When culture is an important part of understanding your experience
Culture may not be the reason you decide to come to therapy, but it can be an important part of understanding what you’re experiencing.
If you’ve grown up across different cultures, there can be different values, expectations and ways of relating to make sense of. What’s expected in your family or culture of origin may not always fit easily with what’s expected in Australian workplaces, relationships or broader society.
You may find yourself caught between different ideas about family, responsibility, emotions, independence or how problems should be spoken about.
You might know that you need to speak up more at work or establish a boundary in a relationship, while finding that doing so feels deeply unfamiliar or conflicts with how you were raised.
There can also be a difficult balance between creating a life and relationships that work for you and maintaining a meaningful connection with your family and culture.
Navigating family, culture and your own needs
Becoming more independent or making different choices from your family can sometimes bring guilt or a sense that you’re turning your back on an important part of yourself.
You may feel torn between your own needs and the expectations or responsibilities you feel towards your family. Setting boundaries can be particularly difficult when those boundaries seem inconsistent with important family or cultural values.
It can leave you wondering which values you want to prioritise and how to build relationships that make sense for who you are now without feeling that you have to reject where you’ve come from.
Therapy can provide a space to explore these different influences. It can help you to better understand how cultural and family experiences may be connected to the patterns, relationships and emotional responses you’re experiencing now.
Therapy that considers the cultural context
It can be difficult to seek psychological support when therapy is unfamiliar in your family or community. You may be the first person in your family to see a psychologist, have grown up believing that family problems should remain private or worry that a psychologist won’t understand the cultural context of what you’re experiencing.
Through my own lived experience of navigating cultural and family complexities, I appreciate how important it is to work with someone who cares about understanding cultural nuances rather than brushing over them.
My approach is warm, collaborative and individualised. I don’t treat a person’s cultural context as a problem to be solved. It’s one part of understanding the fuller picture of what’s happening for you.
For clients from a Sri Lankan or broader South-Asian background, I bring a shared cultural understanding that can make some of the nuances within family and cultural dynamics easier to understand.
Begin a conversation
If you’d like to learn more about working together, you’re welcome to book a free 15-minute call.
It’s a chance to tell me a little about what’s brought you to therapy, ask any questions you have and see whether I might be the right psychologist for you.