Interview with Asma Fawad- IGCBT- NLP Life Coach.
From a stay-at-home mom to an internationally recognized CBT and LifeCoach therapist, my journey has included a lot of hard work, love, and a passion for healing those who suffer in silence and struggle. fight battles that no one knows about. I am the mother of two beautiful boys. My entire life changed when my oldest son was diagnosed with autism. Determined to help him, I began to learn more about the human brain and behavior. Over the years, I have personally experienced unimaginable levels of stress and anxiety. And I decided to help others who are struggling with these problems. That was a turning point for me. Many other parents, especially mothers, began reaching out to me about mental and emotional health issues, and I supported them. I am currently an IGCBT-accredited and certified cognitive behavioral therapist and a licensed LifeCoach. My expertise is in women’s mental health, and I’m on a mission to help women escape the darkness and live fulfilling lives.
Can you share a specific challenge you have faced while working with patients and how you overcame it?
While working with people with mental and emotional health issues, a therapist has to be mentally capable of handling difficult situations. A challenge that I faced at the beginning of my career was “cognitive fatigue,” where I experienced burnout after helping clients with extreme grief and depression.
I overcame this challenge by taking frequent breaks and making sure I had time for leisure in my personal life
As a therapist specializing in female mental health, what unique challenges do women often face in their mental well-being?
I believe the most common and important aspect of female mental health issues is that they are so busy being the nurturers and caretakers, providing love, affection, and warmth to the people around them, that they forget to prioritize their own well-being. This leads to high stress levels, anger issues, anxiety, and physical illnesses.
Secondly, too often, females associate their happiness with their partners, and when their expectations are not met, they struggle to fathom the fact that happiness is an inside job and no one else should be responsible for our feelings.
How do you tailor your approach to meet the specific needs of mothers who are seeking therapy?
When mothers reach out to me for support, they often struggle with guilt. They feel guilty about prioritizing themselves. They have guilt about not doing enough, not being good enough, etc.
In such instances, the fundamental approach is to work on their “limited core beliefs.” Through therapy and counseling, I enable them to look at the belief systems that are usually wrong and are the roots of many of their issues.
Furthermore, I teach them ways to manage their stress levels because mothers often have high cortisol levels, which ultimately lead to higher stress levels.
Tell me about a particularly impactful success story you have had in helping a woman overcome her mental health struggles.
The privacy of my patients is of primitive importance, so I will keep their identities anonymous.
There was a lady here in Dubai who was in an abusive marriage, and her youngest child was newly diagnosed with autism. She was self-medicating to get rid of anxious thoughts. When she met me, she was on the verge of ending her life.
Her depression had gotten worse, and she thought the best way to escape all the horrible realities of life was to commit suicide along with her son with autism.
I had to tailor my therapy and coaching approach with extreme care in this case, keeping in mind the fragile and vulnerable state of the patient’s mental health.
Through my expertise in cognitive behavior therapy and by combining some elements of NLP, I enabled her to look at her life from another perspective.
Now She has a successful career, is a happy mother, and gathered the courage to come out of the toxic marriage. She calls me her angel.
In what ways do you empower women to take charge of their own mental well-being?
My therapy and coaching approach is entirely based on empowering women to take charge of their own mental well-being. Together, we work on:
- Mindset. A negative mindset can never let you have a positive life.
- Self Talk. The way we speak to ourselves matters the most.
- Belief Systems. Women often underestimate their own potential. Those beliefs need to be challenged.
- Self-analysis and self-awareness Only a self-aware person can analyze themselves without judgment and find their role in the problems in their lives.
- Tools and techniques to learn emotional regulation, emotional intelligence, and stress management
Can you provide an example of a situation where your expertise in CBT therapy positively impacted a woman’s life?
In CBT, we learn that our thoughts create feelings, and feelings impact our behaviors. A girl with very low self-esteem reached out to me. She was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. With the help of CBT, I taught her the concept of “cognitive diffusion,” which means that we are separate from our thoughts. Our thoughts are not facts. An average person gets 7,000 to 70,000 negative thoughts in a day. The key is to learn that our thoughts are not us and treat them like visitors who will come and go.
Through an intensive therapy program and slow exposure to the situations that scared her, she overcame her social anxiety and panic attacks. She is now graduating from a well-known university in Dubai and wants to pursue her career as a public speaker. I am so proud of her.
