Persian Women

 
 
So, you're a Persian woman.
 
Your life has been planned for you since you were born. Your parents have been planning your wedding for the longest time. While you were playing with your friends in the street, your parents were searching for your husband. As a young adult, you were taught how to act, dress, and look in front of your potential “khastegar”.
 
You get married at a young age to someone who you think you love. You get married to someone who is older than you are, who has a different perspective, attitude and opinion from you. Your wedding will become an occasion of joy, laughter, and love filled with friends and family, and of course it will be massive and glamorous. After you wedding, you will join your husband in his expensive house where both your mother and his have done all of the house decor for you. Again, you will find yourself lost and confused.
 
Soon after, the daily phone call arrives. The calls usually comes from your mother in law checking  up on your job duties such as cleaning, cooking, laundry, grocery shopping, and of course, keeping his son sexually satisfied. At this time you have stopped working in your career per your husband's request. You spend most of your days with friends, shopping or making necessary arrangements for the house. Shortly after you are raising your children with your husband and, yet again, your parents and his family have involved themselves with their expert opinions.
 
As your child starts to grow, you start feeling overwhelmed. The feeling grows bigger and bigger as you feel lonely in your marriage. You soon will realize that you have no emotional connection or communication with your husband. The person that you have spent years with is not the person that you hoped for. Now you are feeling sad, unhappy, and angry. You wake up every day feeling unsatisfied in the relationship where you once felt happy.
 
Now years have passed by and money is no longer enough to keep you connected with your husband. You lay down every night next to a stranger feeling worry about your future. A stranger with whom you have no connection, or understanding. You have become two strangers living in the same house raising children together. Now what? Do you stay in the marriage and be unhappy or seek help and try to find solutions?
 
In my personal therapy with the Iranian community, I will help you to challenge your family's cultural expectations and values while managing your depression and anxiety symptoms. Therapy will become a safe place where together we will examine your past to find a better future. In individual therapy we will work together to face your fears that have stopped you from moving forward in your relationship.