Pankaj Suneja

Often, we spend first half of our life around our parents. If we are not sent to boarding school, then our foremost school years are spent in the care of the parents. Sometimes we go to another city or country for university or job, that is marked by frequents visits to our parent’s home. Parental home which was our childhood home. And sometimes we spend most of our lives till 30 in close proximity radius of our parent’s physical location.

One of my clients in her early 30s had been struggling to find any employment. Her brokenness prevented her from maintaining any sorts of sustainable functionality. She had frequent panic attacks and breakdowns. She didn’t feel safe with anyone, and she learnt to hold herself back, tightened to an extent that her feelings suffocated in body. She became stranger to her feelings and body sensations. She lived a numbed life. Surprisingly she had migraines and panic attacks which were terrifying but also left her refreshed. Perhaps because these painful states of experiences were only way through which she could feel her feelings. She could release her feelings. There was an outlet and possibility of some space from which she can fill herself up again. Or to some extent engage with outer world again. As much as she dreaded migraines and panic attack, she also felt alive after that.

She never left her parental home in her growing up life. She has been in therapy with me for over 3 years now and recently she has moved out of the parental home to a neighboring city. She is now living independently and navigating the ups and down. Sometimes she is overwhelmed with the demands of the life around her, rejections and failures leaves her feeling disappointment and disheartened. And other times she is the driving agent and looking for something to engage with in her curiosity. she is imagining. She is making her own decisions and planning her life.

The purpose of the psychotherapy is to make the client, the driver of their own life.

She found a job last year and has been able to sustain it. I feel she is entering into new world as she breaks away from dependency on her parents, which symbolically is also sign that she desires to break away from past conditioning and traumas, and be curious and invite something new and fresh in life. She wishes to write her own script and break away the generational trauma.

It is recently that she has found experientially that even though she has left her parental home, her parents still live inside her emotionally and relationally. The fear that someone will criticize her, violate her boundaries, neglect her feelings and punish her openness; still makes her contract and disconnect from her feelings and attunement with others. She is learning what does it mean to stay ‘in relation’ with another in sustained manner without switching in and switching out. She comes close with openness or takes initiative toward her aspirations, and then some setback takes place and she pulls herself back, disconnected and contracted. This has become a familiar zone which is walled from outside and does not allow anything to come inside. This absence of exchange is suffocating and also exhausting to maintain this armour. It is protective self-defense mechanism but it’s also isolating and disconnecting.

The goal of therapy is to open the door in the wall again. To learn to trust again, her feelings and outer world, people, places and things.

Most of us enter this new world at some point of time in life where we are drawn towards living our authentic life. To realize that bad and good can exist at the same time. The positive does not have to overshadow negative. Both have their own space and can rest in ambivalence. A therapist offers a companionship to both good and bad but mostly the negative that often goes repressed and oppressed in contemporary societal structures that endorses toxic positivity culture. Entering into new world of living independently and at one’s own pace also offers another possibility to look into inner demons.