The Myth of the Happy Family
Questioner: You know, I would just cite this example of people from happy families or normal families, seemingly happy families, whatever, and people who have a bona fide past of a trauma like, you know, domestic violence and abuse and mind games and a lot of lowly things that do happen. And you know, in India I have spoken to a lot of women, whether they are in cities or they are in towns or in small places, everybody has had some case of molestation or sexual abuse, no matter which strata of society they belong from mostly. Some choose to speak about it, some don’t. So, the whole point is when it comes to all these different, you know, faces again, transmutation of one evil from another or the curse of the broken family, so how do you exercise your demons? Like I have exercised my demons. But then there are times when I do come back from work and the memories do sometimes come back to haunt you, sometimes it does, right?
So how is it, is it possible to transcend them? And there are, you know, people around me who I know very closely, young girls, literally 10-11 year old girls, who still are living in that kind of a hell that I know I have gone through personally and I feel because you know, I have these aspirations in the sense that you know, work and ample work and everything else that you aspire in your life and do. And then I just feel so helpless in trying to, you know, just go and how do I just help these girls out who are like my very close ones, like how do I help them because it's very rational and you know I can see it happening right in front of me. So, it’s a huge history of trauma and I know that trauma is being built here and history might repeat itself you know because of the younger generation. So how do you come to terms, how do you exercise the demons or as Krishna says you know ─ “Dukhalayam Ashram O Shashvata,”
Acharya Prashant: There are two things that I want to reconcile about. You said, “There are happy families and there are unhappy families,” and then you said that most women or girls you have met have had some kind of a history of sexual abuse, molestation or domestic violence. Irrespective of whether they have disclosed it or not.
Questioner: Yes, pardon, I will just interrupt you. Not domestic violence, but molestation, sexual abuse are definitely rampant and people choose not to. Domestic violence I wouldn’t find, I didn’t find many in my….. so hence I always found myself to be very…..
Acharya Prashant: I am taking sexual abuse as domestic violence, so in that sense. So, if most women you have met have reported sexual abuse in their experience, where exactly are the happy families, you are talking of? Where? They don’t exist. Right?
Questioner: So, just assume that at least they didn’t have conflicting parents who are just you know the games are happening, manipulation and gaslighting and you know.
Acharya Prashant: The silver screen is where they exist. Right? That deceptive you think such a thing exists. That thing is just an idea. So, this is just an idealism of the harmful kind. Idea, just an idea.
Now let’s probe that. If you say that most women or girls, even if it’s not most, let’s say, a significant number of them.
Questioner: 60-65%.
Acharya Prashant: Let’s say 30% to assuage the cynical ones who might be watching this conversation at a later point. Even if a third of them, half of them, are suffering from this kind of violence and even confiding in you that they do suffer, is it something isolated, rare, incidental? I am asking you.
I’ll frame my question differently. There is this room. If half the people who enter this room report suffocation, what do we infer? Let’s take this tea. If half the people and you said most, I’m not even taking much.
Questioner: After much prodding.
Acharya Prashant: Yes. And you have to make allowance in the probability that many of them might not be disclosing to you because they don’t want to confide, right? For the sake of family honor or because they just want to keep themselves in the dark ─ it didn’t happen.
Questioner: Or keep up the image.
Acharya Prashant: Or keep up the image. It didn’t happen to me. I can’t be so unlucky. I have a loving family and loving people and such things. It happens with others, not with me. So, let’s take the most optimistic scenario. Even if half the people or a quarter of the people who come here, report suffocation or distress of some kind, what do you infer? If even a third of people who sip this tea, feel unwell within, what do you infer?
Questioner: That it is not just the meager amount or number of people that we think are suffering.
Acharya Prashant: What do you infer regarding the reason for their suffering?
Questioner: The cause is uh…. Here it is very prima facie because it is happening in your family, so you can’t even not say that, Oh! It is my imagination. It is actually happening with you.
Acharya Prashant: What do you infer? People who have entered this room reported suffocation in a large proportion.
Questioner: Yeah, they are suffocated.
Acharya Prashant: Suffocated. So, what do you infer?
Questioner: They are suffering.
Acharya Prashant: They are suffering. So, what’s the reason?
Questioner: The reason is because they are unable to let it out somewhere, yeah.
Acharya Prashant: Yeah. Does it have to do with them or does it have to do with?
Questioner: The society?
Acharya Prashant: The people who enter the room report suffocation. So, the suffocation has to have something to do with.
Questioner: The environment, in this particular setting?
Acharya Prashant: In this room. We don’t talk about the room. What’s the room?
Questioner: Room is an environment that we are staying in.
Acharya Prashant: In the social context, a room is the room in which these women are suffering.
Questioner: Families, environments.
Acharya Prashant: That’s what. So, the very institution is flawed. It’s not even flawed. It’s designed in a way that’s going to breed violence in some way or the other.
Questioner: If not physical, there are psychological games and, you know. I mean, that’s deeper, you know.
Acharya Prashant: When I say violence, what do you imagine? You think of a bomb blast. You think of a nuclear war. You think of massive layoffs. You think of a highly transmissible virus, right?
Now put your feet on the ground. Practically, what is it that most of us suffer from? Have you suffered from nuclear war?
Questioner: No.
Acharya Prashant: Have you suffered from a terminal illness? Have you suffered from an alien invasion? What is it that the bulk of the Earth’s population really suffers from? We suffer in our relationships. We don’t suffer because the neighboring country has launched a nuclear tipped missile, right? We suffer in relationships.
If you look at, if you look at a person’s, a man or a woman’s life and if you could quantify the suffering the person has gone through and then divide it according to the source of the suffering, you will find that a great amount of suffering comes from the institutions which cherish so much.
Questioner: So how does a 12 year old to, you know, I mean save herself from this?
Acharya Prashant: See if you will make attempts at that micro level, you will not succeed. Rather you will succeed in just consoling yourself that you have done something meaningful for some one person. Some one person. You’ll not be able to bring about any real or widespread change because you are not addressing the root of the problem.
The root of the problem, if you are talking of these things, the things that women face, to some extent men also may be.
Questioner: Yes, I found, I have spoken to men as well. Powerful men as well.
Acharya Prashant: So the root of the problem is the very way our relationships are defined in society. Right? The images that woman carries about herself, about family, about having kids, about the very purpose of life, about the man in her life and vice versa. The images that a man carries about the charming person in his life. We do not address these. We think that these issues are not very important, so we talk of climate change, we talk of disarmament, we talk of colonizing Mars.
Questioner: It is pushed under the rug most of the time.
Acharya Prashant: And what you do not realize is that we want to run away to Mars precisely because we are suffocated in the family. But we want to talk of Mars, we don’t want to talk of mama and her problems. So, that’s what you see, we are born incomplete. One clear expression of that incompleteness is our gender. The woman is a woman, she is not a man. The man is a man, crazed for woman. The very birth is incomplete. You are not given both the genders. You are given one, with a craving for the other. I don’t know how we missed to see these basic things.
And then there is the education that we receive in the family, in the school and more vicious leads through the media. And that totally distorts everything in the head, everything. Our minds are badly distorted by the influence of so many undeserving factors. So be it sexual abuse or whatever, molestation, rape, a lot of that comes from there, you know. And it does not limit itself to the sexual area. I have often said that major causes of corruption are relationships. I’m talking about corruption in organizational systems here.
Questioner: Yes. True.
Acharya Prashant: One would not very intuitively want to relate that to something like molestation. Something is happening in a government department, would not want to relate that to the relationship between a man and a woman. But these things are related.
Questioner: Yes.
Acharya Prashant: Why does a person, a man or a woman, become a bribe-seeker, man has to ask. Unless we have clarity about who we are and therefore what we should be doing, we will keep getting into very messed up situations and violence is an offshoot of ignorance. Where there is ignorance, there is bound to be violence. You cannot remain indifferent towards a system of ignorance and want to address sporadic cases of abuse or molestation, you will not succeed. These attempts have been continuing since long, you know.
It’s like allowing the slaughterhouse to run and caring about the life of one particular cute lamb. Maybe you will succeed in saving that one lamb, but the slaughterhouse will run the way it always does. So, all that you will get is some gratification that there is this particular lamb I could rescue ─ nothing more than that.
There is a 12 year old girl you want to rescue. Maybe you will succeed, and I think you must succeed. I pray you succeed, but I don’t want you to succeed in such a small way. You have to address the root cause. The root cause is ignorance. The root cause is the bad way we are all raised. The root cause is the fact that highly ignorant people in their 20s or 30s become teachers to their kids. It really beats me how, you know, I have been teaching for 2 decades now, and my students have all been in the reproductive age, right? All of them have been over 17 years of age. So biologically they are all eligible to reproduce. And I have seen how kiddish and immature they are. Right? And that’s not an insult or an allegation. It’s the fact, not a pejorative. Right? They would happily acknowledge they are immature, right? If they have been my students and I have succeeded even a little with them, then they would readily accept they are immature. Now they are immature and they could be 17 years or 27 years old or even 32 or 35. And I know and they know that they are immature, and tomorrow they give biological birth to a kid and they become their teachers, it defies all sense.
No, but that’s happening everywhere, happening everywhere. The man or the woman is not fit, as yet, to take any decisions regarding her own life, but she is a mother now. And she has assumed the responsibility of making decisions regarding another life and she will be the first teacher, she’ll be the educator.
Questioner: It’s a train wreck situation.
Acharya Prashant: It’s a train wreck and it’s goose bumps when you think, what kind of training is happening between the father and the daughter or the mother and the son. And when such things are happening, is it any wonder that we have kids getting into drugs at the age of 8 or teenage pregnancies or all the kinds of things we see happening with kids and teens and molestations and such things?
Now, how are these two not very closely related to each other, not part of the same family? The brother has become a drug addict. The daughter is experiencing molestation. Molestation may be within the family, may be outside the family. If she is being molested outside the family, then if somebody from some other family molesting her.
Questioner: Yeah, absolutely.
Acharya Prashant: Much the same thing, right? The fellow who is molesting too is a product of training, teaching and education coming from somewhere. Right? So, it is coming from ignorance, actually.
Questioner: So how do children under such situations persevere? I mean, I understand we have to go and target the root cause of, you know, educating the entire society about what you’re, you know, acts are.
Acharya Prashant: If you ask me, if I have to act in such a situation, I’ll take away the kid.
Questioner: Yeah, how it happens in the west, like they basically completely detain the children and they have their own commune systems and they raise them.
Acharya Prashant: The kid has to be taken away. If the kid is experiencing something like this, she cannot be allowed to stay anymore with the family. But again, you know, this kind of a thing goes against the grain of the well family system, especially the Indian family system.
Questioner: Yes, yes, hum saath saath hain. (We are together)
Acharya Prashant: Exactly. The parents are supposed to be the best educators of how the kid should come up ─ Hamara bachcha hai. (It is our kid). What do you mean by hamara bachcha hai? You yourself are kiddish. Maybe biologically you could give birth. Mentally you are just not fit to be parents.
