After exploring and sharing the Various Modalities to break our repetitive patterns in former articles, I would now like to bring our awareness to relationships. The past few days have been very intense for me, due to the Soul Balancing Sessions I was conducting for Individuals for emotional release. It amazes me that most of us are so oblivious to our internal storehouse of suppressed emotions related to our sexuality, parents, spouse etc. coupled with our own fears, insecurities that post release when you see the face of the person it softens down so much that it appears that the years have added to his/her youth.
Often people, friends have asked me don’t we have enough in our day-to-day life to address that we need to unleash which is already over and forgotten? My answer to them is, yes we have a lot in our daily lives to address, resolve and that we don’t need any more to be added to this list, however, it is a fact that roots of today’s challenges, issues, unwanted patterns lie in our unresolved past and unless we accept our past entirely we can’t do anything to have the present what we want.
Most of our relationship issues come from our childhood and from our experience with our parents. Any unresolved blockage in our relationships with our parents especially with the opposite sex parent continues to haunt our present relationships.
My own life made me come in terms with my parents after a lot of internal work, forgiveness, taking responsibility and accepting the truth. I grew up in a broken family--my parents had separated, father had remarried and I intensely disliked my biological mother. I would say, my childhood wasn’t conducive for upbringing a healthy individual. Being happy go lucky, lack of expression for deep emotions, controlled outward behaviour despite the feelings of being unloved and unwanted, helped me to accept my parents the way they are.
Many a times as parents we don’t realize the difference between quality and quantity time. Several times I have come across my friends complaining about not being bonded with children aged three and above. The fact is that we don’t remember the hours spend with people but only remember the experience we shared with them. So a mother who is around but is constantly engaged in kitchen, TV shows or phone calls, does not add a quality to your child’s life. Often with you being so much around, the child will either be overwhelmed with your presence or will start acknowledging your presence as an invisible person. And in such a situation the emotional distance increases and child grow up as an Individual who finds something missing in his/her life.
In parenting workshops, I often emphasis that parents should spend quality time of an hour or two per day with your child. Anything more or less will fall in the Marginal Utility Principle of Economics.
The quality time in this context is doing things together which do not fall in the purview of usual routines like doing homework, watching TV and to involve more physical activities especially with a smaller age group. These activities could be mimicking someone, dancing, playing a crossword game or games where they can enact and fantasize. Such activities will take care of your child’s right brain which reflects emotions, feelings, personal goals which often gets neglected in our society and schooling and are a strong force in shaping who we become.
I also encourage parents to use double binds with small children. Double bind is a concept wherein a child feels he or she has a freedom to choose for self. For example, rather than telling your child to stop watching television and going to be you could say, “Would you like to sleep now or after 10 minutes.” Rationally the latter statement hasn’t made much of a difference to the desired action however the freedom of apparent choice helps a child to value it more. And thus you will receive less aggression.