Image courtesy: Anjani Trivedi

“My parents happened to me, my religion happened to me, the society too happened to me – but nothing transformed – until I happened to myself”

“I feel as if there are five to six people living inside my head; I don’t know how to keep them all happy at once!” She exclaimed

“Why don’t you let all of them explore individually and not let them create chaos in your head?” I suggested

“I don’t know; I have never done that! Are we supposed to do that?”

A human being, for most of his life, is seen as an amassment of white light, until one day he strikes through a prism, and then all his multi-dimensional colours are radiated from within him at once.

A pattern in an individual might seem too complex and intricate to an outsider. To some, it may seem unusually extraordinary, and to others, it may seem a bit useless and unnecessary. Nonetheless, for that individual, the patterns of his being mean his entire life’s worth. His entire existence seems to rest on them, and in most instances, the individual is too possessively attached to them.

Why, then, do we need such compulsive patterns?

What would happen without them?

What are these patterns, first of all?

Karl, a young adult in his late twenties, is an introverted sort of guy. Whom you would find holding together a conversation on intellectual topics or seeing him show his inclinations in the creative arena. He waged almost averagely in his professional life. He was not fond of his physical self and would often hide under multiple layers of clothing. He was quite rigid within the four boundaries of his theories on life. Still, he knew he did not belong there in total absoluteness. In relationships, he had a formulated loop: he would make the girl too dependent on his open-ended theories of platonic love but soon succumb to his inner hole of worthlessness and end up surrendering to the partner.

He continuously searched for ground to base his identity on while perpetually feeling incompetent and insignificant from within—like someone who is not capable of loving or being loved.

Only after crawling back to his childhood would we get a clearer insight into his current set-up and the patterns he has formed. Karl, if you may see, has had a very mediocrely normal childhood, with one elder sibling, his sister, whom he went along with quite well. Parents stayed together and nurtured him, fed him, gave him education, and made him ‘independent’ in terms of average societal terms.

Doesn’t it give a very idealistic view of any family? I guess only after putting the family structure under a microscopic microscope can we get the truest picture of the functioning of that family.

Our Karl had two very strong feminine energies in his house while growing up. Feminine energy can either help a man grow into a balanced individual or lead him to his doom. Unfortunately, the latter happened in this case. The dominating, competitive, and unnurturing feminine energies did not give him enough space to explore his masculinity.

The father, who was not held in very high esteem in the house, physically molested Karl on more than one occasion. Not just the father, but his sister and father, both on separate and multiple occasions, molested him physically during his early developmental stage of childhood. That left him confused about his sexuality and gender identity. He became borderline homosexual; he kept his homosexual tendencies limited to his fantasies. The confusion led to his disconnect and hatred towards his body. In his family, he remained the centre of all that was lacking in the other members of the family. He could not develop a sense of “self” and remained a toy throughout a major part of his growing up.

This generated a feeling of turmoil, inadequacy, and meaninglessness. He had self-destructive behaviour and an insecure attachment style. He would indulge in intellectual talks to deal with his reality of low self-esteem. Although he knew his intellectual side had huge potential, he remained stuck in his hopelessness of actually materialising anything valuable out of it, thinking to himself that all this was a trick to hide his insecurities and uselessness. No amount of success or achievements in any field or way would become part of my inner identity.

Karl had a potential way beyond any normal individual his age, but it remained submerged deep under the coil of a perpetual feeling of worthlessness and efforts to satiate the low self-esteem through a few creative or intellectual activities here and there, but in the end he returned back to his cocoon of his predetermined fate’s doom.

The thing that makes these patterns interesting to study is the fact that the individual is not willing to leave them despite knowing that they are harmful and disastrous to their identity. In fact, they enjoy them and derive sadistic pleasure from them. In almost all my writings, there is always a mention of a ‘split’, the division of an individual.

This duality often leaves an individual with two selves. One of which sublimates into what is coined the “superego” (Freud). The superego is the accumulation of all the morality, ethics, and standards set by the society and the culture in which the individual is born. The evaporated self (superego) often looks down upon the other ‘self’ with criticism, prohibition, and contempt and goes on to be its lifelong critic. The other ‘self’ becomes a wall of projections of all that is lacking in the superego and its contents. The ‘self,” in turn, ends up taking all the blame for all that has gone wrong. The ‘self’ ends up deriving a sadistic pleasure from all the pain inflicted on it, further entering the territory of playing a victim of the circumstances.

The individual does not want to leave these “games” (Eric Berne), as in these games he gets to play multiple characters that he cannot play in his actual life. He can play a protagonist—a hero, a villain, or a martyr who sacrifices himself for the greater cause. He develops sophisticated arrangements whereby he binds himself and his real-life experiences to them. Try taking away these deals from an individual, and he would act as if he were made to strip naked in public, looking for a new pair of clothes to cover himself up.

However, the alchemical process of transformations is continuously flowing all around an individual only if he is willing to take charge of the responsibility to first witness and then break his pattern and see outside of the cage of his lifelong conditioning. Once he gets the pulse of his own authentic vibe, he will get more tuned inwards under his skin to find his own DNA, and from there he will begin his journey of self-discovery. The patterns are not something etched in the stone but something that is imprinted on clay sand. It will require an individual to melt himself first and then reshape his entire being from the beginning. It is a process like no other; here, an individual has the rare opportunity to be in the position of a potter and shape his own pot of existential being.

The true worth of an individual remains hidden under the corpses of the personas he keeps gathering throughout his life. He cannot, after a point in time, differentiate between the character he was playing and the life that he is living outside the coliseum. He speaks in multiple voices, and he is seen in multiple personalities. Only if he could see within, recognise his patterns, and take responsibility for his broken inner child could things transform way beyond his imagination. Until then, it seems as if an individual has multiple shadows behind him of the other beings within him that could not see the light of the day.

On a macro level, the human race has gone through the tedious and magical process of evolution. If we as a whole were too stuck to our patterns of existence, it wouldn’t be surprising to find some of us still spotting a tail, walking on all fours, and living in caves. We took our challenges of survival as our process of passing through a prism and transformed ourselves from ‘insignificant apes’ to Homo sapiens, the wise men.