THE QUARANTINE, KARMA AND RELATIONSHIPS

THE QUARANTINE, KARMA AND RELATIONSHIPS

The levels of domestic violence, abuse, aggression, frustration in families during the quarantine has increased and is reported worldwide by most news channels. This developing phenomenon is also providing us with a different perspective about observations and experiences of family harmony before the quarantine. How was it before quarantine? Earlier – Absence made the hearts grow fonder? And now – proximity reduces affection and increases aversion? (like the Marathi saying ‘Ati parichayāt avadnya’).

Family relationships and how some people live with each other is, however, not limited to equations such as distance = love and proximity = aversion. The equations are much intricate, very deep, residing unfathomed in our subconscious. According to psychologists who work with Karma, these equations are so deep rooted that they are carried as cell memory through various lives. They keep unfolding the expected learning towards deeper love and fulfilling existence. If we look deeper, what emerges for each of us is lifetime quarantine into certain relationships or certain ‘patterns’ repeating in relationships.

The ‘lockdown’ is happy family time for some, forced family time for others. For some it is ambiguous time, just barely over water. In the last couple of decades there have been innumerable people consulting me for family therapy, marriage counseling, some trying very hard to adjust with their teenagers, some trying hard enough to be cordial with an inevitable spouse, some trying hard to survive the pain caused by abusive parents and yet having to take care of them. There have also been people ‘battling’ relationships sometimes in denial of how much the ‘other’ has contributed (forced) to life and not just taken away from it by simply being what he or she is – ‘difficult’. Shifting the client’s perspective from his or her angle to every bit of the relationship, widening the scope of control, learning newer ways of dealing with abuse, passiveness, neglect, submissiveness, etc. evolves the therapy. Amidst the upsurge of domestic violence around the world, in India, psychologist Radhika Bapat echoing all mental health professionals, mentions in an article by Rekha Balakrishnan that “Usually therapists focus on educating the client about the cycle of domestic violence followed by identifying, challenging, and replacing self-blame with an understanding that the perpetrator is responsible for the assault”. 

Read more at: http://yourstory.com/herstory/2020/04/women-domestic-violence-lockdown-coronavirus

 The ‘cycle’ that Radhika refers to is the truth of ‘all’ relationships and not just the one that are abusive. We all have our own perspectives of relationships and different people who become our destiny encounters help us revisit, challenge or even change our perspectives. We can refer to Carl Jung’s concept of shadows or the Anthroposophical concept of the double to comprehend the deeper levels of these inevitable cycles.

 We all have been children, parents, grand parents, living-in aunts and uncles who were at some point of time in similar situations as above. We all have worked towards bettering our relationships with people who have been ‘inevitable’ in life. Many who wish to ‘fix’ relationships with forcing ‘good’ behaviour keep falling into the same patterns of ‘failure to find joy’ because ‘being cordial’ has a quick expiry date.

 Many who really find joy have worked on their own blind spots, evolved to a different level of functioning and have started contributing significantly to their relationships. And this is the work of psychotherapy, to exactly achieve that joy – with no expiry date.

But you know what? The trick lies in living inside the relationship and overcoming the difficult part of it. Its like being inside water is the prerequisite to learning to swim. So one cannot stay out of a relationship and make it work! Can one?

Throughout my 20 years of career, there have been successes with relationships finally doing good, people finding right ways to assess boundaries, people reaching creative ways of transforming relationships. But there have been times when I have experienced the ‘suicide’ of some relationships and have wished that only if they would have given little more time to it.It has been my premise that ‘relationship’ is a different entity in itself. This is an entity born out of a part of ‘Me’ and a part of ‘You’. It is a product of both our biographies intertwined and there is a reason why You and I are together in it. We don’t make the relationship work. The relationship makes us work.

I may be an offspring, a sibling, a parent, a grandchild, a grandparent, a spouse, an ‘in-law’… whatever. There is something of me that has created this relationship, sustains it and provides for it. It gives meaning to my existence.

Sometimes when I witnessed the suicide of a relationship, I could almost see how something could have positively panned out if one or both persons would have not given up. What is ‘giving up’? How would it be if Sachin Tendulkar or Serena Williams were to leave their respective games in the middle simply because the other team or the opponent player was performing better? Get it? It would be ridiculous! By ‘giving up’ I mean trying to run away and not recognizing what is inevitable. It is falling prey to immaturity and short sightedness.

Closure or creating boundaries is not ‘giving up’. Failure is apparent and that is not ‘giving up’. Playing till the end and courageously and honestly rediscovering oneself irrespective of apparent failure or success is to ‘not give up’.

But isn’t there a difference between a sport and a relationship? Sure there is! We consciously choose to play a game. And a relationship? Well, we sub-consciously choose our relationships, too.

In a relationship, ‘giving up’ is doing nothing about it and allowing it to grow stale, stagnant, impotent. It is like carrying a carcass on one’s shoulders because one is too anxious to face it, too anxious of one’s own ability to provide it newer meanings. It is about not matching up to the challenge posed to one’s own evolution by that inevitability. When we don’t try to comprehend, don’t accept, want to stay in denial, it is the suicide of that relationship and the reason why it exists. Evolution stops, movement stops. Everything that does not move, stagnates – waiting to go through the same challenge at another time. This means that either the participating people will have similar relationships in life that remind them of pending work or they might just take this to another life for much deeper challenges.

Once a lady, emotionally battling her divorce came to me to work with her depression. The relationship was violently abusive through ten years. The husband continued, true to his nature to be difficult to the extent that he was making it challenging for her to get custody or alimony. There came a point when frustrated to the brim, she reacted “I told my lawyer I don’t want anything from him; no alimony, no stree dhan, no house, nothing, if he just leaves my son and me alone”. She had a pretty strong case and her lawyer was asking her not to give up before the battle started. I heard her pain loud and clear and told her one thing that changed everything for her. I asked, “Do you understand that whatever you are trying to give up belongs to you? If he keeps what belongs to you, he will have to pay it sometime. If you give up right now, you may be delaying that ‘sometime’ to a different time in this life or maybe even another life. That means you want to keep going with your give and take with this soul who is challenging your resolve to stick to your ground. If you really want him to leave you alone, then fight for what is yours; finish the account here and now. Your fight may or may not ensure that you will get that what you are fighting for, but fight is mandatory so that you truly finish what you want to end. There is only one right time and that is ‘now’. Lack of fight can create possibility of suicide of the relationship just to come to life once again, in a very unwanted way though.

 One more client of mine was referred to me for panic attacks. She lost her husband to a terminal illness and felt that he died because ‘she didn’t do enough’. For the first 20 years the marriage was an abusive one often forcing my client into situations of severe humiliation and shame, sometimes also in front of neighbours. She was deeply in love with this man while courting and could not believe for the longest time that he had turned out to be this. The dissonance was so huge that she convinced herself (probably simply to be able to survive) that she loved him and therefore will forgive him. She had three opportunities to put him behind bars. But she protected him! This phenomenon is well known amongst Psychologists around the globe. It is well documented in the National Domestic Violence Hotline, Texas. http://www.thehotline.org/is-this-abuse/why-do-people-stay-in-abusive-relationships/

 During therapy, there were many occasions when she HAD to face this dissonance. Why? Simple! One cannot fool oneself for too long. She had a reason to fight till he was alive. Fighting became equivalent to existing. Once he was no more, her reason to keep fighting was no more. The fight i.e. her reason to exist turned inward. She did not have the courage to tell herself that she didn’t protect the man who she loved but she protected the man who abused her and her child. It took 10-12 sessions for her to stop saying (bringing about a false twinkle in her eyes) “…. I tolerated because I loved him”. And it took a few more sessions for her to finally burst out crying and say “I hated him. He was a monster. I hated him. I hated myself, felt ashamed when he was with me”. Actually, that is where the therapy started. Her integration with herself, courage to meet her real self couldn’t have been built without the foundation of accepting this dissonance.

 Are victims to be ‘blamed’ for what happens to them? NEVER. Are they contributors to what happens to them? Yes, they are. They stop challenging their perspective about the relationship though the facts are constantly pointing towards the opposite direction. Do they need help? Yes! They sure do. Because not just victims, we all carry the comfort zones of our perspectives close to our heart, feeling victimized as soon as they are challenged. Our destinies might be about suffering but they are also about finding the silver lining.

 It is easier to discuss abuse as compared to neglect and absence. Sometimes relationships are on the road to suicide also because people don’t actually engage truthfully in what they want to engage in. A man battling with anger issues once started consulting me when he developed panic attacks due to suppressed anger. Anger towards the ‘imperfect’ world! This anger of this high achiever spilled over his wife, parents and children. He always found reason to admonish them giving them a lot of gyaan about how one needs to better oneself. He did lead by example so obviously no one could actually say he was wrong. But something was definitely going wrong. Family members wouldn’t talk much with him, sexual intimacy had drastically reduced and he ended up taking more responsibility on himself than was physically possible for him. Making oneself better was necessarily not a wrong thing to do!

The job of a psychologist many a time is about reading between the lines. The problem was not in what he was doing. It was in what he was not doing. He never engaged in activities and spaces that were beyond winning, losing or excelling. He rarely did movies, parks, walks, long vacations, just lying down and reading, chatting, etc. with his family. He was an excellent cook. But he never cooked for them. He had taken violin lessons as a teenager but never played the instrument in front of them because he may not be good enough. He never told his children about all the things that he loves about them assuming that they would anyway know of his feelings towards them. He was absent! His absence affected him the most. The family learned to find its own way without him. He found himself incapable of any other way to reach his family.

 There are so many of us who have not expressed a thank you, or ‘I am so thrilled to be around you’, or ‘I feel so protected when you are around’ or ‘I love to take care of you’ or ‘It brings great joy to me to see you healthy, beautiful, successful’. It may not be important to say all this, but it is surely important to express all this and much more. Why? To put it simply, though the relationship is an entity in itself, it cannot talk. You and I can… and it is up to this YOU and ME to make the relationship feel nurtured so that it repeats itself and grounds itself to live beyond You and beyond Me.

 Are you quarantined with or quarantined away from the people you love and people who you are challenged with? Then this is the opportunity to come close, express, nurture or create boundaries, sort out, bring closure to all that is stagnating in the closet. Distances may provide a fleeting respite but the quarantine is here to last!