Satlaj Sachan running a session on perception and cognitive bias in Bengaluru

Someone to think with.

Not advice, and not a diagnosis. Somewhere to say it out loud and hear how it sounds.

Counselling with Satlaj Sachan.

Who this is for

Most people who write to me have been managing something on their own for a long time. They are functioning. They go to work or to college, they answer messages, and nobody around them has noticed anything.

Underneath that, something has been getting steadily heavier.

You don't need to be in crisis to come. You don't need a diagnosis, and you don't need to have worked out what the problem is before you get here. Working that out is most of what we do at the start.

How this works

Write to me.

A few sentences about what's going on. It comes to me and nobody else.

We talk for thirty minutes, free.

Not a session. We are both working out whether I am the right person for this. If I'm not, I'll say so and point you to someone who is.

If it fits, we start.

Usually weekly, over video. We'll talk about how often and how long in that first conversation.

More about what actually happens →

Some of the work

What people came in carrying.

Satlaj has worked with more than 140 people. These are some of the testimonials, anonymised. Read them properly →

A woman in her late thirties, after a divorce she described as the ground going out from under her.

What helped was not advice. It was someone steady through the weeks that were worst.

A man in his mid-thirties, who had stayed years in work that was emptying him out, too afraid to go.

What shifted was recognising the fear as noise rather than a signal. He left.

A man in his early thirties, watching a long relationship come apart and not understanding why.

It turned out not to be about love. It was about what the two of them were not saying.

A mother in her early fifties, after her son left to study abroad, in a house that had gone quiet.

The work was about who she had been before she was only somebody's mother.

A woman of twenty-nine, with everybody around her holding a view on whether she should marry.

What she wanted was to find out what she wanted.

A founder in his early forties, already running the company, unsure he had what the next part needed.

She did not tell him what to do. She reflected back what was already there.

A woman of forty-seven, who believed building something of her own belonged to people twenty years younger.

The belief was the obstacle, not the age.

A man of fifty-one, after twenty-five years of working for other people, wanting something that was his.

The work was separating the real risks from the imagined ones.