Isha Sengupta, Licensed Mental Health Counselor
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” — J. Krishnamurti
This quote captures the heart of how I view healing: we are not broken. More often, our ‘symptoms’ are our deeply human responses to painful experiences and systems that were never built with our humanity in mind.
As a South Asian woman navigating her own queerness and having lived across multiple cultures, I deeply relate to the complexity and nuance of experiencing something that is both painful and meaningful at the same time. I also know what it’s like to have one’s identities and experiences erased within Western, individualistic paradigms of therapy, frameworks that understand the self, relationships, and the world in such narrow rigid ways, and often end up pathologizing the very things that make people from collectivist cultures who they are.
If you’ve been feeling anxious, burnt out, stuck, or disconnected, or if you’re navigating trauma, grief, identity, body image concerns, major life transitions, acculturative stress, or complex relationships, especially in backdrop of your diverse cultural identities and contexts, you are not failing, and you are not alone. Life is complex. There is no single or “right” way to move through it. In fact that very pain and ‘dysfunction’ that you have been made to feel ashamed of and been told to ‘fix’ is a sign of your survival, resistance, and even health.
I hope together we can create a space of radical re-imagination, where the intersection of your complex identities can find room to rest, be witnessed and understood beyond the confines of Western, individualistic, white supremacist and colonial meaning making systems, to pave the way not just for change but a more connected, authentic and liberated way of being.
As a therapist, I hope I can support you in this journey of re-imagination by creating a space where all parts and versions of you are welcome to the table, especially those that have been silenced, lost, hurt or forgotten. I also hope that together we can find the space to stretch and breathe beyond the confines of perfection, productivity, shame and performance, that we often find ourselves engaging in to survive these systems of oppression.
Something I also centre in my practice is helping you build trust in the inherent wisdom of your lived experience, including those of the communities and cultures that shaped you, since the answers we so often seek tend to lie within us.
Lastly, we will build the foundation for more vulnerable, playful, and meaningful connections with ourselves and others, by decolonising our ways of relating including building a tolerance for messiness, inconvenience and rupture, while broadening the capacity for repair that is humanizing and not built around perfection, fragility and shame.
My approach is relational and rooted in intersectional feminist, existential, multicultural, and psychodynamic traditions. In our work together, I bring a warm, curious, and gently challenging presence. You’ll often find me using humour, quotes, and metaphors. But I think more than anything, I want you to know that I by no means have the answer of what it means to be a person in this world, but I’ll be right there with you, in the messiness, the uncertainty and the ‘not knowing’ of it all.
If anything here resonates, I invite you to reach out for a free 15-minute consultation call, just to see if we might be a good fit. I am best reached via email, and I will try my best to respond within 24 hours.
I look forward to connecting with you!