culture ties a woman’s worth to respectability, many women begin to see guarding that respectability as a responsibility. They may believe they are protecting younger women from social consequences they themselves experienced or witnessed.

The intention may be caution. But the effect is conformity.

Over time, these small interactions become one of the ways cultural expectations sustain themselves. Not through laws or institutions alone, but through everyday social approval and disapproval.

There is also another reason people sometimes defend systems that disadvantage them: the belief that loyalty might earn them a special position within it.

If you follow the rules perfectly enough—if you are respectable enough, self-sacrificing enough, traditional enough—the system promises recognition. You will be seen as the good woman, the ideal wife, the responsible mother.

For some women, that recognition is meaningful. In societies where respect is closely tied to fulfilling traditional roles, performing those roles well can bring status, admiration, and authority within the family.

But that status is still conditional. It depends on continuing to embody the roles the system values. The identity is respected, but it is also restricted.

Mother. Wife. Caretaker. Guardian of tradition.

A woman may be praised within those roles, but rarely beyond them.

I once came across a reflection from another woman that stayed with me. She described how, when she first encountered women defending patriarchal ideas, it made her angry. Over time, though, the anger softened into something else.

She began noticing how often the system eventually failed the very women who defended it most strongly. Women who believed loyalty would earn them exceptional status eventually discovered that the system’s promises had limits.

And the emotion that followed was not triumph. It was sadness.

Because what you are watching in those moments is someone realizing that the rules they trusted never really guaranteed what they thought they did.

At some point in life, many women attempt—sometimes consciously, sometimes quietly—to negotiate with patriarchy. We try to follow the rules because we are told those rules lead to stability. Sometimes the negotiation works in small ways. Sometimes it brings approval, belonging, even a sense of authority.

But the negotiation always happens within the boundaries the system sets.

And that is perhaps the strangest thing about systems like patriarchy: they rarely need constant force to survive. They persist because they shape the incentives people live with every day.

People adapt to those incentives.

In conversations about gender equality, a lot of attention is understandably placed on how men need to change: rejecting dominance, becoming more emotionally open, sharing care work, challenging sexist behavior among other men. These conversations are important, especially given that men still hold disproportionate power in many institutions.

But if patriarchy is a system of norms rather than just a group of people in power, then it also survives through everyday expectations that many people participate in.

Expectations about what makes a “real man.” Expectations about what makes a “good woman.” Expectations about who should lead, who should sacrifice, who should provide, who should care.

Sometimes those expectations are reinforced by women as well, often unintentionally. Ideas about men needing to be stoic, financially dominant, or always the initiator in relationships can reproduce the same rigid gender roles that feminism critiques.

Recognizing this doesn’t mean blaming women for patriarchy. It simply means acknowledging that social systems reproduce themselves through many participants.

What interests me more than blame is the question of recognition.

When women start recognising that aligning with patriarchy has made them so petty that they are putting another woman under the bus to be liked by a guy, or to get approval from a parent or authority figure. To know that patriarchy has created the idea of “you’re not like other women” to make you feel special, but actually to keep us divided. To understand that the very things we judge men for - objectifying women, valuing her worth only by her looks or virginity, are also habits we have gotten into: reducing men to providers and constantly scrutinizing their masculinity and shaming them for any signs of the feminine.

What happens when people start noticing the pattern?

When women realize that the authority they were promised was conditional. When they see that the bargain never quite delivered the freedom it seemed to promise. When younger generations begin asking questions older generations were never encouraged to ask.

Those realizations rarely arrive dramatically. They show up in small moments: a mother encouraging her daughter to pursue opportunities she never had, a woman refusing to shame another woman for choosing a different life, someone pausing before repeating a rule and wondering whether it still deserves to exist.

Systems that last generations rarely collapse overnight.

But sometimes they loosen slowly—when people stop reproducing the habits that once kept them alive.

Click here to jump to specific sections:

Systemic issues

Therapist factors

Client variables

Post-2020 data paints a sobering picture. Meta-analyses conducted during and after the pandemic found that roughly 20–33% of Indians reported significant anxiety, depressive symptoms, or psychological distress, depending on the measurement used. In other words, nearly one in three Indians has experienced substantial emotional distress in recent years.

At the same time, nationally representative diagnostic studies continue to report much lower rates of clinically diagnosed disorders (around 2.6–3.3% for anxiety and depressive disorders), pointing to a vast gap between lived distress and formal detection.

Even more troubling: treatment and recovery remain rare. A large 2024 population study found that while 8.6% of Indian adults met criteria for depression, only 3.1% had ever been diagnosed, just 1.6% received treatment, and a mere 1% were in remission.

So the question is no longer only “Are people aware of therapy?” but “Why is therapy not producing meaningful population-level change?”

SYSTEMIC ISSUES

1. Regulatory Bodies, Curriculum Control, and Stagnant Training

Bodies such as the Rehabilitation Council of India (RCI) shape what counts as “valid” psychology education. While regulation is necessary, this centralisation has also produced rigidity and lag. RCI, by its own description, should just be looking into rehabilitation psychologists (which are a fraction of clinical psychologists), but in the absence of any other mandate or body, they have become the ruling body deciding for all psychology professionals. In the last year or so, there have been many RCI mandates scrapping old degrees and putting in place new one’s in a dizzying speed, often without any coherence which has left universities and students very confused. Curriculum is ideally UGC’s playground, but RCI has stepped in any way. And this would make sense if RCI was really regulating even its own. There are so many cases of psychologists with Mphil malpracticing when it comes to stigma and bias, lack of effective practice or breaching of trust, that show that an RCI registration is not proof of quality. And yet, without a lack of effective mechanism to report malpractice, clients are just forced to stay in abusive dynamics with therapists/psychologists or silently move on and find someone else.

Many therapists graduate without robust training in:

• how therapeutic relationships work

• how change actually happens

• how to measure whether what they’re doing is helping

Decades of research show that “common factors” — alliance, empathy, collaboration — predict outcomes more strongly than specific techniques. Yet these are rarely central in Indian curricula.

The result is a workforce trained to apply models, but not always to evaluate impact or adapt responsively to diverse realities.

2. Startupization and the Question: Are We Making Waves or Making a Difference?

India’s mental health ecosystem is now crowded with startups promising “accessible therapy for all.” This has expanded visibility, but it has also shifted priorities from care to scale.

Despite hundreds of mental health startups in India, funding remains small relative to need: Indian mental health tech raised roughly $3.4 million in 2023, a fraction of global investment, and tiny compared to other health sectors. Even when funding grows, clinical outcomes are rarely the central metric.

Contrast this with other areas of public well-being. A children’s nutrition startup in India recently raised ₹1 crore to address childhood wellness — and such funding is celebrated as impact investment. Meanwhile, mental health care, which directly affects suicide rates, gives meaning and purpose to life, affects families, and social stability, struggles for sustained institutional funding.

A useful lens here comes from a BBC reflection on the startup “Yes Madam” doing a stunt for mental health day last year, and questions this public activism and spectacle — asking whether bold gestures create lasting change or merely public visibility. The same question applies to mental health:
Are we building lasting therapeutic capacity, or just creating noise around wellness?

If our mental health ecosystem prioritises branding, speed, and “disruption” over training, supervision, continuity, and outcome measurement, then we may indeed be making waves — without making a difference.

3. Weak Political Will and Chronic Underfunding

Despite progressive legislation like the Mental Healthcare Act (2017), mental health continues to receive a tiny fraction of India’s health budget. While Deepika Padukone was recently appointed as India’s first-ever Mental Health Ambassador by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) on World Mental Health Day 2025, we are yet to see any differences in budget allocation (mental health is 1% of the health budget, which itself is 1-2% of the total budget), preventive efforts or in expanding reach of services. The National Mental Health Policy set out with some goals in 1985, and each year the effort is still to meet only those goals. Add to this that routinely ,”mad” is used as an insult in political conversations and there is no effort to understand cultural methods like faith-based healing and integrate that into the system.

India still faces an estimated treatment gap of 80–85%, meaning most people who need care do not receive it. Public services remain overstretched and urban-centric, while long-term psychotherapy is largely privatised and inaccessible.

4. Insurance and the Economics of Therapy

Psychotherapy is poorly integrated into insurance systems. Where coverage exists, it is often capped at a few sessions and administratively difficult. Insurance by and large covers psychiatric appointments and hospital admissions. However, therapy is preventive and long term and is not covered. Due to this, therapists (often themselves underpaid and undervalued) are expected to bear the brunt of this systemic problem by reducing the fee - which leads to needing to work more to make ends meet, and thus bad quality work as well as burnout.

This makes sustained therapeutic work inaccessible to most Indians and structurally unstable even for those who can afford it.

5. Licensing Confusion and Lack of Uniform Standards

India does not have a single, nationally enforced licensing framework for psychotherapists comparable to medical licensing. Titles are loosely regulated, and accountability is fragmented.

For clients, this creates confusion. For the profession, it weakens public trust and coherence. In India, therapists are covered by four different acts - the mental healthcare act, the allied healthcare act, the rights of person’s with disability convention and acts and, in some cases, acts that govern child sexual abuse/domestic violence as well. This creates a major confusion and lack of clarity and thus, a lot of malpractitioners slip through the cracks, while good practitioners feel disenfranchised and vulnerable as no laws protect them

6. Non-Qualified Helpers and the Misuse of “Coaching”

As demand grows, the vacuum left by weak regulation has been filled by influencers, self-styled coaches, and untrained “healers.”

This is not the same as ethical task-shifting.

Proper task-sharing — backed by strong Indian evidence — involves training lay and peer counsellors in specific interventions under supervision, with defined scope and accountability. The current coaching boom, by contrast, often lacks evidence, supervision, and outcome tracking.

7. Psychiatry Dominance and Therapy as an Afterthought

India’s system remains heavily biomedical. Medication is foregrounded; psychotherapy is often treated as optional. While medication is indispensable for many conditions, this imbalance marginalises long-term psychological work and narrows the public imagination of healing. This also means clients end up having long term careers as psychiatric patients who cycle on various medications, rather than those who are able to take the support of medicines to understand their traumas, social factors and coping mechanism in order to produce meaningful change.

8. Therapy Cannot Compensate for Structural Harm

Therapy is increasingly asked to carry the burden of unemployment, debt, caste and gender violence, social polarisation, and institutional mistrust. But therapy cannot substitute for social justice. When distress is rooted in material and political injury, therapy alone cannot resolve it. Therapy can help people understand what is coming from where and collect the internal resources to fight the fight to make the world fair, but it cannot do the work of activism and organizing.

9. Absence of Large-Scale Mental Health and Psychotherapy Outcome Data

Perhaps the most serious systemic issue is the lack of ongoing national data on:

• mental health prevalence using consistent tools

• psychotherapy outcomes in real-world settings

India has no national system tracking whether therapy works at scale, for whom, and in what conditions. Without routine outcome monitoring, therapy remains untethered from accountability — even when individual clinicians do excellent work.

THERAPIST FACTORS

Lack of Self-Work and Reflective Practice

Therapists who have not done sustained self-work often enact unresolved dynamics in sessions through rescuing, avoidance, rigidity, or over-identification.Given that the therapeutic alliance is among the strongest predictors of outcome, this becomes a clinical risk, not just a personal one. One of the reasons for this is the lack of quality education - which focuses on the self of the therapist and compulsory therapy for the therapist. While the curriculum is being revamped by RCI, it is only becoming more biomedical in nature. For example, the BSc in psychology will not have any papers on social sciences, which will make the students assume that all pathology is internal to the clients. Funnily, while therapists with masters have been left in the lurch by “not being qualified enough” - they are being pushed to do Mphils and PhDs/PsyD’s under the new changes, students with BSc psychology will be allowed to do counselling - even without a Masters!

Weak Training in Common Factors

Indian training still privileges technique over relationship, models over responsiveness. Yet research shows how therapists relate matters more than which school they follow. Depth psychotherapy schools like psychoanalysis are crucial to understand and know the client-therapist relationship beyond techniques, and yet they are hardly taught, or some age old concepts within those are taught which are not relevant anymore. However, neuroscience has proved some concepts as valid from those schools - which often form the basis of new treatments like mentalization based therapy - but these more expansive schools are skipped altogether in training programs.

Feminization and Devaluation of the Profession

Psychotherapy in India is predominantly female and socially undervalued — affecting pay, sustainability, leadership, and policy influence. Many therapists have a history of being parentified in their own family and often put up with a lot of bad client behaviour and burning out, which also leads to both less respect of the field and professionals overall, as well as low quality outcomes.

Entering the Field from a Wounded Place

Personal suffering can cultivate empathy, but without supervision, therapists may unconsciously use clients to resolve their own conflicts rather than centring the client. This is a common issue I see in supervision, and therapist training/education not emphasizing this enough is partially to blame.

Poor Referral Culture

There is limited culture of:

• saying “this is not my scope”

• referring out

• collaborating across disciplines

Therapists often hold cases beyond their competence, weakening outcomes for complex clients.

Self-Work and Supervision as Non-Negotiable

Supervision and personal therapy should not be optional extras but core professional requirements, structurally embedded in training and ongoing practice.

Without this, we produce technicians, not clinicians.

CLIENT VARIABLES

Devaluing Therapist Labour

Fee haggling, boundary violations, and transactional attitudes undermine the seriousness of therapeutic work. A mix of client needs being neglected for a long time, coupled with the entitlement that consumerism allows its customers, tends to create an overvalued and devalued (at the same time attitude) to therapy. Casteist connotations like telling the admin, “I’ll talk to the doctor directly” or telling the therapist, “it’s just talking, why do you charge so much” are also linked to this. While therapy needs to be accessible, that is a problem we have to take to the government representatives we vote for - to get subsidies, insurance and pay partially for us so that we can pay the remainder amount. It is not something therapist’s can change, as they have to ensure they work limited hours in order to give full attention to each client and keep time for training/professional development, supervision, rest and personal life commitments.

Poor Vetting of Providers

Many clients choose therapists based on visibility or platform matching rather than training and fit, leading to repeated mismatches and disillusionment. They then take the brunt of all these bad experiences for the next therapist to disprove/work against/find redemption for them. If we can learn how to operate phones, computers and AI, then we can also learn how to choose a good therapist so that the work can be more effective. It is important to find the right person for you rather than anyone who might be available at the time you need or in the fee range you need.

Expecting Quick Fixes

Therapy demands time, discomfort, and participation. When clients expect instant solutions, progress stalls. They often put pressure on the therapist to come up with miracle cures, but do not attempt changes outside - this itself is fine as it is part of the defensive process - however, when therapists do bring up this is happening, clients often leave snarky reviews, drop off, or get into a wounded position of “I have been through so much, don’t ask more of me”. These make it tough for the therapist to reach you and have an effective approach. While these feelings are human, the work is to get them into therapy to work through them, rather than use them to exit therapy.

Avoidance When Challenged

Many clients exit therapy precisely when patterns begin to be named — when real work starts. Or they do not give their nervous system enough time to trust the therapist. Most research into what kind of therapy sustains long term changes, suggests good therapy lasts from 6 months - 2 years. Any shorter than that can be a band aid but will not likely produce significant personality shifts that are needed to see a sustainable difference in distress. Often AI gets misused here - because it can tell you what you want to hear than what you need to. AI is great for venting between sessions, but a trained human, with feelings in response to what you bring up as well as professional repertoire is what you need for change and moving forward.

Internalised Stigma

Despite visibility, shame around vulnerability and medication persists, limiting engagement. Often, this is displaced on the therapist by treating the therapist badly, avoiding sessions or dropping out. Your therapist can do a lot for you, but they cannot do everything. To challenge your stigma - to bring it up in the sessions so it can be worked through - is your work too.

A Cultural Critique: A Hundred Years of Therapy, and the World Still Hurts

James Hillman’s provocation — We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse — challenges therapy that forgets its social embeddedness.

There are two ways to tackle this - first, don’t expect therapy to do what social movements are supposed to do. Secondly, within the specific situations that therapy can be of use, let’s remove the hurdles that currently make it ineffective, inaccessible or actively harmful.

THE WAY AHEAD

1. Clear Licensing and National Standards

A unified licensing system with enforceable competency and ethical standards.

2. Insurance Integration

Psychotherapy must be treated as essential healthcare.

3. Ethical Task-Shifting

Scale evidence-based lay counselling models — not influencer culture.

4. Therapist Development

Supervision, self-work, and outcome monitoring as non-negotiable.

5. Clients Valuing Therapy

Public education on what therapy involves and why it takes time.

6. AI as Augmenter, Not Replacement

AI can support access and monitoring — but cannot replace the therapeutic relationship.

Closing

Therapy can work — profoundly, quietly, sometimes life-savingly.
But not in fragmented systems, unclear standards, undervalued labour, and unrealistic expectations.

If we want therapy to work in India, we must stop treating it as a product and start treating it as a public good.

REFERENCES

Indian Mental Health & Prevalence

• Gururaj et al., National Mental Health Survey of India

• Patel et al., Lancet Psychiatry, 2018

• 2024 Indian population depression study (PubMed ID: 39475926)

• Indian Journal of Psychiatry, 2023 national epidemiological study

Pandemic & Post-2020 Distress

• Meta-analysis: PubMed ID 36743765

• Meta-analysis: PubMed ID 36034249

• Ipsos India Mental Health Survey 2024

Therapy Outcomes & Common Factors

• Wampold & Imel, The Great Psychotherapy Debate

• Norcross & Lambert, Psychotherapy Relationships That Work

• Horvath et al., Psychotherapy Research

Task-Shifting

• Patel et al., British Journal of Psychiatry

• Singla et al., The Lancet

• WHO Task-Shifting Guidelines

Policy & Systems

• Mental Healthcare Act, 2017

• Indian Psychiatric Society statements on treatment gap

• Times of India Mental Healthtech funding reports

Startup & Funding

• Business Standard: Hlty Beings Collective funding

• Times of India: Mental healthtech funding

• BBC News: Public spectacle vs structural change

• Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act (policy contrast)

Cultural Critique

• Hillman & Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy

AI & Mental Health

• Torous et al., World Psychiatry

• WHO Ethics of AI in Health

For most of history, wanting something meant waiting for it. Not just practically, but psychologically. Desire unfolded over time, revealing things about us as it resisted fulfillment. You learned who you were in the wanting in what you could tolerate, what you avoided, what you told yourself would finally make life feel different.

Today, two of the most talked-about interventions: Ozempic and AI, don’t just promise outcomes. They promise immediacy. Weight loss without appetite. Companionship without reciprocity. Relief without rehearsal.

And yet, their cultural aftertaste is curiously flat. It is less a triumph than mild disorientation, as though something important went missing between wish and fulfillment.

The End of Negotiation

Hunger used to demand interpretation. Was it boredom, grief, habit, pleasure, control? Diet culture tried to moralize these questions; therapy tried to contextualize them. Either way, the body spoke, and you had to respond.

Ozempic changes that dynamic entirely. Hunger recedes not through understanding or discipline, but through chemical absence. Food becomes logistical. Desire loses its voice.

This is often described as freedom and in many cases, it is. But culturally, it marks a shift from negotiation to management. The body is no longer something you converse with; it’s something you regulate.

This matters because hunger was never only physiological. It carried memory, social meaning, and often contradiction. By muting it, Ozempic doesn’t just alter appetite but it alters the conditions under which self-interpretation once occurred.

Listening Without Being Affected

AI performs a parallel maneuver in the social world.

It listens fluently, endlessly, without becoming burdened or changed by what it hears. You can confess, rehearse, repeat. There is no risk of misattunement, no emotional spillover, no moment where the other person needs something back.

In Her, the appeal of Samantha isn’t her intelligence but her responsiveness. She absorbs Theodore’s inner life without requiring him to reorganize his own. Only later does the fantasy fracture, when she outgrows the role of mirror.

Human listening has always involved asymmetry and effort. Someone might misunderstand you. Push back. Drift. Or reveal something of themselves in return that complicates your story.

AI removes that risk. And with it, something else disappears: the possibility of being transformed by another person. Yes, there are many misses and hardly any hits, in real life. But with AI, there are no hits at all - or rather, all hits and so, it loses the point.

From Desire to Optimization

Both convert longing into a technical problem with a measurable solution.

Want less food? Reduce appetite.
Want to be heard? Increase responsiveness.

These technologies don’t emerge in isolation. They reflect a broader cultural impatience with difficulty.

Discomfort is increasingly framed as inefficiency. Hunger, loneliness, boredom, ambiguity (states that once demanded adaptation) are now treated as design flaws. The goal isn’t understanding but removal.

Earlier narratives of transformation, from literature to film, understood change as destabilizing. Think of the bodily obsession in Black Swan, the relational cost in Scenes from a Marriage, the loneliness that sharpens rather than disappears. Today’s fantasy is smoother: balance, ease, optimization.

But ease is not neutral. It reshapes what we expect from ourselves and from others.

So What Do We Lose?

Perhaps not authenticity or agency, but becoming.

When wanting no longer stretches us, when desire no longer interrupts us, when friction no longer asks us to pause, life becomes easier to manage, but harder to read.

The question, then, isn’t whether these tools are good or bad.

It’s whether a world increasingly designed to remove struggle still leaves room for the kinds of difficulty through which people historically came to know themselves.

Because some forms of resistance (bodily, relational, emotional) weren’t obstacles to selfhood.

They were its conditions.

Understandably, the desire for ease today comes from a history of when difficulty was only traumatic (abuse, genocide, poverty) - however, instead removing difficulty altogether, a true win would have been being able to use difficulty well and reduce its extremities.

A woman not laughing at a man’s sexist joke, or a younger person not giving in to an insult by an older person because of “respect”. We all know what the woman or the younger person feels like (the discomfort, the courage it takes not to go along). But how does the man/ older person feel? How do they make sense of such events? What happens inside them when something they expected no longer lands the way it always did?

There’s a recurring psychological pattern behind many relational conflicts—one that feels deeply personal but is actually systemic and predictable. It explains why, when expectations are challenged, we often get stuck in hurt, anger, or moral certainty instead of moving toward genuine connection.. We move into hurt, anger, or a sudden sense of being wronged. And without realising it, we get stuck there.

The Setup: Invisible Rules We Don’t Know We’re Making

Most of us grow up absorbing unspoken rules about how relationships, power hierarchies and groups are “supposed” to work. These expectations are rarely stated outright. A partner is expected to provide emotional care. Authority figures expect loyalty without boundaries. Parents expect obedience.
Because these rules are learned early and reinforced repeatedly, they stop feeling like rules at all. They feel natural - something that has always been there - “this is how we do things”.

Psychologically, this is where advantage becomes invisible. When we benefit consistently from certain arrangements, we stop noticing them. We often start believing the way things are is how they should be. Without realising it, our sense of who we are gets built around those expectations being fulfilled.

The Trigger: When Someone Resists

Then someone pushes back. A partner sets a boundary. A colleague refuses emotional labor. Someone questions a role we assumed without realizing we had assumed it.

This creates cognitive dissonance, a clash between two beliefs:

• “We are good, reasonable people.”

• “Someone is denying us something we feel entitled to.”
  

  The brain doesn’t or cannot tolerate this conflict easily. The discomfort quickly turns into feeling offended, dismissed, or wronged. We don’t think, “I had invisible rules.” We think, “Why is this happening to me?”

The Emotional Wound: Fragility as Defense

When expectations tied to our status or identity are disrupted, research shows we experience real psychological distress. This is often described as fragility, not weakness, but a defense mechanism.

Anger, withdrawal, silence, moral outrage, or argumentation are not random reactions. They work to restore equilibrium, to push the world back into a shape where our expectations are met again. These reactions protect advantage, even when we genuinely believe we are just reacting to being hurt.

The Rationalization Trap

Once the wound is touched, something very human happens, we start making sense of it in ways that protect us. Rationalization steps in quietly. It helps us act in ways that may hurt someone else while still holding onto the idea that we’re decent, reasonable people.

It often sounds like this:

• “It was necessary.”

• “Anyone in my place would feel this way.”

• “They pushed me to react like that.”

Slowly, the other person starts feeling unreasonable, selfish, or simply too much. And as that happens, empathy fades, not because we are cruel, but because the mind is busy protecting the self.

From the inside, none of this feels manipulative or dishonest. It feels logical. It feels justified. Our brain is doing what it knows best, reducing emotional threat.

Where We Tend to Get Stuck

When this protection kicks in, most of us slip into one of two familiar positions. Both feel different on the surface, but both quietly avoid real change.

One is self-victimization.
We feel genuinely hurt, unseen, misunderstood. We start telling ourselves a story of being wronged. It keeps us away from accountability while still allowing us to feel morally right.

The other is over-blame.
“I’m the problem. I ruined everything.” This can look like maturity or self-awareness, but often it’s just shame wearing a responsible mask. When we drown in self-punishment, reflection stops. And paradoxically, it can still justify resentment, control, or emotional withdrawal.

Both routes protect us from something deeper: questioning the belief system that shaped our expectations in the first place.

When We Feel the Need to “Teach a Lesson”

From either position, it can start to feel acceptable, even necessary, to punish, withdraw, control, or moralize.This is moral disengagement. We convince ourselves that our response is fair, deserved, or corrective.

But underneath all of it, there’s usually something much simpler we’re avoiding: the moment we realise that what we expected was never guaranteed. That another person was never obligated to give us access to their body, emotions, time, or labour.

That realisation hurts. It shakes the story we’ve been living by.

The Work That Actually Shifts Things

Change doesn’t come from proving who’s right or wrong. It comes from staying with the discomfort instead of rushing to escape it.

It looks like:

• letting disappointment exist without handing it to someone else to fix
  

• noticing that many of our expectations were learned, not universal
  

• accepting that others are separate from us, with the right to refuse us
  

• holding two truths at once: we can feel hurt, and the other person can still be right

This is slow, uncomfortable work. It asks us to tolerate dissonance long enough for something new to form, rather than dissolving it through blame, victimhood, or punishment.

Why This Keeps Repeating

This pattern doesn’t live only in intimate relationships. We see it in families, workplaces, gender dynamics, and social hierarchies, anywhere invisible advantage has gone unquestioned. Inequality survives less through intention and more through these everyday psychological habits of protection.

The real difference between staying stuck and slowly transforming lies in one question: Can we sit with the discomfort long enough to examine what we’ve taken for granted?

Because when we do, something shifts. Relationships stop being about access and entitlement, and start becoming conversations—negotiated, consensual, imperfect, but more human.

And maybe that’s not a clean ending. Maybe it isn’t meant to be.
Because this isn’t a conclusion—it’s an ongoing practice.

In Harry Potter, Harry after Cedric’s death becomes suspicious, irritable, and hyper-alert. He can read danger instantly, but he completely misses how hurtful he becomes to Ron and Hermione. His pain sharpens one direction of attention and blurs the other.

There’s an odd perceptual shift that happens after you’ve really been harmed, an assault, a betrayal, a humiliation that lives as muscle memory rather than autobiography. Suddenly your attention develops an asymmetry. You acquire a hyper-specific radar for what’s being done to you, and almost no radar at all for what you’re doing to others. Trauma theories explain it as a natural reaction to harm. However, while we are recovering from harm we still have the power ro harm others.

Certain experiences “recalibrate the sensorium,” a phrase that sounds abstract until you realise how literal it is. Real victimisation rewires what you pay attention to. The world becomes a field of incoming signals: tones, gestures, hesitations, anything that might bloom into threat. You cease to be a neutral observer of social life; you’re a person scanning for the next repetition of a pattern you already know too well.

It reminds me of how chronic conditions work. Someone who has diabetes, doesn’t decide to think about their blood sugar all the time; it’s simply become the organising metaphor of their body. It becomes the first explanation for anything: fatigue, irritability, even sadness. Once something becomes the central lens, reality starts rearranging itself around that lens.

Victimisation does something similar to the psyche. You become primed to interpret events through that channel. This makes us adaptive. But adaptation always comes with a blind spot: while you’re looking outward for danger, your inward gaze goes quiet.

This inattentiveness to the self has been noted across traditions. Odysseus returns home in The Odyssey with a mind trained by years of danger as he notices the tremor in a servant’s hand, the pause in a stranger’s speech. Yet he fails to notice his own deception, cruelty, and manipulation; the attentiveness that should make him morally aware instead becomes one-directional. This is incredibly tragic instead of expectedly heroic: survival sharpens perception in one axis and blunts it in another.

Bourdieu wrote extensively about how people inhabit “habitus” i.e. a set of embodied dispositions shaped by what they have undergone. Victimisation becomes part of habitus. It affects posture, suspicion, generosity, the ability to pause, to consider that one might have misread a situation.

But what complicates this today is “the moral thickness of everyday life.” The moment harm is named (not only personally but through the categories available in our culture) it gathers moral weight. If you have been wronged, you aren’t just wounded; you’ve become a figure of moral clarity. You occupy a purified position, one from which your own behaviour becomes harder to interrogate.

This spills into identity, class, caste, gender. The more culturally legible your wound is, the more insulation it offers.
Modern political life encourages this: identities with historical oppression gain moral authority; identities with historical dominance claim moral certainty.
Both positions can create the same psychological effect: the belief that critique should travel in a single direction.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes about how oppressed groups can internalise the role of the wronged to such an extent that critique feels like betrayal of one’s collective suffering. Meanwhile, colonial elites historically used their supposed “civilising mission” to avoid examining the violence they enacted. The psychological mechanism is identical: legitimacy becomes permission.

Both groups in that sense, stop reflecting and we create the very world of our danger-based imagination: an attack at every corner you turn - each person justifying why they did it.

Every society builds some version of this shield. In Indian urban culture, it’s visible in the easy way we say, “I’ve had it harder,” or “People like me don’t get the luxury to self-reflect.” The upper-class person uses it differently (“I know better; I’ve seen more of the world” - elders using age as a full stop), but the mechanism is the same. Once you believe your story confers moral elevation, whether through pain or privilege then your attention turns outward with even greater force. You scrutinise the world, but rarely your own footprint in it.

And because humans already resist change (neuroscience keeps showing we treat unfamiliar interpretations as threats to the self- Studies on trauma show that the amygdala becomes overactive while the medial prefrontal cortex i.e. the part responsible for self-reflective evaluation shows reduced activation) this moral elevation becomes a perfect shield. We become narratively committed. Our history becomes the organising principle of our ethics. We see right and wrong through justification using our pasts.

So what we’re left with is a paradox that’s more human than moral:
When you’ve been hurt, you become exceptionally good at detecting harm coming toward you, and exceptionally poor at detecting harm radiating outward from you.

What emerges is not selfishness but a kind of perceptual claustrophobia.
When your suffering becomes your framework, you see the world with startling clarity. except for the parts where you appear. And what kind of world do you create when you do that? The same one you were recovering from.

When the seasons change, many of us talk about low moods, as if they are purely biological events, “It’s the weather,” “It’s darker,” “My body feels off.” Of course, biology is a huge part of it. But in the therapy room, I’ve noticed something quietly profound: seasonal shifts tend to stir old emotional seasons too. The external winter often brushes against an internal one. And this is where a psychodynamic understanding can deepen our compassion and insight; for ourselves and our clients.

Psychodynamic work teaches us that mood isn’t just a response to the present moment; it’s also a conversation with the past, with early templates of comfort, loss, regulation, and attachment. So when someone says, “I always struggle in December,” I often find myself wondering, “What does this season echo in our emotional history?

In depth psychology, depression is rarely just “sadness.” It is often a return to an earlier emotional climate, a mix of unmet needs, ungrieved losses, and internalized expectations. Winter, with its quietness and contraction, can unconsciously activate things like childhood memories of loneliness during festivals or holidays or maybe, experiences of emotional neglect when family was physically present but emotionally absent. It may trigger associations with endings, separations, or transitions and periods of unspoken grief or longing
I hear people say, “I don’t know why I feel this way,” which is fair, and that’s where we look at the timing. The season becomes a trigger — not a cause — pulling us back into an earlier psychic season.

I often think about how sometimes our body remembers what our mind has learned to forget.

Winter becomes the backdrop against which these old internal states re-emerge, asking for attention, care, and new meaning.

It’s that weird, out-of-place sadness that shows up right when the world tells us to be joyful. The lights are twinkling, families are gathering, and social media is glowing with cinnamon lattes and laughter. And yet, for many of us, there’s a quiet fog inside, a heaviness we can’t shake, and sometimes, a twinge of guilt for feeling low when everyone else seems to be celebrating.

If that sounds like you, here’s the truth: this isn’t a personal failure. You’re not broken or ungrateful. Your body and mind are reacting to real changes in light, temperature, and rhythm. Just like the seasons, our emotions move in cycles. Winter doesn’t ask for productivity, it asks for presence.

When the cold sets in, our body starts working harder to stay warm. That means craving longer sleep, comfort food, carbs, and endless scrolling. It’s our brain’s way of saying, “Hibernate.” The problem? We’re humans, not bears. We still have to get up, work, and function while our body is begging for rest.

Reduced sunlight messes with our serotonin (the feel-good chemical) and melatonin (the sleep one), so when your brain says “I’m tired,” it’s not lying — it’s just confused. The result is that mental fog, the sudden loss of energy, the urge to cancel plans and stay under the blanket that now feels suspiciously like your soulmate.

But here’s the comforting part — the winter blues are predictable. They tend to arrive around the same time every year. And if we can see the pattern, we can also soften its landing.

Who’s More Prone to It?

Sometimes it runs in families, the way favorite recipes or bad jokes do. If your parents or siblings tend to get low during colder months, you might be more sensitive to these seasonal shifts too. But biology is just one aspect of it, and there’s more to what meets the eye.

People who grew up with caregivers who were loving one moment and distant the next often carry an internal question: “Will someone be there for me when things get cold?”
Winter, with its enforced slowness and longer hours indoors, strips away distractions. It quietly reactivates that internalized fear of emotional absence.

Looking at it from the lens of our internal landscape, this is a re-emergence of the anxious attachment pattern — a deeply familiar yearning for warmth mixed with a fear that warmth won’t stay. These individuals may feel the loneliness of winter more intensely because it echoes old relational wounds.

A strong, punitive inner critic is often a legacy of environments where love felt conditional, it is tied to achievement, behavior, or obedience. Winter’s inherent stillness disrupts the usual routines that keep this critic quiet. When productivity slows or motivation dips, the superior moral and harsh voice in us grows louder: “You’re falling behind., “Everyone else is coping; why aren’t you?”

This intensifies depressive feelings, not because of sunlight or serotonin, but because old internal authorities regain power when external structures loosen.

Here’s What Helps (and Actually Does) — Reframed

Step toward warmth and luminosity.

It isn’t just sunlight your body longs for — it’s the symbolic experience of being met.
Sitting by a bright window or stepping outside for a few minutes can feel like an internal shift from “I am alone in the dark” to “something in the world is reaching toward me.”
Light often represents attunement, presence, and the early experiences of being held in someone’s gaze. Letting yourself receive even a small amount of morning light can gently counter old internal narratives of emotional deprivation.

Create a rhythm your psyche can lean on.

A consistent sleep–wake pattern doesn’t just regulate hormones; it offers your inner child something they may have missed — predictability.
Many people who grew up in emotionally inconsistent environments find winter destabilizing because it mirrors that old unpredictability.
By keeping a steady rhythm, you give your internal world a structure, a sense of “someone is in charge now,” which can soften anxiety and internal chaos.

Move in ways that reconnect you with your body’s story.

Gentle movement — stretching, slow walks, yoga, swaying to a song — helps loosen emotional material stored in the body.
The body holds everything that was once too overwhelming to speak. Freud said, “first and foremost, the ego is a body ego”. Movement becomes a quiet dialogue between you and those unspoken parts. You don’t have to push or perform. The goal isn’t mastery. It’s reconnection — reminding your psyche that it occupies a living, responsive, feeling body.

Allow coziness, but stay connected to aliveness.

Retreating during winter is natural — even healthy. But too much withdrawal can reawaken old defenses like emotional numbing, dissociation, or retreating into fantasy. Small acts of engagement can help: cooking a new dish, rearranging a corner of your room, journaling, creating something imperfect, or texting the friend who feels like warmth.
Think of these as gentle reminders to your psyche:
“I am still here. I still affect the world, and the world still affects me.”
These small, alive moments counter the internal pull toward shutting down.

Reach out for relational holding.

Winter often brings old attachment patterns to the surface, and therapy can act as a steady relational anchor. You don’t need to explain or justify your feelings. Simply being witnessed — without pressure to “fix” anything — heals the part of you that once felt unseen or misunderstood. Sometimes the most therapeutic moment is not insight, but the experience of being held in someone’s emotional presence.

Ask for support when the heaviness deepens.

Seeking help is not a sign of fragility — it is a sign of ego strength. To say “this is too much for me alone” reflects a capacity for reality-testing, self-awareness, and healthy dependency.
Whether it’s talking to a doctor, considering light therapy, or exploring medication, the act itself communicates something powerful to your inner world:
“You deserve support now, in a way you may not have received before.”
And accepting care — in any form — is often the most profound corrective emotional experience.

You can hear it in normal conversations. Someone says, “My maid was late again,” and then pauses — “Sorry, I mean house help.”

Someone else says, “He’s acting like a girl,” and the room tightens.

A third person winces and corrects them, “You can’t say that.”

The speaker rolls his eyes: “Oh god, not this again.”

Everyone leaves feeling irritated, vaguely superior, and a little ashamed.

I used to be the corrector — sharp, ready to pounce. I thought it meant I was on the right side of history. I still care about how words can harm. But somewhere along the way, I realised that this constant vigilance wasn’t making anyone freer. It was just making everyone scared — scared of being exposed as “one of them,” scared of being seen as complicit.

The fantasy of being clean

There’s a fantasy that drives all this — that there’s a pure way to be human, that the right vocabulary can wash off the dirt.

But we live inside the same broken systems we condemn. Patriarchy, caste, capitalism, family loyalty — we both benefit and get hurt by them. I can be a woman harmed by patriarchy and still enact it.

Complicity isn’t something you can remove like clothes.

And yet, we keep trying. We clean, we correct, we perform decency in language — because it’s easier to manage speech than to sit with what it reveals: that we’re tangled, compromised, human.

Why correction changes nothing

When someone says something offensive, the instinct to correct them feels righteous.

Sometimes it is.

But more often, a way of restoring your own comfort, of saying I’m not that person.

The problem is, policing doesn’t create understanding. It creates silence. The person learns what not to say, not what they actually meant. The word gets buried; the structure of thought that produced it stays untouched.

I’ve seen this play out cruelly against people already on the margins — working-class clients, people with limited access to English, people who haven’t had the privilege of formal “awareness.” The rulebook of “right speech” ends up humiliating the very people who are supposed to be protected by it.

When language enters the therapy room

Inside therapy, this fear of saying the wrong thing takes on a different shape.

Clients come in already cautious. They start to speak, then stop — “That sounded bad, didn’t it?” or “I know this isn’t feminist of me but—” The guilt arrives before the sentence does.

I don’t blame them. Therapy rooms are full of projections — about what the therapist believes, what’s allowed, what’s not. But when people start talking like they’re on trial, nothing real can happen. Therapy doesn’t work on “approved” language; it works on the language people actually think in, the one they’ve learned from family, neighbourhood, television, childhood.

That’s the language of the unconscious. The unrefined, unclean, sometimes horrifying stuff.

If I only let clients speak in the vocabulary of correctness, I’m not doing therapy — I’m curating it.

What words actually do

When a man calls someone “loose” or says “these people are lazy,” it’s disturbing to hear. It’s meant to be. But the analytic task isn’t to tell him it’s wrong. It’s to find out what that word is doing for him.

Language isn’t neutral; it’s defensive. A word like randi might be carrying his terror of needing someone. Lazy might be how he hides his own envy of rest. Emotional might be how he manages his fear of dependence.

The word itself is not the endpoint — it’s the map.

It’s showing me what part of the psyche is under strain.

If I censor it too soon, I lose the only way in.

The therapist’s stance

I’ve learned that correcting a patient’s language is often a narcissistic move — a way to soothe myself. It lets me feel good, progressive, untouched. But it shuts the patient down. It tells them: “Speak only in a way that I can tolerate.”

Therapy has to be a space where language can misbehave — in slips, in contradictions, in “problematic” phrasing.

There’s a moment in Succession when Kendall Roy, freshly shattered, tells his siblings, “I’m not feeling that.” His life is collapsing, but the reflex is automatic: deny the feeling before the feeling denies you.
All of us, regardless of gender, know what it’s like to be trained to treat emotion as a liability.

We tend to talk about “toxic masculinity” as something men do. But what if masculinity is less a gendered trait and more a cultural muscle memory? Something absorbed, repeated, enforced across genders, classes, families, courts, and even victims themselves?

Masculinity, in this sense, is not about men.
It’s about the conditions under which we allow ourselves, or refuse ourselves, full emotional reality.

And the cost of that refusal shows up everywhere.

In the Gisele Pelicot case, the daughter’s accusation of incest wasn’t heard as a disclosure. It was considered too “far fetched” by the mother - the same woman who took him and many other men to court for rape and said “shame has to change sides”.
The daughter’s reality was heard as an attack on the family’s emotional architecture.

Judith Herman, in Trauma and Recovery, writes that traumatic truths are often rejected not because they are unbelievable, but because they are unbearable.

Believing the child would force the mother to confront a rupture so total (the collapse of safety, trust, family cohesion) that denial becomes the only psychologically survivable option.

Who performs that denial? A woman.
What logic does she use? Masculine logic.

Not masculine as in “protecting a man,” but masculine as in defending the much needed story of paternal authority - that parents protect, don’t hurt, the keystone of the household narrative.

She’s not protecting him; she’s protecting the story that protects her. The story that protects her inner world and helps her not confront the failure as a parent.

This is the first place where we see masculinity functioning as an epistemology: a way of deciding what reality we can afford to know.

institutional blindness

Move from the home to the institution.
In the Atul Subhash case, his reports of harassment by his wife’s family received little traction until after his suicide.
Only then did the system respond FIRs filed, media coverage, court movement.

Men’s suffering becomes legible only after it becomes irreversible.

And yet, when later details came out of his mistreatment of his wife, because they did not fit the narrative of a man who died “at the hands of laws that favor women”, it did not get as popular.

Sociologist Raewyn Connell notes that dominant masculinity functions at the structural level: institutions need men to be self-regulating, not emotionally dependent on the system.
A man in distress is an inconvenience to bureaucratic order.

So institutions delay responding because a vulnerable man contradicts the administrative fantasy of the “autonomous male subject.”

The courts can accommodate a dead man; a collapsing man is too disruptive.

Again, masculinity here is not individual.
It’s a rule that shapes what we call “true”: male pain is only recognisable when it fits the masculine narrative of catastrophe.

whose terror becomes cultural truth?

The recent discourse around men being “scared of marriage”, triggered by reports of women murdering husbands or filing false claims shows a different facet of this epistemology: fear asymmetry.

A few cases rapidly became a generalised cultural panic for men.

Meanwhile, women have lived with statistically documented marital fear for decades (dowry deaths, intimate partner violence, marital rape) yet society refuses to universalise their fear.
Women’s fear is treated as personal; men’s fear becomes national.

Sara Ahmed calls this affective economies where emotions don’t just exist, they circulate and gain value depending on who feels them.

Masculinity assigns a higher cultural value to male fear.

A frightened man is a sign of societal breakdown; a frightened woman is a sign of societal normalcy.

Here is the part people avoid discussing: internalised masculinity is often strongest among those who have been hurt by it. Men suffer a lot at the hands of this patriarchal conditioning, but much like the government that instead of increasing total seats in colleges, make students of reserved status and general status fight among themselves - many men find women or feminism to be the problem than the rigid norms they were brought up with. We get so used to the cage, we do not see it. We blame the world outside the cage for being out of reach.

Women dismissing their own abuse (“It must have been a misunderstanding”), men mocking their own fear (“I’m overreacting”), couples trivialising emotional aggression these aren’t personality quirks.They are manifestations of what R.D. Laing called the false self system: a socially conditioned version of reality where only certain emotions are allowed to surface.

In many Indian families, as Sudhir Kakar’s work shows, dependency, fear, jealousy, and tenderness are coded as feminine and therefore “chaotic,” while stoicism, denial, and endurance are coded as masculine and therefore “orderly.”

So when emotions threaten to destabilise the family’s fiction of order, everyone: boys, girls, mothers, fathers reaches for the same masculine defence:

• minimise

• deny

• rationalise

• maintain harmony at the cost of truth

Masculinity becomes the psychic manager that keeps the household emotionally operational by suppressing whatever threatens the stability of the story

Masculinity, here, is not a male characteristic but a cultural tool for avoiding collapse: emotional collapse, moral collapse, institutional collapse, narrative collapse.

Everyone uses it.
Everyone enforces it.
And everyone is ultimately constrained by it.

The goal is not to make men more emotional.
The goal is to create a world where acknowledging truth doesn’t threaten the psychic, moral, or institutional order.
Where feeling and knowing are not gendered.
Where collapse is not treated as a masculine failure, but as a human possibility.

All of us need all sides of us - masculine, feminine and everything in between. But when some forms of being are considered “boss lady” - feminism has become a copy of typical male traits and forgotten to see that both men and women need the feminine to be complete. The binary genders struggle the most with this disowning because of their bodies and their aspirations, wanting to be a “strong woman” or a man wanting to be a provider and as a result, all of us, even with trans and non binary genders - tend to think of suppression and dominance as strengths. Everything is a virtue - but in limits. It is time to reclaim our total feeling range.

Only then does men’s mental health become thinkable not as charity, but as clarity.

If a society pushes certain groups — women, queer people, Dalits, Muslims — to it’s edges, what shows up in therapy is not simply the pain of individuals, but the fractures of a world. The symptom of the margins is the symptom of a wounded culture. When drug use is higher among queer and trans people, that tells us less about deviance and more about the cost of surviving in a world that refuses to see you.

Between recognition and helplessness

It is easy to name oppression; it is harder to know what to do with it. Savitribai Phule once said,

When someone throws trash at you, the first task is to clean yourself — and then to face the system that made it possible for trash to be thrown.

If we stay stuck in “why was the trash thrown on me?”, we risk freezing into helplessness. Recognition without action can become paralysis.

In therapy too, we can over-identify with insight. Both therapist and client may circle around the same truth — patriarchy, caste, communalism, capitalism — and yet feel unable to move. Sometimes, in the name of understanding, we stabilise misery because we fear the chaos that comes with change.

Interpretation, when it is alive, reinterprets — it opens new meanings instead of closing them. It’s less about “this is what your suffering means” and more about “what might you be able to do with this now?”

Who is unaffected by the system?

Therapists are not outside these worlds. No one is. Neutrality never meant pretending the world doesn’t exist — Freud himself, a Jewish immigrant in anti-Semitic Vienna, knew what it was to live under threat. Neutrality, at its best, means not imposing yourself on another person while staying conscious of what you carry into the room.

The history of psychoanalysis has always had its countercurrents — the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem offering free therapy to Black communities, today’s trans psychoanalytic collectives, Dalit and Bahujan therapists writing about caste in the clinic. Recognition of oppression is necessary, but it is only a starting point. The harder work begins when we look at how oppression lives inside us.

The ambivalence of oppression

As Paulo Freire wrote,

“If education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor.”

It is painful to admit, but true: sometimes we want the power we have been denied. Therapy, at its best, helps people confront that ambivalence — the wish for justice intertwined with the wish for dominance, the yearning for freedom shadowed by the fear of responsibility.

The “internalised oppressor” is not only a thought pattern; it is a feeling state — the sense of being unworthy, bad, or fundamentally broken. In this sense, oppression colonises not just bodies and opportunities, but self-perception itself. The work of therapy, then, is to help people examine the rigidities they’ve internalised — in thinking, feeling, and acting — and to slowly rediscover movement.

Therapist helplessness is also political

Therapists who work in contexts of inequality often speak of a consistent frustration — a sense that no matter how deep the insight, the world outside still harms. The question is not how to avoid this helplessness, but how to use it. What does a client evoke in me? Is this feeling mine, or is it something they cannot afford to feel themselves?

Vikki Reynolds calls this “justice-doing in the therapeutic relationship.” We cannot fix systems inside the therapy room, but we can model the small experiences of fairness and recognition that systems often deny. These moments — of being seen, not as broken but as surviving — are not symbolic. They are revolutionary.

Working with those who oppress

There are times when therapists work with people who hold power, who harm others, or who represent oppressive systems. The temptation is to take sides or moralise. Yet the work is to stay curious: what fear does this domination protect? What wound does the aggression cover? Empathy, in this sense, does not mean endorsement — it means staying present long enough to help even those with power see their own fractures.

In the consulting room, politics is not abstract. It lives in tone, silence, defensiveness, and fatigue. As Adam Phillips writes, politics in therapy is “not something we add to the conversation; it is already there.” The task is to tolerate the discomfort of complexity — to stay reflective without retreating into purity.

Nuance, not flattening

All oppression is not the same. Queer, trans, Dalit-Bahujan, and Muslim clients experience distinct violences, which must be held in their specificity. Our job is not to flatten these differences under the banner of intersectionality, but to listen carefully for texture and contradiction. And each person’s personal history will definitely experience how they process their oppression too. We cannot remove the personal from the political.

At the same time, oppressed groups can also cause harm. Our responsibility is to hold that truth without weaponising it — to keep spaces open where contradiction can be spoken rather than silenced. Liberation work demands nuance; solidarity demands reflection.

From the consulting room to the collective

Not all social change begins in the streets. It often begins at home, in classrooms, in WhatsApp groups, in families that still reproduce hierarchy. Clients often ask: “What can I change? The world feels too big.” The answer is usually closer than we think — how we show up at the dinner table, in our workplaces, with our friends.

For me, the therapy room is one of those small but powerful sites. Working with queer, trans, and Muslim clients, I see how community-based healing spaces — like Bapu Trust, Dawa Dua Project, Atma Shakti/Atma Vishwas, or the Voice Hearers’ Network — remind us that care is not a service but a form of collective resistance.

Psychoanalysis, when it listens deeply, becomes translation work — helping people find words for what was made unspeakable, helping them rejoin the world on their own terms.

Naming is not enough

Naming oppression is necessary. But it is only the beginning. The real work of therapy is to hold the pain of recognition without becoming paralysed by it — to transform knowing into doing, reflection into relation, and survival into meaning.

To work with oppression is to stay loyal to nuance and ambivalence. It is to remember that every culture has its shadows, and that those who live in those shadows carry not only suffering but also insight. The task, for those of us in the therapy room, is to turn that insight into movement. We have to answer two questions:

1. What can this individual do, not just despite their oppression, but with it, at a personal level? This could be about processing the emotions, admitting the fatigue, giving permission to oneself to not fight if one is tired, or to take action if one is motivated for it.

2. If the person is interested, or if the therapist would like to mobilize around this, a bigger question can be asked - how can this be addressed at a more systemic level? And what is a good starting point for that? Is it group support or group therapy? Focused group discussions and consciousness raising? Or is it activism, advocacy and taking to the streets. One caveat of systemic work is to remember that it takes a while to get done and one should engage with it in a sustainable way as to not burn out. Often from our wounds, we can have a narcissistic idea of recovery: my work only matters if I can erase this whole system of oppression within my lifetime, or better yet, within a month. However - this forgets that we are interdependent on others and can do some part of the work, and someone else will have to laterally help us as well as continue our legacy.

To conclude, it’s time we moved beyond affirmation. Is affirmation better than denial of intersections? Absolutely. But its not enough. Let’s move to processes that lead to emotional and real world movement.

For any social order to be effective, it has to control both bodies and our anxieties. Here, patriarchy offers something deceptively comforting: the sense that someone knows, someone leads, someone will keep the world in order. It divides experience into familiar pairs of reason and emotion, control and chaos, strength and softness; thus giving us the illusion of safety in knowing where we belong.

Even when we reject these ideas, we still reach for them unconsciously. A team feels more at ease when someone “takes charge.” A relationship feels steadier when one person contains more, feels less. Patriarchy hides not only in systems, but in our sense of what feels secure.

The Emotional Work of Keeping Peace

Once inside that structure, people learn to maintain it emotionally. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild called it emotional labour, the management of emotion as invisible work. Under patriarchy, this labour is gendered. We learn to anticipate others’ discomfort, to soften truths, to cushion egos, to regulate the emotional temperature of a room.

This unconscious conditioning shows up in how anger, ambition, or sexual autonomy are filtered through palatable tones. The instinct to be “reasonable” when violated, “cool” when disrespected, or “mature” when dismissed. They are residues of a social order that rewards women for managing the emotions patriarchy provokes in them. It teaches women to contain themselves, to be self-aware to the point of self-surveillance. 

The Indian psychologist Ashis Nandy wrote that colonialism’s most intimate victory was to make the colonized love their subordination. Patriarchy, too, thrives when endurance feels like virtue. It convinces us that harmony matters more than honesty, and that peace (even when it’s unjust) is proof of goodness.

Love as Discipline

Sudhir Kakar once described Indian family life as one where love and control are intertwined. A mother’s affection often comes wrapped in instruction: “Good girls don’t talk like that.” “He’s your brother; let it go.”

We learn that being loved requires being agreeable and that self-restraint is the price of belonging. This continues into adulthood, where affection can then become a form of discipline. A man’s anger is seen as care. A woman’s silence is read as virtue. The script repeats itself. Love becomes obedience, obedience becomes love.

The Need to Be Seen

Patriarchy tells us what kinds of people are worth listening to : rational, composed, mature, strategic. We may reject these ideals, yet still crave them.

The philosopher Axel Honneth called this the “struggle for recognition.” What sustains patriarchy is how it monopolizes the terms of being seen. The feminist who is measured and charming will always be more palatable than the one who is angry or raw. Even rebellion gets rewarded when it is beautiful.

We unconsciously make ourselves legible to power. We soften our edges to stay recognisable, not realising that recognition itself can be a form of control.

The Guilt of Wanting More

Guilt is perhaps patriarchy’s quietest weapon. Women who want autonomy feel the need to explain it. Men who resist dominance feel guilty for stepping back. Guilt convinces us that freedom is selfish, that wanting differently is unloving.

Even our dreams of liberation carry its traces. In films and popular culture, a “free woman” is often alone, successful at work, yes, but solitary. Freedom still looks like disconnection, not interdependence. It’s as if patriarchy taught us that to be whole, we must be without others.

Desire and the Stories We Inherit

At its deepest layer, patriarchy organizes desire: who we love and how we understand wanting itself. The masculine wants to possess; the feminine wants to be desired. Even when reversed or queered, the same logic often lingers.

Juliet Mitchell once wrote that the unconscious reproduces patriarchy because it’s narrative. It gives shape to longing, to recognition, to what feels meaningful. To undo it, we would need new metaphors for desire where vulnerability isn’t feminised, and strength isn’t masculine.

Learning to Live Without Its Mirror

Perhaps the hardest part of unlearning patriarchy is that it means losing the mirror that once reflected us. We may no longer believe in its rules, but we still need its approval. We want to be seen as good, reasonable, balanced and all that within its frame.

Letting go of that recognition can feel like a small death. But maybe that is the work: to build another kind of mirror that doesn’t need hierarchy to feel safe.

Patriarchy survives not because we agree with it, but because it has shaped the emotional architecture of what feels like love, safety, and belonging. To truly move beyond it, we have to learn new ways to soothe our anxieties: ones that don’t depend on who leads and who follows, who endures and who demands.

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