Modern life asks men to carry many roles at once – provider, partner, father, leader, and achiever – often without offering much space to process the emotional weight that comes with them. While conversations around mental health have become more common, many men still struggle to understand what lies beneath stress, burnout, anxiety, emotional distance, and the constant pressure to keep going. Behind these challenges are often deeper questions about identity, resilience, trauma, relationships, and the stories we carry from childhood into adulthood.
Few professionals have explored these complexities from as many perspectives as Rajvir Kohar. Having lived and worked across multiple countries and industries before entering mental health, he brings a unique blend of clinical expertise and real-world experience to his work. As a mental health clinician specialising in trauma, PTSD, and Complex PTSD, he combines evidence-based approaches such as CBT, EMDR, DBT, and ACT with insights drawn from Eastern philosophy and human experience.
In this conversation, Kohar shares thoughtful perspectives on resilience, emotional wellbeing, childhood influences, modern masculinity, trauma recovery, and why genuine healing requires far more than simply understanding the problem. His insights offer a refreshing and deeply human look into the emotional realities many men quietly navigate every day.
Your bio uses the word “resilient” to describe yourself — not just your clients. What has tested yours?
I think what tested my resilience most was the experience of having to rebuild myself more than once. I have moved across countries, changed professional identities, and entered systems where my past experience did not always translate neatly. Starting again in a new place is not only geographical. It is psychological. It asks you to begin again while still carrying everything you have been before.
That process can be humbling. It makes you question who you are when the familiar markers are removed — your role, your network, your sense of certainty. But it also clarifies what remains.
My resilience has also been tested by the work itself. Trauma work does not allow you to hide behind theory. When you sit with human suffering every day, you have to keep doing your own emotional work. Otherwise, the work can harden you or exhaust you.
For me, resilience is not about being untouched. It is about remaining open, responsible, and meaningful after being tested.
You’ve lived and worked across three continents, in uniformed services, HR, and now mental health. Most people pick a lane early. What does that kind of lateral life do to a person’s sense of identity?
It makes identity more layered. When your life moves across countries, cultures, and professions, you stop seeing yourself as one fixed thing. I have been shaped by structure and discipline through uniformed services, by systems and people management through HR, and now by the clinical responsibility of sitting with trauma, suffering, and human complexity.
At times, that kind of lateral life can feel confusing because the world prefers neat labels. People ask, “What are you?” and expect one answer. But I have learned that identity is not always a straight line. Sometimes it is a collection of experiences that eventually begin to make sense together.
Clinically, this has helped me. I can sit with people who feel divided inside — between cultures, roles, expectations, ambitions, family, and self. I understand that human beings are rarely one thing. We are made of many lives, and the task is not to erase them, but to integrate them.
You blend Eastern philosophy with Western frameworks like CBT. When a modern man is torn between the Western drive to achieve and the Eastern call to detach, how do you handle that clash?
I see that conflict often, especially in men who are ambitious but exhausted. Western psychology gives us very useful tools. CBT helps us examine our patterns. Schema Therapy helps us understand our core emotional needs. EMDR helps process traumatic memories so they feel less overwhelming. These frameworks are practical and structured.
Eastern philosophy adds another dimension. It asks, ‘What happens when your entire identity becomes attached to achievement, recognition, or control?’ Detachment is often misunderstood as passivity, but I do not see it that way. We can still be deeply invested in our work, our relationships, and our purpose while practising detachment from the outcome.
So, I do not tell men to abandon ambition. Ambition can be healthy. But when achievement becomes the only source of identity, the person becomes fragile. Every failure feels like a collapse of the self.
The work is to help a man act with commitment, care, and discipline, but without being psychologically owned by the result. That is where therapy and philosophy can meet beautifully.
Schema Therapy says unmet emotional needs in childhood create beliefs we carry into adulthood. How often does a grown man present one problem and realise it started decades earlier?
Very often. Most men do not come to therapy saying, “I have unmet childhood needs.” They usually come with stress, anger, relationship conflict, numbness, anxiety, or a sense that they are failing in some area of life. The presenting problem is usually adult, but the emotional pattern is often much older.
A man may believe he is simply avoidant, too independent, too reactive, or unable to trust. But when we slow the work down, we often find that these patterns once had a purpose. Maybe he had to grow up too early. Maybe vulnerability was mocked. Maybe love felt conditional. Maybe his needs were ignored, so he learned not to have any.
Schema therapy helps people understand that what looks like personality may actually be adaptation. That realisation can be painful, but it is also liberating. The point is not to blame childhood for everything. The point is to understand where the emotional script was written, so it can finally be revised.
EMDR works in ways that still aren’t fully understood neurologically. As an evidence-based clinician, how do you hold space for something that works but doesn’t fully have an explanation yet?
I hold it with both respect and humility. Evidence-based practice does not mean we pretend to understand every mechanism perfectly. Many psychological therapies have strong outcomes before every neurological pathway is fully explained. EMDR has a strong evidence base for trauma, particularly PTSD, but we are still learning exactly how memory reconsolidation, bilateral stimulation, attention, and nervous system processing interact.
As a clinician, I do not present EMDR as magic. I explain it carefully, assess readiness, build stabilisation, obtain informed consent, and track the client’s response. That is important because trauma work should never be mystical or careless.
At the same time, I have seen how powerful it can be when a memory that once felt alive in the body begins to feel like something that happened in the past. That shift matters. For me, good clinical practice requires openness to what works, honesty about what we do not know, and strong ethical boundaries around how we use it.
PTSD is often about what happened to someone. Complex PTSD is more about what kept happening. How does that shift your entire approach?
It changes the whole frame. With PTSD, we may be working with a specific event or cluster of events. With complex PTSD, the person has often lived inside repeated threat, emotional neglect, control, humiliation, instability, or relational harm. The trauma is not only in what happened. It is in what the person had to become to survive.
So, I do not begin by asking only, “What happened to you?” I am also interested in: “What did you learn about yourself?” “What did you learn about other people?” “What parts of you had to shut down?” Complex trauma affects identity, shame, relationships, emotional regulation, and trust.
This means the work must be paced carefully. Trauma work is not a straight line. People may gain insight before they feel safe. They may understand their story before their body believes it is over. With complex PTSD, healing requires safety, relationship, stabilisation, processing, and rebuilding a self beyond survival.
You supervise other psychotherapists and social workers. What is the mistake you see most often, and is it the same one you made early on?
The mistake I see most often is rushing to be useful. Clinicians are usually compassionate people. They want to reduce distress, offer tools, make interpretations, and help the client feel better. But in trauma work, moving too quickly can unintentionally repeat the client’s experience of being missed.
I made versions of this mistake early on too. I thought that if I understood the pattern, I should name it. But therapy is not only about accuracy. It is about timing. A formulation can be correct and still arrive too early for the client’s nervous system.
In supervision, I often invite clinicians to slow down and notice the process: What is happening in the room? What is the client ready to feel? Are we trying to rescue, prove competence, or avoid our own discomfort?
Good therapy is not performance. It is presence, attunement, and disciplined patience. Sometimes the most therapeutic thing is not the clever intervention, but the moment the client finally feels met.
Men are becoming more emotionally aware, yet also more emotionally exhausted. Why does self-awareness alone often fail to bring peace?
Because insight is not the same as integration. Many men today know the language of healing. They can name their triggers, attachment style, childhood wounds, and trauma responses. That awareness can be valuable, but it can also become another mental loop.
Knowing why you are anxious does not automatically make the body feel safe. Knowing you have abandonment wounds does not automatically change how you behave when someone pulls away. Awareness gives you a map, but it does not walk the road for you.
Peace usually requires emotional processing, behavioural change, nervous system regulation, relational safety, and sometimes environmental change. This is where online self-help can be misleading. It often sells the idea that naming the problem is the breakthrough. In real therapy, naming the problem is often only the beginning.
Men do not need endless self-analysis. They need experiences where they can feel differently, respond differently, and build a life that does not keep activating the same wound.
What hurts trauma survivors more deeply — the painful event itself or the feeling that nobody truly understood what happened afterwards?
Both matters, but many trauma survivors are deeply wounded by what happens after the event. The original experience may be terrifying, humiliating, or overwhelming. But when the person reaches for understanding and is met with silence, disbelief, blame, ridicule, or minimisation, the wound becomes more relational.
Human beings are not designed to carry overwhelming pain alone. We need witnesses. We need someone to say, “What happened to you was real. Your response makes sense.” Without that, people often turn the pain inward. They begin to wonder whether they are weak, dramatic, broken, or responsible.
In trauma work, being understood is not just emotional comfort. It is part of repair. Of course, validation alone does not process trauma. But it can reduce shame, and shame is often what keeps trauma locked in place.
Sometimes the deepest injury is not only that something happened. It is that, afterwards, the person had to survive it alone — or worse, survive it while being dismissed, mocked, or misunderstood.
Your group programme runs virtually. What have you learned about how presence functions when there’s no physical room?
I have learned that presence is not the same as physical proximity. A room can be physical and still feel emotionally unsafe. A virtual space can be online and still feel deeply human. Presence is created through attention, consistency, attunement, structure, and the feeling that someone is genuinely with you.
I also facilitate group programmes in person, so I value the power of a shared physical room. But virtual trauma work has taught me something important: for some people, being in their own environment can increase safety. They have more control. They can choose where they sit, how close they are to the screen, and whether they need grounding objects nearby. For some trauma survivors, that sense of control is not a small thing; it is part of safety.
Of course, virtual work requires careful boundaries, risk assessment, and strong facilitation. It cannot be casual. But I do not see it as inferior. When held properly, a virtual group can still create connection, witness, reflection, and emotional movement.
The therapeutic room is not only walls, either. It is the quality of presence we build together.
What kind of childhood environments most commonly create emotionally distant men later in life?
Emotionally distant men are often not men without emotions. They are men who learnt that emotions were unsafe, useless, or unwelcome. Sometimes this comes from obvious trauma: violence, addiction, criticism, neglect, or instability. But sometimes it comes from quieter emotional environments where the child was fed, educated, and provided for but never emotionally known.
Many boys grow up learning that sadness is weakness, fear is shameful, tenderness is risky, and needing comfort makes them less masculine. So, they become self-contained. They perform. They achieve. They joke. They stay useful. But they do not learn how to be emotionally held.
By adulthood, distance may look like personality. “I am just not emotional.” “I do not need anyone.” “I prefer to deal with things alone.” But often, distance began as protection.
The goal in therapy is not to force men to become emotionally expressive overnight. It is to help them discover that closeness, vulnerability, and dependence do not have to mean danger.
What is the difference between suppressing pain and transcending pain? Why do so many people confuse the two?
Suppressing pain means pushing it away before it has been felt, understood, or integrated. Transcending pain means you have faced it deeply enough that it no longer controls your life in the same way. From the outside, both can look calm, which is why people confuse them.
A person who suppresses pain may say, “I am over it,” but their body may still be carrying the fear, anger, grief, or shame. It may come out through anxiety, irritability, numbness, overworking, or emotional distance. Suppression often creates the appearance of strength while the wound remains active underneath.
Transcendence is different. It does not deny the wound. It allows the person to hold it without being ruled by it. There is memory, but less imprisonment.
Many men confuse suppression with maturity because they were rewarded for emotional control. But real healing is not the absence of feeling. It is the freedom to feel without being destroyed by it.
Working in one of Australia’s largest mental health hospitals, what has witnessing psychological breakdowns taught you about the pressure people silently carry?
It has taught me that many people are functioning until they are not. From the outside, someone may look responsible, successful, articulate, and composed. They may be working, parenting, smiling, and meeting expectations. But internally, they may be carrying years of trauma, grief, shame, pressure, loneliness, or emotional exhaustion.
A psychological breakdown rarely comes from nowhere. It is often the point where a person’s coping system can no longer carry the weight. Many people have been surviving for a long time before anyone notices they are suffering.
Hospital work has made me much more respectful of invisible pain. I do not assume that functioning means wellness. Some people are very good at appearing fine because they have never had permission to fall apart.
It has also taught me that early support matters. We should not wait until someone collapses before we take their distress seriously. The breakdown is often the final signal, not the first one.
Therapy language online — boundaries, triggers, attachment styles, narcissism. Has mental health awareness become more informed or more performative?
It has become both. Therapy language has helped many people name experiences that were previously confusing or shameful. Words like boundaries, attachment, trauma, and triggers can give people a framework to understand themselves. That is a good thing.
But online, these words often lose depth. People may use “boundaries” to avoid difficult conversations, “triggers” to describe any discomfort, or “narcissist” for anyone who has hurt them. Clinical language can become a weapon when it is used without reflection.
Mental health awareness should make us more curious, not more certain. It should help us ask better questions: What is happening in me? What am I responsible for? What pattern am I repeating? How do I communicate this with maturity?
The danger is that therapy language can make people sound healed without requiring them to do the work of healing. Real therapy is not about collecting labels. It is about developing honesty, responsibility, compassion, and emotional capacity.
Some people do not want to be with family, do not miss them, and feel at home while staying away. Is trauma working in the background, or is it normal?
It can be normal, and it can also be trauma-related. Not everyone experiences family as home. For some people, distance allows them to breathe, think clearly, and become more themselves. That does not automatically mean something is wrong. Healthy adulthood sometimes requires separation.
But in other cases, not missing family may be a protective adaptation. If family relationships involved criticism, control, emotional neglect, guilt, humiliation, or unpredictability, the nervous system may learn that distance equals safety. The person may not feel longing because longing was too painful or because emotional shutdown became necessary.
The important question is not simply, “Do you miss them?” The better question is, “What happens inside you when you are close to them?” Do you feel free, safe, and respected? Or do you feel small, tense, responsible, or trapped?
Sometimes distance is avoidance. Sometimes distance is wisdom. Therapy helps people understand the difference.
Throughout this conversation, Rajvir Kohar reminds us that mental health is not about eliminating struggle but learning how to engage with it differently. His reflections challenge many common assumptions about resilience, trauma, emotional strength, and healing. Rather than offering quick fixes, he encourages a deeper understanding of how our experiences shape us and how meaningful growth comes through awareness, patience, and connection. In a world that often rewards performance over authenticity, his perspective serves as an important reminder that true wellbeing is built not through perfection, but through the courage to understand ourselves more honestly.
