Once you've named what happened to you, healing becomes a small, deliberate bracket of work. Not one magic step — several. People hear me say journaling reduced my skin issues and assume journaling did it alone. It didn't. I also applied coconut oil. I stopped reaching for medication. The point is that healing is layered: therapeutic intervention, mindfulness, meditation, yoga, and slowly building coping skills. Yoga and meditation only help once you know where the wound actually sits.
Therapy, and why families resist it
In India, family therapy is barely a concept. I once spoke to someone whose other family members simply refused to come. That refusal matters, because trauma rarely lives in one person — it travels. What you eat, what you think, what you replay in your head: as Sister Shivani says, even a thought can make you ill. So we have to find out where the problem lives before any practice can reach it.
How trauma shows up as mental health
Trauma tends to surface in four broad ways. The first is anxiety — survivors stay hyper-vigilant, prone to panic. Someone in a car accident may develop a fear of driving; more striking, a child who was never even in the accident can inherit that fear from a parent who witnessed one. The second is depression, which families casually call "genetic". I'm careful here. A mental illness passing down a family line is not proof of genes. In one session, a man told me his uncle had a mental illness and now his cousin does too. I asked him to gently find out whether something had happened to her. Patterns of pain are often mistaken for inherited DNA.
The aunt who was "possessed"
Let me tell you about my mother's closest childhood friend. At sixteen, this aunt was said to be possessed — what our culture calls boot. She ate enough for eight people. She climbed the jackfruit tree with her long hair loose, sat up high with red eyes, and suddenly spoke Telugu, a language she never normally used. A baba was called, there were beatings and rituals, and eventually she "became normal".
Years later she was married, had two children, and ended up in a mental asylum, where she finally passed away. When my mother told me this, crying, I said something didn't fit the possession story. Had anything happened in her life? My mother went quiet, then told me: the aunt's own father had sexually abused her as a child. She could never speak it. That buried, unbearable feeling is what was killing her. The red eyes and the strange voice weren't a spirit. They were a brain breaking under a secret it was never allowed to set down.
What we call possession is often unspoken trauma
Even a podcasting tantric admitted that 90 to 95 per cent of so-called possession cases are mental illness. A traumatic event the person could never share — in their own life or a previous generation — is frequently underneath. In my own study I've noticed that a large share of people who were sexually abused carry the imprint of that experience into adult patterns of attraction and aversion. Pleasure or pain attached to a gender in childhood doesn't disappear; it reshapes desire. I'm not collapsing every identity into trauma — but abuse leaves marks we shouldn't pretend aren't there.
What this asks of us as parents
We love our children fiercely and forget the one sentence they most need: if anyone ever does something to you, come and tell me, and I won't be angry. Children are sharp and protective. Out of goodwill, they hide things to spare their parents. Without that permission, the secret stays.
Trauma also wears smaller clothes. Substance abuse, PTSD, and even self-loathing over something minor — a small exam you cheated on years ago — can haunt you, because the gap between how people see you and what you did keeps gnawing. Naming that gap is part of the healing too. The first kindness you can offer yourself is to stop calling your pain a ghost.