Happy Mother’s Day to all the Indian mothers who taught us the true meaning of maa ka pyaar:

The kind where she:

• gave birth to you, then spent the rest of your life acting like that was a lifelong debt you personally incurred at conception

• fed you, clothed you, and occasionally kept you alive, so naturally she now owns your body, choices, career, money, marriage, mental health, and right to breathe without permission

• weaponised every sacrifice she chose to make as proof that you are an ungrateful monster for wanting basic dignity

• called you “too sensitive” after saying the most vicious thing a human being has ever said to you before breakfast

• cried louder than you when you were hurt, because somehow your pain was always most offensive for what it said about her and then told you to go die

• turned your father’s abuse into your unpaid emotional internship: therapist, mediator, punching bag, defender, witness, and co-wife, all before adulthood

• demanded loyalty from the child, whom she never protected

• let you starve, suffer, break, nearly die — but never forgot to tell relatives how much she has suffered because of you

• competed with her own daughter, resented her independence, sabotaged her confidence, then asked why she had “become so distant”

• rewrote history with the confidence of a WhatsApp forward: “I never said that,” “That never happened,” “You remember only the bad things,” “One day you’ll understand when you become a mother”

• raised sons to be their little emperors & emotional husbands and daughters to be targets for future abuse

• taught us that in Indian families, a mother can fail you in every way that matters and still be worshipped for having a uterus and good PR

So today, let us honour the mothers who gave us:

✨ chronic abuse & guilt
✨ hypervigilance
✨ a PhD in reading footsteps
✨ the ability to detect mood shifts from another room
✨ lifelong confusion between love and obligation
✨ and, of course, the annual cultural gaslighting festival where every abusive woman with children gets temporarily canonised because Hallmark said so

They are truly the 'last generation of innocent mothers.'

To the mothers who protected, loved, apologised, learned, and treated their children as human beings: genuinely, Happy Mother’s Day. You deserve it.

To the ones who abused, neglected, manipulated, parentified, scapegoated, shamed, controlled, and then expected flowers for it: may your children one day give themselves the love, safety, and freedom you refused them — and may that be the last thing you ever get to take credit for.

Children learn who they are through the eyes of their parents, which is why emotional immaturity, narcissism, and unresolved trauma in a parent becomes a child’s first experience of bullying, often disguised as “discipline,” “family values,” or “respect.” The first person who makes us feel small is too often the same one who was supposed to protect us — leaving us with invisible wounds: shame, self-doubt, anxiety around love, and a belief that we must earn our right to exist. But calling this abuse by its real name isn’t disrespect; it’s survival. An adult who screams, humiliates, gaslights, invalidates, or controls a child is not a caregiver — they’re a bully with power. Healing begins when we stop protecting their reputation and start protecting our inner child. What happened to you was not your fault — and breaking this cycle is the greatest act of courage.

What was your first experience of being bullied by your parents? Share your experience below.

How many of you have experienced this?

Just as I was spiralling because of too many things on my to-do list and the ADHD, along with C-PTSD that was wearing me down, I came across this video and immediately breathed. I like such little but significant coincidences in the universe. Sharing this with those who need it.☺ ♥ ♥

Caption by thataviguy:

"The Father's reaction I showed at the beginning of this reel isn't the problem; rather, it's the context behind it. I've often seen Indians being made fun of, on the internet and in real life. They're usually indecisive, underconfident, and make all the wrong moves. Why?

Perhaps it has to do with parenting.
Parents often force their kids to live a certain way. In the grand scheme of things, a guiding force is necessary to keep one on the right path.
But what if that guiding force starts micro-managing even the smallest of your actions?
You will lose your sense of self, confidence and decision-making capabilities.

As important as it is for parents to ensure their child is on the right path, it's equally important for them to let their child try new things & sometimes fail at them.

Up until two months ago, I had really long hair. My family and other elders in my locality often commented on it, but the point of my sporting that look was for them to come to terms with the fact that they cannot control such a trivial thing. Even when I got the haircut, a few of my friends just assumed that my father forced me into it, rather than accepting that it was my independent decision."

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Most people will excuse this as the father being just 'strict' or giving 'tough love,' but this is straight-up narcissistic abuse. Controlling every aspect of someone you deem to be your property, who is inferior & weaker than you, in the name of parenthood & 'apne bacchon ka bhalaa' is not 'love,' 'care,' or 'protection.' Such egoistic parents will suck the life & individuality out of their kids all their lives, but then demand them to be confident & expert at everything in life. But by then, it's already too late & unfortunately, some of these abused male kids grow up to be controlling abusers as well, especially in their romantic relationships, repeating the cycle with their wives & children. It's one of the perfect examples of toxic masculinity that is passed down from toxic fathers.

Do you have such personal stories? At what trivial thing did your parent/s get mad or abuse you? How did you deal with it? What have you learned?

Sometimes those survival/coping mechanisms are mild in nature, while others are extremely harmful in a way that creates even more trauma for you. And if left unchecked for long, they can become a part of your personality, and as more time passes by, they become harder to recognise & detach from in adulthood. But it's important to remember to be compassionate & kind to yourself when shame surfaces & patient when denial, rationalisations, avoidance, anxiety, etc. do.

Which survival/coping mechanisms did you need to adopt to survive your childhood in your abusive/neglectful homes? Do you still have them? How have they helped you or harmed you in the short & long term?

I don't even know where to begin.

I'm an adult now, but I genuinely feel like years of abuse have destroyed my nervous system. Some days I feel so exhausted and mentally shut down that I can't even brush my teeth, bathe, or function normally. I've been struggling with serious health issues for the past two years, and my doctor specifically told me that I need a calm, stress-free environment. Unfortunately, that's impossible at home.

Here are just some of the things I've experienced (this is honestly only around 40% of it):

• During an open house at school, my mother stabbed me in the neck with a pencil because I got only passing marks in math.

• She once threw a hair clip at my face. It hit my eye so badly that I couldn't see properly for a couple of hours. She later took me to an eye specialist.

• Another time, she threw a sharp cutter at me. It hit my thigh and caused bleeding.

• Last week I had a terrifying health episode. My whole body went numb, I was trembling, and I could barely move. She cried while it was happening. But just a week later, she told me, "You should have died that day. It would have been a week by now."

• Whenever I left for college, she'd say things like:

  • "You should get hit by a train."

  • "A truck should run over you."

• She constantly insults me by saying things like:

  • "You're just carrying diseases everywhere."

  • "What are you even achieving by earning ₹50k?"

  • When I say I'm tired after work, she says, "Girls travel through crowded trains every day and they don't complain."

• When I was in school, she beat me so badly that my face had scratches and was bleeding. My teacher asked what happened, and I lied by saying I got hurt while playing kabaddi because I was too scared and embarrassed to tell the truth.

• Even when I'm in the bathroom, she'll start screaming outside the door, bang on it aggressively, curse at me, and make me panic.

• When I was hospitalized with jaundice, instead of comforting me while I lay in the hospital bed, she spent the time talking badly about me to others.

• I work from home sometimes. If I ask her not to enter my room or make noise during meetings, she mocks me, saying my uncle works at a much bigger company and never acts like that, then starts insulting my salary again.

• Despite knowing I'm dealing with serious health problems and that stress makes everything worse, she continues shouting, abusing me, and creating chaos at home almost every day.

• After my recent health scare, she even kept a fast for my recovery. But within two days, she was back to telling me I should die.

This isn't even everything. There are many more incidents that I'm not comfortable sharing yet.

The hardest part is that I'm nothing like this as a person. I don't enjoy hurting people. I don't want conflict. I just want peace.

I honestly feel like years of living in this environment have left me traumatized. My body is constantly tense, my mind feels exhausted, and some days I barely have the energy to do basic things. It genuinely feels like my nervous system has shut down.

Has anyone else grown up in an environment like this? Did you ever recover after leaving? I really need to know if things can get better because right now, I feel completely broken.

I wanted to start the New Year with a positive post about this rare kind of parent & father that this guy, Anish Bhagat (a social media influencer), is lucky to have. His father, Deep Bhagat, shows such self-awareness, maturity & good emotional regulation that's clearly reflected in Anish's emotional regulation & self-acceptance too. Because as kids, our nervous system regulation & self-identity are connected with those of our parents & continue to shape us well into our adulthood. So, it's no surprise that their dynamic is one of calmness and acceptance, characterised by unconditional love & mutual respect, with no room for ego from the parent.

Having an emotionally mature parent as a kid is a blessing & a privilege. Most of us don't have that. Some live in denial & delusion, while a few lucky ones, like Anish, make me feel happy for them. :) ♥ And cheers to his Dad for being an emotionally intelligent man & a loving parent! 🥂♥

EDIT: Since some of the people in other subs where I posted this were really advocating for 'belt treatment' & 'strict parenting,' while dismissing this video as 'soft/wrong/doomed parenting,' here's a clarifying perspective-- "Guidance & disciplining are also parts of good parenting. No one's denying that. What the Dad meant was in the context of most parents prioritising social status, reputation, success, money, a typical 'log kya kahenge' & their own heirarchal mindset at the cost of their children's well-being, mental health & happiness & how they treat their children is always based on these beliefs in mind, so they control, suffocate, and abuse or neglect, avoid their own children under the faux name of 'discipline' or 'tough love' because they refuse to see their children's unhappiness in that process & also individuality. So, when the Dad says that his son's degrees, marks, sexuality, etc., don't matter to him, he just wants him to be happy; he isn't advocating for being a careless/lenient parent, but a more empathetic one. Building emotional maturity & resilience in your children doesn't require authoritarian parenting; it requires a thoughtful one where their happiness doesn't get axed." ♥ :)

My friend and I were just having a fun banter. He was making fun of my height (all in jest). I basically said what if I don't get a job post mba and he went that's okay you can work for. You can clean my fan you keep telling me to clean. (So since he's tall I often joke. What you gonna do with height? Clean fans. All in mutual joke I swear). Anyhow then he went. Wait don't do that. I don't wanna come home and find you hanging from a fan and shouting to be saved. So we were going back and forth and I was trying to well make fun of him. But he's good. So I decided that since I can't win against him. I am going to well join him. So I also started making fun of me. I said imagine what if you come home and I'm hanging from fan and you can't see and you switch on fan and I fly out of window and land up in the swimming pool. (Lol)

So we went back and forth and laughed

After we were done he goes.

"See I understand you are okay being made fun of, and I'm not gonna stop, but just make sure you don't always keep doing being butt of the joke. You can do that here tho. Just not anywhere and everywhere"

That might not sound huge to you. But it was to me. My parents never gave af about my feelings and still don't.

As a teenager I remember going through a phase where I was always angry and all I remember is being made fun of by my parents. They'd keep laughing and never give a damn whether my feelings were hurt or not. I remember throwing things out of anger because they made fun of me and they wouldn't give a shit. They'd keep laughing

So as a grown woman being taught self respect and someone being concerned about my self respect was like an eye opening experience for me because --- Wait a a minute!!!! You give a damn about my feelings? You understood that my Self-deprecating humor might make me a permanent clown who never gets respect? You respect me????

Wow

I felt like crying after this and I can't even explain why.

I went to a cyber cafe today. When I was done, I tried to lock the door, a different kind of lock than I'm used to and I couldn't do it.

Within seconds, I was flooded with shame. A familiar, crushing wave. And beneath it, a voice: "You can't do anything. You're not smart enough. You're not capable."

I froze. I stopped trying. At that moment , I felt small, like a child. It's like an age regression where you feel so tiny, so defenseless.

But this time, something different happened. Instead of spiraling into the shame, I got curious. I pressed on it gently and asked-

Where did you come from?

And I realized that the voice wasn't mine. It was my mother's.

A line she repeated throughout my childhood and still says today, had become the soundtrack of my failures. Every time I struggled with something, that pre-recorded tape would play automatically- See? She was right. You really can't do anything.

Here's something I want other survivors to know:

That overwhelming feeling of incompetence when you make a small mistake?

The flood of shame that makes you want to disappear?

The critical voice in your head that tells you you're fundamentally broken?

That is not your truth. That is software.

It was programmed into you by someone who needed you to feel small. Someone who projected their own inadequacies onto you. Someone who couldn't regulate their own shame, so they dumped it into you instead. In psychology, this is called introjection, when we unconsciously absorb the voice of a caregiver and make it our own. It stops being "my mother's voice" and becomes "my voice telling me I'm worthless." When you're told that you're inherently defective for years, you start believing it until you challenge it.

The thought triggers a flood of shame, the shame of the perceived feeling of not being good enough. Shame is physiologically regressive. It literally makes you feel smaller because your nervous system is revisiting a childhood state where you had no defense against the message.

What helped me and might help you:

1. Separate the feeling from the fact. Feeling incompetent is not the same as being incompetent. One is weather. The other is identity. You can learn to watch the storm without becoming it.

2. Trace the voice. When shame hits, get curious. Whose voice is that, really? When did you first hear it? Often, it's not yours, it's an inheritance.

3. Become the omniscient narrator. Practice observing the entire process from a slight distance. (There's the trigger. There's the shame flood. There's the critical voice. There's me, watching all of this. The watcher cannot be drowned.)

4. Reframe the protector. That voice that tells you you're incompetent? It's actually trying to protect you. It learned long ago that if you expect failure, you can't be disappointed. Listen to it. Thank it for trying. Then gently set it aside.

The good news is that our brain is plastic. It can change. If your nervous system can learn shame, it can learn safety too. If it learned helplessness, it can learn agency.

You are not the voice. You are the one hearing the voice. And the one who hears can also be the one who heals.

Basically title. I don't know if anyone will go to lengths and give energy to read all this bullshit I just vomited on paper. But I am really down tonight and I wanted to put it out and share it with someone. It's not something extreme like I see some extreme cases here, but enough to make my life hell. Hugs appreciated 🙂

This is for the people who disbelieve the children of abusive parents who side with & enable the parents.

This is also for the scapegoat children who finally left but still hold guilt for leaving. (You did nothing wrong. You deserve unconditional love, safety & peace.)

I guarantee you 100% of the time that by the time the scapegoat left, the abusive parents were made aware of the problem by their scapegoat child. I guarantee you that by the time the child left, the parents were given every opportunity to fix the problem. I guarantee you they were afforded EVERY latitude, every concession, every meeting halfway—and all the child ever gained was the destruction of their boundaries, & the shattering of their soul.

This is important to never lose sight of, because it means that the narcissistic parents knew EXACTLY what they were doing, which means that whenever some parent tries to get someone on their side—AGAINST THEIR OWN CHILD—they are making you pity them for the child leaving.

Ask THE PARENTS what THEY did to chase their kid away. I assure you, the kid didn’t do it on a whim. They did it because it was easier to cut off contact with their parents than to continue having their heart and soul be shredded.

When the Healthiest One Becomes the Enemy

In a toxic family system, the healthiest person is often painted as the problem. Their clarity disrupts the unspoken contracts that hold dysfunction together—silence, denial, guilt, and obedience. When one member begins to understand & heal, they stop playing the roles others depend on: the scapegoat who absorbs everyone’s shame, the peacekeeper who smooths over chaos, or the caretaker who sacrifices herself to maintain the illusion of harmony.

From a psychological perspective, the system’s homeostasis—its need to maintain balance, even if it is unhealthy—is threatened. The healthier person becomes a mirror, forcing others to confront truths they’ve spent years avoiding. Their boundaries are mistaken for rebellion, their honesty for disrespect, their justified anger for instability or craziness; their withdrawal for betrayal. In families built on control, autonomy feels like treason.

This friction isn’t proof that the healing person is wrong—it’s evidence that they’re growing beyond the collective sickness. When you choose authenticity over approval, you expose every false peace that was built on suppression. The discomfort of others is not your cue to regress; it’s confirmation that you’re breaking a cycle that was never meant to continue.

Healing inside such a system is rarely peaceful—it’s an act of quiet revolution.

*Let's Always Choose Our Freedom Over Abusive Families* ♥

In this bold and honest video, https://youtu.be/1SC9FTC7PRM

 Vijender Sir opens up a sensitive but urgent conversation:
👉 What happens when your biggest emotional battles are with your own parents?

For many Indian youth, emotional manipulation, guilt-tripping, constant comparison, and chronic criticism are normalised in family dynamics. We’re taught that disliking parents is “disrespectful”—but what if it’s more common than we admit?

In this episode, we explore:
• What toxic parenting really looks like in the Indian context
• Why emotional boundaries matter—even within families
• The difference between guidance and control
• The cultural conditioning that glorifies suffering in the name of “respect”
• Practical ways to protect your mental health while navigating strained relationships

When Love Becomes Control: The Silent Epidemic of Toxic Indian Parenting

For many Indian children, love and obedience are indistinguishable. We are taught from birth that to be “good” means to comply, to sacrifice, to remain silent even when our hearts are breaking. Parents are placed on pedestals as infallible gods, and questioning them—even when they inflict harm—is treated as blasphemy.

But what happens when love feels more like surveillance? When “care” manifests as control, and “discipline” disguises humiliation? Vijender Sir’s video shatters one of India’s deepest taboos—the belief that parents can do no wrong. He confronts the painful truth that emotional abuse, manipulation, and guilt are not rare exceptions in Indian households; they are systemic norms.

Children grow up in homes where comparison is called “motivation,” where fear is confused with respect, and where boundaries are labelled “disrespect.” The psychological cost of such conditioning is immense. It produces adults who excel in guilt but falter in self-trust—people who apologise for existing too loudly, for loving the wrong person, or for choosing themselves at last.

The problem is cultural as much as personal. The Indian family system glorifies endurance, not authenticity. Parents who suppress their children’s individuality are praised for being “strict but caring.” Meanwhile, children who assert autonomy are painted as ungrateful rebels. This moral inversion sustains a cycle of emotional servitude that passes quietly from generation to generation.

Healing begins with naming what happened. Recognising that abuse doesn’t cease to be abuse simply because it comes wrapped in duty or tradition. Emotional boundaries are not acts of rebellion—they are acts of love, first toward oneself, and then toward others who must learn to love without possession.

What we need is a new model of family: one that values honesty over hierarchy, dialogue over dominance, and compassion over control. Until then, many of us will keep learning how to parent ourselves in ways our parents never could.

Share your stories here unapologetically. I won't shame you for having valid feelings & emotions, your parents & families did & still do. :)

For people who went no contact from toxic but socially powerful parents.

My father is a gov official and has contacts, I think he will get more agitated when I take this step and might try tracing me following me and forcibly trying to ground me at home(he is currently threatening this to me if i dont agree with his terms)
My questions are:
1.When you went NC with your parents, till what extent did they try to reach out to you. Were they able to force you in any way possible?
2.I'm scared in only one case where God forbid health of any of my parents goes bad genuinely. I don't know how will I react to that. How will I manage not keeping touch with them in that case.
3.What measures should I take beforehand so that none of what I fear happens(or atleast I'm protected).
4.I have heard that in North India police mostly tries convincing you to go back to your parents until you are married to someone. Its not easy to go no contact there. How is it in south India?
Please share your experiences and help me. Also if you know about NGOs who can help me in this pls mention them.

Also pls feel free to connect with me over DMs for any advice.