South Asian Therapy

Therapy for South Asian and South Asian-American Teens, Adults, & Couples

You’ve learned to hold a lot.

Living in the South Asian diaspora means holding multiple realities at once — the culture you were raised inside, the country you live in now, and often the countries your family passed through to get here. Many of us grow up navigating conflicting expectations, intergenerational trauma, and the particular grief of belonging to a community that doesn't always have language for what we carry. This is a space where that complexity is centered, not flattened.

Shavika Singha, AMFT
South Asian Therapist in Oakland & across California

I work with South Asian and South Asian American clients who are:

  • Immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including third culture adults and multi-generational diaspora families

  • Navigating family obligation, guilt, and expectations — especially around gender roles, sexuality, and life choices

  • Carrying intergenerational, migration, or collective trauma, including the long reach of partition and displacement

  • Living between multiple cultures and identities without fully belonging to any of them

  • Part of diasporic subgroups — African Indian, British Indian, East African Indian, and beyond

  • Struggling with perfectionism, overachievement, and "good girl / good son" conditioning

  • Navigating interfaith, intercaste, or intercultural relationships

  • Holding queer, neurodivergent, or non-conforming identities within South Asian family systems

  • Experiencing challenges in relationships or workplaces shaped by cultural and racial hierarchies

  • Developing critical consciousness of racism, colonialism, and how they have shaped you and the people you love

  • Managing stress, anxiety, and burnout, or the pressure of being the one who holds everything together

What we can work on together:

  • Shame, body, and sexuality in cultural and religious context

  • Confidence and self-trust — rebuilding a relationship with yourself that isn't contingent on approval, achievement, or belonging to the right version of you

  • Individuation from family — building your own life without severing connection

  • Grief — personal, collective, and inherited

  • Intergenerational patterns and how they show up in your relationships today

  • Identity — who you are outside of what your family and culture needed you to be

I see both individuals (adults and teens) and couples, holding a liberation and decolonial lens, paying close attention to how race, class, gender, and queer or non-monogamous identities shape your experience. I work somatically and from a parts-based framework, listening deeply to both what you bring consciously and what lives underneath — to address root causes, not just symptoms.

If any of this resonates, I'd welcome a conversation.