How to Convince One's Parents?
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.
So, now you have people—look at the kind of manners and etiquette that they display. And the parents are horrified, and so are the teachers. The kids of this generation just know no respect. Look at how they misbehave with their elders. But then, it was the responsibility of the elders to teach their kids or their students where behavior must come from, not how they should behave but from where they should behave. So, I started my response by saying that you should not behave from your reactive emotional center.
If you feel strongly like bursting out in a particular moment, that is just not the moment to open your mouth. Withdraw. Equally, you cannot stay withdrawn forever. So, when you know that it’s the right time, then speak up; at a time and place of your choice, respond. That’s what they say in the military. When somebody attacks you, obviously it would be attacking you at a time and at a place where you are weak; that is not the time to engage the enemy. Of course, I am not saying that parents or teachers are enemies; I am raising a very broad and loose analogy.
So, you do not just reach then and there, though you will be feeling very angry, right? An army truck was going and it has been ambushed, but hey, this is not the point of engaging them. Engage them as little as possible and just save your response for a better time, because at that moment you will be afraid, you will be angry, you will be hurt; from your feeling of being offended, very hurtful words will arise.
And the mind is a strange thing; it remembers all the nonsense. Two hours of a hurtful conversation will be remembered over two decades of a relationship. That’s how the ego operates. Two decades of mother-daughter relationship the ego will choose to just keep aside, and it will repeat, repeat, repeat to itself those two hours—well, not even two hours, it does not last that long; usually twenty minutes.
Those twenty minutes of bombardment, and every single word, hurt and abuse will be not only remembered but magnified. Your mother said something in two words; the memory will be remembered as two sentences. Even casual glances will be remembered as weapons in sarcasm: “You know, she was not just looking at me—she was using her eyes as weapons! There was so much sarcasm and taunt in how she glanced at me.” And that’s all the work of the ego, right?
So, do engage your parents, figure out what is happening, and then talk to them. It’s an art. When you read the old wisdom stories belonging to the sages or the gurus or the Buddha, often you come across something very curious. The student comes up and asks the question, and the teacher does not respond at all. Sometimes, the teacher responds after an entire year. He waits for the right conditions to develop. He knows that any explanation at this moment will be futile. And then, after one year, he says, “Now, this is the answer to the question you had then asked.”
The teacher is hardly ever seen in a hurry to provide explanations, because if you are a real teacher of life, it is not your job merely to give explanations; you want to take the student to a solution, not merely explain it but actually solve it, and that requires the right time and the right conditions. The student must be ready to listen. If the listening is closed, what’s the point in speaking so much?
When two people are engaged in heated arguments, a de facto quarreling, believe me, neither of them is listening. And if that fellow is not listening, why are you speaking so much to him? You are speaking so much, you are speaking beyond what needs to be spoken, and not a word is reaching that fellow. Even if something is reaching that fellow, his receptors are totally distorting it because he is receiving it through his internal filters and the memory is selectively magnifying and selectively deleting the chosen parts; some part is blown up, and some are chosen not to be remembered at all.
I will give you an example. I would have spoken here for like fifteen-twenty minutes now. If all of us were asked to pull out a sheet of paper and write down what I have just spoken—just the salient points, let’s say, some of what has been said in ten points, ten points each, every one—you will find quite a lot of divergence. Your ten points will be at significant variance from what she writes or from what he writes. How is it possible? The speaker is one; he has not said ten different things to ten different people, and yet we have heard the speaker differently, all of us. There would be obviously some overlap but also a lot of variance. That’s how we are.
So, wait for the other person to be in the right frame of mind before you can say something. If you can eliminate these two things—and that applies to everybody, not just to you as a person, it’s a general answer—reactiveness and emotionality—and I am stressing more when seeing that I am speaking to a girl, to a woman. The way Prakṛti (physical nature) has made the two genders and then later on the way we are conditioned by society and the education and the various influences, girls turn out to be more emotional and more reactive. And that’s a serious handicap they face in life.
The problem that I face when I address this issue is that many women take their emotionality as their strength, whereas it is not. It is something very untamed that arises from the body, the physicality, the chemicals, the hormones, and one ought to understand it and stay at a safe distance from it. I am not saying you must suppress your emotions; I am saying you must understand your emotions, and to understand your emotions, there has to be a certain detachment. You must be able to see where your thoughts, your emotions, and your reactions are coming from.
If you are not able to see that, in spite of all the liberalism and all feminism, life can still be very hard on one particular gender, unfortunately. We have come far from days of open and socially accepted oppression, but still, the scales are not even. They are tilted in favor of one gender and against one particular gender.
I do not want girls to suffer. And the one who causes them to suffer is both outside of them and inside of them. Outside of them are the blind forces of patriarchy and body-identification and materialism and all that; and inside of the woman, the forces of her physicality, they are the ones that cause her to suffer. Those forces are present within men as well. When I speak to men I will address that, but right now, since I am speaking to a woman, it becomes very important.
Do not locate your enemy just outside of yourself. Probably, a bigger enemy is lurking within, and that enemy is your own emotions, your own tendency to quickly react. And a lot of that has to do with insecurity as well. Because we do not educate and raise our girls well and wisely enough, so they are left feeling helpless, powerless, and therefore insecure. When you are insecure, you will be even more emotional and even aggressive. When you are afraid within, then you become violent in many ways, explicit and implicit. Do not let all that happen to you.
Life is too valuable to be wasted away in periods of emotional trauma and neurosis and fragmented mind. Something is saying, “This right”; one part is saying, “I love my parents”; one part is saying, “No, they offend me, I have to do something about it”; one part says, “Family is important”; the other says, “Career is important.” And all that is quite a lot of torture to handle. Do not let that happen.
That’s why wisdom literature is essential, and more important for women than men. Because they are the ones who stand to lose more, who are more often than not the targets of aggression, therefore they must have more centered minds. Make sure you do not get lost in the material and consumerist forces and that you pay adequate attention to setting your mind right. Sort it out and keep it centered.
