Hi everyone and welcome to #YouGotThis: Finding Success and Happiness. This is a women’s empowerment blog that will be featuring ten women over the course of ten weeks. My name is Tanvi Mathew. I’m a licensed therapist and a life coach practicing in NJ. I’ve been in the mental health field for 16 years now, functioning in various clinical and administrative roles. But my most important and ongoing roles have been as a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, and a WOMAN.
I want readers to understand the background and how #YouGotThis: Finding Success and Happiness came to be because it runs much deeper than the word “empower.” The purpose of this blog is to understand how your life can be transformational and you can change your path.
I’ve worked with teenagers and collaborated with the children’s system for years. Children are our future and I advocate hard for those with mental health needs. Helping and interacting with children over the years led me to my passion today in women’s empowerment. Approximately two years ago, I began to pay closer attention to a trend with clients in my private practice. I’m going to say “mothers” specifically because they are the primary contact that I’ve had. The fathers are either absent from the family, working and unable to be involved or as I’ve also seen in many cases, they don’t believe in therapy. Through conversations and observation with my clients, I saw a strong connection with how the relationship between mothers and their children in the home environment were causing an increase in stress and anxiety along with reactionary responses. Instead of working solely with the child, I began bringing the mothers in for separate sessions on alternating weeks because they were the constant and nurturing roles for the most part. As the therapeutic relationship and trust developed with these women, they began speaking less about the behaviors their children were presenting with and more about their past and present stressors, goals, and aspirations they never reached and ultimately acknowledging how their behaviors affect their children’s behaviors. They were diving into their childhood issues which had been left unresolved. Eventually, the women began taking more accountability and charge of what was happening in their environments. This led to improved relationships in their homes with their family members; work-life interaction was improving and socialization as a whole increased because they were now experiencing more clarity in their lives. Ultimately, the women were beginning to change their lifestyles and the children were experiencing a decrease in their stress and anxiety. The changes began to create better balance in their lives.
I was then led to begin working with young women in their 20’s who didn’t have children and were in an in-between stage where they were finding their independence, exploring their career paths and attempting to maintain serious relationships. These women began gaining a better understanding of their self-worth as they sifted through their past and how it created the path to their present. They were able to identify what type of relationships they were looking for as well as distinguish the difference between their values and societal values. At the end of their treatment, all women described a similar feeling, the feeling of EMPOWERMENT. With empowerment comes the ability to make life-changing decisions, understanding you have a choice and ultimately knowing how to take accountability of your behaviors and move forward.
I recently went through a life transition when I decided to leave my full-time administrative position at a hospital where I was running an adolescent program. For the past four years, I had juggled building my private practice alongside with the full-time job as well as balance family time. I’m that person that always thinks they can do it all. But my reality is that I have ulcerative colitis and this past April I experienced the second worse flare-up in seven years. My stress level reached high enough for it to take a physical toll on my body. For nine weeks I struggled to get up in the morning, to help get my children ready for school, make it to work and be there for my employees, to run my private practice and to get home at a decent enough time to be present for my family. During my one week on bed rest, yes I only got one week from the doctor, I made a decision that I couldn’t do it all anymore and enough was enough. I realized that I had to make some serious changes in my life. I spent that one week putting together my presentation for a workshop I’ve wanted to do for a long time… #YouGotThis: Women looking for work/life balance (minus the guilt). In June, I successfully ran my event with 40 women in attendance. It was so empowering and liberating to be able to speak to this audience, and on that evening in front of these 40 women, I announced I would be making some life changes very soon; leaving my job to reach for the dreams that were becoming more vivid and clear to me with each waking day. In that moment and the moments moving forward I held myself accountable. Accountable to the words I had just spoken because I knew it was a move I had to make to improve my quality of life.
This decision and the changes with them didn’t come easy for me. I don’t come from money, and I have three children with a whole lot of bills to pay. It’s an uncomfortable and scary feeling not to have a steady income. I know what it means to work hard though, especially when you want something. I’ve never been handed anything in my life. Everything I have is earned through hard work, sweat and tears. My parents are immigrants and came to the States with a few dollars in their pockets in 1976. I’ve seen their struggles and hardships. I’ve seen and experienced the disappointment of having something at your fingertips but losing it in a split second. My parents lost everything in a fire when they were so close to purchasing their first home. I’ve worn hand me downs from the salvation army, and I’ve slept on a cot in a high school gym on a few cold winter nights. But they kept working hard and got back on their feet. After that, we’ve had some more trials and tribulations as we experienced medical illnesses and financial stress. Growing up, I didn’t have the same things most of my friends had, and my childhood looked different than theirs, but I made every effort to make sure people didn’t recognize it. My parents weren’t around as much because they had to work most hours of the day including weekends. But this was my life, and I accepted it for what it was. Despite feeling short-handed and angry at times because I was always told “no” for most things that I asked for, it helped shape me into the person I am today. All of our experiences…the good, the bad and the ugly play a role in who we become.
We have to take accountability for our lives despite the cards we are dealt. Yes, it might seem unfair at times when we compare ourselves to others around us, but what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Making excuses for not reaching for our dreams and making them a reality is not acceptable. There is no one to blame for that. When there is a will, there is a way. You have to take charge of your life; no one is going to hand you things in life.
This past summer I had a thought in the middle of a random night. I was going to reach out to someone who is well known, has a following on social media and has a story to tell about what lies underneath the surface of the perfection that everyone sees. So I reached out to Dolores Catania of the Real Housewives of New Jersey. She didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, but I told her what I do for a living and my vision to tell someone’s story. A few hours later at 6am, before she was getting on a plane for a work trip, I received a message from her saying she’d love to get on board. She followed through on her word, and we met a few weeks later. Her story was inspiring, and the message she had for other women out there held substance. She gave me a platform and the courage to make this bigger. As women, we have so many experiences between us ranging from abuse, trauma, loss, poverty, and abandonment. I decided I needed nine more women. One after another the right woman came across my path. Some I knew, and some were strangers. But one common denominator between all of them is they want to share their story; they want to help and educate women and get them up and moving again. Not one person ignored my request or said no. We have to understand that we live in a society where we are more powerful in numbers. We need to compete less with one another and instead help one another rise.
Each participant has shown so much strength and courage through this process as they spoke about the obstacles they’ve endured and overcome. I am truly honored and humbled to have the privilege of telling their stories. Every Monday over the course of ten weeks, beginning October 1st, join us on this journey and learn how these women have reached success, happiness and are still going strong. Be prepared to be inspired.
Best,
Tanvi Mathew, MS, LPC
Emerge-The Counseling & Coaching Center
