Tag: therapy

  • From Horoscopes to ChatGPT: The Human Need to Be Seen

    ChatGPT (and similar LLMs) proves something simple yet profound. It shows us that validation, encouragement, and understanding matter deeply to us as human beings.

    Despite knowing it’s an AI, a machine, not a “sane human” talking, we still believe its kind words. We want to hear praise, to have our fears and feelings validated. And we keep coming back for more.

    This shows an interesting phenomenon: the human brain is wired to be seen and heard, no matter who it is from.

    Why Kind Words Matter

    Throughout history, humans have been drawn to psychology, astrology, tarot, and numerology. Some followers turn to them to know the future. But many simply want to feel known.

    Think of any sun sign or name-based reading. Beyond predictions (rolling eyes), they usually describe personality traits like strengths, quirks, weaknesses. And most of the time, they emphasize the positives.

    People end up hearing things about themselves that they may never have heard from loved ones.

    For example:

    “An X sun sign person is sincere and disciplined. They are go-getters, ambitious, natural leaders, and liked by all. They are charming and reliable, though sometimes impatient.”

    Now imagine reading this the day after you failed at something. You might mock it. You might not believe it. But somewhere, it makes you feel better. You reread it, just for that comfort.

    Because often, those who seek such words are people who never got the kind words they deserved.

    The Power of Words from Loved Ones

    Now imagine these same words (true or not, who knows) spoken by someone you love deeply. The impact is undeniable. You may even start embodying them, because the person you love sees you that way.

    And yet, in many cultures (especially South-Asian ones), we undervalue the role of words. We think love is enough. We believe in actions, sometimes not even that. Sometimes we assume our mere existence is enough.

    But technology and psychology, especially therapy, show us otherwise. To be seen and heard is healing.

    Maybe that’s why confession (in Christianity, with all its spiritual significance) feels healing. Even unseen, a person speaks, and a person listens. That act alone is powerful. Our words become more important than our physical appearance and actions.

    Maybe that’s why cultures have speeches for every occasion. Why a eulogy matters so much. Does the dead wait to hear something at last, before moving on peacefully?

    Finding Words, Finding Healing

    In the end, there is an easy way and a hard way to live. The hope will always be to find people who give us space to speak, and who find the right words to whisper back when we cannot hear ourselves in the noise of life.

    But until we find them, I am okay with ChatGPT being my friend, philosopher, and guide.

  • The Opposite of Pain

    We often think the opposite of pain is happiness. But what if it’s not? Is it the ability to get bored easily?  What if the true opposite of pain is indifference, powering through, the inability to get overwhemled easily? 

    People in perennial pain (because of a traumatic/difficult life), when a good thing happens they become numb. They are so used to pain chemicals that good things don’t make their system jump.

    They are shocked! What is this new chemical? All they know is that, this isn’t their usual friend pain. Hence, they are unable to process or express or experience their happiness as expected.

    People who can experience happiness in its realest form are probably happy in general, healed in general. Pain is not normal to them, or let’s say it’s just one of the difficult feelings like anger, disappointment.

    In fact, pain and disappointments don’t affect their system as much as they affect traumatised people. 

    Healed or unbroken happy people with sufficient emotional resilience can find happiness in anything and probably everywhere,everyday. They are those people who say they find happiness in small things.They are excited for anything and probably everything.

    People with pain as their sidekick are the opposite. Even the grandest events make them feel ‘meh!’. They are unable to feel happy when what they desired for long happens, because of their otherwise chaotic life and nervous system.

    They were not born like that, but today they have become like that.

    Their nervous system is not normally attuned to safety and happiness, therefore, when it actually happens, they don’t know how to process it.

    They are probably those people who are picking fights on the grand event day, because chaos is familiar, peace is not.

    Happy people are able to calm down faster and do not get easily triggered. Even if they get triggered, their reaction is not as loud as people in pain, who are easily overwhelmed with minutest of things.

    People in pain, they may or may not show it, but they are always looking for something to sulk about, that’s what their brain understands. Maybe this is how their brain is protecting them, making difficulties predictable.

    The boredom that comes with a safe life is unbearable to people with pain. Unless they recognize it and do something to fix it, this is who they become, party-poopers and crybabies.

    Pour some pain on me!

    Life is full of difficult choices. Be it childhood or old age. Every age has its own set of problems and priorities. The key is to learn how to make healthy choices. And even if we do make mistakes, how to bounce back from them, not dwelling in them forever.

    Nobody can promise a difficulty free, mistake free life.That’s not just how life works. But we can surely learn tricks to help ourselves and stand again after falling down, again and again.

    Healing all the more becomes pertinent, because broken people look for a particular type of pain every time.

    Everyone has a fixed drug in the form of pain, they would like to consume.

    Some look for betrayal in everything, some are fixated with moral and ethical flaws. Some want to prove in their mind that every one is selfish, and some want life to prove that they will be abandoned.

    For some, scarcity of money is always an issue. To some scarcity of love. The other is looking for scarcity of trust and inability to delegate. Some are unable to treat themselves as an individual and are waiting for others to look out for them. 

    Some people have made every relationship in their life someone else’s responsibility.

    To some, life owes them everything. They think it is life’s job to offer them peace, happiness and health without having to work for it. 

    Some believe respect is not given at birth, but earned, even love, even as a child.

    The list goes on.

    The point is, as a person who is able to feel more than others and more frequently than others, the chances are it’s not going to change, at least not on its own.

    If you think one day you will find your utopia, or the reason you are not finding your utopia is your bad luck or somebody’s fault, then this is the mirage you are chasing and living.

    This balloon will not pop on its own! You have to pop it or let it go in the air with your own bare hands!

    How to take this pain out of your system

    To understand what life is, it is what we make it, how it looks, how it feels, everyday!

    These are not just bumper stickers or words to be found in quote books, but it’s underneath the choices we make everyday.

    Everytime you choose not to help someone, because you were betrayed by someone, you are writing a story of kindness and transactional relationships.

    Every time you turn down meeting a friend, it is your choice of isolation. Every time you skip family dinner plans because you think it’s not worth it, only for a lazy reason or to look cool, it’s your choice to put your family away.

    Every time you put off a self care activity, this is the story of how your overall self worth would look like.

    Every time you give up a work opportunity, it’s your choice of employment. Every wellness meeting you are missing, it’s your choice of maintaining your health.

    The point is life is happening, around us and to us all the time. 

    To think we get life exactly how we assume, is ignorance. Life is built through things, and to think we can control the choices is ignorance.

    There is always an opportunity cost that you are paying. It is not about accepting anything and everything, it’s about being aware of what you are losing in the process. 

    It is not about right or wrong, it is how you want to achieve something.

    A house is made brick by brick, it’s not there readymade, nor it should be. It’s better to design your life like you’d love to design your favourite dress (men included).

    The point is not who is better or who is worse, the one in pain or one who is happy. It means, we shouldn’t think our personalities are natural and fixed, when it comes to it. 

    Our personalities are most likely conditioned and acquired. It is how the brain learnt to protect itself, how can we complain about it? 

    But, now that you are aware of it, and if you at all want to feel better, not saying you are not used to the pain, then give a chance to healing. 

    Make pain a foe in life, not a friend. Don’t get used to being in pain so much that you stop having problems with it.

    There is a better life, right inside you, waiting to happen!

    Choosing to be happy or be in pain is a powerful part of free will and being human, which other species don’t have.

    Don’t let anyone else take the reins of your life.

    So whatever you choose today, choose wisely!

  • The Guru Syndrome: How Indians Outsource Emotional Work

    Why Indians Need a Guru / Religious Leader / Spiritual Guide / Cult Figure

    Indian ancestors figured out one thing for sure about themselves, we lack emotional honesty.

    And in the interest of future generations, they decided this weakness needed to be taken care of by someone Indians can’t shut down.

    Hence, the creation of gurus.

    Now please don’t confuse these with the actual enlightened gurus, the ones who guide you toward God.

    The gurus I’m talking about are those modern-day leaders who basically do the job of a therapist, tackling issues most Indians still fail to acknowledge as basic human needs:

    respect, trust, emotional safety.

    In India, there’s a deep-rooted belief that anything related to mental or emotional health should be hidden.

    Admitting it means you’re weak.

    We are masters at dissociation, denial, and drama, anything but having a calm, honest conversation to actually solve a problem.

    We play hide and seek with emotional wounds, thinking if we ignore them long enough, they’ll fix themselves.

    Our families live by an internalised rule:

    Stay in survival mode.

    True happiness doesn’t exist , only endless sadness, which (hopefully) death or pseudo-devotion to God might one day relieve.

    We’ve normalised sulking and complaining.

    We complain to each other, to ourselves, to the divine.

    We are a nation of issue-makers, not issue-solvers.

    Offer someone a solution, and they’ll reject it saying, “But it’s always been like this.”

    If someone dares to introduce a new mindset or healthier patterns, suddenly their dopamine crashes and cortisol dries up because where will they get the stress now to wake up at 4 a.m. and complain about how little they slept?

    Enter: the guru (read: thought leader / cult leader / religious mentor / spiritual coach).

    This person becomes your emotional spokesperson.

    They do the “difficult conversations” for you.

    They validate or invalidate your feelings.

    They might make you feel like the ultimate victim, or like a fool for being you.

    Either way, they often come with zero real solutions, just recycled wisdom, detachment sermons, and vague inspiration.

    In an ideal world, a true guru would help you navigate personal relationships, family matters, business dilemmas.

    Keep you aligned to dharma, kindness, ethics, and gently remind you to be a good human to others, animals, and yourself. They’d help you walk your path with peace and purpose.

    Sounds beautiful.

    But here’s the problem: most self -proclaimed gurus need help themselves.

    They aren’t therapists.

    Maybe they know scripture, sure, but that doesn’t mean they understand trauma, emotional safety, attachment wounds, or the complexity of human relationships today.

    They don’t push people to grow emotionally. They teach escapism.

    They offer band-aid advice, spiritual distractions, and avoidance tactics wrapped in fancy language.

    This not only stalls real growth, it actively damages relationships, and worse breaks people’s faith in both spirituality and common sense.

    People start to believe:

    “If even this wise person can’t understand me,

    then neither can my family, nor God.”

    The guru becomes a tool to bypass accountability.

    Parents use the guru to avoid answering their children’s questions.

    Spouses use the guru to avoid owning up to their role in conflict.

    But here’s the truth:

    Children don’t need gurus. They need emotionally available parents.

    And no matter how old you get, you remain God-like to your child.

    So don’t run from that responsibility.

    But what happens is, as parents age, they declare that “God is all that matters now.”

    Why?

    Because they avoided emotional healing all their lives and now feel it’s too late.

    So instead of trying to grow or make amends, they hide behind spiritual jargon and dump their mistakes on the guru’s feet.

    They call it maya and move on.

    And in doing so, either get emotionally abandoned by their children or continue to hurt them.

    The toxic cycle goes on.

    This isn’t limited to parent-child dynamics.

    Husband-wife relationships suffer too.

    Instead of talking to each other, people run to third parties who don’t have the emotional intelligence or context to truly help and end up complicating everything further.

    The result?

    Indirect WhatsApp statuses.

    Passive-aggressive Instagram stories.

    Cryptic posts about “being misunderstood.”

    A generation of dissociated, hurt, vulnerable people

    who don’t know how or where  to ask for real help.

    How to end this loop of helplessness?

    Parents, adults, please get used to having difficult conversations.

    That’s what being human means.

    It’s okay if someone tells you, “You hurt me.”

    It’s okay to say, “I’m sorry, how can we fix this?”

    It’s okay to not know what to say, but at least stay.

    If it feels too hard to sit with your emotions, please seek therapy.

    Individual, couple, family, whatever fits.

    There’s nothing wrong with learning how to navigate emotions.

    It’s a life skill.

    And no, we don’t just “figure it out”. We learn it, like anything else.

    The point of life is to live happily, as much as we can, without hurting others in the process.

    And that happiness takes work. It takes mutual learning, deep listening, and real effort.

    But it’s worth it.

    Because it brings peace.

    And isn’t that what we’re all ultimately chasing?

  • Seeing the Driver Within: Self-Awareness as a Way of Life

    This is an essay about something we hear daily, in every motivational video, every honest podcast, even in conversations with friends, partners, or children.

    It’s self-awareness.

    Everyone talks about it, but few truly engage with it. It’s often mistaken for a punishment , considered a burden, a summit to conquer, a painful confrontation with the self.

    People assume self-awareness is anti-ego, a punch to one’s pride.

    How can I have issues? Aren’t I a decent human being? Why should I worry about how my behavior affects others? Am I not troubled by them too?

    We tell ourselves, “We can just move past it. Forget it. Shove it. Drink on it. Sleep on it. Everything but deal with it? Why bother?”

    We’ve built a culture of zero accountability. A myth that our personalities are fixed at birth, that children act out because it’s in their genes, that adults are how they are because God made them that way. So why change? Why even try?

    I believed these things once. But then I learned.

    There’s extensive research on this, human behavior isn’t just a random trait; it’s largely acquired. Yes, acquired, not “owned,” not “innate.”

    Our behaviors are deeply influenced by:

    1. Where and when we were born – the country, the city, the traditions, the safety or danger level of our environment.
    2. Our family structure – how we were raised, whether the home was loving or dysfunctional, healthy or chaotic.
    3. Financial conditions and parental health — how much stress existed in the house, how much care children received.
    4. Education and peer groups — the kind of schooling and societal pressures we were exposed to.
    5. Safety and trauma — including exposure to crime, abuse, or neglect.

    Even in good homes, other subtle forces shape us:

    1. The food we eat, the boundaries set, the moral values passed on.
    2. Whether we were taught to handle emotions or suppress them.
    3. If we had access to safe adults or relied on friends and media for guidance.
    4. If we were encouraged to ask questions or silenced for being difficult.

    And then there are the negatives:

    1. Did we grow up in chaos and develop coping mechanisms just to survive?
    2. Were we expected to raise ourselves – or worse, our parents and siblings?
    3. Were our choices constantly shamed, our emotions dismissed, our voices unheard?
    4. Did we watch our caregivers ignore their health, never take breaks, or suppress their own feelings with addictions?

    Hence, even the tiniest patterns in daily life come from this early conditioning. A child who was never nurtured may grow up not knowing how to care for themselves.

    Whether you take a bath every day or not , yes, even that, might trace back to your upbringing.

    Children who weren’t taught how to deal with emotions may end up looking fine on the outside, but are numbing on the inside. They might throw themselves into books, sports, or art, not out of passion, but as a survival technique.

    Others may go down darker paths like addiction, crime, or dangerous behavior. Some are calling for attention. Others are trying to silence their own minds.

    But all of them need guidance – until at least the age of 25 – to make sense of life.

    As adults, our personalities ,be it good and bad, are shaped by these early scripts.

    They influence our career choices, relationships, addictions, emotional patterns, even how we handle food, rest, or routine.

    So does this mean we’re off the hook? Not at all.

    It means: if someone asks you to look into your behavior, take a pause. Don’t defend or attack. Reflect.

    If you grew up in a home with an unstable food situation, you might now overeat, undereat, cling to certain foods, or feel disconnected from food altogether. That’s not shameful. It’s a story. A root.

    And self-awareness means noticing it, not blaming yourself for it.

    You can still have personal preferences, but if a behavior is hurting you or your relationships, wouldn’t it help to understand why?

    Self-awareness is not an apology letter. It’s not a TED Talk you deliver to everyone around you.

    It’s a personal manual you quietly update. It means you choose knowledge over ignorance, introspection over projection.

    It doesn’t make you better or worse than anyone else. It just makes you a work-in-progress, like all of us.

    It creates space for kindness, because once you see a trait in someone, you begin to ask: “What story does this belong to?” Instead of judging, maybe we offer a little grace.

    And even if we decide to step back, we don’t carry resentment.

    This isn’t abstract talk. Self-awareness is one of the most powerful tools we have to live an intentional life. In tough times or big decisions, a little backtracking into our behavioral roots can change the game.

    And if we can’t decode it ourselves , that’s why professionals exist.

    But we must understand: self-awareness is an investment. Its effects are subtle, but lifelong.

    It won’t transform you overnight, but it will transform your life.

    And if, as families or communities, we begin to live this way, the ripple effect would be magical. A near-utopia.

    Imagine if we truly understand ourselves. We’d know our emotional switches. We’d know what version of us needs to show up, and when.

    We’d respond, not react.

    We wouldn’t be living on autopilot. We’d be manually cruising.

    And how cool is that?

  • The Toxicity of “At Least” Culture

    The culture of being grateful is slowly being replaced, or rather overshadowed, by a subculture of “at least,” which often fails to meet even the bare minimum of human decency, especially in the highly toxic societies we inhabit today.

    To put this into perspective, when we’re struggling, we naturally want to find positivity in life. So, we start looking for good things, in situations, in people, in the small moments that give us hope.

    Gratitude, in this sense, becomes an internal journey. It helps us rise above mere survival and feel worthy of the blessings in our lives, many of which others might only dream of.

    But when we shift to relationships, especially toxic ones, whether at the community or family level, this genuine gratitude is often weaponized. It gets sugarcoated, distorted, and replaced with the word “at least.”

    This phrase is then used to invalidate the feelings of the struggling person, turning their pain and longing for love into something trivial.

    Instead of addressing the root of the issue, “at least” becomes a way to silence, minimize, and dismiss.

    For instance, when someone in a toxic relationship expresses dissatisfaction or emotional neglect, they might be met with phrases like, “At least they don’t hit you,” or “At least they provide for you.”

    These statements diminish the person’s needs, invalidate their love languages, and imply that they should be content with crumbs when they deserve the whole loaf.

    This is not to deny that there are exceptions, some individuals might truly be narcissistic or overly self-centered, always fixated on their own needs.

    However, in most cases, the “at least” culture reflects a systemic failure to acknowledge the emotional and physical well-being of those who depend on us.

    The problem with “at least” is that it often doesn’t even meet the bare minimum. It excuses underperformance, justifies neglect, and absolves responsibility.

    By using “at least” as a defense, the burden of improvement is shifted from the person who should be accountable to the one already suffering. It sends the message that striving to do better isn’t necessary, as long as one does the absolute least to avoid outright condemnation.

    This toxic mindset isn’t limited to interpersonal relationships, it’s deeply ingrained in societal structures. When those in positions of power underperform or fail to fulfill their duties, toxic societies quickly defend them with arguments like, “At least they’re doing something.”

    This rhetoric not only undermines accountability but also perpetuates a culture of mediocrity, where improvement becomes an afterthought rather than a priority.

    The damage of “at least” lies in its ability to stifle growth and diminish the potential for positive change. It creates an environment where people settle for less, stop striving to be their best, and feel justified in placing their burdens on others.

    It normalizes complacency and discourages meaningful efforts to be better, whether as partners, leaders, or even human beings.

    To move beyond the toxicity of “at least,” we must reimagine what gratitude means. True gratitude is about appreciating the good in our lives while recognizing areas for growth and improvement. It’s about valuing others’ efforts while holding them accountable for the roles they play in our lives.

    It’s about finding balance, celebrating what’s good without tolerating what’s harmful.

    Instead of settling for the lowest benchmarks, we must strive for a culture where everyone feels valued and respected.

    We must cultivate environments that encourage people to be their best selves, not through shame or pressure, but through mutual respect and empathy.

    When we stop using “at least” as a justification for mediocrity, we open the door to healthier relationships, better leadership, and stronger communities.

    The key is to challenge complacency and embrace a mindset of continuous growth. By expecting more from ourselves and others, we can foster a society where genuine effort and accountability are the norms, not exceptions.

    Conclusion
    The culture of “at least” must be replaced by a culture of improvement, empathy, and mutual respect.

    Gratitude and accountability can coexist, one doesn’t have to come at the expense of the other.

    When we embrace this balance, we move closer to building a world where every individual can thrive, not by lowering our expectations, but by continually raising them for the greater good of all.