Growing up, while the availability of quality mental help was scarce already, those catered specifically for minorities were little to none. This is when I understood that if I cannot find quality help, I should try to build it for myself and others. I always knew I wanted to help and offer my strengths as I understood myself and my path better. I quickly understood that being a counselling psychologist was the best way I could align my strengths to my motivation to help others to the best of my capacity. It was natural for me to be a therapist specifically helping those at a disadvantage due to their caste, gender, sexuality, and other aspects society made them feel lesser about.

To be able to create a safe space beyond societal restrictions set around minorities of caste, religion, sexual orientation, and gender norms, much like I wanted to look for growing up as a Queer Non-Binary Muslim. Essentially to help build the space that I (and those with a similar upbringing) could not have when we needed it growing up. There is a lot of power that clients assume a therapist can have, mostly because very few therapists know how to help a client to see that power to change and reform within themselves. As a therapist, I will never tire of helping clients see their true capacity and to help them reach a point where they can create a steady path for themselves regardless of what concerns may pull them down.

Essentially, the feeling of comfort, safety, and security with the therapist and the therapy space. The comfort one would need to then smoothly build their safe space within the therapeutic relationship is invaluable and needs to start from day 1. While this is not a goal to be accomplished in just one session, I look forward to initiating it from the first session.

Honestly, I would be very happy to know they are taking up one of the most challenging tasks of our lives, to truly begin taking care of ourselves. It is easy to rant to friends or do things that feel therapeutic, but it takes a lot to be able to sit with a professional and work on these concerns in therapy.

The sessions we would have would be at the pace you are comfortable with. I will not probe unless you are comfortable delving into a topic. We will also have safe words in place to help you communicate some difficult feelings in an easier way. Your comfort will always be the priority.

I as a therapist expect to maintain a relationship that is mutually transparent. The client is always encouraged to be transparent with what they would not be ready to discuss yet (it will find its way back to our session s when they more capable of holding that discussion) and to pause to work through grounding techniques as and when they would need to between sessions. Alternatively, I am transparent about any therapeutic approaches we would be looking into and discuss what led us to try the particular approach out, together.

Very simply put, the greatest learning has been in knowing that I will never know them as well as they know themselves. I can bring in my years of learning and practice to the therapy sessions but only they would know how to customize these into helping themselves better.

1. Genuinely incapable of judging a client for what they admit to have done or are doing. There is always scope of recovery (if needed) and if they have shared it in a session there is also a need they see to alter the same.
   
   2. Queer affirmative, Kink positive, and trauma-informed as a therapist.
   
   3. I trust and respect the process enough to not rush a client into anything they would not already want to do for themselves.
   
   4. Self-aware enough to understand that I may be wrong with how I see the client’s concern and willing to discuss this with the client to alter my beliefs when needed.

Spend quality time with my cats, Taking out time every other day to care for my plants, consciously creating bad art and proudly putting it up around my house, among other things that give me the space to enjoy being with myself.

My therapeutic approaches are eclectic i.e. will be customized to what the client’s concerns are. However, in my learnings post my Master’s degree, I have trained in more than 12 therapeutic modalities. My therapeutic interventions build around a trauma-informed and queer-affirmative lens.

Along with trying to continually inform myself of how to be there for my clients better through literature, courses, workshops, etc. that focus on gender beyond the binary and essentially beyond the cis-gendered and heteronormative lens, I also work with every client who identifies anything but cis-het to understand what they would seek from the therapeutic relationship and then working on how to best provide that affirmative space to them. I also normalize the client correcting me when I may need to better express my thoughts about their identity or sexuality.