The power of culture and story-telling – Meet Bimba Chavan

December 5, 2024

 

We live in a community of many cultures.

But if you are a migrant or have grown up in a non-western culture, it can be hard to find your footing as a parent. And even harder to look after yourself.

Bimba Chavan brings a unique cultural lens to her mental health work with families and young people. Here, she shares her ideas for parents trying to navigate across cultures. She explains how stories can build bridges across cultures, generations and continents.

 

Thank you Bimba for taking the time to speak with us today.

Let’s start with your own background. How do you describe your identity?

I think identity is an ever-evolving concept.

I’m a non-Indigenous woman of colour. I am a recent migrant from Mumbai, India.

I come from a land with such a diversity of religions, cultures and languages.  I am still navigating the best of both worlds. I know people identify themselves in different ways. I would still say I’m an Indian at heart.

Because I migrated as an adult, the sense of friends and family and community is still back in India. So right now, here in Melbourne, we are trying to create our own versions of our chosen family.

Can you tell us about the work you do now?

I work at the intersection of creativity and mental health. I am a mental health professional, a counsellor by training. I facilitate workshops about wellbeing with parents and families of all ages and cultures through my private practice at Unhyphen Psychology.

In addition, I write and design eLearning courses on mental health. I hope to create a conversation space in every room where we find a voice to share our thoughts with each other.

Currently, I am also working at headspace in the Multicultural Practice team as an Inclusion Lead. My role is to make headspace services more culturally safe for refugee and migrant communities.

I think it took some time for people to understand what I really do at my job. I studied psychology in a culture where accessing mental health support isn’t often the norm. I used to work as a school counsellor, both in my professional journey in Mumbai but also when I moved to Melbourne. That’s where I started, understanding mental health from a preventative point of view.

My work is to make safe spaces for conversations for everyone. That’s something I really look forward to in any space I work in.

In Australia, there is a dominant culture, but I think more than one in five people have one or more parents born overseas – that’s what the statistics say – which means we have diverse cultures here. So I am interested in how we make safe spaces for everyone, including people who speak diverse languages, to be confident and have their own voice in all services.

What inspired you to follow this career path?

I think I have always been curious about human minds, like while I was growing up. But I think the key point definitely was having been a young carer for mental health in my own family.

It was really hard to see, like, how do we support our own family members who may not be open to seek mental health support so how do we as a family kind of co-create that space for people?

The support and understanding of mental health around me was limited. So that was definitely a turning point for me to choose a career in psychology.

I think another one was moving to Australia. That sense of identity gets ripped apart in ways, and then you’re trying to integrate and make sense and figure out, like, ‘Who am I?’

I have had the privilege of working in a job role that satisfies both my sense of migrant self, but also my mental health training, combined together.

Were books and stories also part of your journey? How did they influence you?

Many stereotypes exist about Indian communities and one of them is that Indian parents are intensely focused on ensuring their children learn English well and achieve high academic scores.

That was very true for me. I was told to read books to understand English better. The dominant narrative was that if you learn English well, then you will be able to succeed more in life. There was a lot of emphasis on that.

In the school where I went, we learned three languages: there was the state language, which is Hindi; there was my own native language, which is Marathi; and there was also Sanskrit, which involved a lot of oral verses to be learnt. I think books were the common denominator to understand stories and ways of being in these different cultures.

Growing up with limited technology worked in our favour I guess. Reading was always encouraged in my household. I used to see my grandmother read a book every day at tea time. As a young person, I saw that she really enjoys reading and now that I think of it as an adult, it helps to have that sense of connection when I read a book along with my coffee.

I think my favourite story was Alibaba and the Forty Thieves. I still imagine there is a den out there, and you say those magic words and the cave opens. So I think it really allows for that sense of imagination to stay with you.

In the cultures I come from, I think story-telling happens anywhere. There is no structure to it. I know in Western society there is a habit of sitting down at the end of the day or in the middle of the day to read a book, but I think for me it was standing in the kitchen and listening to a story or travelling in a train and listening to a story. It was very organic.

I think there’s some magic in it as well in that you get to hear from those adults’ experiences of the world and hear their story-telling as well.

I think that’s a key difference: story-telling could happen anytime. It was more to understand, as a child, the parents’ and family’s worldview. Like, my grandmother travelled from Pakistan to India during the Partition, so they took whatever they could take from there and they came to India. That was the only story I could access from my grandmother’s childhood and I was really interested to know more about her because of that.

What do you like to read now?

I have been a primary school counsellor for some time, so I love reading children’s books, even as an adult. In the library I am probably the only single adult in the children’s section. I love the Oliver Jeffers books, like The Day the Crayons Quit and other stories.

As a teenager and young person, I used to read a lot of fiction stories. Now, I think my attention span is reducing as technology is catching up. I am a big fan of short stories, because I want to know very quickly what’s going to happen.

As an adult, especially now in Melbourne, there is that third space that we want between work and home. So I often walk to a library after work and then have that third space to read a book. I am trying to intentionally increase it.

Drawing on your work experiences, wWhat do you think are the main challenges for parents in Australia who have migrated or who belong to a specific culture?

The key thing is a loss of language. They are coming from countries where English is not the first language and here in Australia, the mainstream society influences you to just speak one language, like there’s only one way of being.

Depending on how old your kids are, you may or may not converse with them in that language, so there’s an intentional effort needed to bring back the stories from your home country – whether it’s family values, or songs, or rhymes that we have learned in childhood.

When people are not speaking the language, I think it’s really hard to have that fit, like ‘Do we fit in Australian culture or do we fit back home, and how do we bring that together?’.

Connected to that, the sense of social capital is really low. We don’t have uncles and aunts, neighbours, everyone chipping in to support the children. So parents may have a different expectation of how to do parenting, but then they are being told, ‘This is how we do parenting here’, so there is that sense of comparison that happens.

For example, children go to sleep really, really early here and that’s the same where I come from in India. It’s so hot and you only cool down and have dinner when the sun has set, so the sleeping patterns are different. Small differences like these create challenges in the way we live in another country.

So you are adapting to a whole new cultural environment and holding onto your own traditions and values and rituals – that’s hard. It is a bit of a juggle.

 And what are the strengths and skills that parents bring to meet these challenges?

From the parents I have interacted with, I have seen they are extremely resourceful in finding creative ways. I am not a parent yet, but I think parenting requires finding creative ways to do the best you can with what you have.

Even if the resources are limited, I think they do try to find a sense of belonging and a pride in their heritage. And I think story-telling is key. You tell stories about how festivals are celebrated, or how certain foods were cooked, about community gatherings.  That resourcefulness is definitely a strength.

There is also a sense of hope that parents have, that hope for a better future. It’s the reason they have migrated and they want to instil that sense of hope in their children.

Along with that comes a real sense of adaptability that I love, that you can adapt to any country, any climate. As humans, I think we have that, but we often forget it.

At the same time,  having those family or cultural values helps us stay grounded. I think that also is a strength. There is a sense of identity that we are bringing in. And you’re also attaching new identities to it.

Do you think reading and stories can help parents and families?

I think reading as an activity offers a space for sitting down together or doing things together.

All of us, especially children and young people, love to be seen and heard. If you’re reading a book that shows characters that look like them, talk like them, and have some similar stories, it helps to process the experience psychologically as well. You don’t even have to say that you are going through it.

I think reading and stories can be a beautiful bridge. You may want to bring in story-books from your own cultures or about the First Nations people here, to make sense of who we are and where we are. I think that really helps.

It can even be considered like a ritual as well. I think children and young people would be looking forward to it. If you are a single child then the power dynamics, the power difference between the child and parent, would be so much. So I think reading together is a space where everyone comes together and it neutralises the space.

Sometimes it might be about co-creating the stories. I am very influenced by narrative therapy ideas and one of the ideas is that people, however young, are the experts on their own lives and they are always responding.

So if you co-create a story together, or like to change the ending to make it more hopeful, I think that gives a sense of agency like ‘yes, I can create a story’. Be open to hear out the ideas offered by the young ones.

What are your top 3 tips for migrant parents to have happy, healthy families?

Creating safe space for open conversations is important.

I think we are too focused on getting it right. But allowing young people – and parents – to make mistakes and acknowledge it, like, ‘Okay oops you made a mistake, it’s okay we can work it out together’… I think that can be especially difficult in multicultural communities where adults never show that we can make a mistake.

Another tip is to make space for all the cultural celebrations at home. I think we’re currently living in a world where it’s heavy and it’s hard to make sense of how we should co-exist where all cultures, all religions exist in the same society. So allowing children to feel like they belong and they’re proud of who they are, that’s really important. Whether it’s cooking traditional dishes or teaching native languages, just celebrating the cultures we come from helps a lot.

Migrant parents carry so much on their shoulders that it’s easy to forget about themselves. So another tip is: take care of your own wellbeing. Think about how you fill up our own cup, and feel more nourished.

Earlier we used to have the whole neighbourhood, friends, family and extended family taking care of young people, but right now if we are trying to create a new home here, we need to have that sense of community to interact, to meet other parents from other communities and get some ideas together.

So yes, taking care of your own wellbeing is important.  That means both your physical and mental wellbeing.

Thank you Bimba!

Find out more about Unhyphen Psychology and Consulting and headspace.

If you need immediate mental health support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

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