You were raised with powerful truths: family comes first, respect your elders, don’t bring shame, excellence is expected, not celebrated. In Eastern, collectivist cultures you were taught to give, to sacrifice, to forgive, to honour, to hold your tongue. Those values helped you become resilient and accomplished. They also taught you, quietly, that your needs come last.

You’ve worked hard for everything you’ve achieved, often inside systems that were not designed with your story, body or surname in mind. Your journey has taken persistence, intelligence and quiet determination. Those qualities deserve to be honoured, not drained.

In this work, we look at what happens when those early rules meet Western achievement culture and modern workplaces. You’ll learn to recognise when people‑pleasing and over‑giving – sometimes praised as “seva” or mislabelled as “sabr”, start to harm your mental and emotional health. We explore how expectations around family obligation, respect for elders and community reputation shape the way you make decisions, carry guilt and silence yourself.

Together, we trace how intergenerational trauma, migration, racism and cultural pressure have shaped your nervous system and identity, not to blame culture or family, but to give you a clearer map of what you’re carrying.

Our approach helps you step out of patterns such as:

• Narcissistic or controlling dynamics disguised as “respect” for authority, parents or partners
• People‑pleasing framed as duty or service that leaves you depleted and still feeling “not enough”
• Perfectionism driven by both Western performance culture and Eastern ideas of family honour
• Burnout from compassion fatigue and the invisible mental load of moving between conflicting worlds
• Persistent self‑doubt and “imposter” feelings despite clear external success
• Lack of healthy boundaries justified as cultural obligation and fear of "log kya kahenge" - “what people will say”
• A lifetime of guilt for wanting to protect your wellbeing and follow your own path

This is not about rejecting your culture. It’s about understanding the operating systems you inherited so you can live within them, or alongside them, with a stronger sense of who you are, not just who you are expected to be.

At rkTherapy we work with high‑achieving, bi‑cultural professionals who are outwardly successful but privately tired of living inside scripts they didn’t write: be good, be grateful, don’t cause trouble, achieve more, don’t talk about how you feel.

These aren't personal failures, they're survival strategies from cultural systems that weren't designed for integration. Many of my clients arrive having done “everything right” on paper and still feeling trapped by expectations about success, status and what a “good” daughter, son, partner or parent should be.

We don’t chase someone else’s idea of a luxury lifestyle. We look at the operating systems that actually run your life, cultural, familial, professional, and how they shape your identity, ambition and emotional world.

Your therapy work is about moving from survival to something more honest: a life that makes sense to you, not just one that looks acceptable to everyone else.

As a co‑author of two U.S. anthologies –Taboo: Stories That Can’t Be Told and MENtal Health: Take It Like a Man – my writing sits in this same space. In Taboo, my chapter “The Power of Not Fitting In” looks at how difference can become a strength in the face of racism, sexism and belonging.

In MENtal Health: Take it Like A Man, my chapter “Breaking the Code” explores how self‑esteem, masculinity and success are scripted, and what happens when men start to question those codes instead of quietly breaking under them.

That’s the thread that runs through rkTherapy: not generic “be your authentic self” or "just journal your negative thoughts", but a serious look at the stories you were handed, the ones you’ve internalised, and the life you actually want to build from here.