South Asian & Muslim Therapist for Couples and Individuals in Texas

Some of my clients pray five times a day. Some attend jamatkhana every week. Some haven't stepped into a mosque in years and aren't sure how they feel about that. Some never believed and are tired of being asked why. All of you are welcome here.

I don't impose belief, and I don't treat faith as a problem to be solved. If your relationship with God, your community, or your practice is a source of strength, we can draw on it. If it is a source of pain, confusion, or grief, we can look at that too, gently and without judgment.

Faith transitions deserve particular care. Questioning what you were raised with, becoming more observant than your family, converting, or quietly stepping away can all set off a wave of guilt, fear, and loneliness. It can also strain a marriage when one partner's relationship to faith shifts and the other's doesn't. In therapy, we can make room for every part of you, including the part that still wants to belong and the part that needs to be honest.

Many South Asian families organize life around closeness, duty, and family honor, or izzat. There is real beauty in that: loyalty, generosity, and showing up for each other through every wedding, illness, and move. There can also be heavy pressure, especially when your choices about marriage, career, children, or faith don't match what was expected.

In my practice, this often shows up as:

• Couples caught between each other and parents or in-laws, sometimes under the same roof in a joint or extended family household
• Marriage expectations, from introductions and arranged or semi-arranged matches to the question of when (and whether) to have children
• Adult children trying to honor their parents while building a life that feels like their own
• Quiet, painful differences around caste, class, sect, or region that families rarely name out loud
• The constant background hum of "what will people say"

I won't ask you to cut off your family or adopt someone else's idea of independence. Boundaries can look different in a collectivist family, and that's okay. We'll work toward the kind of closeness you actually want, with the limits that make it sustainable. If you'd like to bring parents or siblings into the work, family therapy for adult families is an option.

Love crosses lines that families sometimes can't. Maybe you're Muslim and married to someone who is Hindu, Christian, or not religious at all. Maybe you're both Muslim but from different traditions or countries, or one of you is more observant than the other. Maybe your parents are still not speaking to your partner.

These couples often agree on the big things and still get stuck on the specific ones: which holidays you celebrate and with whom, how you'll raise children, what a wedding should look like, and how much say your extended families get. Underneath the logistics there is usually a deeper question. Can I be fully myself with you and still belong to my people?

Using tools from the Gottman Method and Emotionally Focused Therapy, I help couples slow those conversations down so you can hear the fear and longing under each position. If you're planning a marriage across cultures or faiths, premarital counseling is a wonderful time to start.

In many communities, therapy still carries stigma. You might worry that seeking help means admitting failure, that it will reflect badly on your family, or that someone will find out. Those worries make sense, especially in a close-knit community where everyone seems to know everyone.

DFW has a large and growing South Asian community, with Ismaili jamatkhanas in Carrollton and Plano and many mosques across the Metroplex. Because my practice is fully online, there is no waiting room where you might run into an uncle from jamatkhana or a friend from the masjid. You can meet with me from your car, your office, or a quiet room at home. What you share is confidential within the legal and ethical limits I'll explain at the start. Even card payments appear as "Ivy Labs" on your statement as an added privacy feature. Learn more about how telehealth works.

Sessions are in English. Many clients move between English and Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati, Kutchi, or other languages in daily life, and you're welcome to use a word or phrase when English doesn't capture it. We'll find the meaning together.

I draw on mindfulness, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Emotionally Focused Therapy, Gottman Method skills, and the systemic lens I trained in as a marriage and family therapist. IFS can be especially helpful when you feel torn: the part of you that wants to please your parents, the part that's angry, the part that's tired of carrying everyone. None of those parts are bad. They're all trying to help.

New couples start with a free phone consultation, which is required before our first appointment. Individual clients are welcome to schedule a consultation too. You'll need to be located in Texas at the time of each session.