Dedication: To all those children who suffer at the hands of families!
The first memory of my childhood is of a 4-5 year old me sitting on the archaic stone staircase of an old and beautiful bungalow, in a dull sadness with the feeling of dejection from my mother and siblings. I remember desperately wanting my mother to hold me while I was crying, but she took a glance and moved on to her chores, and all I felt was a deep sorrow and an unconscious desire to be cared for.
That must have been the first dent in my consciousness. Coming from a dysfunctional family, I saw everything from wild domestic abuse (physical and psychological) to no social bond among the members of the family. This was to the extent that my mother couldn’t even breastfeed me as she unwillingly gave birth to fulfil the desire of my father’s family for another male child. I, being the third born (after an elder sister and brother), received the least share of my mother’s love. After my birth, disappointment ensued in the family, and my father didn’t look at me properly, let alone hold me for the first 15-20 days (The neglect probably began from there). As I grew up with emotional unavailability, I started liking being alone or with friends (anyone but parents and siblings), and since I was a relatively calm, intelligent (good in studies), and decent-looking child, my parents accepted me to an extent and didn’t bother me much.
However, some serious damage to my psyche had already been done; a negative attachment had woven itself between me and my family. Between the ages of 7 and 17 years of age, I suffered an infrequent onslaught of varied degrees of sexual abuse at the hands of schoolmates, random strangers in the market, and even a family friend doctor. Around my teenage years, physical abuse started from my sister, which she must have internalized from my father. I soon went to college to study medicine in a different city, and as a new world opened to me, I slowly started to explore like a small, apprehensive kitten exploring its surroundings. After that, life started blessing me with painful opportunities to see the bitter realities. During one such time, I had come back home for summer vacation with a slightly exposed view of life, and at that time, marriage proposals were being considered for my sister (who was also a doctor and was studying in college in my hometown). My sister forced me to talk to the marriage prospect on Facebook (just to introduce family members), which I felt was too early, but on her insistence, I shared some formal introductory messages. Following which, the man and his family shifted their marriage interest to me and shared it with my parents, citing that I am better looking than her. This riled up the insecurity that had been brewing in my sister since childhood (exaggerated by relatives and mothers), and she accused me of stealing the man by being flirtatious and breaking up her prospect, which, to my shock, got supported by both my parents as I sat on the living room couch, feeling aghast, suffocated, abandoned, and broken. I defended myself but got tired and ran to the roof, gasping for breath, to gain strength in the limitless arms of that cool, breezy night. I took the train back to my college the next morning, not knowing that this was just the beginning of my sister’s paranoia, validated by my parents (in order to placate her), which would do unimaginable damage to her innocence. In the coming years, she physically abused me and once fractured my finger (in front of my mother) again at home, refusing to believe me that it was broken, saying that I was doing drama to get attention. Once again, I booked my train back to college the very next morning and did not speak to my family for 2-3 months, nor did I receive any call from them asking if I was okay or not. During that time, I got myself treated with the help of a friend, and even after that, the finger is still deformed (but working well).
After a couple more incidences of abuse, as I also moved on with my life and job, and with my own transformation pacing up, I started realising that I had a toxic and bullied relationship with her. The pattern of abuse was becoming clear to me now as her call or message would cause panic, palpitations, and fear in me as she would hurl verbal abuse even from far away. It took support from my friend and back-breaking strength for me to break contact with her and with my family. This separation gave me an objective view of things about family that were sitting in my blind spot.
My father always felt inadequate, frustrated, and emotionally deficient (due to neglect and unacceptance from his father) to the extent that it deranged him psychologically, and he often resorted to committing violence (mostly on my mother). My mother never received the love and support she felt entitled to, which made her an irritated individual. Although I, as a child, gave her all the love and support I could when I stood on my own two feet, by then her personality had become hardwired with no willingness to change. Such a volatile family created deep psychological issues in my two siblings, where my sister became a narcissistic psychopath and my brother, raised in an emotionally deficient environment and starved of any validation, remains in an emotional soup of inferiority complex. My own family gave me such a vast understanding of what a true family is: Those who, in a true sense, share a deep connection with you; in most cases, it is not the blood connection, as it is the one that doesn’t let you grow!
Life is a constant passage of experiences like a flowing river, and while the river flows, it leaves impressions on the riverbed stones that affect or shape the river flow. Just like that, a multitude of experiences (whether conscious or not) shape our lives, and this very thing is called ‘conditioning’. While this is a well-known fact, it is rather less realized in our daily lives as it is so deeply ingrained that it has become our subtle software running in the background, almost invisible. An important beginning of this conditioning comes from family, with which a child shares the longest and closest interactions. The association with family is one of the deepest, undiscovered realities that orchestrate the life of a child. And that is why it is critical to understand family dynamics so that one can be free from them.
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Photo credit: Image provided by the storyteller.
