Strength TogetHER 1 Session 1

Strength TogetHER is a space for girls. It is a platform where girls can share their feelings, emotions in a safe environment to help grow and build strong relationships. Strength together is facilitated by Lokopakar. Lokopakar is an organization working to create innovative programs for youth development mainly around outdoor learning. Lokopakar is also currently engaged in providing mentorship to students from Grade 9-12 to develop personally and professionally.

On May 22, 5 pm Strength TogetHER had the first session which went till 6:30 pm. It was around one and half hour session of fruitful discussion. Since it was our first session, we had an introductory session. Starting out, I Barsha Tamang of Lokopakar was really nervous as it was something I have dreamt of. Coming it into reality made me happy but anxious at the same time. Due to some technical problems, our moderator couldn’t be there. We were around 20 girls starting the initial conversation. Moving forward we started our session with an introduction session after which our moderator joined. Our moderator was Miss. Manusha Jayatilake. Ms. Manusha Jayatilake has primarily been working as a media consultant for the non-governmental organization ‘Scaling Up Nutrition Sri Lanka’ which currently implements the UN action plan on nutrition for the country, on behalf of the Government. 

We started by sharing our motivation. Hearing from the girls, their motivation was from their family to their failure. This actually helped us all motivated.

Then we slowly move towards about inner critique. It was the time when we think what holds us back. We talked about the impact of the ‘inner critique’ each one of us has to battle with every single day. According to Miss Manusha, ‘I feel that girls are under too much pressure from these ‘critiques’, leading to constant self-doubt, shame, and fear, especially during their teenage years and early twenties. Then, to recognize and notice when this ‘critique’ makes a bad comment the next time and onto about the importance of being kind to one’s self in spite of such heavy self-criticisms’. We discovered what holds us back and we got constant feedback from our moderator. Which helped the girls think about looking at their inner critique is a different way. Some of the inner critiques which we faced were

Thinking I AM NOT ENOUGH

Over analyzing things which we shouldn’t have,

Being Short-tempered,

Letting go of things easily either it be opportunities or people,

Being very hard on yourself and overthinking scenarios,

Easily getting attached with people, being possessive about them and scared to lose them,

Not comfortable to share problems with parents,

Not being able to express feelings,

Compare herself to others,

Hard time sharing her feelings, trust issues,

 

Manusha Ma’am advice :

ALWAYS BE KIND TO YOURSELF!!

Talk to yourself like you would console to others when you doubt yourself

Find a comfort person and share them everything bothering you or making you happy

Recognize owns deep feelings 

Slowly try to express yourself 

Takes time but You will be confident eventually 

Taking the suggestion, it gave us a way how we can learn to cope with the Inner Critic that has been holding for long.

We ended with a feedback session on how we can move forward and what we can possibly target for next time:

1 session in 2 weeks interval

Session sharing stories

Saturday preferred