Carrying parents on your back

Do you remember the old poster of Bollywood movie Paa - Abhishek Bachchan carrying Amitabh Bachchan on his shoulders (Bollywood remake of Curious Case of Benjamin Button)? All of us do it in our lives. We constantly carry our parents on our backs, although only figuratively.

Many of the emotions we face in our lives are a reflection of unresolved pain from our childhood. All our lives we carry a false self-image imposed on us during our childhood interactions with adults around us, mostly our parents. Our entire lives will be driven by a constant need to prove that this image is wrong (or to conform to this image) than living life authentically being ourselves as we really would like to do. If you see yourself as being an angry, rude or a sad or an envious person, is it really you or is it your Dad (or Mom) you are carrying on your back?

As a child, if my father used to beat me up or shout at me for getting low marks, as an adult I carry the belief ‘I am not good enough’. I constantly feel the need to prove ‘I am good enough’. So I speak forcefully, I put down other people and their capabilities and I react with rage and resentment in all my interactions with the world that involve any intellectual aspect. I carry a false self-image of ‘I not good enough’ imposed on me by my Dad (or Mom). I may think why everyone treats me unfairly and get more angrier solidifying another false self-image of being an angry person. I am not my real self any more, I am just carrying a false image and fighting with the image all my life because I know it is not true.

I know deep within me it is NOT true that ‘I am not good enough’. So the anger I feel now is in fact my best friend showing me that I am rejecting a part of me and I need not do so. As a child I have received a message, if I am not intelligent, smart, or ‘good boy’, this part of me is not loveable. But we all know intuitively any one part of us is just as loveable as any other. There is a strong need to disprove ‘I am not good enough’, so I make this a central theme in all my interactions with the world. All I need to do is just accept all parts of me now, with love and compassion. And the false image just melts away.

You do not have to carry your parents on your back all your life, you can live life being yourself. You can live your life loving yourself and with joy for the gifts that life brings to you. Emotions like anger or sadness or envy or jealousy are just messengers showing you some aspects of you are rejected by parents or people around you and subsequently by you. If you allow yourselves to feel through them, they take you to those aspects of you that need to be embraced now.

All of us are sensitive and loving human beings caring for people around us with genuine compassion and regard. But very few allow ourselves to live from that place of love and joy. What prevents us to live life as our own true Self in the Now, is the unresolved pain from our childhood. Most of the time, we are unconsciously reacting to life from a place of past pain instead of experiencing life in its true light. We can heal all the issues in our lives when we heal our relationship with our parents. When we free ourselves from the false image we picked up from our childhood, we can can live life authentically loving ourselves and our loved ones.

We have to remember it is our own unacknowledged pain that makes us shout at others or put down others or act superior to others or feel inferior. We do not have to stay as a hurt or angry child all our lives. We can say thanks to our emotion for bringing up the pain that needs to be addressed. We can identify the past pain that is being brought up now, acknowledge it and give it our complete attention. All that is needed now is to embrace all of Self with loving acceptance. We are all Unique the way we are, no aspect of Self is unloveable.

When you treat yourself, your emotion and the pain behind the emotion, with complete love and acceptance, you will be ready to let go of all that is painful to you. You stop resisting the anger, you stop observing yourself as your own worst critic, you stop feeling like a helpless victim. You will just start treating yourself with loving attention as with a hurt child. As you address emotions with loving attention, you heal from within and only then you will be able to extend the same loving acceptance to your parent also. After the past pain is resolved, you may see it all from a new perspective. In fact, parenting is a tough task and all parents act from the level of awareness they have at that moment. You realise you need not allow your childhood experiences to influence how you live life today as a conscious adult. Once you reach this awareness awakening from within, you can really get your parent off your back and be your authentic Self.

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