Does our desire for freedom from parents come from resentment towards them or from a genuine need for self-expression?

Answer Podcast

So, if we wish to feel free from our parents how do we know whether the desire is genuine or it has come from a resentment when both feelings are present? I saw one devotee you know he was… sound is not coming I saw this one devotee I was talking with him and he said there is a phone I said what phone? He said it is jail I said what is this jail? He said this is the number of my home. So, some people just have so much resentment So, if the parents are parented in a very restrictive way in a very coercive or restrictive way then they say give me freedom home is like a jail I just want to get out of there That’s very unfortunate. Now, we don’t in a sense choose our parents but we do choose our present and our future.
Now, for most of us we all go through different phases in our relationship with our parents. Now, when we are small our parents are like God for us they are providing everything our parents are perfect and as we start coming to our teenage years we start saying you know actually you know my parents this is not right that is not right that is not right and then what happens is in early childhood everything my parents say is right and when you come to young adulthood everything my parents say is wrong So, often many people do certain things not because they want to do them just because they want to rebel against their parents that’s how they do those things So, we have to know that we are individual souls in our own right we have our own destiny to fulfill and our parents are definitely going to play a valuable role whatever kind of parents we have had you know that is ultimately shaped us in a particular way but we shouldn’t let let either the aversion to parents or attachment to parents shape our life’s choices So, aversion to parents means out of resentment to our parents because if I do this this will hurt them that’s why I will do this or because this will please them so I will do it Now, neither of those are sustainable we have to find out what is the best for us and the most reliable way to find this our desire for freedom from parents is actually patience patience means that if we are feeling in a particular way as long as thoughts are in the head they keep congesting the head so get the thoughts out write them down in a journal and then when we write them down in a journal that just getting them out creates a certain level of objectivity you can evaluate it this makes sense even this is not very reasonable here I am just getting too negative over here and then instead of constantly thinking about them just when we get those thoughts out that is like a snapshot of our mind that we have got and maybe if it is a major decision we want to make in our life maybe about a career choice or a life partner choice or whatever it may be then we can keep don’t make an immediate decision but keep periodically revisiting the issue maybe every week spend some time and revisit that whatever you have written down maybe I need to add this point I got this thought I had not thought about this and then if you find after six months after one year our overall thoughts remain the same then that means that is not driven by attachment or aversion that is something which is our own authentic need that is the way we want to express ourselves sometimes when we write it down after one month what was I thinking at that time this doesn’t make any sense I don’t feel like that at all now so we can ask by getting our feelings outside of ourselves and keeping them for analyzing later we will be able to find out which are our lasting feelings and accordingly we can choose so normally we think of our emotions only in two options either I express them or I repress them but actually there is a third option that is we process them process them means we get them out but analyze them afterwards and then decide whether to act on them or to move beyond them