Marriage Counsellor and Psychologist Shivani Misri Sadhoo

Whether it relates to your relationships, career, or your own self well-being, knowing how to tough through disturbing situations by finding ways to be emotionally strong can positively impact your life. When it comes to stress, it can affect many people in various ways, some might cry every time they are frustrated or guilty. While others choose to be quiet and hide until they feel good. Though, there is nothing wrong with either of those situations. Being aware of how to manage your emotions and dictate why you are feeling them can help you understand yourself in a better way so that you can stop considering yourself weak.

Emotional strength comes from when you allow yourself to be both independent and dependent. This means developing up your internal resources and becoming comfortable seeking and accepting help,

Learning how to handle life’s misfortunes is a great method to build your emotional strength.

Delhi’s top marriage counsellor and relationship expert Shivani Misri Sadhoo share tips to make yourself emotionally stronger.

Respect the Strength Of Your Past

It becomes difficult to be emotionally strong if you keep living in the past. You need to throw away those thoughts and accept the reality that those struggles made you who you are today, which is a strong, better person. Many a time we have bitterness from the devastation, slavery or even family history of violence and crime. You can instead, respect the struggles and our cultures in a way which are positive. Do not discount the struggle, instead see how it can be a way to respect the strength in your past. If you can honor the strength of the past, you are a result of that past, so you honor yourself and become stronger.

Make Healthy Choices

A lot of your emotional strength generally comes from within. This means you will most likely feel your best if you eat healthily and treat your body with utmost care. Remember that every time you make healthy choices, you actually strengthen yourself. For example, have you selected an apple over a sweet candy, one point scored for becoming stronger? Have you taken a stroll and enjoy the view? Another point scored for resiliency. Honor every time you create a healthy decision.

Help Others in Need

It may sound weird to help other people especially when you are trying to figure out things for yourself. But when you are unselfish you can become strong because the care you show towards others can reverberate and look into caring for your own life, too. Helping others creates empathy and it makes us a better person, over a period of time. This way you become stronger emotionally.

Embrace Your Adversities

Never beat yourself up when things are not going your way. Failing is a part of life and how you look to challenge and accept it can really alter your perspective in a positive manner. Try to practice some positive psychology and start to embrace all your challenges and adversities as your greatest teachers and power for changes.

Identify Your Emotions

Do not look to criticize or punish yourself for having certain feelings. It is natural to feel low, angry or jealous. When you experience any negative emotions, carefully analyze them and figure out what you want your next step to be. Allow yourself to identify and accept every emotion you have and then decide if you want to follow this emotion or let it go.

Relationship Tips by Marriage Counsellor Shivani Misri Sadhoo

Many of you believe that love should be similar to the kind of romance you see portrayed in movies, television, and storybooks. Due to this notion, you may feel that a romantic relationship are less if you do not experience this kind of fairy tale relationship.

Many a time you feel like if you can have a perfect prince or princess then life will be a lot easier. You will think that your life will be safer forever.

The reality is you did marry a prince or a princess but that person is also a human, who will have faults and shortcomings like any other person, does not matter how wonderful he or she is. You need to understand that at some point you have to let go of the unrealistic metaphor of romantic love in order to search true happiness.

So, how could you make relationships work and remain happy?

You need to begin with the understanding of what eternal love is and then redefine and update the romantic fairy-tale into a healthier kind of love.

Today, Delhi’s eminent marriage counselor and relationship expert Shivani Misri Sadhoo reveals how to create a strong, intimate relationship. Here they are. These will help you to create true intimacy, find real love and be truly happy in your relationship.

Use Relationships to Teach You How to Be Complete within

Relationships are not just about having another person fulfil you, but coming to the relationship whole and sharing your life interdependently. By letting go of the romantic ideal of merging and becoming “ONE” to love the gaps in a relationship as much as the closeness.

Look Your Partner For Who He or She Really Is

The tragedy in romance happens when you look at the person you are in love with as a symbol of what they have come to show, the idea of him or her. When you understand that more often than not you do not actually know your partner, you start to discover who they are and how they change and evolve.

Be Willing To Learn From Each Other

The idea is to see the other as a mirror and learn from the image of how you can be a better person. When you feel upset, rather than blame your partner and pointing fingers, remain awake to what is yet to be healed in yourself.

Get Comfortable Being Alone

In order to accept that love cannot save you from being alone, try to learn to spend time being with yourself. By feeling safe and secure to be on your own within the core of the relationship, you will feel complete and happy.

Own Who You Are

We generally grasp at romantic love because we’re desiring for something that is beyond reach, something in our partner that we do not think we possess in ourselves. Sadly, when we finally get love, we discover that we have not got what we were looking for.

Understand that true love only exists by loving yourself first. You can get only from another person what you are willing to give yourself.

Embrace Ordinariness

Once the fairy-dust start of a relationship ends, we find ordinariness, and we often try to do everything we can to avoid it. The idea is to see that ordinariness can become the real “spice” of intimacy. The daily loveliness of sharing life with your partner can, and does, become extraordinary.

Monitor Closely Why a Fight May Start

Many couples create distance by fighting and then making up time and again. This allows you to continue the romantic trance, creating scenes and escaping real intimacy. If you become aware of what you fear about intimacy, you will have a better sense of why you are fighting and are likely to fight less.

Expand Your Heart

One thing that unites us is that we all want to be happy. This happiness generally includes the desire to be close to someone in a loving way. To create true intimacy, get in touch with the spaciousness of your heart and bring awareness to what is good inside you. It will be easier to identify the good in your partner when become connected to the good in yourself.

Focus on Giving Love

True happiness is not about feeling good about yourselves because other people love you this is more about how well you have loved yourselves and others. The unintentional result of loving others more deeply is that we are loved more deeply.

Let Go Of Expectations

You might look at things such as romance and constant togetherness to fill a void in yourself. This will certainly cause suffering. If you unconsciously expect to receive love in particular ways to avoid giving that love to yourself, you will put your sense of security in someone else. Create upon your own inner-resources to offer love, attention, and nurture to yourself when you require it. This way you can allow love to come to you instead of putting expectations on what it needs to look like.

These are some ways by exploring them you can create a strong and intimate relationship.

Relationship Tips by Relationship Counselor Shivani Misri Sadhoo

Human relationships are quite fickle and tricky at times, particularly in marital life. You never know what will happen next in your relationship. More so if it involves cheating on your partner. When someone you love and betrays your trust, it can feel like a hopeless situation. But when you learn how to move on after cheating, it’s completely possible for your relationship to survive.

Here’s how to turn your relationship around, repair trust, and get things back on track. India’s eminent marriage counsellor and relationship expert Shivani Misri Sadhoo reveals 5 ways couples can survive cheating.

1.    Practice Gratitude

Does not matter what happened in your marriage, coming back to gratitude will set the groundwork for positive transformation.

If you feel destroyed by betrayal and despair, take a moment to focus on appreciation. Think about all the things you appreciate about your mate. After a few minutes of refocusing in this way, notice what changes inside you.

2.      Completely Face Your Feelings

When you are hurt or emotionally broken, you may tend to blame, run, fight, judge or explain. If you can stop and fully feel the heartache gently, you will be surprised at what is possible. When you step completely into the sensation in your heart, beyond thought and explanation, the feeling commences shifting.

3.    Try to Do Things Together

Couples who spend time together and have shared interests recover from cheating much more rapidly and effectively. Try to discover or rediscover things that you can do together that you both enjoy. Always remember that not all hobbies or activities are costly there are plenty of things you can do together that do not cost money.

4.   Create a Vision of the Past And The Future

One of the ways that couples can learn how to move on after cheating is to think about the past like when they first met or got married. How did you fall in love? Why did you get married? How did the relationship look like back then?

Now, assume about the future you wanted together enjoying your golden years of togetherness, travelling, playing with the grandchildren, and enjoying family activities. What would it look like? Create an image of these things and how nice it can be to share this with the person you love most the person with whom you are married.

5.   Start a better-than-ever relationship

Take a relationship education course or counselling that starts by helping you identify the weaker areas in your relationship and then try to strengthen them for future happiness together. The more powerful your skills for talking together about sensitive issues are, the less likely you will be to drift apart or to let anger or disagreement rifts lead to resentment or fights.

In general, couples who are fleeting through distressed relationship doubt if couple counselling would never work for them or not or would it be a wastage of time and money – and that stops them from seeking professional help from an expert who can save their relationship and marriage.

The problem arises because there are myths about the low success rate of couples therapy. People with no experience of good counselling or who don’t know about the subject, give the worst advice to distressed people. “Couple Counselling is a waste of money”, “rather wear gems or consult an astrologer, do yoga, meet new people” but don’t trust a trained and certified expert who is trained and experienced especially to help distressed couples and to save their relationship and marriage.

Delhi’s eminent Psychologist and Couple Counsellor Shivani Misri Sadhoo tell us that the success rate of couple therapy is extremely high. She says there has been much research done to check the success rate of couple counselling and the results are always extraordinary, for example recently a research was done by the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, families and couples who have attended family or couples therapy sessions indicate high levels of patient satisfaction. Over 98% of those surveyed reported that they received good or excellent couples therapy. Respondents also reported improved physical and emotional health and the ability to communicate better at work after attending therapy.

So how couple counselling work? Counsellor Shivani Misri Sadhoo says good couple counselling works on certain basic principles and that pulls out couples from their distressed state to a positive and healthy relationship condition. These principals are:

1. Good couple counselling changes the views of the relationship.

First, the couple therapist helps both partners see the relationship in an objective manner.  The therapist helps the couples to learn to stop the “blame game” and instead look at what happens to them when they involve each partner negatively.

2. Modifies dysfunctional behaviour.

Effective couple therapist attempts to change the way the partners actually behave with each other. This means that in addition to helping them improve their interactions, therapists ensures that their clients are not engaging in actions that can cause physical, psychological or economic harm to self or to their partner.

3. Decreases Emotional Avoidance

Couples who avoid expressing their innermost feelings put themselves at a greater risk of becoming emotionally distant and hence grow apart. Effective couples therapist helps their clients bring out the emotions and thoughts that they fear expressing to the other person. Attachment-based couples therapy allows the partners to feel less afraid of expressing their needs for closeness.

4. Improves Communication

An effective couple counsellor focuses on helping the partners to communicate more effectively. The new communication mode which the counsellor redevelops within couples is not abusive, nor does it ridicule partners when they express their true feelings. The counsellor helps the couples learn to listen more actively and empathically.

5. Promotes strengths

Effective couple therapists point out the strengths in the relationship and build resilience particularly as therapy nears a termination.  The point of promoting strength is to help the couple to gain back their trust, their love, their bliss and satisfaction which was put on the back burner by both the partners.

According to India’s National Crime Records Bureau India reports a maximum number of depression cases of depression, anxiety and the suicidal tendency among teenagers originates from exam pressure and from pressure to perform. But the question is why today’s young generation is emotional & psychologically fragile? so much so that they become highly prone to suicide and psychological disorders and issues?

According to Delhi’s leading Psychologist & Counsellor Shivani Misri Sadhoo, among many reasons, today’s teenagers are more prone to psychological issues due to a massive shift in food habits in metropolitan Indian families. Today’s Indian kids find extreme joy by consuming nutrient deficit burgers, pizzas, cold drinks etc. These foods not only hamper adolescent’s physical growth but affect their brain development too and when the time for exam pressure comes and huge numbers of them just get emotionally and psychologically shattered.

Junk foods” such as cakes, croissants, and doughnuts) and fast food such as hamburgers, hot dogs, cold drinks and pizzas not only misses essential vitamins and minerals (required for child growth) but they also contain a very high glycemic index. High glycemic index foods are referred to those which are rapidly digested, absorbed and metabolized and result in marked fluctuations in blood sugar (glucose) levels and blood sugar fluctuation images a person mood.

Counselor Shivani Misri Sadhoo suggests that no one should eat junk food on a regular basis. Kids especially should be encouraged to foods rich in the B-vitamins, folic acids, such as lentils, bean, spinach, oranges, asparagus, avocado, seeds, tomatoes, and fortified cereals along with foods high in vitamin D develops can help their child’s brain development and better functioning process.

Along with balanced died today’s parents should also encourage their kids to play every day and keep them away from fast food joint and from junk food, as much as possible.

In today’s fast moving lifestyle, building a healthy and long lasting relationship with your spouse is not easy; a large portion of the population that daily faces professional, travel and financial pressures, find the least time and energy to devote to their family and spouse.

According to Delhi’s eminent marriage counsellor and relationship expert, Shivani Misri Sadhoo, the key to maintain a healthy and long term relationship is not to take relationship or spouse for granted rather put a constant effort to enhance the romantic bond by – building healthy relationship habits. These good romantic relationship habits could be:

1.  Always go to bed together.

One of the effective good relationship habits is to go to bed at the same time. Remember happy couples resist the temptation to go to bed at different times. There’s nothing more soothing than a bedtime cuddle.

2. They don’t expect their partner to read their mind; they ask for what they need: 

The happiest couples generally ask for what they need and listen to each other’s needs. Running around hoping that another person will know what you need or that you are supposed to know exactly what they need is a recipe for disaster. The happiest couples are delighted to openly talk about needs and honour differences in needs without feeling like anyone should have already known or that their ‘soul mate’ will have the same needs as them.

3. Always trust and try to forgive.

In every relationship, there would be arguments and small fights but couples who are dedicated towards their relationship make a habit to trust and forgive, rather than distrusting and begrudging as their default setting after an argument.

4. They focus on what they do right, not what they do wrong.

Positive reinforcement is an age-old concept used with children but it’s also important for fully grown adults too. So compliment your partner when they deserve it and try not to look for things they do wrong.

One of the hardest things to do in a relationship is to be nice to your partner when you’re upset with them. It’s also one of the most important moments to be kind.The act of not choosing kindness is therefore doubly hurtful to our partners and to ourselves because it undercuts our efforts for growth and the potential for greater intimacy.

I see couples in my chamber who want to “solve” their issues first before going out for an ice cream or relaxing over dinner. It will never work. It’s not possible to solve problems with someone you don’t want to collaborate with.

About the author:  Counsellor Shivani Misri Sadhoo is the consulting Counsellor at Fortis Hospital, IBS (Indian Brain & Spine) Hospital and with Express Clinics. She has served over thousands plus happy & satisfied individual 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.