Exploring mental wellness
Welcome to the Jamila Keenadiid Psychotherapy blog, a space for exploring mental wellbeing, emotional health, and the reasons people seek therapy. Drawing on a systemic psychotherapy approach, these reflections consider how anxiety, low mood, relational difficulties, and life transitions are shaped by relationships, family dynamics, culture, and the wider social context. The focus here is on understanding distress in context, and on how therapy can support meaningful and sustainable change.
Why so many young women are turning to therapy
Many women come to therapy not because something is wrong with them, but because they are living at the intersection of competing needs and expectations. Today’s world asks women to be self-defined yet endlessly responsive to others, independent yet emotionally available, strong yet accommodating.
These tensions don’t live only inside the individual, they show up in relationships, in intimacy, in the body, and in the quiet question of who am I allowed to be here? Do I like who I am becoming, or who I am with this person? Therapy can be a place to reflect on these questions. How these competing forces shape wellbeing, connection and identity, and to consider how relating, to oneself and to others, might become more spacious, more honest, and more sustainable.
When competing demands cannot be spoken or negotiated, they often emerge somatically: anxiety, exhaustion, shutdown, difficulties with desire, or a sense of disconnection from pleasure. From this perspective, therapy is not about “fixing symptoms” but about listening to what the body may be communicating about the context, safety, and unmet needs.
Many women arrive in therapy carrying not only their own histories, but the emotional labour of families, partners, workplaces, and cultural scripts. They are often highly attuned to others’ moods, needs, and disappointments, sometimes at the expense of their own inner signals. Therapy becomes a place where this attunement can be examined rather than automatically enacted: When did I learn to prioritise harmony over truth? What happens when I don’t?
A recurring therapeutic inquiry is: Which parts of my life feel chosen, and which feel inherited, expected, or default? This includes patterns of attachment, partner selection, caregiving roles, and self-criticism. Therapy allows space to gently disentangle what was adaptive once from what is still nourishing now.
For many people, identity has developed in response to what was required of them rather than what emerged organically. Being “good,” “capable,” “easy to be with,” or emotionally literate often becomes a way of securing belonging and safety. Over time, this can blur the boundary between who one is and who one has learned to be for others. Therapy offers space to notice this distinction without rushing to resolve it.
Identity questions often intensify at moments of transition: entering or leaving relationships, becoming a mother, migrating, changing careers, or confronting the limits of endurance. What once felt adaptive may begin to feel constraining. A common experience in therapy is the quiet unease of I’ve built a life that looks right, but doesn’t quite feel like mine. This is not a failure of insight or gratitude, but a signal that identity is reorganising.
There is also the tension between coherence and multiplicity. Many feel pressure to present a consistent, integrated self across contexts, when in reality identity is made up of different parts that come alive in different relationships. Therapy can legitimise this multiplicity—allowing room for desire alongside responsibility, anger alongside care, ambition alongside attachment—without collapsing into self-judgement.
Importantly, identity is shaped not only by choice but by power, culture, and history. Gendered expectations around emotional labour, attractiveness, motherhood, and sacrifice quietly contour who women feel permitted to be. Therapy does not remove these forces, but it can make them more visible, enabling a more conscious relationship to them rather than an unconscious compliance.
Over time, therapeutic work around identity is less about defining oneself once and for all, and more about cultivating the capacity to stay in relationship with an evolving self. This includes tolerating uncertainty, allowing contradiction, and trusting that identity can be responsive rather than rigid—shaped through reflection, relationship, and lived experience, rather than solely through demand.
Therapy here is not as a crisis response, but can be seen as a developmental and reflective practice. For many people, therapy is less about pathology and more about meaning-making: understanding themselves in context, integrating different parts of the self, and learning how to relate with greater clarity, reciprocity, and self-respect.