I met a friend recently who shared with me about his unhappy relationship with his spouse. His wife has started arguing a lot lately in front of their children which really upset him. He was hoping I could help his wife to understand the big picture. This gave me the inspiration to share this important truth to parents out there who are ignorant about their actions.
Do you know how the fight between parents can hurt the children?
I remembered my Guru, Paramahamsa Nithyananda (fondly known as Swamiji) once advised a parent on a similar situation. He said: “Arguing is nothing but being unable to come to terms with the other person. It is not that you are unable to come to terms with the situations. No! Understand, you are not able to come to terms with the other person.”
The constant fight between parents is going to bring a tremendous damage and hurt to the children. When kids see parents fighting with each other, they lose trust in life and their risk-taking ability is broken completely. They are put into the fear psychosis of “Oh, if I don’t behave, I may not have a place here.” When that insecurity is planted in a child’s inner space, forever he or she will be suffering from the fear of insecurity. In the first 9 years of a child’s life, you need to give a complete safe and secure feeling so that he or she will have the confidence in themselves and life. Arguing and fighting in front of kids directly destroy this feeling of security in the life. In addition, children lose respect for life and experience incompletion with life itself when they see parents fighting with each other. When they carry the wound of seeing parents fighting, they feel incomplete with the father or mother and they carry so much of incompletion inside them towards life.
From my own life, I witnessed my parents fought so often, in terms of both verbal abuse and physical violence, since I was a 4-5 year-old child. As a result, I carried a lot of fear, insecurity towards life and a low self-esteem throughout my growing years. There was always a sense of sadness within me that impeded my creativity and courage to explore things in life. It was only after I met Swamiji that this wounded child in me got healed completely and brought back to the space of wholeness, space of completion.
It really pains me whenever I see parents fight due to their inability to come to terms with their spouse. This occurs when both parents are carrying too much incompletions from the past. Incompletion is nothing but the memory from the past which is sitting in the present moment affecting your future. Unless the incompletions are brought to awareness and relive, they continue to live within your inner space and create sufferings for the rest of life. Any difference or incompletion between spouses can be resolved from the right context of completion, harmony and spiritual expansion, instead of anger, hatred, ego and arrogance. Swamiji taught the world a very powerful science called Science of Completion (Poornatva) from the ancient scripture Agamas revealed by Lord Shiva in Vijnana Bhairava Tantra verse 118. It says – Let attention be at a place where you are seeing some past happening, and even your form, having lost its present characteristics, is transformed. This very technique can simply heal anyone’s past and rewrite his future.
When children see both parents share a beautiful love and respect for each other, they will feel so fulfilled and complete with life. Swamiji iterated one great thing which happened in his life was – he never saw his father abuse his mother either verbally or physically. Very rarely there will be some verbal fights. But his father would always make sure it never happened in front of the children. He said: “I tell you, I still feel grateful to my father for this one thing. Just because of that, I can see very clearly how beautifully my inner space got built and how much of respect I have for both of them. See, respect for the parents means respect for the one thousand and one good things they taught you. This feeling was what gave me the courage to break the parental conditioning which is required for the ultimate enlightenment experience.”
In essence, providing a safe and secured feeling is the ultimate security you can give to your child because it has tremendous impact in your child’s inner space in terms of the way he or she relate with life and respond to life. It is from this feeling of security that a child develops confidence, energy and courage to explore life and his/her highest possibility. Namaste. 😀