Tag: therapy

  • 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 new-age 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 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.