You & Your Family

The psychologist G. Stanley Hall coined the phrase “storms and stress” to describe the intense interpersonal and intrapersonal turmoil that adolescents typically experience. No longer children but not yet adults, adolescents are neither fully dependent on nor totally independent of their parents. One of the challenges of this in-between stage is around the task of […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has cast a menacing cloud over humanity and directly affected every country, rich or poor. Over the past year and a half, a staggering 187 million have been infected and more than 4 million have died.* Singapore has largely been spared the worst in the pandemic. This is not to say that no-one […]

“Teach your children” is a hit song by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Written in 1970, it reminds parents that they have a responsibility to teach their children, and should they fail to do it, as the song’s lyrics go: Don’t you ever ask them “Why?” If they told you, you would cry. Just look at […]

Each time I run my counselling course, I set the students an essay that asks them to draw their family tree and examine how their family has shaped them. This exercise can be illuminating as they trace how their values, habits and even temperament may be linked with their parents’ and with family events during […]

As I reflect on the topic of sacrifice, especially in the context of family relationships, let me begin with a simple definition. Sacrifice is giving up something to gain something else. What is sacrificed may be tangible, like giving up your seat on the train for an elderly passenger. Or it could be intangible and […]

I am not sure when it happened. Neither do I know how it happened. What I do know is its signs. What I am referring to is losing the fight with change. It began with a feeling and then the realisation that I was having difficulty keeping up with change. Following this realisation was resignation […]

To “burn one’s bridges” is a commonly-used phrase for a situation of no turning back from one’s commitment. For instance, when a general orders his troops to burn or demolish a bridge that they had just crossed, he is saying that there is no retreat—they have no choice but to fight the enemy or die. […]

It is time to take charge It sounds like a tongue-in-cheek question: “Is there a law protecting parents from being abused by their children?” Increasingly, this question is being asked, not of abused elderly parents, but in the context of parents in their forties and fifties, with abusive children in their pre-teen and teenage years. […]

Conversation about values has featured prominently in my sessions with a couple I have been counselling for almost two years. They came in to try to repair their marriage after the husband’s infidelity—for the second time. Six years earlier, he had cheated on his wife but was given a second chance. The husband is again […]

Connection, compassion, constants “Lest we forget” is often associated with remembrance ceremonies of the Great Wars. It is an appeal to the living not to repeat the mistakes that led to such tragic waste of lives. An estimated 40 million lives were lost in World War One. Unfortunately, humankind soon forgot any lessons learnt—40 years later, […]

A client of mine is facing a difficult decision, akin to one doctors have to make to save the life of a patient with a badly infected limb—whether to amputate all or part of the limb. In her case, it would be an “amputation” of her 15-year marriage. The “infection” has been in two ways. A […]

Champion runners like Sebastian Coe and Usain Bolt are famous. Ivan Fernandez is less known. Whilst the first two are known for setting world records, Fernandez’s claim to fame is coming in second in a race—when he could have been first. In that race, he had been trailing the frontrunner, a Kenyan named Abel Mutai. […]