Mny individuals of the South Asian background struggle with that first email to try to access therapy. Loyalty to one’s family is prized in South Asian families. This can lead many individuals in the South Asian communities to struggle alone in pain without making an attempt to reach out for help. In other cases the person may reach out, but to a friend or a family member - someone close by.

Reaching out to a therapist poses a dilemma to South Asians. Reach out and get support, but reach out and also maybe

betray the family. That is a scary thought to most South Asians.

What does loving yourself look like? How does one do it?

This question, it can become so confusing, right? Because you can only get to move towards that goalpost of loving yourself, the more insight you develop about yourself. So in order to truly move towards loving yourself, you need to really get to know your own self.

If you don't have that insight, you won't be able to peel back the layers of the onion, that is yourself, to see your true self. But honestly, loving oneself is a journey. It's not a final destination, because life is ever changing.

The question is, how do we get walking on the Yellow Brick Road that is self-love? Because self-love, not a final destination.

When we've been hurt, what happens is our mind tricks us into thinking that holding on to the hurt gives us a level of control. We keep pointing to the person or event that happened, or the person who wronged us. We keep thinking that staying angry keeps the power in our hands, but here's the truth.

Holding on doesn't change the past. It only keeps us trapped within the past. That's where radical acceptance comes in.

Even the patterns we call “unhealthy” are, at their core, attempts at protection shaped by past experience. When the mind has lived through trauma, it learns to avoid what once caused harm. So resistance, whether it shows up as avoidance, numbness, or hesitation in a therapist’s office is not failure, but the brain doing its job: trying to keep you safe.

In this era of social media, substantial amount of individuals are finding comfort in the label of narcissism to explain what they have experienced or are experiencing by an abuser.

Sighs of relief come from those who finally have a term to explain what they experienced. Cue the range of books and so called experts dedicated to help individual's recover from narcissists.

However, the current clinical understanding is that the term may not fully encompass the realities of domestic violence or abusive behaviour. This leads to the understanding that social media has failed when it has ultimately coloured abusive relationships with the same brush as narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder.

One of the most overlooked realities in psychology is this: personality disorders are not identified through blood tests, brain scans, or any form of biological marker.

There is no lab result for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. There is no objective medical test that confirms it. Instead, diagnoses such as Narcissistic Personality Disorder are constructed through clinical classification systems like the DSM, which rely on observed patterns of behavior, reported experiences, and functional impairment over time.

That fact alone should change the way these terms are used in public discourse.

In recent years, the term “narcissist” has become widely used across social media platforms, often in a loose and non-clinical way. It is frequently applied to describe behavior that is experienced as selfish, hurtful, dismissive, or emotionally difficult. While increased public awareness of mental health concepts is valuable and important, many of these interpretations are not grounded in clinical training or psychological research.