Pt 1: Trauma, Loss & Therapy Ft. Fatima Hussain

My second episode, and the first one where I am not just speaking into the void alone. For this one, I sit down with Fatima Hussain. We went to school together, did our O Levels side by side, and now she is a psychotherapist. But this is not a dry explainer on what therapy is. It is a conversation about loss, about being human, and about stumbling into a career that asks you to feel other people’s pain for a living.

I wanted to keep this chat candid, to pull back the curtain on what it is really like to be a therapist. Not the clinical version, but the deeply human one. Fatima talks about her path, which began completely by accident, and we end up in a very raw place, trying to process the grief and fear that gripped so many of us after Noor Mukadam’s murder.

Healing yourself to heal others

Fatima’s journey into psychotherapy was not a straight line. She tells me she picked a bizarre A Level combination of psychology, English literature, and media studies because it felt “edgy,” without thinking about where it would lead. A levels were tough. She went from a tiny, sheltered school to a massive campus of 800 students and felt like she never quite fit into any single group.

She thought she wanted to do anthropology, but a devastating rejection from LUMS rerouted her. Her mother insisted she have a hostel experience, so Fatima ended up at BNU for a four-year applied psychology degree. It fit. The coursework came easily. But it was an internship at Services Hospital that changed everything. She saw how mental health patients were treated, with so little empathy, and she knew that model was not for her. “I don’t think this model works,” she says. The path toward counseling began.

She applied to programs on a whim, stumbling upon the University of Edinburgh a week before the deadlines closed. She got in. The training was not just academic. It was deeply personal. “The idea is that if you don’t have awareness of your own wounds, the way you respond to different things, you can’t help people,” she explains. She started personal therapy during her training and has been in it ever since. I love how plainly she puts this: if you want to sit on one side of the couch, you must know what it is like to sit on the other.

The therapist is not an expert telling you what to do

A lot of people imagine a therapist as an expert who tells you what is wrong and gives you a diagnosis. Fatima strongly resists that frame. It is not a typical doctor-patient relationship with one person holding all the power. Instead, the therapist’s job is to redirect you back to your own experience.

She contrasts her approach with a more clinical, symptom-focused route. “If you come in and say I’m an alcoholic and by the end of our work together I would like to stop drinking, my work is not going to be just that. We’re going to talk about what makes you want to drink, what are you numbing to begin with,” she says. That is longer, deeper work, a process of getting to the root rather than applying a cosmetic fix.

This kind of work requires a real relationship. Research shows that the therapeutic relationship itself is the real agent of change, more than any single modality. And for Fatima, that relationship sometimes spans years. She has a client she has been seeing for over three and a half years. It is a massive investment of time and emotional resources, for both people in the room.

The honor and the hazard of feeling someone’s pain

I ask her a question I have always wondered: how do you stay non-judgmental and not get triggered when people unload their deepest pain on you, and then how do you walk back into a normal life?

She tells me the non-judgmental part comes from training, from looking at a person as a whole. When someone acts out or says something difficult, she sees it as coming from a place of deep hurt they might be completely disconnected from. But the emotional impact is real. You are left holding the worst aspects of human existence after the client leaves the room.

She manages it with personal therapy, regular supervision with a senior clinician, exercise, and learning when to take a break. Still, she is honest that she is not always good at pausing. And sometimes being affected by a client is exactly what the work requires. She shares a moment when a client who had a sudden bereavement just could not cry. So Fatima sat there, and she cried. “Because that was my natural response in that moment,” she says. “I needed to do that in that moment for them to be able to get in touch with something they couldn’t feel.”

That is the heart of it. You have to be moved by somebody to truly help them. It is an occupational hazard, yes, but it is also a profound honor to be let into the most guarded parts of a person’s life.

Loss and the grief that has no space

During her master’s, Fatima researched disenfranchised grief and pregnancy loss. She found that men’s grief around pregnancy loss is often completely invisible, treated as a secondary concern only. I think about a friend who lost her baby during pregnancy and told me how, for the longest time, she could not hold space for her husband because she was drowning in her own pain. Nobody ever asks the man if he is okay. Grief is never linear, and it never looks the same between two people.

Understanding this changed how Fatima thinks about loss. She has no time for the tidy, pop-psychology stages of grief model. Grieving hits you out of nowhere, even when you are functioning perfectly well on the surface. And that reality was something we both had to face in a much more immediate and terrifying way.

Noor, the aftershocks, and the performance of outrage

We cannot have this conversation without talking about Noor Mukadam. Fatima knew Noor from school. They were in a play together. So when the news broke, first that she had been shot, and then that she had been tortured and beheaded, it was not some distant horror. It was deeply personal. Fatima could play out in her mind what Noor must have looked like, what she sounded like, how she must have tried to escape.

For a long time, Fatima did not cry. She was just functioning, busy with work and life as a mother, and did not have the time or space to grieve. She told me that all the online outrage and the vigils, while important, were not healing her. They were almost a way to avoid sitting with the pain. It was only when she finally spoke to her husband and then let herself cry, alone and with people who truly knew Noor, that the grief began to move. “Grieving is almost always a community process,” she says. Remembering Noor personally, talking about who she was, mattered so much more than the noise.

This hit a nerve for me too. As someone who is often expected to speak out immediately on every tragedy, I know that pressure intimately. I often say things that I know are right, but they do not always feel authentic yet because I have not had time to process them myself. People do not give you that time. They want to know where you stand so they can model their own position, or they assume your silence means you are complicit. But I am a human first, and I need to heal before I can speak from an honest place.

Fatima saw this play out with her own clients. Every single woman was deeply affected. Only one man asked what he could do differently to make the women around him feel safe. It revealed a vast gap in experience. So many men simply cannot grasp the constant, background hum of unsafety that women carry. And for many of us, Noor’s murder shattered the illusion that our class or privilege could protect us. A client told Fatima, “I realized that my privilege doesn’t protect me from anything.” It was a terrifying wake-up call.

We talk about how we did not have the vocabulary growing up. We did not know words like toxic, patriarchy, or gaslighting. We just felt uncomfortable, abused, and often shut down our intuition because we could not name what was happening. It is a systemic problem, not just a few bad men. And while it is true we need to raise better sons, I have also come to understand that putting all the responsibility on women to fix or educate men is its own kind of burden. Men need to be accountable and hold other men accountable.

This conversation was heavy, honest, and it ran so deep we could not possibly fit it all into one sitting. We decided to pause here, but there is much more to unpack with Fatima. There is so much more to say about healing, about the systems we live in, and about the quiet work of sitting with pain. That will have to wait for the next one.