Tag Archives: #emotionalexhaustion

3 Ways to Create Healthy Emotional Atmosphere for Your Child

June 15, 2020 Olya Aman Leave a comment

Family discussions, with old and young alike taking part, can be as stimulating as sparks that ignite a fire. – Spanish saying

1) Every Child Is Born With the Growing Desire to Discover the Unknown

Curiosity governs his actions and you need to satisfy it and help it to develop into a conscious longing to learn, that in later years will determine his success in life. He perceives you as a magician that knows everything and has numerous wonders.

You reach into your bag, take out the phone and put it to your ear and listen and talk back, you put it back and grab a bottle of water, put it on the table and place a cookie on it that you just pulled from the same charmed sack. Don’t be surprised when this little adventurer approaches your bag as soon as you put it down and starts his discovery process, taking everything out and examining every object. Let him satisfy his curiosity, when he is done he probably won’t disturb the contents of it anymore.

But if he continues to do so every time you leave the room or just turn around, and you can tell that now it is a mere play – not curiosity; then you can show him a sign of your disapproval.

2) Be Careful When Distinguishing Between Curiosity and Misbehaving

He is a smart little guy and will read the expression on your face: knitted eyebrows and stiff lips. If you are careful when distinguishing between curiosity and misbehaving, you will reap the fruits of your efforts soon enough. One day traveling you visit a wonderful ancient church with colorful frescos, golden candelabras, and stained glass windows. You come a bit earlier to have enough time to wander around and then to listen to the organ music. Your son will look around with his eyes wide open and a smile on his face, taking time to examine each painting.

When you quietly call him to have a seat beside you he will show ‘behavioral discipline’ and sit beside you and listen with you, maybe still occasionally looking around. You did a great job thinking ahead and coming earlier to give him time to contemplate the beauty of the place.

You may see another family with kids. They came just in time to sit down and listen to the music. The mother keeps reproaching the kids for not sitting still. The father may threaten them with what he may do when they leave the place. And the little ones try to obey and hide the burning desire to look around and see what is on that wall behind them and the one on the left, and to learn why there are multiple colors and sun comes through the windows in rainbow-like rays. These kids will get used to bottling their emotions up to save themselves from scolding.

3) Create Emotional Freedom in Your House

Your effort will determine your future success as a parent and you will be proud of your children. Discipline is important. The goal is to create true harmony between the emotional world and conscience.

If you govern in your household by the rules you never explain properly so that little soul may understand and admit them – you teach external discipline – one without understanding. Kids will obey because of fear of punishment, not because they internally comprehend the importance and meaning of these rules. And when the very person who introduced the rules is gone, the kids won’t follow them anymore – there will be no threat to force them to do so.

But if you take time to explain every disciplinary action to your child in a way so that his conscience will recognize and acknowledge it – whatever happens in the future, with you beside him or when you are gone – his conscience will remind him the good and bad, true and false, love and hate.

Conclusion

Conscience is the most sensitive scale that perfectly distinguishes between right and wrong. Be an example of a principled centered life, governed by your conscience and this way you will teach your child to balance the emotional world with the help of internal discipline. Sooner or later the time will come when only those treasures will help him to be a good person. Make sure you supply him with all he needs and you will be proud of your child for making this world a better place.

Stay tuned…

Personal Growth

I’m White, He’s Black – We Are on the Right Track

August 26, 2019 Olya Aman 73 Comments

The rich human diversity is wedged in my family

When you create a family — you become one organism, breathing through one source, looking and moving in one direction. – Olya Aman

I formed the habit of sticking my attention into the venerable instrument of our diverse family. I feel the impulse to pull out our story of my head and heart because I know you can make better use of it.

My Afro-Asian husband

Everything about my husband is a bit stupefying. He has a large, square face, with a massive projecting nose and narrow greenish Asian cut eyes. Black hair brushed back from a broad but low forehead open two distinct parallel straight lines, that meet only at infinity. Grave and weighty in his manner and body, he does everything slowly and massively. Like a locomotive, he melancholy moves through life. Within his setting, I feel indolent and silenced.

Zac’s family, that is his name, is a unique example of the ‘cafeteria culture’. And the only idea of it is beautiful. His father was born and raised in Mexico in a Muslim family. While his mother is a daughter of a Methodist minister. They adopted Zac when he was 4 years old. He identifies himself closely with both cultures and religious beliefs, never feeling pressure coming from either side. The inner climate of their family is always mild and comfortable. They love each other and accentuate their family values on common grounds, minimizing the importance of the differences.

Our union

When Zac was 20, I got pregnant with our first child. We got married for love and forever, family values prevailing in Zac’s perception of the world. I am a woman of a European origin with deep cultural ties and beliefs. My cultural and religious sentiments are softly echoed by his acceptance and loving understanding.

Zac’s interracial, interreligious family experience made him flexible and adaptable to the changing world around. My family got to love this young-looking man with old wisdom lurking in his Asian eyes. Zac’s family accepted his choice with loving humor and serious understanding. The colors of our faces are diverse, the shades of our philosophies are controversial in many aspects — but we have a common universal understanding of the family values.

We have a family brunch once a month, to which all relatives bring their specialties. We celebrate our diversity and remain faithful to our histories.

What I’ve learned from my multicultural ongoing experience

Form a brilliant scheme to focus on shared pricks.

We are all enveloped in and on and under our histories. To make life easy, we slide gently through every circumstance, stressing our common patterns, and minimizing the importance of our differences. Close personal ties with each other are the sweets of life for all of us.

The focus on critical dissimilarities gives the bitter taste that disagrees with any family union. That is why we never cross the line and always stay in a circle of peaceful, polite conversation.

Rejoice at the contrasting blessings of your personalities.

Together we monopolize our differences and celebrate them with respect in our minds and love in our hearts. Because the family union is like a union between two countries — with unique histories and traditions, views and life principles. To maintain peace may be a laborious process, but it for sure is rewarding.

Respect has a lot of hand in building our family union. We learn to accept the cultural identity of each other and have judgment enough to distinguish between historical and religious differences that are important and those which are not. Any dissimilarities are not the instruments of destruction, but the triggers that move our curiosity forward.

Artlessly admit extended family connections.

We united the best blessings of existence when we decided to raise a child. We care a great deal for each other, that is why we are open to connect with members of our extended families and are eager to introduce our offspring to the variety of family relationships.

The chances are that the child will be a gainer if loved by many relatives and experienced in various cultural situations. Life with little and sometimes bigger difficulties and privations is not damaging but strengthening if you can look at your family and see the rock that will always hold you firmly on the ground.

To pursue a happy family union, everyone in it should help each other out of the deepest gulfs of human miseries. In the sequel of life, the family union is the only harbor that can give us the taste of happiness and peaceful harmony. – Olya Aman

Stay tuned…

Mental Health

My Struggle With Hatred After My Boyfriend Was Killed

August 26, 2019 Olya Aman 21 Comments

Do not let hate make you old and stale and faded

I was beside her, wrapped around her, melting in my anger… – Olya Aman

I was almost abnormally fond of Adam.

The little dimples on his cheeks were driving me crazy. He was the only means of complete and ineffable happiness, the very essence, which I defined as Life.

His heart stopped beating and the Hatred to the person (who drove the car in a state of alcohol intoxication, killed my boyfriend, and remained almost unharmed) began to control my existence with innate satisfaction.

This experience turned my understanding of Hate and Hatred bottom side up.

I meditated on my hate, crying quietly, shouting inwardly. I was utterly desperate in my desire to inflict the same suffering upon a person responsible for that devastating emotional pain, soul-torture, the heartbreaking outcry of my whole being.

I will share my love story with you in a few well-chosen silences, and the story of my hate — in several emotional words.

1) Try to accord with the disturbing person.

The ghost of an idea to get to know that person better (and if not to forgive, but at least to free my spirit from a tormenting feeling of anger, that didn’t let me breathe fully, function satisfactory, and live bearably) invaded my thoughts.

I visited Mary in prison for eighteen months and four days after the car crash. The expression on her face told me wordlessly that I should (if I would be so kind) spend a moment in her presence, make an effort to not shout from inner pain, listen if she had anything to say, have a look into her eyes for just a fraction of a second… and just be quiet.

Mary’s apocalyptic face, whiter than Death’s itself, seemed incapable of even a glimpse of a smile anymore. I felt my hatred if not slipping away but for sure diminishing. In front of me, there was a woman that made a fatal mistake, a mother that could not be beside her kids, a wife that lost her husband’s trust and love.

I, for one, had her to blame. Mary had gone on every night without the consolation of exoneration.

2) Keep in close touch with your motives.

After the meeting with the person who killed my boyfriend, I was unhurriedly and calmly propelling myself toward recognition of my loss and acceptance of my fate.

I did not forgive Mary, I still felt the pangs of hate often. That was a huge step forward to a new life, where moments without this suffocating feeling were visiting me more and more often.

I had never in my life so perfectly understood (even to the most exquisite nuances) that state of hatred I lived in for so long.

But before that meeting, I had not even one-third the command over it. My ability to distract my thoughts and recover some balance in my feelings ranked better with each new day.

3) Thrust hateful shock upon a paper.

Although my loss was the unspeakable and the unwritable history of agonizing anger and bitterness, I created by some occult process of self-mastery a diary of perfectly cruel time in my life. I wrote about the perpetrated deed of self-distraction committed by hatred.

I wrote down my feelings partly because I wanted to get rid of that hate, and partly because I wanted to have a shred of evidence in the form of a written word of that time, to justify my desire to live when my lover was not among the living, to show him that I still loved and suffered tremendously from that loss.

4) Value trustworthy spectators and listeners.

I could not push this pain off or away, but I started to talk about it with people who cared to listen.

By doing so, I rose from the domain of the inner prison cell I used to live in one on one with this feeling of hatred.

I appeared on the surface where friendship and love of close people and consolation saturating from every encounter could help me recover and drift peacefully along with the current of life.

5) Breathe a tepid skepticism and sickly dislike out.

From all the indescribable I had known, definitely, the most intense one was the feeling of overwhelming loss, pain, and hatred mixed together.

This cocktail made me sick to my stomach and dizzy in my head.

I learned a special breathing technique to help me manage this dreadful inner hullabaloo tornado of disruptive feelings.

It helped me to diminish that absolute and incurable hysteria of emotions and, with time, to extract it from my life almost completely.

6) Ease your pain in the certitude of positive and healing forgiveness.

I visited Mary, the unfortunate driver who killed my boyfriend, only once.

I could not force myself to go to prison again. In one more year after our encounter, Mary was released.

When that piece of news was announced in an official letter, I felt bitterly disappointed. Were thirty months in prison enough to pay for the taking of someone else’s life?

I was despite myself with grief. The feeling of hate overwhelmed all my entire being all over again.

The authorities forced our second encounter on me. I needed to be present at the release meeting, where Mary would declare her remorse, ask to believe in her renewed self, and plead to be forgiven.

What a hellish thing it was to sit through it. I could not lift my eyes to see her talking. When most of the time elapsed, the door opened and two pairs of huge black buttonlike eyes entered the room.

A three-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl. Mary’s husband divorced her while she was in prison, but being a good father brought the kids to see their mother on the day of her release.

The spectacle was refreshing for my feelings. Now I stared all eyed in the scene of devoted love of a mother and unconditional love of her children.

I leapt to my feet and made for the door to shut it and never see these people again, to close that chapter of my life, and be partially contented with the idea that I could not hate this loving mother anymore and hopefully would never see these people again.

Mary and her family moved to a different state, away from the memories and people who can judge her and bully her kids in school. Away to start a new life.

Let me tell you what I know for sure.

Hate is the most uncomfortable, impoverished, and disagreeable feeling to live with.

It sucks the life-giving energy from a human being like a hungry vampire from an unfortunate victim. It is inhaled together with humiliation, mistreatment, and a feeling of impotence.

As an artificially grown black rose, that you may buy to go to the funeral, this feeling cannot becomingly complete a bouquet of beautiful and kind emotions. It spoils the entire picture, sticking out and disgustingly protruding.

Forgiveness and compassion can help to avail this sickly atmosphere.

To say ‘No’ to distractive thoughts means to see better days. Start a journal of positive recollections and put yourself in a contented state every time you read it.

Sometimes things you write may be appalling and rereading those is inflicting even more pain. Tearing up or burning, though, on the contrary, is releasing yourself, freeing your spirit — making it flexible, prone to change.

Close, loving people represent all the vast conscious world of consolation, empathy, and emotional and physical support.

Relax in a company of a friend, the one you can talk a long time to, who will be attentive and intense, who will drink it all in and will help you release your pain, anger, and misery.