Curated by Mitali Parekh, Heena Khandelwal and Kasturi Ghatge

Brown Girl Trauma (BGT) is an Instagram handle and a website run by mental health professional Nisha Patel. Through it, she reaches out to identify, stop and heal toxic patterns and behaviours typical to South East Asian  (SEA) families, mostly contrasted among the community transplanted to Western soil. SEA family units have familiar patterns of shame and repression often disguised as values and tradition to bind the members together. BGT looks at breaking this cycle of generational trauma and dysfunction, first by identifying and naming it and then charting a course out of it. Here are some familiar themes: You can’t talk to anyone outside the family, but no one inside it wants to talk about it; Growing up in a dysfunctional family, you are taught to keep your head down and not question anything. It was normal to “not know”. She also traces how oppression, violence, uprooting caused by major events in SEA history—the Partition or the Bangladesh war of Independence—lived by a set of parents could tumble into violence or anger suppression into their children, which manifests into approval-seeking, anxiety, attachment issues and co-dependency in the current generation. Follow to be safe in the knowledge that you are not the only one, and that you can change it. 
@browngirltrauma/Instagram