My father once told me how he was shamed as a young boy for his anger — mocked and humiliated for showing what could have been seen as his strength.
You’d think that would make him more compassionate, more aware of what happens when your protective drive — your natural aggression — gets suppressed. But it didn’t.
He even used the same name he had been shamed with to ridicule me, repeating exactly what had been done to him.

My mother, too, told me how she felt betrayed by her parents and vowed to treat her children differently.
But like so many, she ended up repeating the very patterns she swore to break.
In her effort to do better, she only tightened her grip — controlling more, worrying more, trying harder to get it “right.”
And I, too, felt betrayed by her, just as she did by her own parents.
But I can see now that she couldn’t escape the domination oriented mindset her parents passed down to her — the same one that ruled them, too.
Her good intentions without awareness only made things worse, strengthening the very pattern she wanted to end.
In trying to give more, she actually gave less — her control and anxious care cutting deeper than her parents’ neglect ever did.
Neglect may leave a wound of absence, but at least it leaves some space to breathe.
Control, on the other hand, invades the very ground where your own life is meant to grow — and in doing so, it can be even more destructive.

And that’s the real work: to see the mindset beneath the behavior — to become aware of the motor that keeps it running.
To turn toward what is brutally uncomfortable: the conditioning and the rage, grief, and helplessness it caused.
Only awareness can cleanse it — by letting what was once locked in finally move through.
That’s how real change begins.

My mother tried to control it all outside.
But control never works. It’s impossible to stop repeating the patterns of dysfunction that way.
Control is what keeps the system intact — tightening the same loops that caused the pain in the first place.
We need to instead turn inward and realize that it’s our own defensive reflexes — the conditionality of our self-worth — that keep the pain alive and multiplying.
As long as we try to manage it externally, we’ll keep replaying both sides of the wound — the victim and the perpetrator — over and over, until compassion finally changes the equation.

Because control breeds rebellion.
Aggression breeds aggression.
And we all know where that cycle leads — to the atrocities humans commit when fear takes the driver’s seat and survival becomes the main agenda.

My mother tried to control the whole family.
One woman among three men, determined to stay on top, terrified of losing control.
But in her desperation to contain life, she ended up crushing it — in us, and eventually in herself.
And when a child feels trapped like that, when there’s nowhere left to feel one’s own agency, they start looking for an exit.

I withdrew inward. My brother went the other way.
He jumped headfirst from our family home — and even though it was only two stories high, he still managed to not survive.

To be accurate, he was placed in a medically induced coma before my parents made the hard decision to turn off his life support, once it became clear that his brain was severely damaged.

He could have survived, but it would have meant living with profound disability — a condition that might have freed our family from the endless need to perform and meet social expectations.

Instead, his death became another thing we buried — another symbol of how we tried to control outward appearance instead of facing what was broken inside.

That day I understood something no philosophy could teach me:
You cannot control life.
You cannot contain it.
All you can do is move with it — and allow everything that has been frozen in fear and control to flow again. It’s not about giving up, but giving yourself fully — surrendering, not in defeat, but in complete trust that whatever needs to move through you can’t hurt you.

That’s what healing really is: letting your emotions — all of them — move again.
Not holding them back in shame or pushing them underground out of fear.
Feeling them, experiencing them fully, witnessing them.
Being the parent to yourself who doesn’t shun your emotions but sits with them patiently, quietly, compassionately, through every storm.

There is just no way around it.
Only a way in.