Posts tagged 'drugs'
“He is very manipulative!”
You’ve probably heard this sentence before. Maybe you even used it yourself. It’s usually said with the same tone you’d use for moldy cheese or stepping on LEGO barefoot.
But here’s the thing: manipulation isn’t a bad word.
And before you scream, “Noooo, Ronit, don’t go there!”, stay with me.
In parenting, relationships, workplaces, families — even in our own health — manipulation is everywhere. And it’s not what you think.
Intuition can feel like a fuzzy, mysterious thing — like a whisper you’re not sure you heard or a gentle nudge you can’t quite explain. Many people call it the sixth sense. Others think it doesn’t exist because you can’t see it, touch it, or prove it in a lab.
But intuition is very real. It’s the quiet inner compass that helps us make decisions when logic can’t keep up. It’s the gut feeling that says “yes, this feels right” or “no, something is off,” even when we can’t point to any facts.
Developing intuition is one of the most valuable skills we can strengthen — as parents, as partners, and as individuals trying to navigate life with clarity and confidence.
Read Developing Intuition: Your Inner Compass for Better Decisions »
Control is something every human being wants. Adler once said that all human problems are the result of lack of control and/or lack of attention. Control plays a huge part of our life and to gain it, people will override many of their values, their dignity, wellbeing and even their humanity. Control is important to our existence.
Let’s be real. The only reason we want control is because… we feel out of control. Why is that? Why do humans feel out of control?
Well, the simple reason is that we are born like that. We start our life without any sense of control and from that moment on, our life journey is an awakening to the realization that even our death, is out of our control.
What makes a good relationship? Are there signs of a good relationship? What questions would you ask to find out if a relationship is good? How to have good relationships?
Every year, as September gets closer, my husband Gal and I think about relationships. This year, in September 2020, we’re celebrating 40 years of friendship. We’ve learned over the years that friendship is a special relationship worth celebrating.
When you spend many years with one person, you learn a lot about them. But mostly, you learn about yourself and what relationships mean.
I think most parents are worried their teens might be (or are) using drugs. Those who are not so worried typically used drugs themselves when they were young and keep telling themselves, “I turned out OK, so my child will ‘get it out of the system’ and grow out of it”.
This is nice, but one small mistake will make sure your child will never grow at all.
Every parent of a teen hosting a party at home debates whether or not it is OK for the teen guests to use drugs and what to do about it.
There are some people who give their teens drugs to use in the company of their friends to be perceived “cool”. They say they are using those same drugs themselves and don’t see any harm in doing it.
My parents landed in Brisbane, Australia, on a Friday evening. Only a week before, we started discussing what we wanted to achieve during their visit. The incentive was the new addition to our family – their new great-granddaughter. Our oldest daughter Eden did not work, Tsoof was on a school break from teaching, Noff was on a break from studying and we had many plans for them.
My siblings said, “You can’t take them anywhere. She can’t walk for 5 minutes”. The meeting at the airport was very exciting. I had seen them a year before and Eden had seen them a year and a half before, but the rest of the family had not seen them for 9 years. For me, my mom looked 10 years older than she did the previous year, so I worried.
Much like in coaching, every journey has 2 main points – where we stand now and where we are going. I told myself that for couple of days, I must gather all the information I could to know where we stood.
My mom’s legs were swollen. One leg was worse than the other, so she had to wear different size shoes. She could not bend to tie her shoelaces. She took a long time putting on her underwear and she needed help putting on her bra.
Children are affected strongly by their emotional state. When I work with children, I can see their performance decrease when they are emotionally preoccupied. Some kids are affected more and others less, but all of them drop in performance when they are down.
Kinesthetic children are typically affected more, because they are very sensitive to the people around them. These are the kids who can “sense” others around them and all they want is for “everyone to be happy and nice to each other”.
Children who are highly sensitive to pressure are at risk of developing “the disease to please” – dependence on external rewards and oversensitivity to pressure. It is the perception that other people’s feelings are so important that they trump your own.
In most cases, “the disease to please” comes from fear of rejection, which most people want to avoid. Many people have this disease and they got it during their childhood. We can say that this kind of disease is contagious and we catch it from our parents…
Addiction a dependency on an object, a substance or an activity. As hard as it is to admit, we are all addicted in some way or another. If you want to know if you are addicted do something, take it out of your life for a week and watch your reaction.
People can be addicted to food, phone, TV, a person (like their spouse), work, coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, glue, sex, medication, gambling, drugs and more. I had a friend who was addicted to pain killers. She took them as if she was eating candy, and it became obvious she had an addiction because she could not cope without them and needed more and more of them over time.
It is very important to remember that every addiction we develop is an attempt to fill an emotional and/or physical “hole”. We want it to give us the feeling we are missing without it. This is as true when we talk about drugs as it is when we talk about food.
Read Addiction in the Family »
No matter how hard parenting is, giving your child psychiatric drugs must be considered very seriously, because it is very often a bad idea. Here is why.
Working with parents and kids for 30 years, I can tell you that it is not easy to be a parent. It is not easy because unlike computers or other gadgets, kids do not come with an instruction manual and they do not behave in a way that is easy to predict.
Inexperienced parents react to things that do not work as they expect. Experienced parents, having raised other kids through the same situation, can see the patterns and not panic when something unexpected happens.
I realized this when I had an early childhood center. After working in a group of 30 toddlers, I became an experienced parent in a flash. Why? Because when you deal with 30 kids, you can see that when your child does not behave the way you expect, he/ she is still normal. When you see your toddler touching his/ her sex organs, you may think something is wrong with him/her, but when you see 30 toddlers doing it, and you see them stop when you do not pay attention to it, you feel a bit more relaxed about your own toddler and comfort yourself that he/she is normal.
Inexperienced parents have a problem with the concept of normality. Since they have nothing to compare to, they do not know what is normal and what is not and too often jump to the conclusion that something is wrong with their child and needs to be fixed. This fear and doubt mindset about children’s development, behavior and achievement can cause many problems, mainly because it determines the parents’ course of action.
In Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists, I covered easy ways to diagnose symptoms of stress in children, without having to go to psychiatrists that are very likely give your child medication that might prevent them from developing coping mechanisms and might damage them for life.
Once you have confirmed the stress, you will want to know how to deal with stress and start helping your child. So here is a list of easy solutions you can use at home to help your child cope. No Psychiatrists. No Medication. These methods take the same time to work as medication does, are just as effective and have no side effects, so they are much better in the long run.
Read Kids under Stress: How to Deal with Stress the Easy Way »
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