An aspirant’s struggle with identity loss and competitive exam stress; how counseling at Rachmanas helped her reclaim herself beyond one result.
Rachmanas Counseling
Priya (name changed to protect confidentiality), 28, started her competitive exam stress counseling session with Rachmanas looking composed. However, soon she appeared tired in a way that had little to do with sleep.
She had been preparing for the UPSC Civil Services Examination for four and a half years, living in a rented room in Delhi, far from her family in a smaller city in Uttar Pradesh.
She worked through standard materials, attended classes for the first two years, and had appeared in the Prelims three times. She had not cleared any of them.
On the surface, her concern was focus. She described sitting at her desk for long stretches and doing nothing. Books were open. The hours passed. She said: “I keep starting the same chapter. I don’t know what will happen after that.”
She had stopped taking mock tests months ago because, as she put it, the results felt like a verdict on her as a person rather than feedback on her preparation.
Underneath the study problems was something more difficult to name. She had lost touch with most of her college friends, who had taken jobs, some had married.
She found their ordinary life updates painful to read. Sleep had become unreliable around any UPSC-related deadline. There were no sharp feelings of panic; mostly a flat, heavy numbness that sat through the day.
The thought that returned most often was: “If this doesn’t work, I have nothing left.” Research on identity and achievement pressure in young Indian adults points to exactly this pattern; when a goal absorbs the whole of a person’s self-concept, failure at the goal feels indistinguishable from failure as a person (Oyserman et al., 2004).
The first session of competitive exam stress counseling began with a Personal Information Questionnaire (PIQ) to document Priya’s history, family background, health, and daily routines. This was followed by a semi-structured clinical interview across the first two sessions, designed to explore her relationship with the UPSC goal over time; when it began as aspiration, and when it became something else.
The Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) was administered at the end of the second session. Her score placed her in the mild to moderate range, below the threshold for a clinical diagnosis but clearly significant in terms of daily functioning.
The formulation drew on two intersecting frameworks. The first was identity fusion theory, which describes how a deeply pursued goal can absorb a person’s sense of self to the point where any threat to the goal becomes a threat to the person (Swann et al., 2012).
Priya had not simply committed to UPSC; she had reorganized her entire understanding of who she was around it. The second framework was the sunk cost fallacy as it operates psychologically; the inability to consider alternatives because doing so feels like admitting that years of effort were wasted. This kept her locked inside a narrowing space with no exit that felt acceptable.
Lambert (2013) notes that accurate formulation of a client’s problem, before selecting any specific technique, is among the most reliable contributors to positive outcome in counseling work.
The formulation here pointed toward work that was not primarily academic coaching, but identity expansion; helping Priya develop a sense of self that could survive both success and failure.
The competitive exam stress counseling ran across 12 sessions over four months, meeting once a week for the first six sessions and fortnightly after that. The following approaches were selected based on Priya’s specific presentation.
Before any technique could be introduced, ambivalence needed space. Priya arrived with a complicated relationship to her own goal; she neither wanted to quit nor could she function within the preparation.
Motivational Interviewing (MI), developed by Miller and Rollnick (2013), creates a non-pressured space for a person to examine what they actually want, without the counselor pushing them toward any particular decision.
Sessions two and three used open questions and reflective listening to help Priya separate what she genuinely valued about civil service work from the fear of being seen as someone who failed.
This distinction mattered considerably. She discovered she cared about public service as a vocation; she was also carrying a significant amount of what she called “family honor” that had attached itself to the goal without her quite noticing.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (Sessions 3 to 7)
Priya’s thinking contained several well-defined cognitive distortions. All-or-nothing reasoning showed clearly: “If I don’t clear this, I am a failure”; catastrophizing was present in how she imagined any alternative future; and mental filtering meant she registered setbacks in full while the experience of genuine ability and progress went largely unnoticed.
Cognitive restructuring, consistent with the approach documented in the meta-analytic review by Butler et al. (2006), worked on these patterns directly.
She kept a daily thought record, noting specific situations, the automatic thought that arose, and a more measured alternative. Within three weeks she began to catch the filtering in real time.
One entry read: “I actually completed two full topics today. I did not write that down until now.” The behavioral component introduced a modest but structured study schedule with defined stopping times; work that was bounded rather than open-ended reduced the sense of drowning in an infinite task.
ACT, developed by Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson (2012), shifts focus from eliminating distress to building a life guided by what genuinely matters.
Values clarification exercises helped Priya map out her values beyond the UPSC outcome; she listed contribution, learning, financial independence, and close relationships. She then mapped how much space each value currently occupied in her daily life. The gap was stark. Relationships and physical wellbeing had essentially disappeared.
This was not framed as a failure; it was framed as information. The exercise gave her permission to reinvest in parts of life that had been suspended pending the exam result. She resumed a short morning walk three times a week. She called a college friend she had not spoken to in over a year.
Narrative therapy, developed by White and Epston (1990), works with the stories people carry about themselves. The dominant story Priya had authored went roughly: “I am someone who has tried and failed, repeatedly, and that is what I am now.”
Narrative work introduced what White called re-authoring; examining moments in her own history that contradicted that story. She had, in fact, cleared an internal Civil Services preliminary exam for a central government post in her second year of preparation and declined the offer because the role was not the one she wanted.
She had also mentored two junior aspirants through their first Prelims attempt. Neither of these had featured in her account of herself. Externalizing conversations helped her separate the exam outcome from her identity: “The result is not you; it is a result.” This sounds simple. Sitting with it for several sessions made it real.
Withdrawal had become self-reinforcing; the less Priya engaged with life outside preparation, the harder any engagement felt.
Behavioral activation, consistent with the evidence reviewed by Cuijpers et al. (2019), introduced one small engagement per week outside the study routine; a weekly outing, meals away from her room, and eventually a conversation with her family about exploring parallel options.
Sunk cost reframing was addressed directly. She was asked to consider: “If a friend had spent four years learning a skill and was deciding whether to continue, would you tell her the years already spent are the reason to stay?”
The thought exercise opened a genuine shift. Past effort, she came to understand, was a real investment; it did not automatically determine what the next chapter should look like.
By session eight, Priya’s BDI-II score had moved out of the mild-to-moderate range. She described feeling “less stuck” and noted that the paralysis at her desk had reduced considerably. She sat for a full mock test in the tenth session week, the first in nearly seven months.
She did not perform well on it. She also did not spiral afterward, which she recognized as new.
By the final session, she had made contact with a career counselor about parallel options in the public sector and state-level examinations. She was not abandoning her goal; she was loosening its grip on her sense of who she was.
Sleep had stabilized, the weekly outings were continuing, and she had resumed a light workout routine three mornings a week. She described the shift herself in the last session: “I still want this. But I am not only this anymore.”
Wampold and Imel (2015) observe that the therapeutic relationship, more than any single technique, predicts durable change; Priya’s progress was gradual and grounded in exactly the kind of incremental reengagement with life that counseling, at its best, makes possible.
All identifying information in this account has been changed in accordance with the APA’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (APA, 2017).
Informed consent was obtained before assessment and was reviewed at the start of the counseling work. Confidentiality and its limits were explained clearly. The counselor remained attentive to the risk of inadvertently reinforcing either continued pursuit or abandonment of the goal; both were Priya’s decisions to make.
Regular supervision supported the maintenance of appropriate professional boundaries throughout.
Priya’s case is not unusual. Across India, hundreds of thousands of young people are preparing for highly competitive examinations under conditions of enormous personal, financial, and family pressure.
The UPSC examination receives over a million applications for fewer than a thousand final selections. The mathematics of that process means that most people who prepare, including people of considerable ability, will not clear it.
The psychological consequences of that reality receive far less attention than the preparation strategies do.
What competitive exam stress counseling offered Priya was not a study plan. It was a way back to herself; to a sense of identity that had more than one room in it. Competitive exam stress is real, and its effects on sleep, focus, relationships, and self-worth are clinically significant.
The work of expanding a person’s identity beyond a single outcome is slow, but it is achievable. And it does not require giving up on what matters; it requires making enough space around it to keep living while pursuing it.
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