 Thank you very much for keeping it wide in the morning. My name is Ram Agukul. It is time for the next conversation of the day and today it's all about talking about mental health, especially in the youth. Today, let's talk about mental health and relationships among the youth. How healthy or how can your mental health affect our relationships? Can it affect the way we socialize, the way we interpret information, the way we deal with other people, the way we also raise up our families? Is it possible that our mental health can have a long lasting effects even on our own children and their children after them? Well, this particular conversation that we shall have today, a man with grace karaoke. She is a therapist. She'll tell us more about what she does and she has a good, a very good CV. Karim Sana Grace, thank you for finding time to join me. I am so glad to be here. Thank you for the invite. Kusalamaz. Kabisa. Now, tell us, you are a therapist. Yes. Tell us more about what you do and the areas that you always cover. Yes, I am my degree is in marriage and family therapy. And I also do mental health counseling. So anything, mental health, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, stuff like substance abuse, anything that has to do with grief, trauma. I am the person to look for. You are the good person. You are like our modern day church where you know when people have problems, they go to church. When people have mental issues, they come to grace. They come to grace, yes. Where can we go find it? I do my sessions mainly online after the COVID situation. But I'm based in Ridgeways, which is off of Kimburot. And that is where I do my physical sessions. But mostly I do a lot of online through Zoom, WhatsApp, Google Meet. Wherever a person is able to reach me, I'm really happy to be of help. I also do a lot of social media. So I have a lot of following on IG, on Facebook. And I also have a website that people... That's the way you make an appointment to reach me is to go to my face. Tell us your website and your social media. Okay, my website is www.graceriochi.co.ke. And over there you will find everything. Because you can click... I have a YouTube channel. It's called Live by Design with Grace Karyuki. Lots and lots of information on mental health and relationships. I told you this lady has a lot, I told you. So one more. Well, Grace, even as we start this conversation, I would like you guys to check her out on her social media platforms and show that engage with us. The hashtag is one in the morning at Ram Agoko. It's my handle at Y254 Channel. It's the station handle at Michelle Ashira, my colleague's handle. Remember to head over to Facebook, drop in your comments. As we continue with this conversation, ask your questions. Ask away. She is here to answer all your queries. It's all about mental health and relationships among the youth. Thank you so much for being part of this conversation. Let's start. Let's talk about this from different angles, Grace. Because I know that mental health is so broad. There are so many things that can affect the mental capacity of the mental health of an individual. But before we get into the nitty gritties, is it possible for someone to establish within themselves that my mental health is good enough? Yeah, yeah. Because when you think about mental health, mental health is about how you think, how you feel and how you behave. Because this is what happens. Is that you have a thought. That thought triggers an emotion. And that emotion triggers a behavior. It's a process. Absolutely. One thing leads to another. One thing leads to another. So for instance, you wake up in the morning and the first thing you think about is, oh my goodness, this is going to be a hard day. And fun enough, there's a way that particular mindset affects your day. Yes, yes. So now you trigger emotions within you, the emotion of stress. And now because you have predicted that the day is going to be hard, the next thing that you feel is some sort of negative energy. And once you have that negative energy, what do you do? You take the blanket and you put it over your head. That's the behavior. But if you wake up in the morning and say, oh, thank God, what a beautiful day. You get out of bed and you go into the bathroom, you wash your face, and you have a song in on your lips. And you have a good day. It changes what you do. Because at that point, you go, you shower, you have a good breakfast, and you are looking forward to the day. So your mental health is how you think, how you feel, and how you behave. Now, WHO, the World Health Organization, they say your mental health is as important and probably even more important than your physical health. Wonderful. So young people who are between the ages of 18 and 25, their mental health is very important because they are moving and transitioning from being children into being adults. Now you have the capacity to think for yourself and to make choices. And so if you are not taking care of your thought patterns, if you are not taking care of how you feel and you are just reacting and reacting and reacting, or even not reacting, then you are going to create a life that is going to be either stressful for you, it's not fulfilling you, or you are going to create a life that is very fulfilling. It's interesting what you're saying, that it all starts from your head. From your mind. From your mind. That's why it's important. It's important. So when you wake up in the morning, tell yourself it's going to be a good day, even though you had a bad day the previous day. If you're going to work, even though you have struggles and disagreements, we are normal in the office. When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself today is going to be a good day and it will affect your day. If you look at some of these behaviors that people show, because you said it affects your behavior, if you look at people in the office or at home, is it possible for you to pick out that this particular individual needs assistance in terms of their mental health or should need to work on their mental health? Is it possible for you to either pick it out from someone else or notice it within yourself? Oh yeah, definitely. Now, let's look at signs that your mental health is good. Exactly. Number one, you don't make assumptions about things that are happening around you. You clarify, you ask questions, you communicate. Number two, you do not judge other people's intentions without having evidence that what you are telling, you are thinking and saying to yourself about why they did it is correct. So for instance, if I'm walking down the street and I meet you and I say hi to you and you don't respond, my first thought is that you have ignored me, you don't care about me and therefore you are mad at me. So that thinking is going to create sadness in me, frustration in me, a lot of questioning until you come to the office and then you say hi to me and then I'm thinking to myself, why are you pretending? I talked to you and you didn't tell me. And then if I don't ask you, I will call you a person who doesn't care. But if I say, hey, by the way, I met you on the road, I say hi and you ignored me completely. And then you tell me, where? Oh, I didn't see you. And then I say, how? Then you will tell me, actually I was hurrying because there was something. Your mind was somewhere else. So if I do not learn how to understand human behavior, then what is going to happen? I personalize everything. If you tend to personalize everything, you know your mental health is not okay. You need to work on it. Now, how can you tell another person has mental health issues? Sadness, you can tell somebody who is sad. Isolation, especially for this age group, a lot of isolation with drawing. Is that from 18 to 25? Yeah, from 18 to 25. You find that there is a lot of isolating with drawing from social situations, lack of interest in things people used to love to do, and then a lot of restlessness. You know, quick tempers, yelling and shouting, and also behaviorally, we develop what we call coping mechanisms. And these are, sometimes it is drinking some things, smoking something, some way I'm going to escape to something. We should lead to some more problems. Much more problems. Addiction. Yes, addictions and other self-destructive behaviors. Now, the other thing that we need to understand is that our upbringing plays a big role on how we develop in our mental health, our emotional health, and psychological health. There are some thought patterns and some belief system that are created by the way that we experience our parents. Now, this is what I normally tell young people who are in this space in their lives, that take time to get to know yourself. Get in touch with who you are by doing the simple thing. Start writing your life history from the time you are, as long as you can remember. And take segments like 10, zero to 10 years old. What was my experience? What did I experience? How did I experience that? So you're doing that to evaluate yourself? Yes, to understand yourself. How did I used to feel at home? Maybe when you were a kid, you used to wet the bed, you used to have nightmares, you used to really be afraid of the dark, be afraid of snakes and bugs and everything. So you need to go back there and get in touch with that. Those people who experience those kinds of fears early in their childhood, those are the people now who develop anxiety disorders like panic attacks because you are not sure of the environment. And let me say something very quickly here. There are four things that as a child, you need to know and to experience. Number one, that I am loved, I am acceptable and I can give love and it is accepted. Number two, I need to feel that I am competent, that I have the skills and I can develop the skills to be successful in my life. Number three, I need to feel that I am safe, that the environment I am in, I am safe. So I'm experiencing safety because my parents are not fighting. The people in my environment are constantly not in a fight. They are not chaos. People are managing life well. And then number four, I need to know that I have control, that I can make choices and I'm allowed to make mistakes and learn from them. So in this scenario, we're looking at how family affects relationships, especially among those who are growing up. When, how deep can it go? Especially for these, for people who are within this age group. Because we are seeing some of them even getting into family. Some are in the age of 25. In the Kenyan youth of today, some are families, some are children. How diverse can the effects be in the long run even to their own children? Yeah, yeah. Now, this is the thing. We are creatures of imitation. And so when we are growing up, and that's why I said, take some time and do your own life history, reflect back so that you know, how did I experience dad? How did I experience mom? And how did they shape the way I think about life? Many of us, me, I was 12 when I said, when I grow up, I don't want to be in a marriage like my parents are in. You see, we make certain vows because we are experiencing certain negative things happening within our environment. So when we grow up and we get into families ourselves, we do not know, apart from what we experienced at home, how do we know what the other alternative is? We haven't experienced it. Because even the person that you're going to start a family with has their own experience in the family. They have their own baggage that they bring with you. They bring with them. And so that is why it's important. Before, the best way to prepare for a long-term relationship and young people in this age group, that's what your crisis, your developmental crisis is about your occupation. Who do you want to become? Career. And number two, it is your relationships. Now I'm no longer I'm a child of career, I'm a child of my grandmother. Now I am me, myself in the world. Stand alone independently. Yes, how do I now create my own life, my own identity outside of my family? And this identity crisis starts when we are in our teens. We begin to differentiate, we call this differentiating in family therapy, that you begin to differentiate yourself from your family. And that is why teenagers and their parents have a lot of fights. And what is the complaint mostly? That you like your friends more than you like being with us. You see, it's because your child developmentally, their emotional space and even their social space is changing. And we will get there on the teenagers. But now I'd like you to touch on this particular aspect of how that trickles down to the generation. To the generation because that is one thing that affects people. Absolutely. They say that my father used to do this. Used to do this. My mother used to do this in our family. Yeah, we used to. We do this, you know. And you know, you end up wondering, is this a pattern that should change or should it continue? Absolutely. It's because, like I said, monkey see monkey do. That's the way we are. So when we know that what I have experienced at home, I don't like, you see. But what I want, I don't know how it looks like. Can you change that pattern? Yes, you can. And you can change that pattern if you are self-aware. Take some, that's why I said during your 20s, you during your early 20s, take time to get to know yourself before you couple yourself with someone else. So how do you, yes, it will trickle down because when you get into the situation where you have to discipline a child. Now, you are such a, these days, I mean, not these days, we have never had a manual that this is the way you parent. We parent, we parent according to the way we were conditioned. Or we parent against the way we were conditioned. So you, we say that you either, if your father was authoritarian, your mother was authoritarian, you will find yourself saying, I will never be harsh like that towards my children until you have your own children and you realize you are turning into your parent. You see. So in order for you to change that, then you need to take some time to know yourself, understand who you are, understand how you relate to the world. And I will say this because your subconscious stores every information that you go through, every experience you've gone through, throughout your life. It is going to affect the way you feel about yourself, the way you see the world and the way you receive information from the world. I love what you're saying, that at the end of the day, you need to re-evaluate yourself. And you mentioned, write down the story of your life. And I think that's how people end up writing books. Now, because what happens is that if you sit down, the first memory, I'm going to give a challenge to everybody. Try to think to the first, very first memory you can remember. And I will tell you mine. Me, I can remember my first memory. I was mother. I was running around, singing, skipping and all. That's my first memory. When I look, when I ask my mother how old I was, I was around three years old. It's not foggy. It's foggy. Your memories begin to form when you're around two and a half to three years old. That's when you begin to retain memories. Because, personally, I can't remember much about how things were, but I remember so many things. Yes, it's very foggy. They're so scattered. And I can't pick out which one is the first memory. Yes. And this is the thing that I want people to understand. Our lives are very emotional. We remember things in emotional terms. So you remember the things that affected you emotionally, whether it was happiness, sadness, you know, positive or negative. Those are the, whenever you have this gaping information, memories in your mind, stop and ask yourself, why is this memory so clear in my mind? What is it about? What are the emotions around it? What does it mean? What did it, how did it impact my life? Because you are remembering a certain situation. Now, it all moves or revolves around self-identity. Yes, yes. It means self-identity has a key role in emotional health. Yes, yes, yes. Now, if you look at the societal expectations, I want us to look at some of these nitty-gritty things that affect mental health of the Kenyan youth. Societal expectations. Yes. People want you to become that doctor. Yeah. If you grew up in a family where your mom is a doctor, your father is a doctor, or your mom is a lawyer, your father is an engineer, and then there is that expectation that you must be a lawyer, you must be an engineer. You are 18. And at that time, you're looking at, you know, people who are finishing their high school, they are getting into campus, and they're expected to make career choices, which at the end of the, in the long run brings in that friction between them and the family. And you want to say that maybe stuck you over here, because there's a youth who is suffering from that particular, right now. What do you do? Yeah, exactly. Now, the issue of now self-identity and differentiating yourself, who you want to be versus who your parents want you to be. I normally say that education, going to campus and getting an education, sometimes that education is not so much about what career you will go and do. It is actually about social development. It's actually allowing yourself to be in that social space so that you can grow outside of your immediate family, so that you are in this space where you are learning to be an adult and you are learning to make choices for your life so that you can be able to be independent. So your first degree, if you have parents who have decided that this is what we want you to do, I want to say this to young people. You can either fight against it and go into college for four years and come out with nothing. Or you can look at it and you can tell your parents that this is really what, if they are not willing, because at that point they are in control and you don't have much control. You're still under them. Yes. So either you can go in and be bitter. I did that for six months when I finished from four. My parents were not able to take me to college. So one of my relatives was gracious enough to allow me to come to her house and she took me to go and learn how to make dresses, dressmaking. And I felt... Is that what you wanted? No, no. I wanted to be a teacher. And me, what I felt, my experience with what that good Samaritan did for me was Amenidarao. So I spent six months and then three more months of practicum in addressing making school and I never learnt anything because my attitude was rotten. You don't want it. I did not see the opportunity. I saw, I saw Amenidarao. And so my brain refused to accept the info. Today I wish I... Because that was a skill that I was being given that nobody would have ever taken away from me. And today, you know, today I have to pay for this dress to be made. I would be doing my deal. I would, why? You see? So what I'm saying to the young people, if you are in that situation and your parent has insisted, I want to tell you, you can either choose to be bitter and not see the opportunity or you can look for the opportunity. Serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can't change. So I can't change my parents. But I give me the courage to change the things that I can. So what is the opportunity here? The opportunity here is for me to go to college and get a degree and learn. And there is things I'm going to learn in school that nobody or in college, that nobody can ever take away from me. So I'm going to go in with an open mind and I'm going to say, what is the opportunity here? Because after your four years of your bachelors in business administration, then you can now, after that, you can now, you have more, what do we call, more control and you have more opportunity to be able to choose what you want to do. Just remember your mental health is what is going to determine how you are going to go on with your own life. I wish I had a taro meta here. Here? That's my point. You can choose whether to rebel or not. And this is what many people are going through. I want us to take a short break. We'll be back after this. And I hope you're learning something from home, especially when it comes to this particular conversation on mental health and relationships among the youth. Are you learning something? Are you a parent? Do you have questions? And should you engage with us? The hashtag is one in the morning at Ram Maguko at Y254 channel at Grace Karaoke. It's also where you can find her, correct? Yeah, Grace Karaoke, middle dash in the Rito. That's my Facebook. Yes, on Facebook. Or in IG, GK in the Rito. Yes, make sure that you keep it. You tag her as we continue with this particular conversation on mental health. It is so important. We have a lot that is still coming up. After this break, we want to also look at so much more in regards to mental health. So don't go too far. This is one in the morning. We'll be back in a bit.