Talk to an Urdu speaking therapist

If you have been searching for an Urdu speaking therapist, an Urdu speaking counsellor, or an Urdu 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 Urdu with people all over the world.

Sessions run in Urdu, in English, or in the mix of both 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. Psychologist is a restricted title in Australia and most other countries, tied to a separate registration and to formal assessment work. My own registration is as a counsellor and psychotherapist, which is a distinct profession with its own standards and its own bodies. What each title actually means is set out separately.

Sukoon, and what its absence actually means

There is no clean English equivalent for sukoon. Peace is too flat, calm is too clinical, contentment misses the stillness in it. It is the settledness that lets you rest inside your own life.

Sukoon nahi milta is one of the most common things I hear, and it is doing far more work than the English sentence it would become. People are not usually describing a bad week. They are describing a state that has gone on long enough to feel permanent, where nothing lands and nothing restores. A clinician hearing it in English translation registers restlessness. What was actually said was closer to: the thing that makes life bearable has stopped arriving.

That distinction matters, because sukoon nahi milta is frequently the sentence that comes years before anyone uses the word depression.

Urdu has a hundred words for sorrow and none for treatment

This is the particular difficulty for Urdu speakers, and it is almost the opposite of the usual problem.

Urdu is extraordinarily well equipped to describe suffering. Gham, udaasi, tanhai, bekali, dil bojhal, hijr. The ghazal tradition has spent centuries refining this vocabulary, and people raised inside it can articulate melancholy with real precision and beauty. What that same tradition also does is treat sorrow as something noble, permanent and to be borne with dignity.

So a person can describe exactly how they feel, in language far more exact than most English speakers manage, and still have no framework in which that feeling is a condition that responds to treatment. The eloquence and the fatalism arrive together, which is one reason low mood goes unnamed for years. Naming that out loud is often the first useful thing that happens in the room.

Pareshani is the other side of it. It is the everyday catch-all, and it flattens everything from a difficult fortnight to a serious depressive episode into one word. When someone tells me they are pareshan, the work is usually to find out which of the several very different things that word is currently covering.

Sabr, dua, and where therapy fits

For many of the people I work with, faith is not a background detail. It is the framework the whole difficulty sits inside, and a genuine source of strength rather than an obstacle.

What causes trouble is not faith itself but a particular response people meet when they disclose distress: have sabr, make dua, Allah par bharosa rakho. Offered kindly, and almost always sincerely. But when someone has already been patient for four years, being told to be more patient lands as a door closing rather than as comfort. A number of people arrive having concluded that continuing to struggle means their faith is insufficient, which adds a layer of shame on top of the original problem.

I am not an Islamic counsellor and I will not pretend to religious authority I do not have. What I can do is work without asking you to bracket your faith, treat sabr and dua as real resources rather than as avoidance, and be clear that therapy is not a competing belief system. If you want religious guidance alongside this, that belongs with someone qualified to give it, and the two run perfectly well in parallel.

Biraderi, and why privacy is the real obstacle

For a great many Urdu speaking families the barrier to therapy is not cost, and it is not scepticism. It is that the news would travel.

Biraderi and rishtedari are not abstractions. They are a working network in which a piece of information about one person is information about the whole family, and where it bears directly on marriage prospects, on a sister's rishta, on a father's standing. That is why so many people delay for years and then contact someone in a different country.

Sessions are online, so there is no building to be seen entering, no waiting room, and no local practitioner who may turn out to be someone's cousin. Nothing is shared with a GP or anyone else unless you ask. If you want to be in my diary under a different name, say so and I will do it. In practice, people take sessions from a parked car, from an office after hours, or at home with headphones when the house is empty. None of that is unusual and none of it weakens the work.

What people usually bring

Rarely the thing said first. The opening line is often sleep, or pareshani, and the material underneath tends to be recognisable.

The rishta process and what it does to people, particularly women being assessed and declined repeatedly by families they have never met. Marriages arranged into households where the daughter-in-law has no territory of her own. Ghairat and izzat as the frame in which a woman's ordinary choices become family matters. Sons carrying the financial weight of an extended family across two countries. Second-generation people in Britain and elsewhere holding two incompatible sets of expectations and finding neither community entirely theirs.

Alongside those, the entirely ordinary: anxiety, low mood, grief, a marriage in difficulty, a parent who is unwell far away. None of those stop being ordinary because of the culture they happen inside. Where the wider South Asian picture is the useful frame, that is set out under therapy for South Asians.

How to start

A free 15-minute conversation, in Urdu or English, whichever is easier. Ask whatever you need to, including whether I am the right fit, and disclose nothing you are not ready to.

If speaking about any of this is difficult even in your own language, that is common and worth saying rather than something to resolve beforehand. There is more on making a start when speaking is the difficult part. If you would rather not have anyone at home know, this is worth reading first.

What I can help with

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

آپ اس سفر میں اکیلے نہیں ہیں۔ You are not alone in this journey.