Marriage Counsellor and Psychologist Shivani Misri Sadhoo

Some couples break up for the most trivial things, while others continue fighting for their relationships not noticing that the entire energy they are consuming is actually going to waste. Well, neither of those is correct because the first is a misjudgment of their partner while the other one tends to create toxic tension. The true secret lies in the fact that there are certain mistakes that are forgivable, and others that are quite difficult to let pass simply like that.

While most of you might think that major break-up reasons might be normally, obvious and easy to spot, the reality is that they actually are not. Yes, some circumstances or characteristics could be so subtle that you would not even notice the fact that they are alarming bells for you to pay attention to.

This blog by Delhi’s Top Marriage Counselor Shivani Misri Sadhoo talks about some unclear and tricky signs of a relationship that can act as an alarm for you. Here, they are.

Your Partner is Unbelievably Charming and there is Nothing Wrong with them

Excessive charm is generally not good for your relationship’s health. Charm seems to hide bigger issues behind an individual’s personality especially when it is constant or excessive. Yes, it feels good in the beginning, but it is also a big red flag that must get you asking yourself, “Then what are your flaws?”. Even in stories, when a girl meets the flawless man of her dreams, he most probably turns out to be some shady character in the end. You are not being asked to look for the drama, but the effort is to draw your attention towards the fact that too much concealing of a person’s natural and spontaneous traits can lead to big shocks in the end. It is either they are hiding certain things behind this constant sweetness, or they are lying about something. If not any amongst those, then also run because sooner or later, he/she is probably going to get bored of the charming role they are playing and will mistreat you as you had never imagined.

You Quit Fighting

It’s quite common that fighting a lot is one of the big break-up reasons. What might be misunderstood, is that not fighting or arguing at all is a good sign. No, no one is telling you to be a drama queen. Healthy relationships always consist of healthy discussions and arguments. It is a normal phenomenon that indicates how two individuals are always in search of common ground to meet on. When one stops mentioning what may annoy you in a relationship, you may think that you have become more mature. However, it is a sign that you no longer look for solutions, but rather care less about the entire thing. If this happens a lot, it will eventually lead you to stop caring completely, and therefore, you must consider a break-up. This is by time, you’d have reached your complete capacity and would lose interest in your relationship.

You are on Your Partner’s Waiting List of Priorities

It will not be stated clearly. It would be indicated in actions. No matter how much you are told you are important to your partner, you would find him/her always acting otherwise. Work, family, friends always take priority over you. A person who keeps you as an option will tend to make you feel guilty and inconsiderate of his/her busy schedule. This is, definitely, ladies and gentlemen, the art of turning tables. A partner who is not as caring as he/she should be would focus on blaming you rather than trying to make things up to you. Occasionally, you would find him/her forgetting about important events/dates or missing out on gatherings they know are important to you.

Your Counselor Is Now Just Skype/Video Call Away

During the current challenging time, it’s common to experience anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, and relationship challenges at home. While you are under lockdown and maintaining social distancing norms to help the country to control COVID-19 spread, your very own counsellor Shivani is now just a call and Skype video call away from you.

However, in this age of coronavirus, we hope to offer our therapeutic help. Change is difficult for all of us and changing the way you meet with your therapist is no exception.  But try it before you disregard this option.  This is a challenging moment in time, and fears and anxieties are running high.

You may find, telepsychology isn’t a second-rate option. Instead, it’s an effective and efficient upgrade to a valuable service!

Feel free to call Counselor Shivani Misri Sadhoo at +91-8860875040 for telephonic or video support and to book an online counselling session to address any relationship issues, emotional and psychological challenges.

Is crying beneficial for you? The answer is yes. While crying is expected in babies and young kids, whether it is because of pain, anger, fear, lack of communication skills, or any other reasons—adults also cry from time to time. On average, women cry more than 5 times per month and men cry at least once a month. These crying episodes vary anywhere from having tears well up in the eyes or complete sobbing. Psychologist Shivani says, in addition to emotional tears, your body also utilizes tears to physically protect the eyes from harm.

There are 3 kinds of tears each having different purposes. Crying has both emotional and physical benefits, and your body has several ways of producing tears to achieve those benefits. The physical benefits of crying include keeping your eyes lubricated, clean as tears wash away debris and germs that may damage your eye or cause infection. While many a time the emotional tears could provide relief from stress. The three kinds of tears include:

Basal tears: These tears stay continuously in your eyes and maintain eye health. It lubricates your eyes and protects your cornea.

Reflex tears: These also protect your eyes; your body utilizes them to flush out things, like the stray eyelash, dust, smoke, and also the fumes from onions.

Emotional tears: Your body produces tears in response to several emotional states: not just sadness, but also during happiness and fear.

Let us find out the benefits of crying here in the blog, by Delhi’s top psychologist and marriage counselor Shivani Misri Sadhoo.

Emotional Tears Might Help Your Body Release Stress

Psycho-emotional tears contain no physical benefits for the health of your eyes. But emotional tears might flush out stress hormones and other toxins from your body. Some studies have found higher concentrations of specific proteins in emotional tears than in basal or reflex tears. Although more research is required for conclusive evidence, some hypothesize that emotional tears purge the body of stress-related substances.

Crying in a Supportive Environment Makes One Feel Better

Emotional tears could also be a communication tool for adults, suggesting a need for social support. When someone cries with a close friend or a family member nearby, the person mostly feels better after crying. That social support can assist the person resolve a conflict or help the person who is crying better understand the event that occurred that caused the tears. This results in an individual feeling better after crying. In contrast, persons who try to avoid crying or who cry and do not receive social support are less probably to feel better.

Tears of Children Indicates a Need for Care

While it might be frustrating for adults, it is essential for children to cry, for their physical and emotional health. Without hearing an infant cry, parents and caregivers may not immediately know that the baby requires the assistance of some sort, be it is emotional comfort or some other type of care. Babies and kids also cry because of pain as a non-verbal mode to request the care of an adult.

Some Emotional Tears Signal When It Is Time to Seek Professional Help

Frequent emotional crying could be a sign that the person requires to call a professional for help with a mental health issue, like depression. Other signs of depression include feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness; problem sleeping or sleeping excessively, having difficulty making decisions; losing interest in kinds of stuff that were once pleasurable; and thoughts of suicide. When frequent crying is accompanied by other signs of depression, call a professional.

Your Counselor Is Now Just Skype/Video Call Away

During the current challenging time, it’s common to experience anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, and relationship challenges at home. While you are under lockdown and maintaining social distancing norms to help the country to control COVID-19 spread, your very own counsellor Shivani is now just a call and Skype video call away from you.

However, in this age of coronavirus, we hope to offer our therapeutic help. Change is difficult for all of us and changing the way you meet with your therapist is no exception.  But try it before you disregard this option.  This is a challenging moment in time, and fears and anxieties are running high.

You may find, telepsychology isn’t a second-rate option. Instead, it’s an effective and efficient upgrade to a valuable service!

Feel free to call Counselor Shivani Misri Sadhoo at +91-8860875040 for telephonic or video support and to book an online counselling session to address any relationship issues, emotional and psychological challenges.

Loneliness is not the same as being alone. Being alone is a fact whereas loneliness is a feeling. You can feel lonely when you are with friends or with your partner.

At the same time, you don’t need to feel lonely when you are alone.

In other words, loneliness can be termed as the desire to get connected with someone and that someone is not available. This can certainly occur when we are alone, but it also occurs in relationships when one or both partners are unavailable for connection perhaps due to anger, doubts, distrust, withdrawn, tired, ill or just being complacent in the relationship.

So what really causes loneliness in a relationship? According to Delhi’s eminent Relationship and Marriage counselor Shivani Misri Sadhoo, in relationship loneliness is created by certain situations and conditions and there are:

1. When a person is emotionally fragile, many times it’s seen that such personalities start protecting themselves from getting emotionally hurt by expressing anger or by withdrawal. In such a scenario, their partner finds it difficult to connect with them.

2. One may feel lonely with his/her partner when their partner deliberately shuts them out with work, TV, food, hard drink, hobbies, the Internet so on and so forth.

3. One may feel lonely when he/she tries to have control over their partner’s feelings. Since no one in this world likes to be controlled and such tendencies soon pushes away the person’s partner physically and emotionally.

4.  One may feel lonely if the other half keeps judging them regarding their thoughts, feelings, looks or actions. Judgment creates disconnection, and disconnection can be very lonely.

5.  One may also feel lonely when their partner can’t connect with them due to being overly tired, frazzled and overwhelmed or unwell.

Relationship expert and marriage counsellor Shivani Misri Sadhoo suggest if you are in dating world or if your family is arranging a meet with prospective guy or girl for an arranged marriage, here are 4 qualities of a romantic partner that you can look for in the person.

1. Look for similarities between you two

A lot of relationship research across the world has identified that opposites do not always attract in the long term. People tend to find more opportunities to develop their marital relationship when they share similar interests, value system and attitudes. For example, a girl who loves to trek would possibly get better opportunity to enhance her relationship with her husband if he loves to trek as well and they can trek together. However, if there are differences in taste and/or hobbies largely, the couple then should check if they both hold the capacity to respect each other’s individual preferences and can offer each other the freedom to explore their individual interests.

2.  Kindness, fidelity, and support

While selecting an ideal life partner, a person and his/her family in India put a lot of emphasis on personality, career, and earning potential and physical attractiveness. But remember more than anything else, it’s the person’s kindness, loyalty, emotional support and understanding that really defines who he/she is and that will determine if you would really be happy with this person in life.

Since all superficial traits are conditioned to time and situation, like someone who is an average earner today could reach an excellent career point in future or vice versa, or someone who looks extremely beautiful today would be overweight after child birth or vice versa.

But someone who is kind, capable and puts efforts to understand another person’s unspoken words i.e. emotions and feelings–will be like this possible for rest of his/her life. Hence look for these traits and check if it’s genuine or pretended.

3. Have to mean in life.

Appreciate and value the person who is leading a purposeful life, holds a passion, a mission or larger meaning to his/her life. This happens when a person uses his/her strengths to help something they believe in. It might be volunteering with NGO, being an active part of a spiritual process, contributing to a good cause.

Remember a person, who has a bigger mission in life and live more than its materialistic dimensions, holds much better chance to live an emotionally healthy and peaceful old age and that would certainly make them a better life partner than others.

4. Check for emotional stability

This trait is the most important harbinger of relationship success, and should ideally be at No 1. Those who lack emotional stability and are high on the trait of neuroticism, tend to be moody, touchy, anxious, and quicker to anger, all traits that can be destructive in any given relationship. Those who have low emotional intelligence or EQ, tend to be negative and are more prone to be combative with others and their partners. There is a strong link between high levels of neuroticism and divorce.

How to check if the person is emotionally stable? Marriage Counsellor Shivani Misri Sadhoo suggests looks for the following clues.

• An emotionally stable person treats others well. They view other people with compassion and treat them with kindness that is a hallmark of their own emotional well-being.
• An emotionally stable person is flexible. People who have emotional wellness have an ability to adapt to all kinds of situations that life throws at them. They’re able to assess a situation mindfully — they notice their surroundings, their own emotions and other’s reactions to a given situation — and then they use these factors to decide what the best course of action would be for them. Hence if a person shares a difficult period of his/her life and how they overcame time, try to identify how they coped with it, took help of others or used situational assessment, searching inner strength, overcoming fear and doubt etc.
• An emotionally stable person holds gratitude in life. If a person is emotionally healthy, it’s likely he/she easily feels and shows gratitude for the people and the things in their life. Holding gratitude is a way of purposefully looking at our life with a sense of appreciation for what we have, rather than focusing on what we are lacking. And indeed, research has shown that counting our blessings has added strong benefits to our emotional well-being.

According to past sociological & psychological studies & surveys, 67% of couples experience a decline in relationship satisfaction in the first three years of a baby’s life and this deterioration often persists into subsequent years.  In fact, one study showed that couples notice a 40% increase in arguments after having a baby, and two-thirds of these couples admitted that these were often “silly” arguments caused by stress or exhaustion.

Though many couples are over the moon about their new bundle of joy, they also struggle with work-life balance, more loneliness, financial stress, friendship changes, more chores, and minimal free time.

New parents are also sleep-deprived, which, research suggests, greatly diminishes their ability to stay positive, communicate, and manage your emotions. One study revealed that working couples felt their daily workload increased by 4 hours each day after they had a baby.

Today relationship expert and Marriage Counsellor Shivani Misri Sadhoo shares some important tips that new or would-be parents can follow & practice to avoid the decline of their relationship & closeness after having their baby.

1. Understand, Communicate and except that there will be change in Sex life

Women and men are wired very differently – a new mother can be totally consumed with baby care all day and night. She may simply feel ‘all energy drained out’ after giving so much of her body to the baby and energy to household chores. Conversely, the guy’s way of feeling close is to have sex. As this is where things can break down, communication and understanding play a vital role in increasing the intimacy.

Counsellor Shivani suggests all husbands that during their early fatherhood phase, instead of ending up staying away from the wife and feel rejected in their heart, they should put efforts to do baby care & household chores and try to get their wife as much as possible the free time to take rest. This will definitely go to win their wife’s attention and heart and gradually will make them come closer their husband.

2.  Mothers should find some time for themselves

Remember if you feel worn out after a long day, you can’t expect to feel excited about your relationship: you need to keep loving yourself in little ways so that you have good energy and loving feelings towards your partner.

“It’s important to find ‘me’ time as well as “we” time,” says Counsellor Shivani. It can be good to stick a reminder  fir the things you need to do for self-care – from painting your toenails to watching a movie on Youtube while you feed the child or call a friend or check emails while baby has a kick on the floor,

3.  Plan The Time You Can Spend with your partner.

Good relationship maintenance requires couples to spend quality time with each other and after the baby comes, free time looks like a distant dream. Hence couples must recognize the requirement to spend quality time and they should plan accordingly. Like every weekend you may keep you child with his/her grandparents and go to watch a movie or have a dinner in the restaurant.

4.  Both the partners should try to join parenting classes

In today’s nuclear family parents put too much attention on their single or two children and as result, today’s parents commonly argue over whose way is right, because both partners are adjusting to their new roles and responsibilities.

Many young fathers feel left out, especially if the mother acts as the baby’s primary caregiver. New moms often feel as if their husbands are ill-informed or less experienced and that sparks the frequent arguments.

Hence before the baby is born, both the partners should conjointly visit the doctor and most importantly both should try to attain parental classes that generally been organized by all major hospitality chains or by individual counselors.  This way they will adopt coordinated parenting style early in their life instead of wasting their precious time arguing, criticizing each other parenting style and distancing themselves from each other.

About the author: Counsellor Shivani Misri Sadhoo is the consulting psychologist with Fortis Hospital, IBS (Indian Brain & Spine) Hospital and with Express Clinics.

Counsellor Shivani has served over thousands plus happy & satisfied individuals and couples in India and abroad.She is one of India’s eminent Marriage Counsellor & Relationship Expert, who is frequently been featured by leading newspapers, magazines and TV channels.