Nimisha Shrivastava

Most people don’t arrive with a neat problem. They arrive with something heavy and hard to name — a mood that won’t shift, a worry that has taken over, a pattern that keeps repeating. My first job isn’t to fix that. It’s to understand it, with you.

I spend the early sessions building a picture of how things fit together: your history, what has helped before and what hasn’t, and the situations where the difficulty shows up most. Psychologists call this a formulation. I think of it as a shared map. Once we have one, we decide together what to work on and how.

The methods I draw on are well researched — cognitive behaviour therapy, schema therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, mindfulness-based and DBT-informed approaches, and trauma-informed work. I choose among them based on you, not the other way around. Some sessions are structured and practical; others are slower and more reflective. Both are therapy.

I’m less interested in labels than in what is actually happening for you — and in what might help.

I work alongside psychiatrists and other professionals when that helps, and I’ll always tell you if I think someone else should be involved. I’m also interested in how therapies developed elsewhere can be made to fit Indian lives; that is the question my doctoral research asks about schema therapy and complex trauma.

Whatever brings you, you set the pace. You can say as little or as much as you like, and you can stop at any point.