Utkarsha Jagga

I am a trauma-informed and queer-affirmative practitioner. I am the founder of and senior counselling psychologist at The Coping Central. I have completed my undergraduate education in Psychology from the University of Delhi, and my Master's from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. I have furthered my education in Narrative Practices and have been trained as a Suicide First Aid Responder. I am also a Pleasure Fellow (The Pleasure Project Fellowship, 2023), which informs my practice as sex-positive and kink-affirmative.

I work with individual clients, couples, facilitate support groups, and also work as a trainer. My areas of specialisation include complex trauma, gender, sexuality, and depression/anxiety (and the many areas of our lives that are impacted by these experiences). I have a relational approach to therapy and believe that our sense of self is shaped by the relationships we hold and the stories we come to know about ourselves within them. My therapeutic lens is influenced by client-centred and narrative schools of therapy, alongside feminist and social justice principles. I believe in privileging people's narratives and lived experiences, and in collaborating with people to uncover stories of agency, preferred identities, and possibility.

Founding The Coping Central has been one of the most meaningful ways I have lived out the values of narrative practice beyond the therapy room. I have been interested in what it might look like to build an organisation where curiosity is valued over certainty, collaboration over hierarchy, and ethics over efficiency. These ideas continue to shape our work with clients, our training programmes, our supervision practices, and the way we support one another as a team.