LITTLE MEN

Hello, dear friends of life, conscious, healthy, kind-hearted, and beautiful-spirited people of my heavenly Turkey.

Our article last week, ‘Hidden Rules,’ brought to light many tragic cases we keep hidden within ourselves. A reader wrote:

“I can’t get my children to listen to me; they don’t study. We have to pick them up from the streets, so (pay attention here!) I beat them. Sometimes I make their father beat them.“

Another reader:

“I’m a truck driver; I couldn’t get an education, but I want my son to study, become an engineer, and live comfortably. I’m working day and night behind the wheel, exhausting myself. He wants to be a musician. He wanders around like a hippie. The other day, he put an earring on. I went crazy and ripped it off.“

The emails continue like this, but one caught my attention, and I’m sharing it with you:

“Since my childhood, my father has always compared me and my mother to others, belittling me. Despite wanting a different major, I barely managed to study Economics in Cyprus. Now I’m a 35-year-old married man with two children. I still work for my father’s company on a salary. Every day, it’s scolding and complaints. My father at work and my mother at home interfere with my entire life. My marriage is now in jeopardy. “

If you recall our articles from a few weeks ago, we discussed the concept of the family system. To understand the behavior of a family member (a parent who is beaten, or a parent who beats) within a family where everyone interacts with each other, where should we look first? At that family member. And at their position within that family system. At the value, respect, and love given to that person within the family. If a person grew up in fear, anxiety, threat, and worry, if they couldn’t gain self-awareness over the years, if their emotions were suppressed, marginalized, if their human values were wounded, if they grew up with violence, experienced a drop of love and a lifetime of darkness; how can they offer sunshine to their own children? If they were never caressed, never appreciated. If they were abandoned to their own inner world? What if your parents are actually small children? If they never experienced a relationship based on love and respect with their own family? If they were never valued? And do you know what the most important thing is? Let me tell you: What if your parents were never “treated as a person” when they were children, meaning no one ever listened to them?

WHAT ERA ARE WE IN?
Although I feel like saying, “There are interesting idioms in our society. For example; ‘Beating comes from Heaven.’ ‘A stick for a wife’s back…’ ‘Your flesh is mine, and so are your bones.’ ‘A daughter not beaten…’ What’s going on? Are we going to war? What era are we living in?” I actually can’t say it. Because; the parents who wield that stick don’t know a better way. Because they, too, were most likely raised with fear.

WEEK’S CONSCIOUSNESS NOTE
Have you ever been beaten for reasons you didn’t understand or couldn’t attribute meaning to? For trivial reasons, that is. Perhaps your mother, perhaps your father, experienced all these traumas in their childhood years. Perhaps their pride, their honor, was trampled upon. Did you ever listen to them? How much do you know about their life stories? Did you ever treat them as a small child? Now I hear your voices, telling me: “No reason can explain being abandoned in terms of love. Especially not beating and violence.” I’m not saying we should accept it or resign ourselves to our fate; however, despite everything, we need to keep our relationship with our true selves healthy. Perhaps our adult parents need to become children. We must face what life offers us in a stronger, wiser, more experienced, and freer way, and protect our inner happiness. By speaking to each other’s hearts.

Uğur Uğural