As Indian trauma-focused therapists with a social justice bent, I deeply believe that one of our most important roles is to continue to support our most traumatized clients as they heal from the shadows of their heritage. We have a responsibility as systemic-focused healers to advocate for more opportunities and empowerment across the board for a less fragmented, more unified nation, which is still very young and healing from the most basic survival trauma of rising from abject poverty and malnourishment.
As a social-justice focused therapist, I believe the most educated must reach the least privileged. I enjoy working with sociopolitical ideologies of all sorts, even if I don’t agree with them and work across the board with people and organizations of all political leanings who ask me to come in and do a workshop on trauma work and the Indian mind (from “far-right”, “centre” to “radical left” to put in western terms). There are anti-caste leanings in a majority of these spaces and it is not even an argument anymore to even suggest that someone believes they *should* be allowed to discriminate someone on the basis of their caste. It is known that caste-based discrimination is a regressive Hindu problem (shadow) that has been loudly declared as wrong for years together, which is why the majority of this community, across caste lines has been wanting access to education, money, power and more on equal grounds.
Nothing is more immature currently than Indian leftist politics, its understanding of what is happening in the Hindu majority’s grassroots mind and the speed at which it is losing its membership because of its absolute idiocy. It is worrying to say the least as someone who advocates for values on all ends of the spectrum.
Where the American Left and the Indian Left differ, is that atleast the former wants its own nation to progress through inclusive change of some sort. The Indian Left however is increasingly seeming completely uninterested in any form of national integration/growth, even at a college-ideas level and when asked for solutions, their options are more theorizing, vague accusations around the same flat idea of “power” and cancelling of even more parts of their own selves with little interest in any nuance. Cutting off your ability to even want to understand religion in a religious nation is just plain nonsense, and people are going to continue to run away from you.
Thank you, Kushal Mehra for naming these themes in simple, blunt language.
#indianpolitics#mentalhealthmatters#godeeper #nationalintegration #bharat #diversityisourstrength
