Author: Kawsar Koodaruth
Publisher and Year: Reach Publishers, 2022
Contacts: Kawsar Koodaruth
- Within its pages lies the power to emancipate yourself by shifting your mindset to positivity and trampling negative energy and self-disqualification.
- In her life as a coach and mentor, Koodaruth has interacted with many kinds of experiences from diverse clients.
- This anthology’s author leaves no chain unturned, noting that beauty standards are a major shackle, especially severing the minds and self-esteem of adolescents.
Psychotherapy is one of the appropriate fields to help patients free themselves from false beliefs and harmful perceptions
Kawsar Koodaruth, Author, Chained by Beliefs.
Kawsar Koodaruth is a Business Coach, a Psychotherapist, an Author, a Director at Life Choices Management, and the Founder and Director of Mount View Care Home, born and bred in Mauritius.
A highly-trained coach and certified member of the International Coaching Federation, Ms. Koodaruth thrives in helping and accompanying people to the heights of their dreams.
Chained by Beliefs is her masterpiece written for you who is struggling and battling in the mind, feeling chained by cultures, mindsets, career-related and family impediments, and other kinds of prisons.
In this collection, she tells people’s real-life stories that have been her lessons over the years, shaping her approaches to mentoring, coaching, and offering psychotherapy services.
Within its pages lies the power to emancipate yourself by shifting your mindset to positivity and trampling negative energy and self-disqualification.
She uses eight beautifully-weaved, inspiring stories to tell the journey of life from childhood and parenting, to adulthood and independence.
Chained by upbringing
Ms. Koodaruth opens the lesson-filled anthology with the story of a wonderful family of eight, with Sophia, the protagonist, and Zoya, being the key players, surrounded by their four brothers and two parents.
This chapter coaches us, readers, about the power of parenting and the impact of thoughts.
When Zoya, Sophia’s younger sister, was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease while still a child, the whole family shifted into a different kind of life altogether.
Naturally, Crohn’s disease patients require attention because the inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) causes swelling or inflammation of the tissues in one’s digestive tract.
This may trigger severe diarrhea, abdominal pain, weight loss, malnutrition, and fatigue.
The previously caring and concerned parents, especially the mother, channeled their energy to attending to Zoya and keeping her in shape, all at the expense and detriment of adolescent Sophia and his elder brothers.
Ms. Koodaruth says that due to the shift in the parents’ attention to their ailing child, Sophia was neglected, just as were her brothers, who started bullying and overworking her.
Commenting on the effect of parental beliefs on their children, “Siblings who are seen as less able and fragile usually carry these thoughts into adulthood, which impacts on their self-worth, their choices, their risk assessments and trust in their success.
When children feel they have less parental attention or responsiveness and are being compared to others, there is a perpetuation of rivalry,” she writes.
Distracting herself with reading and drawing, she improved in school and hoped to become an author.
However, her academic excellence wasn’t the joy of her parents.
Whenever she tried putting in the work at home to excel more, she would be allocated more home chores, discouraged, body-shamed, and mocked by the family.
She never made it past O Levels.
She would later, after making lemonade from an early marriage and building her family business with her husband, be held with high esteem and regarded as her family’s savior, helping her brothers, sister, and mum (after the death of their father).
Sophia rises above the mediocrity she faced in childhood and builds herself up, trying to help her family, especially her previously-pampered sister Zoya, a victim of three failed marriages, wallowing in negativity, self-doubt, and powerlessness, bruised by life.
Zoya, failing to seek professional help, commits suicide.
Ms. Koodaruth maximizes this thought-provoking, real-life story to remind the reader that while being pampered and spotlighted may feel good, it has the potential to chain the beneficiary and snatch from them the joys of facing life with courage, hope, and determination.
She unearths the pains inflicted by parental neglect on the side of the other family members, pointing out that a change of mindset, as Sophia did, can powerfully springboard a person to self-fulfillment.
Sophia, later Ms. Koodaruth’s therapy client, has been breaking the patterns of suppressive and negligible upbringing.
“Her fight against negative thoughts and beliefs is on-going, but the results she has achieved so far with her, me, and her new lifestyle, give her the power and energy to strive towards her best self,” acknowledges the author.
In her life as a coach and mentor, Ms. Koodaruth has interacted with many kinds of experiences from diverse clients, especially women, whose journeys have inspired her to write this collection.
Cracking chains of separation
Digging deeper into the chains of beliefs, she narrates about Sarah, a young girl whose parents separated during her tender years, plunging her into a world of fear and uncertainties.
Rehana, her mother, had to work her fingers to the bone to sustain herself and her daughter.
Meeting two men at different times and moving in with them, Rehana thought she would redeem her life and happiness and bring comfort and enough care to Sarah.
While one of the men was loving and concerned, the marriage didn’t last long because the man returned to his home country.
The next attempt was disastrous, leaving Sarah with incurable scars of months of sexual abuse from her mother’s fiancé.
At 16, Sarah got married to a man from a supportive family, which lulled her with the love and opportunities she had so badly craved—a toxic marriage, though.
“Why do women remain in toxic relationships? Sarah was imprisoned by the fear of what others would say.
Her past pinned her down to such an extent that she did not believe in her potential to attract better, loving, and caring people in her life.
She was ready to accept lower standards and a lack of respect for a life full of make-believe,” writes Koodaruth, a high-level psychotherapist.
She recollects that when the stars aligned for Sarah to muster her courage, she sought her professional therapy services and guidance and embarked on a healing journey.
Chained by beliefs, Sarah had gone for the least and worst, veiled by receiving attention she had lacked.
How many times do challenges clog our minds, chain us, and force us into believing we’re faring correctly, and we settle for the least?
This book is a timely eye-opener to peer through the darkness and dissect the mental configurations that seem right when they’re actually thwarting our future.
A chaining culture
The author also takes us to a situation where the culture alters the mind, imprisoning the encultured.
Farah, brought up in a strict culture, was prohibited from sharing her feelings as a child, airing her concerns, and simply being childish, the opposite of the orientation her brother had.
Underscoring the power of listening to children, parental involvement in their upbringing, and the need to nurture them, “Suppressing a child’s emotions repeatedly leads to unbalanced brain chemistry, distressing their digestive and immune systems and undermining their ability to relate to others,” she reveals.
Though “trained” by upbringing to be a great wife, her marital life was demandingly draining, and the husband was busy and unconcerned.
Sadness, exhaustion, loneliness, and inability to speak out crushed her, and self-care was a fruit too lofty to pluck.
When she finally chose to dig herself out, she sought a psychotherapist, Ms. Koodaruth, and opened a new chapter, elevating her self-worth and self-belief and starting her dream business in fashion design.
This collection of easy-to-relate-with experiences paints the image of the many chains that we all, in one way or the other, find ourselves victims of.
Prisoner of rejection
By pointing out practical tips, it cracks the doors open for any chained individual to emancipate and dig themselves out of the dungeon.
She tells of Anjana, a small girl who was well-cared for by her mother, only to realize later that she had been left by her biological mother when she was only months old.
No kin, including her father, bothered to answer her questions about it.
After many struggles, including assault by her husband in later life while pregnant, “Anjana had two choices: look back and cry, remaining in darkness, grief and regret, or look forward and strive. She decided to move on,” Ms. Koodaruth narrates.
She tells of how, as a therapist, she chose to hold her hand and help her accept the loss of her child, recollect herself, and navigate life’s pathways with light.
Anjana later reunited with her biological family.
To succeed, “She had to fade out the old and construct the new: self-worth, self-esteem, self-confidence and above all, self-love, were the answers,” therapist and coach Koodaruth tips.
Abandoned
Telling more experiences of people who had been chained by their situations and beliefs, “The mind has a natural tendency to shift towards pleasure from pain,” she notes of Johanna, 10, bred in an overly strict family and laughed at whenever she failed in school, now trapped in smoking cigarettes.
With empathy, Ms. Koodaruth narrates how she has knocked on the life doors of these struggling people and offered her life-changing professional expertise to redeem them.
“Emotional abandonment is a common occurrence when children do not receive psychological or physical protection.
Repetitive emotional abandonment creates toxic shame, guilt, and implied messages about not being important or valued,” she shares.
As an adept psychotherapist, she advises that “While there are many ways to heal from trauma, many people do not receive appropriate care. Psychotherapy is one of the appropriate fields to help patients free themselves from false beliefs and harmful perceptions.”
Shackled by beauty standards, religion
This anthology’s author leaves no chain unturned, noting that beauty standards are a major shackle, especially severing the minds and self-esteem of adolescents.
She recounts of Meera, born of a fairly light-skinned mother and a darker-skinner father, who never liked her daughter’s complexion.
“…skin tone for a girl defined success, ability to find work and a worthy spouse. Meera felt insecure and started to worry about her future,” she explains of this culture, narrating Meera’s wrong choices instigated by this in later life.
Working on herself, seeking professional help to overcome self-criticism, and acting differently was her warrior’s spear to fulfillment.
Turning to religion, she tells of how Chandra’s daughters rose above the caste system despite disapproval, ostracization by family, demands by new norms, and other impediments.
They made their voice heard in foreign lands, challenges notwithstanding.
Ms. Koodaruth, a grandchild of Chandra, says that her grandmother was ever-present for them despite the dark times.
She feels that had her uncles and other relatives known how to navigate the limiting beliefs and traumas, they would have sought help and redeemed their lives.
Digging yourself out
Calling upon people, especially women to always seek help, “One action can change a life; one life changed, changes many other lives,” she writes.
These stories go past the limits of storytelling, elevating the importance of seeking help, trampling self-limiting beliefs, being intentional, and getting on the loose to save one’s life in all ways possible.
Ms. Koodaruth’s firm understanding of beliefs goes further, pricking her to expound more about them in the recently released She Leads Vol. 2 book, where she has a chapter about “How Beliefs Determine Leadership Effectiveness”.
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Chained by Beliefs is a masterpiece you’ll never regret reading, a collection of life experiences dismantling any comfort and complacency of being a prisoner of wrong beliefs and mindsets.
To easily grab your copy and gain from its riches, click to purchase from Amazon.
To benefit from her professional services, get in touch with her via her LinkedIn account or fill a form at her Thriving Mindset Coaching website.
