Heartbreak life coach Annalisa Bahadur to start NGO with focus on helping men heal
Having gone through what she has described as “a number of heartbreaks”, including acting in the best interests of her daughters and separating from them while they were young, and being in an abusive relationship, life coach Annalisa Bahadur believes she is in a position to help people heal from the many heartbreaks they may have had to face and in doing so she strategically focuses on men.
Describing herself as an unorthodox heartbreak coach, Bahadur said it is her niche because she has had to heal from a number of heartbreaks over the last few decades. She pointed out as well that heartbreak does not only occur when a romantic relationship ends, but involves any pain from various life experiences. When people do not heal properly, it affects their confidence. The pain also piles up as they continue to have other experiences and this can lead to anxiety.
“It is something I have learnt to do very well. I like where I am at emotionally, psychologically, spiritually and physically. I think this is the best time of my life and so what I do now is I teach that to clients who are going through heartbreaking situations or who have suffered from trauma, going all the way back to childhood… and how it affects their lives now,” the life coach said in a recent interview.
While her practice is based in New York, in the United States, Bahadur said she has also worked with Guyanese and other international clients over the years and she is now in the process of setting up a non-governmental organisation (NGO) here.
Interestingly, Bahadur said most of her clients are men and so the NGO would be focused on men as, according to her, patriarchy has created a lot of pain and hurt.
“And while we women tend to feel that we are the only victims of it, because our men don’t know how to embrace their emotional side, which we need to build better, stronger relationships, men struggle a lot,” she added.
The NGO, which would be located in Berbice, would explore how companies can lend support to men who have lost their jobs, give help for at least six months and work with other agencies to find job placements for them. Situations like job loss affect men emotionally and they do not know how to handle it, she said. She also hopes the NGO would offer assistance to people migrating to Guyana in an effort to help them to adjust to Guyana’s culture.
Even though she is encouraged to widen the coverage of the NGO, Bahadur maintained that she does not believe that men get the attention they need, especially in Guyana’s culture and there is also a stigma attached to
them seeking help.
Bahadur combines her coaching certificate and a psychology degree with life experiences to create programmes to steer her clients from a state of emotional turmoil to a “more successful life”.
Since the majority of her clients are men for whom she creates a “safe space” the life coach pointed out that she is already in the field and she understands their needs and how they need to be approached in order for them to open up and communicate their feelings. Men, she said, are in some cultures seen as weak if they cry or say ‘I love you’ without feeling as if they have lost control and this causes unnecessary pain.
Painful experiences
Getting into this line of work started with years of painful experiences for Bahadur and blaming others for the experiences caused more pain for her as she pointed out that throughout the years she kept making the same mistakes over and over.
It was her move to India at age 26, after she had divorced and had three daughters, which triggered change, painfully so, that eventually brought her to where she is today.
Bahadur shared that she was married at 20, but by then the couple already had a daughter who was a year and a half. At age 21 she had her second daughter and at 23 the third. By the time she was 25, she and her husband realised that they could no longer live together. At that time they were looking for support through counsellors and therapists but had no access to such assistance.
“Eventually that marriage ended [and] to provide a better lifestyle for the girls, I decided to permit their father to take them up to Canada where they would be raised… It was a really difficult time for me to cope with all of that and then again not having anyone to turn to and talk to and then facing the judgement of my culture. I was considered a bad parent,” Bahadur said.
The former television journalist said that within six months of her daughters leaving, she went to India, where she became involved in an abusive relationship. She remained in that country for three years.
“That’s when really, I think, I realised that I just could not keep going through this pain. I could not live with this pain anymore as I wanted so much more for myself and I felt like I was hitting rock bottom and I had to do something,” she shared.
Her first order of business was googling ‘how to get out of an abusive relationship’, taking mental notes and slowly getting out of the relationship on her own. Buddhism, which she discovered, she said, helped to strengthen her spiritually and mentally.
Bahadur said in that process as well she started to see a pattern and realised that it wasn’t the people in her life who were causing the pain, but rather she was attracted to certain behaviour patterns and when she got into the relationships she “was trying to fix the person instead of fixing myself”.
In her practice, Bahadur said, she now teaches people to find what works for them when dealing with certain issues as the one-size-fits-all approach does not work. She added that in Guyanese culture, people are not often taught how to “think and communicate” effectively but