Khushi started Khushiyaan Clinic, which is a place based on respect and emotional honesty. She thinks that therapy should be a place to see things, not just fix them. Khushi blends psychoanalytic depth with gentle somatic care. She walks with you as you explore silenced stories and identify difficult emotions, always moving at a pace that respects your safety and the unfolding of your experiences.
Sitting With What Was Never Said
Khushi Kumar on therapy trauma and the ethics of listening.
I did not come to psychotherapy because I wanted to fix people. I came to it because I kept encountering silences that felt heavier than speech.
My earliest clinical experiences working with students children and later survivors of abuse taught me something that textbooks rarely emphasize: most psychological suffering is not loud. It does not arrive as a dramatic breakdown. It arrives as compliance politeness intellectualization or an impressive capacity to function despite everything.
Formal training gave me language psychodynamic theory trauma studies, somatic psychology but the work itself taught me something more unsettling: that many people are emotionally fluent only in what once kept them safe.
Emotional performance and the loss of emotional truth said Khushi
We live in a culture that rewards emotional performance. There are acceptable feelings resilience, optimism, calm articulation and unacceptable ones: rage, need, desire, grief without a timeline. Research in affect regulation and attachment consistently shows that children learn early which emotions maintain connection and which threaten it. Those lessons do not disappear in adulthood they become personality traits.
In the therapy room, this often looks like clients who can describe their emotions without ever feeling them. They speak eloquently about pain while their bodies remain braced, detached, or numbed. My work begins there not by asking for more insight, but by noticing what the language is doing.
Kushi What do you feel?
It is “What have you learned to show, and what was never allowed to exist?”
Often, emotions that lack language first appear as confusion, bodily discomfort, or silence. Therapy becomes less about interpretation and more about permission.
Why psychoanalysis still matters in a culture of speed?
Psychoanalysis is frequently caricatured as slow, indulgent, or impractical. Yet in a culture obsessed with solutions, its insistence on staying with discomfort may be its most radical offering.
Silence, in my practice, is not a technique it is an ethical stance. Neuroscience and trauma research both confirm what analysts have long known: meaning cannot be forced. When a therapist rushes to soothe, explain, or reframe, they often bypass the very material that needs witnessing.
Pauses allow the unsayable to approach language. They also allow power to shift. The therapist is no longer the one who knows; they are the one who can wait.
Trauma as a present-tense experience
Trauma is often described as a memory problem. Clinically, it is more accurate to describe it as a time problem. The body does not know that the danger has passed.
Decades of research from van der Kolk to contemporary polyvagal theory demonstrate that traumatic stress lives in physiological patterns: breath restriction, muscle tension, dissociation, autonomic shutdown. Narrative alone cannot access these layers.
This is why somatic awareness is not an “add-on” to therapy it is foundational. Healing begins when the body is no longer treated as an obstacle to insight, but as a record of adaptation. Symptoms are not pathologies they are strategies that once worked.
The ethics of witnessing
Many stories remain untold not because they are forgotten, but because they were dismissed when they first emerged. In my work with survivors particularly those from marginalized or over-controlled environments the most reparative moment is often not catharsis but recognition.
To witness ethically is to resist the urge to normalize harm, to reframe too quickly, or to extract meaning before safety exists. Dignity is restored when a client no longer has to justify why something hurt.
This is not neutrality. It is responsibility.
Depth without harm
There is a misconception that depth-oriented therapy must be intense to be effective. In reality, depth without gentleness often reenacts the very dynamics that caused harm overwhelm, intrusion, loss of agency.
The nervous system sets the pace. Exploration deepens only when there is enough safety to return. Consent is not a one-time agreement; it is an ongoing relational process.
Healing should expand a person’s sense of choice, not test their endurance.
Rethinking power in the therapy room
When healing is understood as a relational unfolding rather than a problem to be fixed, the power dynamics of therapy shift fundamentally. The therapist is not an authority delivering insight, but a participant in a carefully held relationship.
This demands humility. It also demands political awareness. Psychological distress is shaped by social realities gender, caste, class, sexuality, labor, family systems. An intersectional practice like mine does not universalize suffering or prescribe identical paths to healing.
Care must be responsive to the world people actually live in.
The body as archive
Modern physiology increasingly confirms what lived experience has always known: the body is not a machine to be optimized. It is a living archive.
Stress, pleasure, deprivation, attachment, and threat leave physiological traces. Hormonal cycles, immune responses, and neural pathways adapt continuously to context. In a world of chronic stress and overstimulation, the cost of endless adaptation is visible everywhere burnout, autoimmune conditions, anxiety, sexual difficulties.
Rest is not indulgence. Relational safety is not optional. Without them, resilience becomes erosion.
Why this work matters now
Therapy, at its best, is not about self-improvement. It is about reclaiming authorship over one’s body, story, and emotional life.
In a time that rewards speed, performance, and productivity, the act of slowing down, listening carefully, and taking emotional reality seriously is quietly radical.
That is the work I am committed to at Khushiyaan Clinic and beyond.
