Talk to a Hindi speaking therapist

If you have been searching for a Hindi speaking therapist, a Hindi speaking counsellor, or a Hindi speaking psychologist, this is the right place. My name is Shagoon Maurya. I am a registered counsellor and psychotherapist with over ten years of experience, ACA Level 2 and PACFA registered, and I work in Hindi with people all over the world.

Sessions run in Hindi, in English, or in the mix of the two that most of us actually speak. You do not have to choose in advance, and you do not have to stay consistent.

Many people search for a psychologist when what they want is someone qualified who will understand them without translation. In Australia and most other countries, psychologist is a legally restricted title with its own separate registration. I practise as a counsellor and psychotherapist, a distinct and fully recognised profession with its own standards. There is a fuller explanation in my guide to the difference between the titles.

What Hindi carries that English doesn’t

Some things only exist properly in the language you grew up in. Log kya kahenge is not really “what will people think”. It is an entire architecture of obligation, and anyone raised inside it feels the weight without needing it explained.

Adjust kar lo is rarely a suggestion to compromise. It is usually an instruction to absorb something rather than name it, and people carry years of that before they ever reach a therapy room. Sharam sits somewhere between shame and modesty, and whether it is praise or rebuke depends entirely on who is saying it to whom.

None of that needs translating here. You can say it the way you would say it at home, and we start from there rather than from the explanation.

That vocabulary is the reason people say the first session in Hindi feels different from the first session in English.

Ghabrahat, bechaini, tension: the words people actually use

Hindi does not have a comfortable everyday word for depression, and the word for anxiety that most people reach for is the English one. So distress gets named differently, and the naming matters clinically.

Tension is the borrowed word doing the heaviest lifting. Tension ho raha hai covers a range that runs from ordinary pressure to something much closer to a panic response, and the same sentence is used for both. Ghabrahat is nearer to a fluttering dread in the chest than to worry in the head. Bechaini is restlessness that has nowhere to go. Mann nahi lag raha, which translates as something like the mind will not settle on anything, is how a great many people describe what a clinician would call anhedonia, without ever using the word depression.

A therapist working in English hears any of these as anxiety and something specific is lost. Working in Hindi, I hear the word you chose, which is usually more precise than its English approximation.

When it shows up in the body first

Distress in Hindi-speaking families is often spoken through the body rather than through feeling words, and this is well documented rather than a stereotype. Sar bhari rehta hai. Kamzori. Dil ghabra raha hai. Neend nahi aati.

People frequently arrive having already seen a doctor, had tests, and been told nothing is wrong, which lands as a dismissal rather than a reassurance. Sustained stress genuinely does act on the body, through pathways that are well mapped. It is not that the physical symptoms are imaginary or that the body is standing in for the mind. Sustained stress produces real physical effects, and a family vocabulary with more words for bodily symptoms than for emotional ones makes the body the natural place to start. Where that has tipped into running on empty for years, the picture usually needs treating as such.

I do not treat that as something to be corrected before therapy can begin. We start where you start, which is often with sleep and with the body, and the rest follows.

Hinglish is fine, and so is switching mid-sentence

Most people who speak both do not think in one or the other. The thought arrives in Hindi, the professional vocabulary is in English, the swear words and the endearments are in Hindi, and a sentence uses whichever is closer to hand.

You do not have to pick a language for the session, keep it consistent, or apologise for switching. What often happens is that the account stays in English while the feeling arrives in Hindi, and that shift is usually the most useful thing in the hour rather than an interruption to it.

It works the other way too. Some people find it easier to say a difficult thing in English precisely because it is at one remove from the language it happened in, and that is a legitimate way to work rather than avoidance.

What Hindi speaking clients usually bring

Rarely the thing mentioned first. The opening line is often sleep or tension, and the material underneath tends to be one of a handful of recurring themes.

Marriage and in-laws, where the question is very rarely about two people alone. A career chosen to satisfy a father, and the resentment that has had nowhere to go for fifteen years. The guilt of being the son or daughter who left, which sits close to what most people in the diaspora bring, sharpened every time a parent's health changes and you are on a video call rather than in the room. Being the one who made it out, and the family finances that now quietly rest on you. Adult children who cannot tell their parents they are struggling, because the disclosure would cost more than the struggle.

And the specific loneliness of being too Western at home and never quite placed outside it. Alongside all of that, entirely ordinary things: anxiety, low mood, grief, a marriage in difficulty. Culture is the context these arrive in, not a separate category of problem.

Privacy, which is usually the real obstacle

For a lot of people the barrier is not cost or scepticism about therapy. It is that someone might find out.

Sessions are online, so there is no clinic to be seen entering, no waiting room, no receptionist, and no local practitioner who may turn out to know your family or your community. Nothing is shared with a GP or anyone else unless you ask me to. If you would prefer to be in my diary under a different name, that is a normal request and I will simply do it.

Practically, people take sessions from a parked car, an empty office, or at a time when the house is empty, with headphones. None of that is unusual and none of it compromises the work. If keeping this private from your family is part of what you need, say so in the first conversation and we will arrange around it. There is more on that in having therapy without your parents knowing.

How to start

A free 15-minute conversation, in Hindi or English, whichever you prefer. You can use it to ask anything, including whether I am the right person for you, and nothing has to be disclosed in it.

If speaking about any of this feels difficult even in your own language, that is common and worth naming rather than treating as something to sort out beforehand. This covers how to start when talking is the hard part. For the wider picture of why cultural context matters, see therapy for South Asians, and if you are in Melbourne and would rather meet in person, that is available too.

What I can help with

Anxiety and panic, low mood, sleep, self-esteem, marriage and in-law conflict, the guilt of distance from ageing parents, and the identity questions that come with living between two cultures. Whether Hindi is the language you grew up in or one you are reconnecting with, you are welcome here.

आप इस सफ़र में अकेले नहीं हैं। You are not alone in this journey.

We begin with a free 15-minute consultation so you can see how it feels, no pressure, no obligation.