FOUNDER | REGISTERED PSYCHOLOGIST | DIALOGICAL PRACTITIONER
Meet Shubhangi
I’m a registered psychologist and the founder of Dialogue Room. I work online with individuals, couples and families across Australia.
Where It Started
Early in my career, I worked in a youth mental health inpatient unit. Among the young people I worked with was a 13-year-old. I will call her Heather. What struck me most wasn’t the details of her life. It was how little space she had ever been given to actually speak about it. Her distress was noticed, assessed, and documented. But her voice was systematically erased. What she needed, more than another treatment plan, was someone to sit with her without trying to fix her and actually hear her.
That moment shaped everything. It taught me that the systems we have built, however well-intentioned, often do the opposite of what people actually need.
The Path Here
I have worked in mental health for fifteen years now. Across different layers, in different roles. I have supported families affected by mental illness, worked alongside people with lived experience to change how services are designed, and sat with patients and families when the system wasn’t hearing them. And over those years, I watched the same pattern repeat: people not receiving the support they truly needed, with their circumstances unchanged.
Open Dialogue found me almost seven years ago. It changed how I understood the work, the relationships, and the whole question of what it means to support someone. I then spent four years helping organisations embed the approach, translating principles into real practice, and learning how slowly institutions move.
I spent years trying to create change from within traditional systems, but the pace was slow and the human cost was too high. I stepped away from roles inside large systems so my clinical practice could sit fully with my values.
Founding Dialogue Room was a commitment to doing things differently. Not by trying to reform the whole system, but by creating an unhurried space where the conversations that matter can actually happen.
How I Work
I am someone who feels deeply. Who sits with people in their pain. Who shows up with the full range of emotion, including my own. For years, I thought that made me a bad psychologist. But then I learnt that vulnerability, presence, and genuine feeling are the work. They are not soft add-ons to clinical practice. They are part of the foundation.
I hold my perspective lightly, as one possible understanding among many. When I work with more than one person, I hold each perspective as valid, even when they contradict each other.
Your life, your choices, your knowing of yourself. That’s where the authority actually sits, not with me.
This is collaborative. You’re not following my path. We’re finding it together.
Outside the Room
I’m a Kiwi living in Sydney. I am a mother to a little guy. My husband is my biggest cheerleader. I collect plants (though these days I am mostly trying to keep them alive). I cherish the relationships I have. They keep me grounded in what matters the most.
More importantly, my life isn’t perfect. I experience ups and downs like everyone else, including in my own relationships. I know what it is like to carry weight, to struggle, and to need someone to sit alongside you without trying to solve it.
That is what I bring into the room. Not an expert who has everything figured out, but a fellow human who knows what hard feels like and is willing to sit with you in it.
