𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗜𝘀 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗘𝗻𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁

Years ago, I was participating in an international therapy group. As the youngest and only Asian person in the room, I genuinely experienced myself as a little Brown girl trying to survive among people who seemed more articulate, sophisticated, and entitled to take up space.

I came from a low-income family. Yet, like many Indian parents, mine stretched themselves financially to send me to an English-medium school where many of my friends came from affluent homes, spoke fluent English, and carried a cultural ease I deeply admired. Somewhere along the way, I internalised the idea that Westernness meant superiority.

And in that international group, all of this came alive inside me.

I struggled to understand some accents and felt embarrassed asking people to repeat themselves. At the same time, I became hyperaware of my own Indian pronunciation because occasionally people could not understand me either.

Every misunderstanding felt exposing.

So internally, my experience was:
“I am scared.”
“I am lesser.”
“I need to be careful.”

The group gave me empathy around this. But then something happened that completely disoriented me.

One group member interrupted me and said:

“Anisha, I believe that you feel scared. But do you realise you are probably the one person in this group who has confronted almost everybody here — including the facilitator? Every time you speak, my ears perk up. I feel the group come alive when you intervene. I have taken courage from watching you. So why do you keep talking as though you are small or powerless?”

I remember seeing others nod and I felt almost destabilised.

Because until that moment, I genuinely had no awareness that others experienced me this way.

Inside myself, I was still organised around fear.
But outside myself, people were experiencing impact, courage, and authority.

That moment felt like what Jack Mezirow calls a 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗱𝗶𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗺𝗮 — an experience that disrupts an old meaning structure so deeply that you cannot comfortably return to your previous self-understanding.

And it made me realise the difference between insight and outsight.

𝗜𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 helps us understand why we became who we became.

But 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 is when other people help us see ourselves beyond the limits of our old self-perception.

Without new mirrors, we can remain psychologically loyal to outdated stories about ourselves.

A good group does not only empathise with your wounds.
It also helps you confront the possibility that your self-image may be outdated.

-Written By Anisha Pandya