3aib: Shame, Silence, and Mental Health

Hello everyone, welcome to the Said in Therapy Podcast. Have you ever considered going to therapy and you ended up not going? My question is why? In my humble opinion, I believe everyone can benefit from therapy. In fact, I believe everybody should go at least once in their life.

My name is Iman Tohami, and I'm a psychologist. This podcast tells you all about everyday cases with everyday people who have everyday problems and difficulties, and sometimes they carry around really deep wounds. These are their stories.

So, hi guys. I just decided to record this intro before we start with the episode. I just wanted to thank you for all the love I have gotten for the last episode, and I kind of knew that AI in the therapy world is kind of a big T right now.

I didn't expect that people are going to listen. Very surprising, very happy about it. And I hear you, I will record a second episode about therapy and AI. And I do believe that this is very important. I have gotten a lot of questions.

So because this episode was pre-recorded, I'm going to release it first. But next week I will try to record an extra bonus episode and I will dedicate it again to the topic of AI and therapy and mental health and everything that has to do with it.

So I wanted to encourage you to send in your questions. I will leave a link for you where you can actually send me longer questions than we are used to, and then I will try to address them in the next episode.

So once again, thank you so much. But let's start with this episode. It's also quite interesting.

This episode is going to be about the word Aib. Aib basically means shame in Arabic, but it's overused to an extent that everything you do wrongly is misread as disrespect, and Arab parents use this word so much that I don't think any Arab kid, whether they speak Arabic or not, has not heard this word.

Every single kid that grew up in a Middle Eastern household knows this word and also understands what the word means. Basically, this episode is going to be about shame and everything that has to do with shame. So hate, shame, silence, and the mental health in the Middle East or for children who grew up in a Middle Eastern household.

So as I said before, hype means shame, but it's not just shame. I want to explain this a little bit further. It's a kind of shame that tells you hide all your emotions, don't talk about your problems, and whatever you do, never ever admit that you need help.

That right there is the biggest danger of that word. If you are a long, long, long time follower of Said in Therapy, you will know that this account was previously called Hype in the City. Yes, yes, it is an homage to the series in the city, and basically it gave a lot of Arab girls an outlet to be understood and also share their stories about dating, about meeting people, about being basically a Middle Eastern girl in

a society that is not exactly helpful for girls. So over time it evolved into Said in Therapy and it evolved into something more holistic than just hype in the city. But what I'm trying to say is hype was basically one of the first indicators that tells me in our society so many things are going wrong.

And this is what inspired the name. AIP means shame. But how do we address shame? What do we do with shame? How do we learn from shame? And what can we do to get out of this endless cycle that is telling us not to exist the way we want to?

Alright. I first want to tell you more about AIP and what AIP teaches us. Growing up in a Middle Eastern home, you hear AIP early and very often. Don't ask that. I don't wear that. I don't talk about your feelings.

I don't see a therapist. I what will people think? And in my case, don't study psychology. Ape, why would you even do that? Ape doesn't just police behavior, it polices emotions, it teaches us that suffering should be silent.

And so many of us internalized it. Basically, the majority of my patients today are masters at smiling through their pain. And the majority of my patients, by the way, have a Middle Eastern background. We pretend, we shrink, but behind every hate is a story that was never allowed to be told.

And this story comes from one of my patients, and she gave me consent to share it. Her name is Sara. She's 26 years old, she's from Hamman, and she grew up in a house where Hayeb was basically the answer to everything.

Why she couldn't talk, about being bullied, about why her brother's anger was always ignored, why therapy was something those people did, but not them. And when she was 23 years old, Sara basically decided that she has to do something about her anxiety attacks.

The kind that make your hands go numb. Her mother said she needed to fast more, her mother said she needed to pray more. Her aunt said she needed to stop watching sad shows, whatever. Everything that you could imagine was said to her.

Only she should not go and pay for expensive therapy. But Sarah did something else. She Googled Arabic-speaking therapists near me, came up with nothing, heard about a therapist who lived in Dubai, understands Arabic, also speaks English, happens to speak German, and she reached out to me.

She booked a session and she lied to her family about what she was doing for the next hour. She said she had a meeting and she closed herself up in a room and then she started therapy. She was doing this for months, and they have always thought whenever she was in a therapy session that she's actually working and she is in a meeting.

She sat basically on a virtual stranger's couch and did what no woman in her family had done before. She told the truth. And even though I cannot go into full details of her story, there were a lot of really sad aspects of her life.

She shared things she thought she would never share with anyone.

All of these feelings, all of us have felt before. And she shared them. And guess what? By sharing them, she actually didn't break. She began to rebuild, she began to process new thoughts because by going into conversation about these feelings, she discovered there is another way to handle these feelings and to turn them around and give them meaning.

A year later, she told her mother the truth, even though she really thought about it for a very long time. We always went back and forth. Why is this so important to you? Why do you need to tell your mother that you're going to therapy, even though you know that she's going to be so strongly against it?

And she felt that this is part of her story and she wanted her mother to know. And in the end, she did. We prepared her the best way possible. When she told her it was really messy, there were a lot of tears, and then there was silence.

And then there was that word again. This is hey, why are you doing this? And then after that, a few weeks later, her mother came to her and asked, Does your therapist also see older women? In that type of way, you break the cycle.

Her mom didn't end up to be my patient, but I was able to refer her to someone else. I want you to understand that sometimes being the first person to do something different, it's some sort of revolution. It's not loud, it's not something you know you share as a big milestone.

Sara didn't only heal herself in that moment, she also made healing somewhat contagious. Because everybody around her saw the change, saw how she felt, and saw all the positive changes that she has implemented into her life after starting therapy.

It's only one thing you can do. Therapy is not always the answer, especially if it's not free to you. But sometimes investing in your own mental health is the first step you can take to free yourself from all the negativity that you have been carrying and internalizing.

Let's be honest, suppressing emotions isn't culture. It's survival that becomes tradition and it's hurting us. We see it in panic attacks dismissed as being too sensitive, in depression, misdiagnosed as laziness, in trauma brushed off as you're being too dramatic.

Mental illness in our communities isn't rare. It's just invisible sometimes. Because what's visible gets labeled as aib, and what is aib has to be buried. I'm very happy that the newer generations are waking up to that fact and trying to break the cycle when it comes to that.

However, the word aib is so internalized in so many people that they don't even understand what it means to feel so much shame that it still affects them to this day. And let's not forget how often faith is misused in this space.

Pray it away. God is enough. And while yes, faith is an extremely powerful tool, and yes, I also use it in therapy if it is requested. It's not a substitute for therapy if you suffer with mental difficulties or a mental illness.

I want to address something that is very important to me and I've been working towards for at least 15 years now. I want to talk to you about the change that is happening. And it's good news. Things are shifting slowly but surely, and we are seeing creators, therapists, young people finally naming what they are feeling.

We are starting to realize that being vulnerable isn't a weakness, it's rebellion in the face of silence. And yes, talking about your anxiety in a group chat might still get you awkward silence in return, or when you meet up with friends and you talk about your panic attack, you know, or when you talk to your family member and then that random cousin just replies you're too sensitive, happy tea, or whatever you have to endure when you

open up, that one message, that one honest moment, it ships away at generations of silence. So even if those people are replying to you in a way that is not validating or comforting, trust me, they still register what you have just done.

Opening up in many ways can be an act of rebellion. I have tried for the longest time to reclaim the word hype. What if we redefine type? What if instead of shame, hype becomes a trigger for reflection? And I mean it in the best possible way.

Why is it considered shameful? Who benefits from our silence and what happens if we stop hiding? Because the truth is, the things we label as hype, therapy, crying, asking for help, are exactly the things that could save us.

It is not shameful to struggle, it is not shameful to heal, it is not shameful to speak to someone. I want to give you a final reflection. If you're listening to this and you have been holding on to something because of hype, because of fear, because of family, this is your sign.

Say it, say it in therapy, say it to yourself, say it out loud, say it to your journal because silence has never protected us. Only the truth can. Thank you for listening to Said in Therapy. If this episode resonated with you, share it, rate it, or send it to someone who might need it.

And if you're ready to break the silence, I see you. I'm with you, and you are not in this alone. Trust me.

Hey, thank you so much for tuning in, and hopefully you will tune in again next week. It will be another episode talking to or about clients of mine, and you can find us on social media on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

The handle is always @saidintherapy. Thank you so much.