Therapy Notes

  Feeling overwhelmed by a breakup? Can’t stop crying? The more you try to put it out of your head, the worse it gets. You’re hurting, and you don’t know how to stop it. What you’re feeling is quite natural. We all hurt. The range of emotions – love, anger, hatred, fear, jealousy, sadness, loneliness, surprise and more – are all normal. The ones that make us feel good are not the ones we worry about.   It’s the ones that trouble us. Because of the pain we feel, we often try to suppress these emotions. However, the more we suppress emotions, or tell ourselves they don’t matter, the more we will hurt. If an emotion troubles us, the first reaction may be to ignore it or pretend it isn’t there. For example, if we like someone, and they don’t reciprocate, we’ll sometimes pretend we don’t care. If we are jealous of a friend, partner or a person or situation in which we are not getting the attention we feel we deserve, we suffer. We hurt. We pretend it doesn’t matter. But it does...

  I often hear people say: I am so afraid. We are afraid of many things, real and unreal. Growing up, as children, often adults threaten with fearful outcomes if we do not eat, sleep, or do what we should be doing. I remember our ayah, the woman who took care of my sisters and me while we were children, would often scare us by saying an old man with a sack would take us away if we were naughty or disobedient. For years, I had a recurring dream, a nightmare really, of an old man with the sack coming up to the house to take me away. I was running, terrified, not being able to move. Patients come to me with various fears: of flying, of fire, of water. Some of these fears are real in the sense that people have witnessed a plane crash or a fire or experienced almost drowning. It could have been in this life or a past life. I had a patient who was petrified of flying. During a hypnosis session, she saw a past life in which her mother died in a plane crash, a crash she witnessed a...

  I have been working as a psychotherapist in the Delhi area in India for almost twenty years.  When I started, therapy was not popular in India, as most people thought seeking help was  something to ashamed of. And many still do.  Growing up in India in the 50s and 60s, the only word for people who were not mentally well was 'mad'.   Keen to study an area that focused on the mind, after high school, I didn't figure out that it was psychology I wanted and there wasn't anybody to guide me. Fortunately, I fell into taking Education as my major in College, during which I was exposed to a fair amount of psychology.  While I was living in the United States in the 70s and 80s that I sought therapy. I had issues that I couldn't work out on my own. I too, initially resisted, thinking it was for the weak and I could manage by myself. But, I couldn't. My housemate suggested a therapist she had been working with.  I was in therapy in the U.S., Italy and when...