I met Priya when she was 21 years old and had come to meet me as her “depression and suicidal thoughts had become very intense.” She had known that she was gay from an early age and had tried to talk to her mother about it, but it either led to “cold silence” or her mother leaving the room, dismissing it as “unnatural” and eventually leading to “shouting matches.” Priya was very angry with her mother for “rejecting” her and was “done with it,” and “determined to get a job and move out of home,” even if it meant estrangement with her own family. People cannot heal in silos. Priya had tried for years to “self-heal”, but in her words, “it felt meaningless and incomplete.” Over the years, I have learnt that our sense of self and identities is relational, and it is only when our relationships heal that we have a better chance of healing. All this new-age idea of self-love, self-care, self-acceptance can ring hollow if we are not taking steps to build kinships. In therapy, we could have let the conflict take centre stage, thus corroding the relationship and dismissing any possibility of reconciliation. But I realised that her relationship with her mother, Kamala, mattered to Priya, despite the latter’s refusal to accept her sexuality. On my request, Priya agreed to invite Kamala for the next session. At the beginning of the session, I asked both of them, “I wonder, when you came here today, what sense of hope did you carry about what kind of conversation we might have and what it might lead to?” Priya started by sharing how painful it had been for her to not have her mother acknowledge her sexuality and that “she could not do this alone” and was “tired of hiding.” Kamala started crying and talked about how scared she was of “shame and misery” that Priya would face once everybody got to know about it and her dismay at “failing as a mother.” She turned to Priya and asked, “Why can’t you be like other girls — get married to a nice man?” Priya, a little exasperated, replied, “You have always told me to ‘Be honest and truthful,’ and now you are telling me to lie about my own identity?” I also got to know from Priya that her parents had an inter-caste marriage for which they had to face extreme opposition. She turned to her mother and asked, “Didn’t you face shame then? How is it different now?” Person is not the problem; the problem is the problem, and the problem is mostly social. It is disturbing to realise how much of the problems that we internalise have roots in our sociocultural-political context. Kamala’s family had refused to have anything to do with her for the first few years of marriage until she gave birth to Priya. She talked about shame, feeling isolated and rejected. I asked her, “Do you think the problem was you, or the society’s entrenched beliefs against inter-caste marriage?” She replied, “These social customs can be cruel, but I don’t want Priya to go through what I went through.” To which Priya replied, “Do you know how difficult it was for me to share with you that I was gay? I feel so lonely and exhausted that I’d rather die than do this on my own”. It was a poignant moment as both of them were crying by now. Struggling back with my own tears, I reflected, “I wonder how society’s idea of what is okay and what is so-called ‘unnatural’ has caused so much pain to your family?” People are multistoried. I was also very keen to know more about Priya’s parents’ inter-caste marriage. I learnt that Kamala took the step of leaving her family as “I knew I would be miserable if I let them decide who I should marry.” When I asked her what it took to take this step, she responded, “I am very stubborn and do not give up easily.” I also learnt that it was her stubbornness that made her stand up to her in-laws when they were resentful of Priya’s birth as they were hoping for a son. I asked her if Kamala had passed on her legacy of stubbornness to Priya, and both of them burst out laughing. We had a discussion on strong, “stubborn” women in the family who refused to be victimised. People are people through other people. Kamala’s one regret was, “I wish I could have convinced my family and not lived with that cold silence and shame for so many years.” I was curious to know if that was what Priya was trying to do, and not let the cold silence break their relationship. Kamala stayed quiet, so I turned to Priya and she replied, “I know two things for sure — I am gay and that I cannot be happy without my mother.” As we wrapped up, I reflected, “In your family, women have had to live with shame and cold silence. I wonder what legacy you would want to pass on to future generations of women so that they do not have to live with it?” People’s conflicts carry complexities. They cannot be seen in binaries of good-bad, fair-unfair, wrong-right. In my work with families, I have learnt that it is crucial to separate the intent from the impact, as intention is rarely about hurting the other person. Conflicts often come down to people’s perceptions of their identities or sense of self being diminished. Priya was hurt that her mother was “rejecting” her sexuality, whereas Kamala blamed herself for having failed as a mother. It has been more than two years since I had that conversation with Priya and Kamala. They had to navigate through difficult territories of intergenerational discourses, prejudices and pain that took a long time to come to any semblance of resolution. I had emailed them to seek consent for writing their story (with pseudonyms). I learnt from their reply that Priya was living with her partner and recently the whole family had gone for a family holiday. As Priya put it, “It took time, and we have a long way to go, but it is worth the love.” Peace and restoration can only happen when we expose the ruse and align people together against patriarchy and not against each other. Mental-health difficulties can be shapeshifters and show up as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addiction, but they can only heal in the context of relationships and not in silos. Psychiatry and psychology have a murky history in terms of parent-bashing in the name of “healing the childhood wounds”, causing more damage than cure. At times, restoring peace in some relationships is not possible, and it is only by moving away that we have a chance of finding peace. In those circumstances, healing is about finding our own tribe of friends, partners, communities where we discover visibility and build connections against “cold silence and shame.” As the late Desmond Tutu put it so wisely, “People are people through other people.” Shelja Sen is a narrative therapist, writer, co-founder, Children First. In this column, she curates the know-how of the children and the youth she works with. She can be reached at shelja.sen@childrenfirstindia.com
