Imagine you’re walking down the street with your child and a stranger shouts, “Get out of my country. Go home, terrorist!” You’re at the playground, and you notice a mother pulling her child away from yours, looking at you with suspicion.
These are some of the experiences Sarah Khan has had to live with since the attacks on 9/11. As a devout Muslim woman, she’s easily identifiable because of her appearance and her headscarf.
One incident Khan still remembers vividly is when a vehicle sped up and drove towards her in a Walmart parking lot. “I was walking with my infant child,” said Khan. The cruel words and attacks led Khan to withdraw both physically and psychologically from the world.
She was eventually diagnosed with social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia. Initially, she tried to manage her anxiety with a combination of medications, but she says, “The medications, including Xanax, eventually stopped being effective.”
Even in therapy, she was met with hurtful comments. One therapist told Khan, “Your people are causing trouble all over the world,” she shares.
After struggling for many years with overwhelming anxiety and fear of people, she finally decided she needed a more intensive treatment. She signed up for an outpatient treatment program at Linden Oaks Behavioral Health.
The treatment program was a combination of mindfulness, acceptance therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Khan says, “I was in the treatment program, every day, for about four hours over a course of four weeks.”
In the program, she learned coping skills and became less reactionary to the hateful comments and attacks. “I became desensitized to the word ‘terrorist,’” says Khan.
After the treatment program, she was armed with a lot of tools to help her manage her anxiety and agoraphobia, but she also realized that the tools weren’t enough. “I needed a safe space to practice these tools,” said Khan.
She eventually found this safe space at Toastmasters, a global organization devoted to communication and leadership skills development. Initially, she experienced anxiety even at the Toastmasters meetings, but, she shared, “With the acceptance and empathy from the ‘Americans’ at the meeting, my anxiety eventually lessened.” Khan says, “The people at Toastmasters, exemplify diversity and inclusion.”
She began to recognize that just as strangers feared her, she also feared them. Just as strangers generalized and put her into one giant category simply because of her appearance, she began to see that she too was overgeneralizing, fearing everyone.
Eventually, Khan made a career transition, from a fashion designer to a public speaker and trainer. Now, she calls herself a diversity and interfaith speaker, and she offers her message of inter-community harmony, as well as increasing social harmony at schools, churches, and in corporate settings.
She also offers workshops within her community to talk about acceptance. “I’ve learned to put myself in the other person’s shoes. This helps me to understand other people’s perspectives,” says Khan. She believes that it’s only through getting to know an individual that we can begin to break down the barriers—the “us”-versus-“the other” way of thinking.
“I put myself in situations where people can get to know me. This helps others recognize that I’m not different from others,” says Khan.
Sometimes, when she’s offering these workshops in public, people will ask her questions such as, “Why are you people so different from others?” She explains that, “When you get to know the individual, you no longer ‘other-ize’ people. You start to recognize the common humanity. This helps to build bridges.”
She always tells people, “Throughout history, there has always been a marginalized group for political gain. Get to know someone from that community. If you develop a personal relationship, that fear diminishes. You’ll see similarities.”
This article previously appeared on Forbes.