Maryam Suheyl

From as early as I can remember, I've been a "relationship enthusiast." As a child, relationships felt as essential as sustenance to me. However, tension in these relationships often felt like deprivation. This drove my early quest to understand the significance of relationships in my life, which later extended to studying relationships of others. On returning to Pakistan with a Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy from Northwestern University, Chicago, I utilized my systemic understanding and therapeutic skills in schools, corporate environments, academia, and media. Observing a gap in the field, I saw the pressing need for therapists with a relational and systemic focus. Consequently, I began supervising and developed courses to train marriage therapists to respond to the growing needs of couple’s therapy in Pakistan. As our family system in Pakistan is changing our couples find themselves struggling to find a balance. Growing up with western values of independence and still living with-in the eastern communal family system, couples were struggling. I started to follow the development trajectory of many couples in our culture that informed the unique way I started to think about marriage in South Asia and what it needed from professionals like us. For example answering the big question “How can we as couples enjoy independence yet maintain the strong family ties that we inherited?” This brand of thinking is reflected in the courses I teach, the supervision that I do, the content that I make and finally in the way therapists approach a problem in Maryam Suheyl Therapy.