Skip to main content

Importance of a breakdown

 


Each one of us carries within ourselves a child who is confused, angry, hurt, and longs for recognition. The degree of the confusion, anger and hurt will obviously vary from individual to individual. Instead of coming to terms with that inner child, instead of dealing maturely and intelligently with the anger and/or other states of emotion, we let them be. We get on with life.

We are experts at it. At getting on. That is easier to do than deal with our deeper personal problems. It is easy to surrender to the demands of the world around us and go on. No strife. It is easy to live up to what is expected of us at the workplace, in the society, even at home, and move on. No quarrels. We get on apparently smoothly with priorities defined by others.

How long? Maybe till the end of our life. Many people manage that. They are only half alive. They have killed a part of themselves for the sake of peace with others. Turn a blind eye to unpleasant realities. Create darkness by shutting your eyes, as we say in Kerala.

Not all can do that, however. A time comes when you break down. A time comes when certain personal truths demand your attention. This half life doesn’t satisfy you. You want to be fully human and fully alive. You want to be psychologically healthy.

Every nervous breakdown is painful. Excruciatingly painful. It makes you appear like a vulgar gargoyle to yourself.

The nervous breakdown is not the illness, however. We were ill before we broke. It is our illness that made us break. Every breakdown is rather an invitation to health than an illness. It is a demand for greater self-knowledge. A life-force within us is urging us on to process of personal growth which we had hitherto refused to undertake. Every nervous breakdown is an invitation to healing, to a fuller life.

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanJune 17, 2021 at 9:12 PM

    Hari OM
    Such breakdowns come to those who are ready to become naked to themselves and others. So very important in processing through to true adulthood and personal authenticity - as long as it is embraced and processed correctly. I have also seen how that can go very wrong, everything reburied and twisting of personality as a result. The "invitation to healing, to a fuller life" has to be seized! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 17, 2021 at 9:17 PM

      I went through a long and much needed process and gained much. But as you point out, there may be many who get decimated.

      Delete
  2. LehaJune 18, 2021 at 1:31 AM

    That's a wonderful insight. A breakdown is a sign that there's a deeper problem that needs addressing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Chinmayee Gayatree SahuJune 18, 2021 at 12:22 PM

    Thank you again for this series of posts. I am trying to accept myself completely and this particular insight definitely helps.

    ReplyDelete
  4. SonaJune 20, 2021 at 7:22 PM

    We are really good at ignoring things that need to be faced and getting on with life.
    Some years back,I read an article in 'The Speaking Tree'. What I remember is one sentence, 'We go on with life and something happens and we realise we are far from home. Or nothing happens.'

    ReplyDelete
  5. SuchitaJune 21, 2021 at 11:58 AM

    Such a powerful perspective on breakdowns. I like to think when my body is in pain it's like - will you listen to me now? Because we tend not to listen unless it hampers our productivity.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 21, 2021 at 5:05 PM

      Yeah, we listen to our body even more rarely than we do to our soul.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
11 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

Raging Waves and Fading Light

Illustration by Gemini AI Fiction Why does the sea rage endlessly? Varghese asked himself as he sat on the listless sands of the beach looking at the sinking sun beyond the raging waves. When rage becomes quotidian, no one notices it. What is unnoticed is futile. Like my life, Varghese muttered to himself with a smirk whose scorn was directed at himself. He had turned seventy that day. That’s why he was on the beach longer than usual. It wasn’t the rage of the waves or the melancholy of the setting sun that kept him on the beach. Self-assessment kept him there. Looking back at the seventy years of his life made him feel like an utter fool, a dismal failure. Integrity versus Despair, Erik Erikson would have told him. He studied Erikson’s theory on human psychological development as part of an orientation programme he had to attend as a teacher. Aged people reflect on their lives and face the conflict between feeling a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction (integrity) or a feeli...
7 comments
Read more