Through Brown Girl Therapy, Kohli is teaching South Asian American and other bicultural women that courage doesn’t have to be loud to be brave.
This piece is part of an ongoing series, “Redefining Power: How Indian American Women Are Rewriting the Rules of Leadership, Identity and Care.” The series explores what it means to modernize without losing our roots—through candid conversations with Indian American women reshaping culture, power and possibility.
Seventy-seven percent of Indian Americans ages 25 and older hold a bachelor’s or advanced degree—one of the highest education levels of any group in the country. We have the resources, networks and expertise to shape policy and culture.
And yet, when I speak to Indian American women about the widely supported issues dominating headlines and shaping American culture—reproductive rights, Palestine, caste equity—their convictions are rarely in doubt. Their voices, however, often are.
Many support the cause. Few post about it. Fewer donate. Almost none speak publicly. And these are women who are otherwise bold: executives, founders, fundraisers, moms who command rooms. But when it comes to controversial topics—especially anything that could “stir the pot”—there’s a quiet, familiar retreat.
What are we actually losing when an entire generation of educated, successful, deeply principled women stays largely silent on the issues they privately champion?
You kept your head down so I wouldn’t have to. You gave me the privilege of ease. So now, I get to speak up.
Sahaj Kohli to her father
Therapist and founder of Brown Girl Therapy, Sahaj Kohli has spent six years studying the phenomenon. Through work with thousands of bicultural women, she’s identified what she calls the core tension we all navigate: the pull between self-determination and cultural-familial obligation.
Kohli’s own story mirrors the very struggle she helps others name. As the first in her Punjabi Sikh family to be born in the West, she spent her childhood navigating two cultural worlds: one steeped in collectivist Indian values, the other driven by Western individualism.
“I felt like different versions of myself depending on who I was around,” she recalls. After years of therapy and introspection, Kohli launched Brown Girl Therapy in 2019, originally as a personal effort to find community among other South Asian women grappling with identity. What began as storytelling soon evolved into a global bicultural movement spanning more than a hundred countries—offering support, professional trainings, and advocacy for immigrants and children of immigrants learning to bridge generations and cultures.
It’s from this personal reckoning that Kohli turned toward the public, naming patterns she and many others shared. Today, Brown Girl Therapy reaches hundreds of thousands across social platforms and has partnered with universities, Fortune 500 companies and global nonprofits to train leaders in cultural humility and bicultural well-being. In doing so, Kohli hasn’t just built a community—she’s built a new infrastructure for belonging.
Through that work, she began to notice a shared emotional throughline running across communities: the quiet guilt that comes from wanting to honor your roots while still claiming your voice.
“Our parents didn’t teach us to stay quiet because they were too busy or didn’t care,” Kohli explains. “They taught us to stay quiet because, in their world, silence meant safety.”
Many of us grew up being taught not to rock the boat, to be agreeable, to not embarrass our families. That’s the contradiction so many of us carry—we’re raised to care deeply, but at the same time, to also disappear.
Sahaj Kohli
But what served our parents’ survival, she argues, now undermines our generation’s ability to create change. “I see women who want to speak up about injustices, who want to push back against gendered expectations, but they freeze when the moment arrives. There’s this feeling of, ‘If I say this, will I bring my family shame? Will I still be accepted? Will I still belong?'”
The result isn’t just personal—it’s political. When South Asian women’s voices are missing from public discourse, movements lose more than participants. They lose perspective, resources and legitimacy.
Consider reproductive rights. As I wrote recently, while Indian Americans overwhelmingly support abortion access, our voices are largely absent from the public conversation. We’re not testifying at hearings, writing op-eds or serving on nonprofit boards in numbers that match our education levels and stated beliefs.
“There’s this invisibility of our experience,” Kohli notes. “Our bicultural perspectives and our needs aren’t really mirrored in mainstream conversations. We want to be connected to our culture and our families, and we want to be our own individual people out in the world. We want both of those things.” That experience is not accurately reflected in how movements think about leadership or advocacy.
Through her clinical work, Kohli has identified what she calls “unhelpful guilt.” It’s not the kind that guides moral decisions, but the chronic feeling that you’re never enough—”not a good enough daughter. Not a good enough Indian. Not a good enough woman.”
This guilt, she’s observed, becomes “the number one blocker” for women who want to live lives more aligned with their values. To engage publicly with issues they fully champion in their heart and mind. It manifests as a series of paralyzing questions: Whose comfort am I protecting? What is my silence costing me? What is it costing the issues I care about?
“Many of us grew up being taught not to rock the boat, to be agreeable, to not embarrass our families,” Kohli explains. “That’s the contradiction so many of us carry—we’re raised to care deeply, but at the same time, to also disappear.”
The irony is striking: A collectivist society raised on values of seva, or selfless service, struggles to translate those values into the public sphere where policy actually gets made.
Perhaps most significantly, our collective silence teaches our daughters to tolerate the same dissonance. When they see us passionate at the dinner table but quiet in public, they learn that being agreeable is always noble, even when it’s just another form of fear.
This pattern became clear to me while interviewing women for my upcoming book. One woman told me, “I check all the boxes: I vote, I stay informed, I even attend fundraisers. However, when it comes to hosting a fundraiser, posting publicly, or donating, I freeze.”
When I asked her why, she told me, “… it can have a negative impact on me or the people I love. I’m constantly negotiating, can this hurt my career? Or my parents’ family business? What if I embarrasses my parents?” Three times during our conversation, she asked me to confirm that no one else will hear our conversation.
This cost compounds across generations. “Silence has a cost, too,” Kohli points out. “It robs us of alignment. It conditions us to believe that our voices don’t matter, or that speaking up is somehow incompatible with being culturally connected.”
When Indian American women’s voices are missing from public discourse, movements lose crucial perspectives, here are just a few examples:
Reproductive rights advocacy lacks voices that can speak to the complexity of choice within communities that value both family, autonomy and faith. Indian American women’s perspectives on reproductive healthcare, family planning and bodily autonomy could reshape how movements think about cultural competency—if we were willing to share them.
Economic policy discussions happen without significant input from women who understand both entrepreneurship and caregiving, both individual achievement and collective responsibility. Our perspectives on issues like paid family leave, healthcare reform and small business support could influence policy—if we engaged publicly.
Democratic participation itself suffers when educated women who understand the importance of civic engagement model withdrawal rather than involvement for their communities.
Kohli’s framework makes this clear. When her post about Gaza went viral, her father objected—not because he disagreed, but because he worried about safety. She didn’t argue. Instead, she reframed: “You came here in survival mode. You kept your head down so I wouldn’t have to. You gave me the privilege of ease. So now, I get to speak up. That’s what you built.”
Representative Pramila Jayapal described Kohli’s approach in an earlier conversation for this series. After 9/11, when she publicly defended Muslim Americans and her father objected, she had to help him see that her voice wasn’t a rejection of his sacrifices; it was a continuation of them.
Kohli emphasizes that courage doesn’t always require confrontation, but it does require visibility. “Your voice doesn’t have to be angry or loud in order for it to be brave. It just has to be yours.”
So how do we start to navigate this tension? Based on her clinical work, Kohli offers three specific steps for moving past inherited silence:
1. Understand what’s behind the silence.
“Most South Asian women aren’t quiet because they have nothing to say. They’re quiet because they were taught that speaking up threatens connection,” she explains. “Start by asking, whose comfort am I protecting? And what is that costing me?”
2. Root your voice in shared values.
Instead of leading with opposition, lead with lineage. Reframe your voice as an extension of what your family taught you: justice, resilience, service. That shift softens defensiveness.
3. Choose your arena.
Not every act of courage has to be advertised on a billboard. Kohli believes in the full range of visibility: not letting misinformation and disinformation go unchecked in a WhatsApp thread, writing a letter to your representative, hosting an event for a nonprofit, funding anonymously, or engaging in good old-fashioned volunteering.
These aren’t just therapy tips, they’re skills for civic life. Kohli emphasizes that breaking inherited silence isn’t a switch you flip, instead, it’s active work, and it takes practice.
“I’ve been doing this work for six or seven years,” she says, “and I still feel guilt. That doesn’t mean I’ve failed, it means I’m human.”
For her, guilt is an emotion to be examined, not obeyed. “Like any emotion, it’s telling us something,” she explains. “But we don’t always have to listen. We can ask, whose values do I think I’m crossing? Are they mine or my parents’? Is this something I need to interrogate more?”
That process, she says, is the real work: the daily practice of self-awareness and compassion. It means building the skill to name your feelings, to say out loud, “I feel guilty, I feel angry, I feel torn.”
“Many of us were never taught the language to articulate our experiences,” she notes. “But having that language is part of healing. You can’t transform what you can’t name.”
When individual healing meets collective action, change becomes possible. The same skills Kohli teaches for navigating guilt—naming your feelings, examining whose expectations you carry, choosing aligned action—are also the skills required for activism. Once you learn to hold discomfort without retreating, you can engage in hard public conversations with empathy instead of fear. Healing ourselves from inherited silence doesn’t pull us away from community, but prepares us to participate in it more fully.
The movements we care about are making decisions without us. Policies that affect our families are getting shaped without our input. Our silence is teaching the next generation that caring deeply and staying quiet can coexist indefinitely.
But what if they didn’t have to?
As we celebrate Diwali—a festival that honors light’s triumph over darkness—it’s worth remembering that our voices are part of that light. Choosing to speak, even when it’s uncomfortable, is how we brighten the path for those who come after us.
And luckily for us, Kohli has done much of the hard work—through years of education, research and clinical practice, she’s mapped the emotional terrain that so many of us are still learning to navigate. She’s built the language, the tools and the spaces that make it impossible for us to feel alone or stuck in this journey. She’s shown us what a fuller, more integrated sense of self can look like. Now, the work is ours: to pick up those tools, use our voices, and carry this evolution forward.
Sahaj Kohli is betting that Indian American women won’t just find their voices, they’ll transform what voice means in our communities. Through her book But What Will People Say?, her newsletter Culturally Enough on Substack, her podcast So We’ve Been Told, and her workshops, she’s redefining how bicultural women lead: with empathy, depth and unapologetic cultural pride.
If we follow her lead, the inheritance we leave will include truth, belonging and power, not silence.
