Why South Asian Professionals in Chicago Are Quietly Seeking Therapy
Priya is a 32-year-old data scientist in Hyde Park. She got married last spring to a man her parents introduced her to over a Zoom call from Mumbai. The wedding had 400 guests, three outfits, and a sangeet her mother choreographed for six months. The photos are beautiful. Every relative who matters has them framed.
Priya has not told anyone, including her husband, that she cries in the parking garage of her office building twice a week before she goes upstairs.
Priya is a composite, but she is not fictional. She is a stand-in for the South Asian professionals I have sat with for two decades in Chicago, and the version of this story I hear most often in 2026 is hers. It starts with a marriage that looks correct. It starts with a career that looks correct. It starts with parents who are proud and a life that, on paper, is the life everyone wanted.
It ends in the parking garage.
If something in that paragraph hit you, this article is for you.
The performance that eats you
Most South Asian professionals I work with in Chicago do not arrive in my office because of a crisis. They arrive because they cannot keep performing the version of themselves that everyone is so proud of.
The performance is exhausting in a way that is hard to describe to someone who has not lived it. You are the daughter who made it. You are the son who became the doctor. You are the grandchild your grandparents brag about on long-distance calls. You did the thing. You are not allowed to be tired.
The cost shows up quietly. It looks like:
– An inability to sleep through the night, even though nothing is wrong on paper.
– A relationship with your partner that has become functional and polite and quietly dead.
– A growing resentment toward your parents that you cannot speak out loud because it would be the worst thing you have ever done.
– A career you chose for reasons you are no longer sure were yours.
– The sense that if you stopped performing, even for a week, the whole construction would collapse.
Therapy with a South Asian therapist is not about validating that the construction should collapse. It is about giving you a space where you can put the performance down for 50 minutes and figure out what is actually yours.
Five pressures that bring South Asian professionals to therapy
In two decades of practice, the conversations cluster around five themes. Almost every South Asian client I see is dealing with at least three of them at once.
One. Career success that feels stolen. You are senior at your firm. You make money your parents could not have imagined when they came to this country. You should be proud, and on a good day you are. On a bad day you wonder if you actually love what you do, or if you just love that your parents are no longer worried. The guilt of even asking the question is its own pressure.
Two. Marriage pressure (or marriage regret). If you are unmarried, the question is asked at every family event. If you are married, the question becomes when are you having kids. If the marriage was arranged or semi-arranged, you may be sitting with a quiet doubt about your partner that you would never have framed as doubt out loud, because it would dishonor everyone who arranged it. If the marriage was a love marriage, you may be sitting with the silent grief of family relationships that have never fully accepted it.
Three. Parent-pleasing exhaustion. You have spent thirty-plus years optimizing for the approval of two people whose model of a good life was built in a different country in a different decade for a different child than you actually are. The optimization worked. The cost is that you do not always know what you would want if you stopped optimizing.
Four. Cultural belonging that does not quite land. You are too American for your relatives in India and not American enough for the world you work in. You speak the language but you cannot read it. You go to the temple but you skip the verses. You are neither, both, and tired of explaining yourself.
Five. Mental health stigma in your own family. You cannot tell your parents you are in therapy. Or you can, but it would become a story they tell, and you would lose control of the story. Most of my South Asian clients keep the fact of therapy quiet for at least the first six months. That is a normal and reasonable choice.
The two generations living in one body
There is a particular kind of pain that comes from being a 1.5 or second generation South Asian professional in Chicago, and it does not get talked about because the people who feel it do not have the language for it yet.
The pain is this. You are carrying two complete value systems in one body. The first value system, the one your parents brought with them, says: family is the unit, the elders are right, sacrifice is the highest love, individual want is selfish, and life is a series of duties you perform well. The second value system, the one you absorbed from this country, says: the individual is the unit, your own happiness matters, boundaries are healthy, and sacrifice without consent is a problem.
Both value systems are real and complete. Neither is wrong. They contradict each other constantly.
Most South Asian professionals try to manage this by code-switching. They run the second value system at work and the first value system at home. It works for a while. It stops working around the time you have to make a decision your parents would not make (a partner they would not pick, a job they would not choose, a city they did not want for you, a decision not to have children, a decision to leave a marriage, a decision to leave the faith).
That is the moment most people call my office.
The work in therapy is not about picking one value system over the other. It is about being able to hold both without splitting yourself in half to do it. That is the work immigrant second generation therapy (https://sabitanandy.com/immigrant-second-generation-therapy/) is designed to do.
Why “I can handle it” is the problem, not the solution
If you grew up in a South Asian family, you grew up watching adults handle things. Your mother handled her mother-in-law. Your father handled his career. Your grandmother handled a partition, a migration, a marriage to a stranger, and the loss of a homeland. Nobody fell apart in front of you. Nobody named what they were carrying. They handled it.
You learned that this is what love looks like. You learned that this is what strength is.
The problem is that “I can handle it” is not actually a strength when it becomes the only tool you have. It is a coping strategy that worked for a generation that did not have alternatives. You do.
Therapy is not weakness. Therapy is what handling it looks like in a generation where you finally have access to better tools than your mother had. Choosing those tools is not a betrayal of her. It is the next logical step of what she sacrificed for you to be able to do.
I say this in session sometimes, and clients cry. It is not because the idea is sad. It is because no one has ever given them permission to think about it that way.
What South Asian-informed therapy actually looks like
Here is what I do differently from a therapist who does not share the cultural context.
I do not make you explain. When you mention that your mother flew in from Mumbai for three weeks and is staying in your guest room and you are losing your mind, I do not need you to explain why that is hard. I have lived it. I have heard it. We can skip the cultural primer and go to the actual feeling.
I do not pathologize family. A lot of Western therapy frameworks assume that the goal of adulthood is independence from your family of origin. South Asian families do not work that way, and they are not supposed to. The work is not separating from your family. The work is finding a way to remain inside the family while also being a whole person.
I know what the wedding actually was. When you describe the wedding, I know the difference between the ceremony, the reception, the after-party, the haldi, the mehndi, the family politics around the rituals, and the cost. I do not need a translation.
I know the Relational Narrative Imaging Therapy approach is especially useful here. South Asian clients carry generational narratives, often without knowing it. A great-grandmother’s silence about a lost child. A grandfather’s refusal to ever speak about partition. A father’s career chosen out of his own father’s regrets. These stories live in your body until you can see them. The work of seeing them is gentle, slow, and freeing.
For couples where one partner will come and one will not
This is one of the most common situations I see with South Asian clients in Chicago, especially clients in arranged or family-influenced marriages. One partner is ready to do the work. The other is not, or will not, or believes that bringing in a third party would shame the family.
You do not have to wait for them.
Relationship therapy for one is therapy where you work on your half of the relationship, the dynamics you bring, the stories you have absorbed about what a wife or husband is supposed to be, the patterns you are repeating from your parents’ marriage, and what you actually want from a partnership. The relationship changes because you change. Your partner may eventually join. They may not. Either way, the work is yours, and it is enough.
FAQ
Do you only work with South Asian clients?
No. I work with clients from many backgrounds. The South Asian context is one of several lenses I bring. Many of my clients are not South Asian and find the work just as relevant.
Can I keep therapy private from my family?
Yes. Confidentiality is protected by law and by my practice. I have many clients who have not told their families they are in therapy and who never will. That is your choice, and it is a reasonable one.
Do you offer in-person sessions in Hyde Park?
Yes. I have a Hyde Park office in addition to a Downtown Chicago Loop office, and I see clients in person at both. I also offer telehealth across Illinois for clients who prefer it.
My parents would never approve of therapy. How do I deal with that?
That is part of the work. You do not have to choose between therapy and your parents. You can have both. The version of that conversation that eventually happens (if it ever does) will be different from the version you are dreading right now, because you will be different by the time it happens.
Is therapy covered by my insurance?
I accept most major insurance plans. I also offer self-pay options. Many South Asian clients choose self-pay so that nothing tied to mental health appears in insurance records. We can talk through your options in the consultation.
How long will it take to feel better?
Most clients notice meaningful shifts within the first two to three months. The deeper work of unwinding generational narratives takes longer. You decide how long you want to stay in the work. There is no contract.
You do not have to figure this out alone
If you have read this far, something here recognized you. That is not nothing. That is the part of you that has been waiting for permission to put the performance down.
You do not have to tell your family. You do not have to know what you want. You do not have to have a crisis. You just have to book the consultation.
Book a consultation with me here:
The South Asian community in Chicago has a quiet, growing tradition of professionals taking better care of themselves than the previous generation could. You would be joining people who look like you, who work where you work, who have parents like yours, and who decided they were allowed to want more than the version of life that was handed to them.
You are allowed too.
