Stress...

wish you all a very happy holi..hope you enjoy the day with lots of colors and sweets!!

may the colors brighten up your year ahead !

Menopause can occur any time from age 40 to 59 and is...

just wanted to know how deeply have these terror attacks affected you all..do u feel safe in going to crowded places, especially on weekends? frankly, i dont. my blissful�blanket of security was torn and shredded when once i got stuck in a hindu-muslim riot in gujarat. nothing happened to me, not even a scratch, but the mark was deep in psyche. that left me with an impression that anything could happen anytime. when i watched Taj burning on TV, i could feel knots in my stomach. recently newschannels showed the pune bakery blast caught on cctv and it sent shivers down my spine. there are blasts everywhere these days. its a news when its happening to someone else. its a trauma when it happens in our lives.

i went to Total Mall (sarjapur road) on a weekend evening, expecting usual safety routines to frisk us and our vehicles. but i was shocked to see that on such a day and time, when the footfall is much much high, there were no security checks. on asking the manager, i was told that "due to no such threat, there is no such need for rigorous checks"!!! last weekend i went to shoppers stop (bannerghatta road) and even there, no one checked our bags while going inside. i was sitting in the cutomer's lounge to get a new membership card, when the TV sets blared with 'blasts in bangalore stadiums'..i was angry and scared at the same time. when i heard the customer care executives chatting about the blast (as if potato is 30Rs kg instead of 12), i couldnt contain my anger anymore..i asked them why there was no security check at the shop and they told me there was staff shortage and assured me that there would be security checks again in sometime.

am i the only one affected by all this? should i make a hue and cry only when i lose a relative or friend in a blast? as citizens, shouldnt we all make a noise when the big malls(most likely targets)�take money for parking our cars but dont spend money on keeping security personnels?

i appeal to all of you for making a big noise when u find these security lapses..create a scene and walk out of the mall..do anything that u find appropriate..

thats the least we can do, to lessen the chances of� becoming a mere number in death toll.

 Inner peace does not refer to the absence of conflicts around us or to a state of happiness or euphoria within us, but to a state of restfulness and a sense of fulfilment within us. When you are peaceful within, you are calm and strong in the...

aarav: pyaar kya hota hai mumma

me: (smiled..didnt know what triggered this question in�my toddler & how to answer)

aarav: bataao na

me: pyaar..hmmm..umm..pyaar matlab khayal rakhna..ummmm..kisi ki baat maanna, uski fikr karna...hmmm...sabkuch share karna

aarav: toys bhi share karna?

me:(giggling inside) haan..toys bhi, baatein bhi

aarav: (thinking)

me: aur pyaar matlab puchchi (kissed him on his forehead)

aarav: aap mujhe puchchi ki..matlab pyaar ho gaya?

me: (too tickled by now)..haan beta..

aarav: (still thinking)...ok! good night

i was so tickled by this small conversation with my 2.4 years old, that i find no words to describe my feelings nicely..it is�amazing how kids come up with such questions we want so difficult to answer..i hope i did justice to his query!

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Consider this. You are an employee in a top IT firm in your city. You have taken your 2 years old daughter to the society’s garden and she has just given another push to a child in the play area. This is the fourth time today that she has hurt someone deliberately. That child’s mother looks at you and you give an apologetic look and scold your daughter that such behavior is not acceptable and she cannot hit someone. Then you let her play again. When everyone prepares to leave, you approach the other mother and prod your daughter to say sorry. The other mother assures you it is not necessary and that all children do such things. The onlookers agree with the other mother and you feel reassured, though slightly embarrassed. Fair enough! Or so you think!

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Now consider the same situation as a mother who is a psychotherapist by profession. When your daughter hits another child, the message you read from others’ eyes is “how good a psychotherapist is she, when she cannot handle her own daughter!” When you scold your daughter for hitting the child, the next message is “tsk tsk. Scolding the child being a therapist”. When everyone prepares to leave and you approach the other mother, you hear her say, almost mockingly, “Why is your daughter being so aggressive? Being a therapist, you must know everything. You must have read about it. My son never hits anyone.. And the blah blah continues.

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Handling emotions:

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If people around you know your professional background, their behavior with you changes. It happens. If you are a doctor, people tell their symptoms even when they meet you at a wedding party. If you are a politician, everybody gets into the competition of being your numero uno. If you are a millionaire, people are attracted towards you like bees to honey. But if you are a psychotherapist, what changes more in people around you is not their behavior but their perception. There is a strange conviction in everyone that if you are a psychotherapist, you will have no emotional problem yourself and you will properly handle all those around you, no matter what they say or do to you. You will be soberly happy or happily sober, whatever suits you best, all the time. You will have a good marriage. Your family will be satisfied and happy with you. There will be no fights between you and your husband. You will have children like angels, who study well, play nicely and have good manners. If crisis strikes you, you will handle it calmly, set an example of excellent behavior and have everyone cheer “now this is the perfect way to be!” If your life displays any sign of a common man’s life, where people have an argument, where children run away from books, where the daughter in-law is not happy with the mother in-law, your professional front suffers attacks of criticism from all corners. In a nutshell, you will hear, “You should never feel sad, irritated, angry, greedy, demanding or lazy, because that is what people come to you for. You should always be cheerful, happy, full of energy and all giving, because that is what the end result of your work with each person should be. “

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Handling pregnancy:

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A pregnant woman or a new mother is like a suggestion-box. Everyone around her is full of wise suggestions (with serious expectations of being followed blindly) for her well-being. Perhaps in our culture, strength of relationships is directly proportional to the number of suggestions and commands that are exchanged and followed. When you are carrying, all aunties, distant cousins, neighbors and even passers-by have good stock of suggestions for you, on what to expect and when, what to do, how to do, expecting you to look bewildered on knowing something so important, yet unknown until now and of course, express gratitude for sharing it, promising to follow it without fail. If unfortunately you have studied psychology of children and you happen to know the dynamics of child development from womb life till teenage, you may not be able to show the required bewilderedness and gratitude, thereby disappointing those around you, even though you thank them for their piece of advice. You fail to be a good suggestion-box. You become useless in their world of give-and-take-suggestions.

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Emotional upheavals, mood swings, morning sickness, anxieties, fears are common during pregnancy. They are understood by those who have gone through the turbulent 9 months. The newness of experiences and the strangeness of bodily changes can turn the tables from sanity to insanity. But somehow people do not expect a pregnant doctor to experience these feelings. In addition, if you are a pregnant mental-doctor (forgive me for using such a term), you might as well resign from the world of emphatic understanding. Nobody expects a good therapist to say such a thing as, “I don’t understand what is happening to me. I feel so sad without any apparent reason these days”. People assume that you should not feel any emotional problem in the first place, and even if you do, you should be able to sort it out in a snap. That you are trained enough to handle such feelings. They do not have time and patience to hear the moans and complaints of someone who should be on the receiving end of the conversation and not the speaking end. So what if you are pregnant! It is almost like saying, if you are a gynecologist, you should not feel any labor pain and you can handle your own delivery or if you are a general physician, you should never fall ill. Common! Even the best-trained and experienced cardiac surgeon can have a heart attack and in such a situation, he cannot perform his own surgery. The best hair-stylist in town definitely goes to another stylist when they need a haircut. So it is very hard to understand why a psychotherapist is forced to feel inadequate when they experience trouble, when they need help.

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Handling kids:

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Women in our country have been programmed to devote themselves to their home-husband-children loop. This devotion, by default, is amalgamated with pseudo-positive feelings. No amount of house-chores, baby-chores, lack of personal life can justify that frown. Sleepless nights with a colicky baby, tiring days, round the clock feed-milk-change-diaper routine, exhausted soul 24*7, with no sick leave, no weekends. And yet they are expected to say how blissful it is, to have the most wonderful gift of life, that is, a complete family, with children as pivotal point, of course. Imagine how this kind of expectation affects the perception of all women around, when you, again by the same bad luck, are a psycho-sophisticated mother (sigh!). You might have given up your job as a therapist to take care of your small baby. After all, it is a high-pressure job and does not have provisions for work from home. And you, for sure, do not want to neglect even smallest aspects of your child’s development. So you might decide to resume your practice once your child starts going to school. You love your baby, you care about your husband and you look after the house dearly, but that does not mean that you cannot feel the tinge of frustration when you are exhausted after feeding and the baby is crying again for a diaper change.� Almost all mothers suppress this frustration, feel guilty about that momentary anger at the baby and attend to the diaper change immediately, singing a song in mind “oh, how much I love my baby!!”. If you are a mother who has studied the deep dynamics of psyche, you are bound to understand when your unconscious feelings manifest in your behavior, even though it is for a fraction of second. You may interpret your inabilities as your unwillingness, your reluctance as your anger. But, what do you do next? Do you foolishly tell any of this to someone else (and thus attract sarcasm and taunts)? Or do you keep all this in your mind and go on feeling angry at others for not empathizing with you? Or do you vent it out somewhere (like me, through this write-up)?

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As a mother and as a therapist, I have realized that I should not discard my feelings into dustbin along with the diapers. I must acknowledge what I am experiencing. I must accept that I can have negative feelings for my baby. I must feel reassured that my positive feelings are way too bigger than those negative ones and my relationship with my baby will be rock-solid enough to withstand momentary anger or frustration. I must learn to take out time for myself without feeling guilty. If others feel that my inability to understand my child’s whines reflects my incompetence as a psychotherapist, I must learn to ignore them and continue to interact with my child with a fresh mind, without any preconceived notions.

Smiling is a great way to improve our physical and mental health, beauty and interpersonal relationships. But before we proceed, close your eyes for a few seconds, slowly take a deep breath, smile and exhale slowly while opening your eyes. The...

the kid in question is a 6years old boy..i dont know much about the family dynamics, except that the father is always out of town on work-trips(mostly to foreign countries), the grandmother is on wheel chair, the grand father is a retired and affluent person in the society and the mother(dunno if she is working) doesnt talk to anyone in the society(and always looks angry)

this kid is always getting fancy, imported and costly stuff that his father(perhaps as a compensatory measure)�brings from all possible corners of the globe he covers. as a result, other kids buzzzzz around him like honey-bees when this boy has something new to show off..this has given him a hell lot of attitude.he thinks very poorly of his friends, is passive-aggressive in nature(to an extent of becoming a sadist from time to time, as u can often catch him petting and then torturing stray cats). he is unable to mingle well with the society kids in the playground and gets into fights very frequently. the other kids, for the greed of new stuff, do not complain even after being hit by this kid.but on rare occasions when they do complain to his family, the family members shout back at them and take side of this kid. the mother stands in the balcony to make sure that her kid is not scolded by the watchman for plucking flowers, that he is not being told by other mothers to slow down with his cycle where toddlers play, that he is not getting hit back after hitting or hurting other kids. the grandfather also keeps coming to the playground to warn everyone. the other kids do not talk to this 15 kg weakling for a couple of days after the big-fight, but then again start buzzing around him when he gets another fancy stuff to show off.

in my 6years of practice,i have never seen a worse case of spoiling your kid..it puzzles me to see how can a family be so blinded by 'love and affection' that they are unable to see that they are doing more harm than good..i wonder if we are also guilty of taking side of our kids without knowing, or trying to know, what happened..i wonder if we also wish and try to do something to help our children stand out in crowd..i wonder to what extent we go, or we should go, to make our children feel special?

any thoughts, friends?

BLOG !! the newest craze in cyber world..ever since amitabh bachchan and the likes started blogging, it has become a religious duty for everyone..its like the new and must thing in the fashion world, without which one is considered...

People have different needs related to sleep. Some need 10 hours of sleep everyday, while some may feel fresh by sleeping for just 6 hours. Sleep has a very deep connection with our physical and mental states. During fevers or other infections,...

Consider this. You are an IT professional and you have taken your two-year old daughter to the play area where, she has just deliberately shoved a child for the fourth time today. The hurt child’s mother looks at you. You give an apologetic...

raw: grated carrots, grated cucumber, onions(not kidding!!), sliced tomato

sauted: grated carrots, chopped cabbage, diced capsicum

baked: boiled potatoes, broccoli

cooked in our indian style(not spicy though): potatoes, lady's finger, beetroot, cauliflower, beans, bottle gourd, snake gourd, carrots, capsicum

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my personal feeling is that since i never wished my mother on this day when i was a child, it makes me feel very awkward when i wish her now. she too feels very squirmish. we both finish the process quite quick and get onto talking about something else. we share a great rapport and� a rock-solid relationship, but somehow we dont feel at ease when mothers day come. no one as an outsider can make out the discomfort we experience, but both of know how both of us feel..the comfort level is still not there. it was easy to start the trend with my mother in law, as the familiarity and comfort level with the idea didnt matter in her case.

but with my own son, again, i couldnt feel at home with the idea. he is too young to understand what� mothers day is (he is just 1.8), and i dont want to start it on my own. when my husband went ahead to tell my son to wish me, i felt we were forcing him to put me on a dias unnecessarily. i may be wrong, but i feel that when he grows big, and when he knows that in the month of May, this day comes every year, if he wants to wish me on his own, i would truly cherish it. but not, if i� teach him myself to wish me..

any thoughts?