Dyslexia Consultation Centre, Gurgaon Sector 24

In a world of fluid family structures, the resources I have had at my disposal to maintain my marriage and care for my daughter in my parenting tasks has varied as romantic partners entered and exited our family life. I have seen heightened parenting stress and faced the psychological strain created as the demands of my role as a mother exceeded my capacity to handle things. Today I look back and realise that decisions made by me due to relationship transitions has caused nothing but tension in my life and agony for my father and mother all the while increasing my stress to such an extent that I was ready to give up. Dr Singh has been a source of exceptional support for me in what he called my relationship churning and helped me stabilise my entire personality and mental chaos that was making me go craazy. I have managed to move on rather than break up and get back together with my ex husband, and keep the cycle of emotional turmoil ongoing. I am grateful to God to be able to get out of my toxic relationship in time.

I can say I have sat in front of the telephone and agonized because I have been so afraid to pick up the receiver and make a call. I was even afraid to make a call to a colleague working on the same floor as me or even go to the bank for a transaction as I was afraid I would not be able to handle the pressure of dealing with the person and that the individual will be upset with me. It’s very hard for me to take rejection, even over the phone, even from someone I don’t know. If I say I am especially afraid to call people I know because I feel that I will be calling at the wrong time and the other person will be busy and they won’t want to talk with me, it is not an overstatement. I feel rejected even before I make the call. If I do make a call , when I end the call I sit and analyze, and ruminates about what was said, what tone it was said in, and how I was perceived by the other person. My anxiety and racing thoughts concerning the call prove to me that messed up this conversation up, too, just like I always do . Sometimes I get so embarrassed just thinking about the call, because I am so afraid that what will the other person be thinking about me. I know that it is not really true, but I could not get out of this trap. Always conscious that people are looking to me wherever I go, judging me by my clothes and my looks. I have tried to smile, but it is so weak that my lips shiver and I have always felt that in occasions where we have to attend get togethers , I always feel like I am making a fool of myself and my self-consciousness and my anxiety rise to the roof. More than anything else, I don not want anyone to know that I am afraid deep inside me. It has taken me 3 seasons with Mr. Singh, and 1 test and he has already helped me understand what I am going through and why. It has been very helpful that the sessions have been virtual as I don’t think I would have been able to go to a clinic and when I keep my eyes safely away from anyone else’s gaze and pray I can make it home without having to talk to anyone. My life was seven miserable days of anxiety and worry ahead of me to think about it, over and over and over again. 3 Session’s. That is all I did to become fully aware of each of the issues facing me. I will be continuing the therapy, and the positivity I have felt make’s me respect the manner of his working.

I first sought out dr singh with the complaint that everything was all

Right between me and my wife except our sex relations, which occurred

Practically once a year. My wife joined from the next session as it was

unproductive as per sir to have one person trying to solve

the issue, while the other did not know what was going on. I know my

wife loves me and said it also and does not want our marriage to break up.

But how can we live if she says that it feels like a duty to her. My wife will

want to write the rest of this feedback.

It is true what my husband just mentioned. But I am just not so interested in

Intimate relations and after our third child I feel so worn out and even more

less interested than ever. I am so tired by the time I go to bed in the night

That I can’t even think of anything else except sleep. I agreed to the counselling

as I agree it looks unfair to my husband, but what can I do. My mother

has always told me that good husbands do not bother their wife very much

for sex and that we get very little satisfaction specially after the child

Is born and she is right as I get so tired through the day. I started counselling

with my husband just not to disappoint him and make him feel bad. However

my attitude towards good counselling has changed a lot after our talks

with dr singh who was very mature from the start and had very non judgemental and non conflicting views and he has genuinely helped so much that I think we should have entered into counselling therapy much earlier.

Nothing can change the pain that I have experienced in the past. My sessions have helped me to calm down and change my thoughts and feelings. I can now truly say that there are things that happen in life that are tragic and unfair. There are people that come into your life that hurt you. And we may see them as awful. But they are there to serve you. They are there to help us tap into the person we truly are. This whole process where Sir helped me understand that there are there to help you become even greater, they are there to help you become who you were meant to be has made me stronger and even more determined to live my life on my terms.

I am a retired Defence Services Officer and would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr singh for the help he has provided in guiding my daughter for her SSB interview. The guidance that he gave in the sittings he had with my daughter were unique where he made her psychologically perfect for her interview which is the most important part of the SSB interview. The tests he made her take and then guided her to improve her personality were very unique and excellent. Your guidance has been invaluable. Sincerely

Good morning sir, I hope you are doing very well.

I m just writing to let you know, that I finally did find my voice, discovered my own inner strengths and overcame most fears. I now know how all the time you tried to enable the same but I wasn’t getting there then. Life is full of turns and surprises, so lets see how it goes from here.

Sir, I do want to thank you for the support you have provided me each time. Immense gratitude.

Here’s Wishing you a Very Happy Diwali.

Success sometimes is not about achieving something, it can also be about knowing your objective and also knowing a correct strategy to reach your objective.

My daughter is severely handicapped and has been handicapped since birth but no one has understood what a brilliant mind she had and the the application of her brilliance where it could be utilised to make her self sufficient.

No one guided us , no one pointed me in the correct direction. Being from Jammu there was no way I could take her back that and make her live a life of harassment.

Prof Singh (he dislikes being called doctor Singh) spent 1 full day making friends with her. 1 day to assess her, and 1 day to tell a shocked father that her IQ was 137 , which he said was IIT material. On the 4th day he called up all the institutions, on the 5 day he signed their form for learning disabilities , which incidently we realised only he can as per the guidelines , on the 5 day then he sent the hard copies to their admission offices and then charged us a very good amount of money. Then he gave us a IT exempt receipt of section 80G and made whatever he had charged 100% tax free under the IT act 1961, for this retired Air Vice Marshall of the Indian Air Force ,

What an effort , and what a blessing , and what a curse . A curse as I wish I had found him earlier , a blessing as I did manage to find him and an effort as no school ever , ever guided me to him.

Coping with my fathers death

My father passed away on April 28, 2016. It has been over 11 months and now I am coming to terms with it. Initially I tried to just block myself and my feelings and the emotional hurt I felt made me feel more overwhelmed with my grief than ever before. I miss him so much and it hurts badly. My father battled with cancer for years, each time winning the battle and remaining strong. Finally the cancer decided to overtake him and before we knew it, he was gone. I'm 23 and I dropped out of my M Phil studies. We belong to Patiala and there was no way I could forget. I came to Sir when I was surfing the internet and saw his experience and did not know what to do or expect, just that I wanted to understand what to do. I felt cheated that I only got 23 years with my dad. It was becoming more difficult as I realised how permanent the loss was and how much more time I would have to spend without him than I got to spend with him.

Sir, from the first meeting itself was so reassuring that I felt a strange connect with him, a feeling I don’t easily get with everyone, and meeting with him was as though everything would turn out right. With Sirs help I have managed to removed the isolation I had developed from my friends and the isolation I had put on me which takes so much effort to go out into social situations, has begun to lessen. Honestly i find it nearly impossible to put a fake smile on and deal with it. Life goes on and I'm not ready to to yet. I feel sad most of the time, but I am now now passing the days watching mindless television. Just talking to Sir has made me realise the value of family and my worry about forgetting my father, his voice, his laugh, his encouraging words, how he could always make me smile when I was sad is beginning to make sense. Sir made me realise that , my father wouldn't want me to be like this. The manner in which sir has managed to help me overcome my problems sleeping and experiencing panic attacks, has helped me cal down to a very large extent. I plan to go back in July for my studies again and though I am scared to face it, I have learnt to take care of myself and my mother as I have started to work to taking care of myself. I owe a great deal to sir, who treated me more like a daughter than a patient and helped me overcome may feelings of uselessness.

I never knew that grief is so hard, and that it feels unbearable. But sir has managed to get me thinking rationally and for me, it seems that time has made things a bit lighter with his helping and soothing nature. I still feel so overwhelmed and I don't know what to do, but I am able to handle the loss a bit better now.I guess I want to share my story, so that others know that we can overcome to some degree the distress we face in our lives if we can get the right person to show us how to. Malti Yadav

Divorce

Recently my husband and I almost separated, and over the course of a few weeks the life we'd made broke apart. The new reality did not represent a kind of progress. But it was in fact a regression. You break a glass: the new reality is that it is broken. I had to get used to the new reality. My young daughters would have to get used to the new reality. But the new reality, as far as I could see, was only something broken. It had been created and for years it had served its purpose, but in pieces it was good for nothing.

My husband believed I had treated him roughly. This belief of his couldn't be shaken: his whole world depended on it. Before I landed up at Prof Singh’s calm room, If someone were to ask me what disaster this was that had befallen my life, I might have asked if they wanted the story or the truth. For me, life's difficulty has generally lain in the attempt to reconcile these two. My own children do that, forcing my husband's hand into mine when we're all together. They're trying to make the story true again, or to make the truth untrue.

Their growing neutrality worried me into taking action as I saw they were becoming disillusioned. And my husband saying I was a feminist, in the raw bitter weeks after we decided we should separate. He believed he had taken the part of a woman in our marriage, and seemed to expect me to defend him against myself, the male oppressor. Dr Singh very quietly asked him how would he like half of everything, including the children and how does he propose to divide children in half. I think that stopped him cold. What we got was an understanding of how maybe we had denied each other, what we expected for ourselves from the other. The first few visits were confusing.

My own thinking was had I as a mother, been denied? The pregnancy, the childbirth, the slow rebuilding of every corner of my private world that motherhood has entailed? I think Dr Singh understood when he raised the issue of what he called a pact of silence, a treaty that gave him and me equality, that I would not invoke the primitivism of the mother or innate superiority. How I have changed from angst of thinking my womanhood is a fraud, manufactured by others for their own convenience; that I was not born but made, is surprising to me also. As my husband began to respond to understanding that he does not have to fight that we should not have a joint bank account or a house in joint names he began to accept that our upbringing from my parents of male values to us, as daughters could come in a circle to his daughters. I think that hit him quite hard, and how Dr Singh did it, in his soothing voice was absolutely amazing. It was like a trance. I also understood that choosing to remain a lot out of the city may be my escape from my daily commitments , I may have signed up for when we got married.

The sad part is that my children have been roused from the unconsciousness of childhood; theirs is the pain and the gift of awareness. But I credit Prof Singh from stopping us from having two homes, to having one home. I appreciate it that I understood that that rescue was neither wanted nor required , that two halves are what made up a whole. Our combined sessions and our conversation helped me not keep missing my footing.

In the neutrality of Dr Sings consulting room the whole past has been revisited, but with a difference. My husband knows what to do and I know that he knows what I go through and he is not aggressive anymore. Neither am I. As we learnt, and that includes me, how Dr Singh helped keep the family together and how he showed that the war of words, can be turned into a living silence which need not be disturbed, I appreciated a a gentleman who would put in the effort to help keep people together. Neetu Menon

Marriage Counselling

Extreme Distress is how I would explain, why I visited Dr Singh. I had been married for 8 years, and what was a love marriage, became a terrible problem between my father and my husbands family. I am the eldest and it is my responsibility to make a trend for my brothers and sisters. My father was very supportive and never force me to study or do anything against my wishes. I have been a very happy girl and now with so much time I have become a very moody person. We had our baby boy 4 years ago and we thought the troubles would go away. But it only became more serious as now I had to look after my baby also and I really wanted to work also. When I came to Dr Singh, I was not sure I could tell him everything, but I was wrong. Somewhere in the last 6 months he tool responsibility for my family and met my husband also.

It is not good to say I also may have been somewhere wrong. But I just wanted all the simple things in life like love, a family and a job. Maybe my problem was that I can shout very loudly and this also I am now controlling. If I say Dr Singh is just a doctor I would be wrong in saying this. His way of making you feel so comfortable and confident are very different. Being with him regularly and questioning him, I can say I have learnt a lot about my family and myself. It is difficult to admit, but after my baby’s birth, I also had started to love someone who was married. I am not lying. This was also troubling me a lot in my mind because, after 1 year, I had began to feel he will not leave his wife. This was very disturbing and when I told Dr Singh about it, i felt so ashamed. But I wanted to be happy. How to explain what being sad can do.

I am 35 now, and I wish I had come to him earlier. I could have saved so much with my life and sadness that does not go away now when I think of my past life. Mostly I cry when I think of my father, but I also feel that I should have given more time to my studies and becoming something. Dr Singh has been like a strong person for us. He is our guide and well-wisher and a lot of decisions we take, now we first talk to him about it. One thing that he has helped a lot with is keeping me away from depression medicines as I do not want to gain weight and how long can I take medicines for my mind. The other thing is that mu husband has also become more quite and less aggressive as when he talks to Dr Singh he is able to express himself much more better. It is not easy to find a well wisher and a guide, and this is why we are now definitely much better. We would like to thank Dr Singh for his extreme kindness and gentleness. Tina Johri