SELFSAME Therapyby Srividya

Approach

Culturally informed, integrative, and paced by you.

I do not belong to one school of thought, and I do not treat your culture as background noise. Your particular difficulty — and the two worlds it sits between — decide what is useful.

  1. 01

    We start without translation

    The first session is unhurried, and you do not begin by explaining your culture to me. No footnotes about arranged introductions, festival obligations, or why you send money home. That shared context is where we start, not what we spend the hour on.

  2. 02

    We trace the pattern to family, culture and migration

    Most of what feels like a personal failing was once an intelligent adaptation — to a family that needed you to be capable, to a community that watches, to a country that asked you to prove yourself twice over. We look at where it came from without turning your upbringing into a verdict.

  3. 03

    We work with the exhaustion, not only the story

    Insight alone rarely changes a nervous system that has been braced since the day you landed. We pay attention to what happens in your chest before a call home, in your shoulders on a Sunday evening — and build tolerance slowly, at a pace you set.

  4. 04

    We practise living well across two places

    Change gets tested in real conversations — with a partner, a manager, a parent eight time zones away. We review what happened, adjust, and keep going. The aim is not to choose between cultures, but to stop being torn in half by them.

Close-up of a handwoven textile where blue and clay threads are worked into one cloth

What I draw on

Methods in service of the person and their context.

Culturally informed & migration-aware

Family, community, duty and diaspora are treated as central context, never as noise to be worked around.

Psychodynamic & relational

Understanding how early family relationships shaped the way you relate now, including at a distance.

Cognitive behavioural (CBT)

Practical tools for the thoughts and habits that keep anxiety, sleeplessness and low mood in place.

Somatic & trauma-informed

Working with what the body carries through relocation and pressure, with consent and pacing at the centre.

First session

What the first fifty minutes look like

Held online, at a time that works in your time zone. Nothing to prepare, and no cultural background briefing required.

  1. Minutes 0–10Settling in. Practicalities, confidentiality, time zones, and what you can expect from me.
  2. Minutes 10–35You talk — about the move, the marriage, the job, the family, whichever is loudest right now.
  3. Minutes 35–45I share how I understand it so far and what working together might involve.
  4. Minutes 45–50Deciding whether to continue. There is no pressure either way.

Next stepBegin

You do not have to explain yourself from the beginning.

A free 15-minute call is a gentle way to begin and see whether this feels like the right fit. No obligation, and nothing to prepare.