Cameraperson: Mukul Bhandari; Omar Shah
Editor: Puneet Bhatia
'Words have a lot of power,' a therapist once told me. I told her as a person in mass communication, I understood that well. (Talk about soft bragging!)
Score 1-0. I thought. But the words she said next had me clean bowled.
"Your words may reach 1000s of people, but our words reach a person in the most intimate way possible," she said.
"Our one sentence can change their life, and our one word can destroy them."
That's the power of therapy. And that's the power of a good therapist.
Often provided by psychiatrists, psychologists or trained counsellors — therapy involves talking about difficulties faced by individuals and finding ways to overcome them.
Don't quite get what we are saying? Listen to these four women who will tell you all about their BIG therapy breakthrough.
'If You Ask Me to Name a Friend From School, I Had No One'
Wearing a bright yellow sweater and sporting a warm smile, Soumya easily starts chatting up with all our crew members. She speaks confidently and holds her own even in different settings.
But as she starts talking about her journey, tells us that this was not always so.
All through her school days, Soumya had been a really lonely person and she didn't know how to be the kind of person who could have friends.
However, therapy helped her loosen up and instead of feeling pressured to make friends and be a good friend, made her more comfortable with herself first - the prerequisite of being good socially.
"Therapy helped me understand that if I am who I am, and if I am happy, people will come to me," Soumya says.
Her Big therapy breakthrough?
"Now from that scared, lonely, upset person, I have a beautiful social life. There’s five of us who are absolutely ride or die for each other."
Soumya says she loves her friends, and her friends too love her back. "I know that I have a life that’s really worth living," she says.
'I Moved Cities'
Nandini, a style blogger, had been living in Bengaluru for the past nine years.
But all through this time, she was never quite happy in the city.
She felt alone, like she didn't belong. For a long time, she had been thinking of moving to her home town, Delhi, where she felt comfortable and where there were a lot of loved ones to take care of her.
But change - especially of the dramatic kind - is hard.
To make matters more difficult, Nandini's life had negative people and toxicity holding her back.
However, when Nandini changed her therapist, she found a person whose gentle nudging finally gave her the courage to move back to the city where she belonged.
"The process of therapy is what actually helped me take that decision and not keep postponing it or keeping it in my mind," says Nandini.
'I Used to Have Suicidal Thoughts'
For many years, Parthavee used to struggle with suicidal thoughts. "I used to hate myself," she says. In fact, she did not have mirrors in any of the houses she moved to because she hated looking at herself.
After going for therapy since October 2019, she now feels more reassured about the future.
"Earlier I used to feel blurry about what will happen in the future,
now I am able to enjoy the present", she says.
She has even started sketching again, something she had stopped doing when she was undergoing mental health challenges, but had loved doing as a five year old.
'I No Longer Fear People'
As a young child with no agency, Lasya had battled abuse. One of its manifestations in later life was that she had a fear of people, which her therapist diagnosed.
Even though the change was not overnight, it did come. Now Lasya no longer fears people and is able to hold her own in front of people.
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