Dr. Najmun Riyaz, MD – My Story

“Two years ago, right before when the pandemic began I was working as a full-time psychiatrist in a local hospital, while at the same time caring for my family, three kids, and my elderly mother. Pretty much running on autopilot.

There was no time to take care of my own needs. No time to even reflect on what do I want? What is my passion? Of course, I knew my purpose in life is to raise happy, healthy children, but what about once my kids become adults. And they leave home. What do I want for myself?

Then the pandemic happened. I started working from home and realized how much time was being wasted in unnecessary conversations, advocating for my patients to the corporate world, and even commuting. I got to spent quite some time alone, while I started working from my home basement, on Telemedicine, pondering over what is more important in our lives? How did we get here?

I saw the stress my colleagues, bussinessmen, working moms, and general public in other fields were going through. I noticed how unprepared we are to handle adversity. Especially when it is of a magnitude as big as this pandemic.

I also started recognizing that many of us may be carrying some past wounds, be it having survived war or political unrest of the conflict-ridden areas, like myself, natural disasters like hurricanes, and earthquakes, childhood abuse, witnessing domestic violence in our homes, parental conflict, bullying in schools, or other forms of psychologic hurts. Many of us, especially women from cultures where we have to constantly prove our worth, and have to work hard at a pace which is way more than our male counterparts, may be struggling with some form of codependency traits, meaning; we are fixers. We like to fix things, which may be a nicer form of “imposing control”. But we mean well and in all this caregiving business, we lose sight of our own self, our own priorities. We become bitter, angry, annoyed, and constantly stressed. Then we have trouble sleeping, trouble relaxing. We blame our husbands, partners, and even children.

The relationships we grew up watching were not modelled, parental conflicts were ongoing, family discord, abuse, or even violence inside our homes, chronic inbreeding toxicity, and so much more human suffering that we may have witnessed around us, and growing up in a part of the world, where these things were normalized, as we were in a survival mode. And that all my friends may have caused us to have generations and generations of trauma, which makes us anxious within. And this anxiety makes us go in a constant state of fight and flight, even when we know we are safe and away from that state. But as they say “ Our brain keeps score”

May be these past unhealed wounds that may be the cause of us having some form of perfectionistic tendencies. It might have turned us into people-pleasers, where we have a hard time saying ‘ No’. we take up more and more on ourselves, until we feel, overburdened, and overwhelmed.

From the cultures, we come from, boundaries have no place.

We do quietly what we are told, cause confrontation makes us feel anxious.

But in reality, what we need is first to do some soul searching as to how we got here, and what to do, to regain back our power, our authenticity and integrity, and above all our inner happiness.

With help of our inner power, we will find what works best for us. We will change the course of our life so that we can enjoy our work and that may mean making some serious changes. Some of us could be ready to make that change, and some of us, maybe not be there yet. It does not matter where we are on this journey. What matters is how we want our journeys to be from here on.

I am so looking forward to taking this journey with you and hearing more about you.”