Mrs Sharma sounded worried when she handed over the school bag of her daughter to bus attendant, “Please tell the driver not to drive too fast. He fetches small children, They can fall off their seats “. The bus attendant just nodded her head in affirmation. Not satisfied with just a nod, Mrs Sharma moved to the front of the bus .”Please drive slow and take care of our children” she had told the driver. The driver too nodded his head. Mrs Sharma waited for the bus to move. She kick started her scooter . She paused for a moment and then turned her scooter towards the direction in which the bus had been going. She followed the bus at a safe distance and eventually having seen the bus safely getting into the school gate, she turned back . Such melodrama has been going on with Mrs Sharma for over a month now.
The matter came to the notice of the family one day when Mr Sharma had gone to the bus stop to see his daughter off to school. The attendant told him, “please tell Mrs Sharma not to follow the bus till the school gate.We are equally concerned of the safety of the school kids we fetch to the school .The school driver is a very experienced man and he drives very carefully.He has a very clean service record” .
Julie is only six years old .She studies in the neighborhood kindergarten school. She had been fine all this while and used to be very eager to go to school every morning .Last week suddenly out of the blue she complained of stomach ache and refused to go to school. Her mother had taken her to the pediatrician who found nothing wrong with the child . The child had been referred to the school counselor. A few sessions with the parents, the child and the class teacher revealed, the child has been always worried about her mother being alone at home and this worry always prevailed upon her mind.
Just as the mind of the young child Julie created the drama of her mother being unsafe at home, the same way worry can play havoc with the mind of the adults too. Worrying excessively can bring into mind series of fears , apprehensions, dark imaginations of the concerns about the safety of person and his or her near and dear one’s .
Worry is fine so long as we just reflect constructively and think about the situation or the problem to find out our next course of the action. But when the worry becomes constant fear and apprehension, it turns into the chronic emotional disturbance , with the mind being hijacked all the times into apprehended dangers which in reality may never occur. The hijacking of the mind brings with it the chronic anxiety, phobic thoughts and the loss of reason .The person so affected exhibits obsessive compulsions, generalized anxiety into every situation, panics over trivial matters , fears of getting cheated, robbed, being abandoned by the near and dear ones and of dying .Some of the affected even begin worrying about the worry that they carry in their mind.
Mrs Narwhal was so much worried of getting affected by the germs or carrying the germs back home that she would hang an extra set of clothes in her toilet in advance , which she wanted to wear the moment she would get back home from her trip outside. Every time she had come back to her house, she would first get into the bath to wash her clothes, bathe herself in order to cleanse herself of all the germs that she thought she might have brought with her from outside. She would feel completely relieved once having done this ritual .But it is obvious, such a ritual can be a great pain to other members of her family as the rule of changing into the fresh clothes after returning from outside and of washing the clothes that had been worn for going outside immediately on return from outside played havoc with the peace of the family . Any kind of advise to Mrs Narwhal to stop worrying created further problems as she would avoid such person who would advise her to not to worry .
Such worries form a part of the depression syndrome . They bring about with them , breathlessness, the faster heart beats,sweaty perspiration, choking , suppression of the mind, the feeling of the distress, ,and the lack of focus , attention and sleep .Such chronic worry needs to be treated with psychotherapy, Cognitive therapy , holistic therapy and even by way of the perceptive meditation to bring about a complete change in the thinking and perceptions of the affected individual.
-Ramneek Kapoor – Family Therapist, Psychologist Counselor and Science of Living Expert.
FAMILY THERAPY INDIA 