Emergency Measures for Being with Parents During COVID-19 Lockdown

1) Enjoy a daily practice of intimacy with your body and breath, linking the mind to the whole body, and abiding in the mystic perfection that is your life and its perfectly established relatedness to the cosmos.  

2) Acknowledge the profound feeling of restriction that you feel when around your parents. Know that everyone feels this and it is not a problem nor a sign that something is horribly wrong with you or them.

3) Agree with everything your parents say. Be like the water. They are just expressing personal opinions, even if they seem to be about you, and you can just agree that yes, they do in fact hold that opinion. It doesn’t need to mean anything for your life. It’s not a binding agreement. If you just agree without reactivity or caveats, you’ll find the conversation moves on quickly and often never returns. 

Example: 

Parent: "While you’re here in isolation, you should finish your accountancy degree, that would really open up job opportunities."

What you mentally translate this to: “I love you and I want you to feel secure in the world in the only ways I know how.”

You: “Good idea mum, I’ll look into it.” 

= PEACE

4) Abandon the demand for your parents to receive you. Grieve their lack of capacity and then just try and receive them. Zero expectations for reasonable, loving, self-less or sane behaviour. These are not reasonable expectations and cannot be met at this time in human history. “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me” — Auden.

5) Imagine yourself to be a plughole through which family trauma can drain—generations of it. 

6) Cognize the simple, absolute fact that parents are the source of life. That through their perfect collaboration in the harmonies of mother nature, a cell formed and from that single cell you arose as the whole body, the power of the cosmos, a new human being. They provided circumstances, however emotionally limited, that nourished your body and enabled your physical existence and survival.

7) Wherever possible keep conversations short and upbeat. Ask your parent about their life before you were born.

8) Touch. Reach out and rub their shoulders. Little no-big-deal hugs, affection, cut through the focus on mental content with physical affection. Small gestures of affection: pick some flowers for the dining room table, create some muffins for everyone, keep your creative agency and avoid becoming passive. Your choice to stay in active loving relationship no matter what is happening is YOUR key to feeling okay.

9) Take responsibility for actively directing the family mind in sustained positive friendly directions knowing that without such energetic and active intervention, everyone’s mind will slip onto deadening all-too-familiar feedback loops. Strategies include: putting on a movie, juicy gossip, talking about what your friends are doing with their lives. This option does require energy. Anticipate and prepare effectively with a cup of coffee and packets of lollies. 

10) Avoid all attempts at any kind of profound emotional unearthing or reconciliation conversations if your parents do not have the emotional capacity to deal with it. They may have the emotional capacity of a toddler. It’s not their fault. 

11) Don’t be surprised that they are vulnerable to feeling rejected by you — for example, when you go to check your emails in your room, your mother assumes you hate her and gets emotionally withdrawn and sad. Rather than reacting to this obvious irrational behaviour, try clearly stating your plans - “I’m going to check my emails in my room for an hour now,” and providing reassurance at the same time (a hug or kiss or other show of affection). All they want is to know you still care and this can be easily and non-dramatically communicated.

12) Tell them you love them. Whatever shit has gone down. Even if they can’t say it back. One day they won’t be there any more, so try your best to connect with that feeling now.

13) Forgive yourself any time you inevitably fail at all of the above. Constant failure is pretty much guaranteed. Its all good.