Questioner: When I do something my parents don’t approve of, they scold me. But sometimes the matter goes too far and I get offended, and then I refrain from talking back to them; I fear that if I say something, I will end up hurting them. But then, if I don’t say anything, my feelings get bottled up. What should I do?
Acharya Prashant: You must talk back but not from an emotional center. You must be eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, something—an adult now. You have all the rights to engage anybody in a conversation. But engaging in a conversation is not the same as reacting emotionally. The chances are that because they hurt you, so you will react. No, don’t do that.
It’s very difficult to say which of these is worse. The two options that we usually exercise are: one, we suppress our feelings, we block our expression—that’s the option very frequently chosen, and that’s also the one you seem to be choosing—and following this particular option, there is the other one in which there is an explosion due to continued suppression.
When you suppress your feelings and your instincts for too long, one day they will explode. And when that explosion comes, you know how the sight of an explosion looks—you only have debris all around, things shattered and scattered. Sometimes not all the scattered things are visible to the eyes; they are all within the mind, and there is so much destruction. What has happened? Look at the faces, and you can know just by looking at the faces of the members of the family that there has been a civil war just an hour back.
So, you must, as young people, learn to engage your parents and your seniors and your teachers. In India, somehow the culture has been of authority and silence—authority from the senior side and silence from the junior side. And the direct blowback has been that a lot of the current generation is now becoming extremely disrespectful and disregardful, precisely because they have not been engaged but instead being asked just to shut up, and you cannot have a person shut up till eternity.
