Book Review: Letters From Your Therapist: On Love and Loss by Kareena Mehta

Book Cover

Not very long ago, telling someone they needed to see a counselor was considered an insult, the kind of suggestion that ended conversations and carried with it the quiet but devastating implication that something was fundamentally broken about the person on the receiving end. Mental health was rarely discussed openly, and people sought professional help in secret, if at all, because the stigma of being seen as uncomposed outweighed their internal struggles.

That has changed, and we should sit with that change for a moment and feel truly grateful for it, because it did not come easily and it is still not complete. People are beginning to understand, slowly and imperfectly but sincerely, that going to therapy is not an admission of failure but an act of real courage, and that sitting with a trained professional and saying the things you have never said out loud to anyone is one of the most necessary and most human things a person can do for themselves. We are learning that everyone deserves an ear, a space, and a presence that holds what is shared with care rather than judgment and that the absence of that kind of listening in a person's life leaves a particular kind of loneliness that nothing else quite fills.

And yet we are still not starting early enough. In a world where social media bullying is routine and relentless, affecting everyone from ordinary people to celebrities to children, the case for making emotional education a mandatory part of how we raise every child has never been more urgent or more obvious. If we taught children to name their feelings, to sit with discomfort without being destroyed by it, and to be present for others without needing to fix or dismiss what they hear, we would raise a very different generation from the one we currently watch struggle.

It is within this context, and with all of this in mind, that Letters From Your Therapist: On Love and Loss feels not just timely but necessary.

Kareena Mehta is a trauma-informed therapist trained at Columbia University and the founder of Kare Counselling, and what she has written here is unlike most of what passes for mental health writing in India today. It is part literary nonfiction, part poetry, part letter, and entirely human in a way that only writing born from years of truly listening to people can be. The book articulates voice to what happens inside a therapy room — not through clinical analysis or case studies presented at a careful distance, but through the felt experience of the people who sat across from her and trusted her with the things they had never said anywhere else: the doubt, the confusion, the grief, the love that hurt as much as it healed, and the slow, patient, often invisible work of finding your way through.

Each chapter is a letter, addressed simply as "To the One Who," and what follows that phrase is written with the kind of directness and warmth that only comes from someone who has truly listened—not to respond or diagnose, but the way all of us, at some point in our lives, have desperately needed to be heard. The poetry woven through these letters carries the emotional weight of what therapy actually feels like from the inside, saying in a few lines what pages of prose could not quite reach, and it is in these moments that the book becomes something more than a reading experience and closer to a conversation you did not know you needed to have.

This book will find South Asian readers and, honestly, anyone who grew up in a family where love, silence, and expectation arrived together in the same breath in places they did not expect. The guilt woven into love in our families is a thread that runs through our lives. The grief that never quite got its proper space. The exhaustion of being strong for everyone else for so long that you have forgotten what it feels like to be held by someone else. Kareena Mehta knows these patterns intimately, writes about them with real compassion, and gives you language for things you may have spent years feeling without ever quite being able to name.

It is one of the most worthwhile things your bookshelf will hold this year.

And to Kareena Mehta and her entire team at Kare Counselling—thank you for choosing a profession that asks you to carry the weight of other people's pain with grace, patience, and an open heart, because in doing so, you give people back to themselves, and there is no greater gift one human being can offer another.

Title: Letters From Your Therapist: On Love and Loss 

Author: Kareena Mehta.

Published by: White Falcon Publishing.

Available on: Kare Counselling and Amazon at Rs 1,599.