The Style of Relating to Oneself and the world

When we are born, we are born in relation to everything in the universe, even the universe itself. Your primary relations with your parents or caregivers are something like a fire ignited from two stones which leads to all the other forms of fire in your life. This fire of relating to people that you learn from your parents can either be brightening up every relation in life or just burn things down for you. We say we walk on the footprints of our parents, but we need to see what ashes of yours are on the ground that are making these footprints visible for you to walk on. Because I guess the foot needs a ground for its print to be engraved on it.

The style of having relations of our parents with others (including you) and each other are like two wings that a bird grows while growing up. These wings are something that dictates your height of flying in relation. But fortunately, unlike the bird you have the ability to change these wings and the way they function to get rich in your relations. But this requires for the bird to fall, get in discomfort and distress and situations where a bird can no longer even fly and feels powerless to its own wings. This acceptance leads to the birth of new wings.

Looking at my parents being loving to each other, yet not being in love had confused me and there were two parts within me one that could see, hear, feel and understand the reality of their relation and the other was the one that had to be a part of their reality which was opposite to the reality of my understanding’s split was present in them too. This part of me that was able to see the reality was something I pushed away in order to feel safe about the relationship my parents hold. So, for this 7-year-old girl, her parents were the embodiment of love and relationship, the best couple she could ever find. It was like she was looking at the fire burning down the forest but yet concluding that it is so to provide light to her house. It is difficult to see the reality when seeing so might just turn you towards seeing the truth in the people your need of connection is based on. It is very much like looking for the truth in a job that’s paying you big enough. It is like looking for the truth in the equation that looks solved because doing so requires you to put in work back into things that made you feel good and in power of safety at some point. Remember everything that you conclude and solve in your mind doesn’t necessarily mean you cracked the truth, there is a thin line of difference between solving things and understanding things. We often choose to solve things because doing so keeps us in control and provides us with safety. Many of your relations in life are based on the concept of feeling safe and not on the feeling of connection. It is like connection has space for safety always but safety doesn’t always have a place for connection. It is like the roots of relations have both these elements so the presence of one will also grow the tree but under what conditions. This is what you need to look for.

Explaining what relations are about comes from a girl who grew up in an environment where relations were not even a thing. Because relations require presence, emotions, thoughts, space. We learn from our parents how to emotionally and mentally relate to people but what if you never experienced any of this. What is there is an absence of emotional and mental connection with your parents. And the same between them. Or it was not really an absence but the dysfunctional way of this connection. A connection that is dysfunctional is what we call a bond with knots, which holds the relation but also hurts the thread. What do you think you learn about relations? Do we learn how they look or do we learn there is no such thing as relations in life?

But after these early years, life happens. And life is nothing but a beautiful art painted out of different colors of relations. But when you haven’t learned to identify the importance of these colors, all you do is repeat the white and black colors in your life. Since childhood all I had remembered about my father was how hardworking he was towards his work. The relationship my father had with his work was something that I learned from him but that too was unhealthy in nature. But I picked up the pieces that worked for me in my adulthood today. But be it as a child or an adult, I just have one question for my father. Were relationships scary for you or the people you too were related to made it scary for you? It is very important to see what relationship your caregivers hold towards relationships in totality.

Our mother is always someone we learn a lot from. Being a girl, I adapted the most about being a female and relating to the world from her. Her relationship as a mother with me, as a wife to my father, as a lover to her partner, as an aunt to the kids, as a housewife to the household. Each of these forms of her showed me a different part of my mother. Every relation that she held was like a chapter that I registered which made the book ‘Life as a Female’. Remember people and even your parent figures always teach you what they have experienced. So, everything that I learned about love, connections, and relations was that they will never serve you and if you want them to be serving, you need to get yourself to go for it.

Trauma is not always what you experience in your reality but it is also what experiences you witness in other people’ s reality in your life. For example, it is a trigger even today for me to see a woman crying for some man because all it puts me back to is a child that saw her own mother doing so. These events that you witness as a child form the default files in your subconscious and they reflect back in a way you don’t realize in your life, because for realizing so you need to address those events directly and they hold a lot of pain for one to do so. These events are not something you are hiding from, instead they are the very events you are hidden in.

So, remember if your parents were like walls for relationships, remember they too hold bricks of disconnection, unsafety and unawareness of emotions related to relationships.