Monday, August 24, 2015

It began filling a home years back...

Have you found your child very hyperactive? Did you try exploring with your child what could keep him or her happily engaged as well as calm down over time? You better be prepared to be surprised to see how such an activity can help your child no longer be an annoyance to the teacher.

Here is a mom writing to her son about her experience when she began to explore and how she discovered some truths…

My dear son,
You may not be aware, but every day when the sun is down and you are back from your play-session, I cannot wait for you to settle down with your keyboard. If you are wondering why, it’s because evening-time is not only the time of your daily tryst with music, but also mine. You have been an active child right from your infant years, often loving to test my endurance limit by playing pranks and fidgeting around when the need is to focus and study. I have tried everything, from coaxing to explaining to admonishing, to make you sit a little longer with your books, but they have yielded only temporary results. It would have continued on this note, had it not been for my chance discovery of your love for music. Of course, the first credit goes to your Computers teacher who observed you and came up with the suggestion to involve you in a hobby activity that calms you down.

I can still recall how you sat still, interested and observant, as your music teacher gradually introduced you to the world of *“Saa-reh-gaa-maa” (equivalent of Do-re-me-fa) and how your eyes gleamed and your face shone with a newfound passion when your fingers set about mastering tune after tune every week. Well, to say I was surprised would be an understatement. I was clearly amazed at how music was playing its magic on you, moulding you, and changing you. Yes, changing you slowly. You just seemed to be transported to a new world where even small noises wouldn’t be distractions for you anymore. 

As your rendezvous with tunes continued, there was something I discovered about myself too - I too have a deep love for music and that it runs deep in me, maybe a little too deep for even me to be aware of it. If music calms you down, it soothes me. If music helps you kill boredom, it rejuvenates my tired mind. If music helps you get focused, it is something I can no longer do without. What is it that sowed this love for music in me? My schooldays rushed back to me as scenes of songs being played out from our school piano went flitting by before my eyes.

There was the song “Peace is flowing like a river…” that helped us unwind after grueling English lessons. Then there was “We shall overcome….” That charged us up and helped us put in our efforts for preparations when the exams came calling. “When upon life’s billows you are tempest-tossed….” let us know that life is not a bed of roses alone, there are thorns too and when the thorns prick, we can think of the roses that we had admired.

Love for songs, love for music had secretly grown in me decades back. Today, as the notes keep floating down to me from your room, I feel blessed – not only for these blissful evenings that you gift me with, but also because I’ve discovered my intense love for music.


Monday, August 17, 2015

Why are children far away from India being exhorted to rise up to the challenge of Indian children habitually staying far ahead in the race?

How much should we retain from our time-tested methods of learning vis-à-vis how much are we actually still holding with us against this great wave of ‘modern methods’ of learning? 

How much should we absorb from the new, modern method of learning that seems to sweep many Indian parents off their feet, without letting go of the proven Indian ways of learning?

While facing the teacher during parent-teacher-meetings, how much are we ready to accept our children’s flaws as we keep nodding fondly at their strengths being highlighted? How much grit do we have to face the truth and do something about it?

Here goes the story of a boy and his mom....

My son became a Fourth Grader and strangely did not want to contest the election for the post of prefect in his class this time. He said he had had enough of it. Chatty that he always has been, the duty of keeping discipline in the class came as an unwelcome item in the list of responsibilities. There were noticeable changes in him that year and the next. Even the way his teachers looked at him was different now. Their eyes did not light up when I attended usual meetings with them for them to brief me up about his progress. His comprehensive profile was mediocre. Something did not seem to be right. Was it a mother’s sixth sense? I gave repeated visits to the school to get reassured by his teachers. They hinted that he is a bit lazy, not forgetting to add that he has very good application skills. “He does get carried away by the pranksters of the class, but is a gem of a boy.”

They did not mention that he could do much better than he was doing. Some almost hinted that I was being a too concerned mother. But something inside me told the red signals were showing and I had to take notice of them. It took me quite some time to realize that teachers had not been forthcoming enough about the transformation in him. It took me a year to realize why this was so. 

My one-year stint as a teacher in a school put things in perspective. In a bid to not hurt parents’ feelings, teachers today are far more polite and do not readily talk about a child’s shortcomings. Moreover, to keep boosting the children, they speak about their strengths, while merely mentioning their weaknesses. Sadly, if your antennae are not ‘up’ to catch the subtle messages they pass on, you miss something important, something that could direct your child right towards the goals you and he have envisioned.

When I look back at my days in school, I can’t help but admire the way my teachers did not mince words. They were not worried about if what they said hurt their pupils’ self-esteem. Bitter words do hurt, but only for the time-being, and help in the long run, provided they are taken in the right spirit. Were my parents hurt if some not-so-encouraging remark was made about me? Definitely they were not. They were concerned. They immediately reprimanded, if necessary. Did my parents doubt my teachers about their opinion of me, if my teachers felt I wasn’t doing my best? No. Were my parents any different from other parents? No.

The rest is in my book Rays and Rains (e-book available at a much lower price).
Rays and Rains


Friday, August 14, 2015

A quiet, sensitive daughter, feeling disconcerted by her mother’s responses to certain incidents, wouldn’t open up …

Sunaina was dismayed that her daughter Nila has been hiding vital information from her for long. Recently she found Nila's highly expensive gold ring in a corner of her house very unexpectedly. What rattled her was the fact that Nila hadn’t spoken a word about it to her though she was aware of its sudden disappearance. Feeling confused, she shared with me how helpless she felt when she saw her daughter did not share her own feelings and fears with her at all.

The complete story:

Sunaina was distraught that her daughter Nila had always been hiding vital information from her. Dismayed, she poured out her feeling of helplessness as she narrated how she had spotted Nila’s highly expensive, newly-gifted gold ear ring in the corner of a room of her house one morning very recently. Nila, married and settled far away from her home in Bangalore, had come down to spend a few weeks with her parents.

Sunaina has been a working mother all through and has never been able to spend sufficient time with her daughter. The regret remains hidden somewhere inside her that surfaces for a while whenever she narrates to me any incident of her life that leaves her wondering why, at different points of time, her daughter didn’t speak up and share her worries even when she was right near her.

As I empathized with her, I asked her how she responded when such unpleasant events occurred, unexpectedly, in her life. She fumbled for words and so I helped her analyse her own behavior by recalling if she had given herself to outbursts of anger or had become very tensed or nervous. Slowly, through a series of questions from me and her replies, she realized that the anger and acute tension she felt and showed on such occasions had caused huge discomfort to Nila in turn.

By nature quiet and not expressive, Nila had kept the news of the loss of her ear ring to herself instead of sharing it with her mother. Sunaina thought Nila knew she would lose her peace of mind the moment she would hear about it.

Here was an opportunity for Sunaina to look deep within herself and to think about her responses to certain events in her life. She felt she needed to work on herself when it came to expressing her anger with something or somebody. Also, when it came to facing a particularly challenging situation, she indeed would benefit if she knew how to face it better, she felt.

Considering she is mostly time-starved, I gave her a few simple and quick tips:
·        *Keep taking deep breaths.
·        *If possible, leave the place, where the event has occurred or the person whose presence is causing you discomfort/tension, for a while.
·        *Get busy doing something simple, preferably with your hands.
·        *When you feel a little calm, you may return to taking up the issue that was bothering you deeply.
Sunaina no longer complains about her daughter. Now she knows what tools she possesses to deal with a situation, the kind of which had her at its mercy in the past quite often and wreaked havoc in her fast-paced life by impacting her relationship with her family suddenly and swiftly now and then.
(I came in touch with Sunaina  when I was having a session with an old lady who was mourning the sudden loss of her doctor brother, much before Sunaina approached me recently for help.)


I'm glad if my post has touched you. Since I have the constraint of returning home well before my daughter is back from school, I cannot give myself to counseling as much and also as often I'd like to. So maybe your sharing of my experiences with my counselees, with your friends, and you asking them in turn to do the same, could compensate for that a little bit at least.



Monday, August 10, 2015

Water, not too much, not too little, at the right moments, for every sapling within my reach

The thought behind the birth of my creation “Rays and Rains”:

Very happy was the potter,
In her hands she held the soft clay.
She sat down in earnest,
to shape it into a pot within a day!
Later she left the wheel aside,
for it wasn’t really very soft, the clay,
She has begun shaping with her fingers,
and learning many truths along the way.
It’s quite tough, but she won’t give up and go away,
for she knows, with efforts, it will be a pot some day.
It may be perfect or maybe not,
“I enjoyed it and did my best”, one day
the potter would proudly say.

A little of a potter and a little of a gardener - that is how I feel about myself now. Whether it is my daughter, my son or any of my young counselees, every time I interact with each one of them, I know I'm touching a sapling. The sapling is growing. If I pour too much water over it, it could droop. If I pour only a little, it could get stunted. If I pour the right amount, but at the wrong time, that too would impact its growth.

I am a mother. And I am a counselor.

Every morning arrives with a golden opportunity for me to spray water, not too much, not too little, over each sapling within my reach, at the right moments.


The rest is in my book Rays and Rains (e-book available at a much lower price).
Rays and Rains
Reviews


Tuesday, August 4, 2015

A basketful of experiences at a rehab centre near B.G. Road, Bangalore

The second part of this series features at Why do they throw away a life that was going hunky-dory?

As a counselor and as an interviewer….

Life can indeed take strange turns at the most unexpected moments for inexplicable reasons for someone. This truth has been staring at me from time to time whenever I visit a centre for rehabilitation of addicts to talk to the people there as a part of my counseling journey. My sessions there with people from different backgrounds give me a view of a different world – a world unknown to most people around us. At the centre, some of the inmates are alcoholics, addicts and into substance abuse.
Why does someone veer off the track he was walking on and allow himself to go astray and ‘fall’ before the public eye? What are his internal struggles? When he finally does pick up the pieces, and aim to come back on track, how do people around take it? How does it in turn affect his morale?
My own conversations with some inmates over a few months and a recent interview with the chief official there gave answers to many questions that have hovered in my mind and many minds for long.
The following questions and answers carry the essence of my talks there as a counselor and the conversations as part of the interview (I've kept it shorter and simpler through editing). The answers carry answers to multiple questions, though not in the exact order in which I asked them during my counseling sessions with the inmates and during the interview of the chief official.

Why and when do they start going astray? Is there a usual trend seen amongst them? Is it linked with the economic background etc?
It can happen at any age. Nowadays, even boys in their teens are falling prey to this habit. Some of them are school-dropouts. There are middle-aged men too. They are a few old people too. People from different economic and social sections of society come to the centre. They can succumb to the ‘disease’ without any logical reason. It may have triggered from a failed relationship or a failed marriage. It can be owing to being unemployed and idle. It can be because of influence of friends going astray.

Under what circumstances do their relatives come to get them admitted here?
When they get violent or act in an extremely unacceptable way under the effect of alcohol/drugs/substances, they even hurt their near and dear ones mentally, psychologically and physically. Sooner or later, sometimes in the very next morning, it is all flushed out of their mind. They are in no mood to believe how unreasonably they have behaved and how much hurt they have caused to their near and dear ones repeatedly over a period of time.

Sometimes they get alienated from their family and friends which brings about a quicker ‘fall’. They lose focus completely and literally do not know what to do with their life because it is already in a mess.
It is under these circumstances that they are brought to the centre.

What is the mental state of the addict during admission to the centre?
When the addict is brought in for admission, he is consumed with resentment and anger. If he is a father, he still loves his child and is thus furious that his wife, with help of family, has taken the audacious step of keeping him away from their child. He does not realize that he has been a nuisance to and a burden for the family instead of having been a support.
If he is a young, unmarried man, he is extremely annoyed and bewildered that he has been left behind by his parents here.

Does his mental state undergo any change over time? How does it undergo change? How fast or slow is it?
As he begins to follow a schedule in the centre, away from alcohol/drugs/substances, he begins to feel better in every way. His appetite returns. He sleeps soundly. His mind gets clearer. He is again able to think logically. It dawns on him that there can be a life without alcohol/drugs. The truth glares at him – he has been irresponsible. He begins to feel that he has let his family down. He has caused them misery to no end.
Then his ego begins to overshadow the thoughts. It provokes him to think that he is not the culprit, that he had no option but to resort to drugs/alcohol because of certain events or certain unreasonable people in his life.
There begins a struggle in his mind between his new self and his ego. And there begins a transformation. It is a very difficult stage of his life when he realizes that he should mend his ways, but does not have the courage and determination to. This process of self-introspection, realization and transformation happens at its own pace. Some people leave the centre at the end of three months, while some take more time.
But for people who have been brought by family under some condition (as a sort of bribe), the transformation does not usually take place. When they go back to their familiar environment, and see that the condition is not being met by the family, they tend go back to their old ways.

How does the centre help the inmate go back to the normal way of life?
A rigid time-bound schedule from early morning till night ensures that every inmate follows a routine. A good healthy diet throughout the day everyday helps him feel healthy from inside. Regular health checks by visiting doctors and psychiatrists and face-to-face sessions with visiting counselors give a boost to his mental health.
After some days of staying ‘clean’ at a stretch, when he is feeling much sober, his family visits him. This is termed as ‘family confrontation’ during which he interacts with his family and understands all the more the huge ordeal his near and dear ones have gone through again and again, owing to his addiction.
This is followed by a solitary confinement when he is suggested to self-introspect.
The next stage is the group discussion, when he is given a forum to share with the group his past and how he feels about it and how he intends to pick up the pieces of life to move on. The other group members too, do the same. Since during family confrontation before the self-introspection, some other inmates were told to be present as mute spectators, they too act as witnesses during the group discussion. This does not allow him any room for telling lies about himself or the circumstances under which he took to alcohol/drugs.
When the realization finally comes to him that now the time has arrived to mend his ways and he finally feels he can and should begin working in that direction, he has dealt with his ego at last. He is given permission to walk out of the centre when his family comes to pick him up. (Sometimes there is a relapse. It could be because of the fact that he was brought here in the first place under some condition that is not possible to satisfy, which he realizes, when he is out again.)

I'm glad if my post has touched you. Since I have the constraint of returning home well before my daughter is back from school, I cannot give myself to counseling as much and also as often I'd like to. So maybe your sharing of my experiences with my counselees, with your friends, and you asking them in turn to do the same, could compensate for that a little bit at least.




Sunday, August 2, 2015

Case Studies from a Counselor's cabin

Relationships can run or ruin a world!

------------When the communication channel is not there---------

Samira has been alienating herself from her mother right from her teen years. Roshni, her mom, having been a time-starved working mom all through her life, neither had the inclination to work on the fragile relationship, nor had the time. Samira felt neglected and as a young adult she was not on cordial terms with Roshni. The relationship, worsening each day, needed repairs.
Initially hesitant and sometimes rude during my sessions with her, Samira started opening up gradually. Our rapport started building during our talks on her family life, her friends’ circle and what she felt about life. Her anger and bitterness over Roshni’s neglect towards her and unkind behaviour over the years began pouring out.
I empathized with her just as much as I refrained from judging her. Over time, through our sessions, realization dawned on her that Roshni actually cared about her though she could never express it and that her frustration for never having had sufficient family time made her an embittered person. Now less agitated and more matured, Samira doesn’t brush aside her mother brusquely any more. A new relationship has just begun.



------------When comparison does more harm than good----------

Ruby, a sensitive pre-teen, is no longer quiet and often gets into loud verbal battles with her mother, Ajita. Well-educated, Ajita quit work since she felt Ruby needed her at home though of late she felt Ruby was not grateful or respectful towards her. A session with Ruby helped me know that she is raring to grow out of her shell, wanting to have her own space and her own free time. During my sessions with Ajita, I empathized with her as she shared how sad and angry she felt for being taken for granted by Ruby and that Ruby’s stubbornness and lack of ambition came in the way of her being an achiever in different areas. It became increasingly clear that Ajita herself was under pressure of seeing Ruby a great performer everywhere. Ruby, though a topper in school wasn’t focusing enough on anything, she felt. Through our interactions over days, Ajita realized that continued comparison with Ruby’s peers actually didn’t inspire Ruby to get focused and Ajita needed to go easy on her by beginning to let her handle her tasks. This way, Ruby would know that she had to begin taking charge. Ajita is now getting ready to let Ruby face the outcome of her own attitude and actions and start taking the first steps towards becoming responsible.

I'm glad if my post has touched you. Since I have the constraint of returning home well before my daughter is back from school, I cannot give myself to counseling as much and also as often I'd like to. So maybe your sharing of my experiences with my counselees, with your friends, and you asking them in turn to do the same, could compensate for that a little bit at least.