Soulful Journeys Within

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Before We Had Words for It

I’m sharing this story in series of posts for mental health awareness and for caregivers who are walking a path they never expected. #1 Mental illness rarely announces itself loudly at the beginning. For us, it arrived quietly; disguised as anxiety, depression, fleeting psychosis that felt like a vivid nightmare, and heightened sensitivity. Like many families, we believed we were dealing with something temporary like school stress, puberty or a phase. She was bright, thoughtful, and deeply sensitive. Early Signs We Didn’t Understand She was born with separation anxiety and had scarlet fever at age eleven, something that may have triggered underlying vulnerabilities, though nothing became obvious at the time. Faith, Fear, and Missed Language The real shift came years later, when I took a job 400 miles away and she was left to manage her daily life on her own at sixteen. I couldn’t hear what wasn’t being said. She couldn’t make sense of the conflicting thoughts she was having; th...

Habhae saak koorraavae ddithae: Love Without Safety Is Not Love

On average, couples date for three to five years before marriage. For me, getting to know my husband began after we were married. Three months after our first meeting in 1993, I married the man I believed was the love of my life. At the time, this was not unusual in the Sikh Punjabi community. Long courtships were rare, and marriage itself was often the place where love was expected to grow. Everything appeared aligned; faith, family, careers, values. What felt like a bold leap of faith, however, began to tilt toward uncertainty soon after the wedding. I stayed through the first five years because I believed in what we had begun. There were moments of connection, hope, and genuine affection. I wanted to believe that with time, understanding would deepen and challenges would soften. Living in a joint family initially felt like support, but over time I realized it also masked what was breaking between us. The presence of others filled the space where intimacy should have been, camoufl...

Habhae saak koorraavae ddithae: Honoring Hukum Without Enduring Harm

In Sikh thought, a child’s emotional well-being is closely connected to their sense of safety, love, and belonging. When a home environment becomes emotionally unsettled or confusing, children may struggle internally in ways that are not always visible. Over time, this can affect their confidence, relationships, and ability to cope with life’s challenges. Within our community, conversations about mental health are often difficult, especially when they intersect with marriage, family, and faith. I once believed that acceptance of Hukum meant tolerating circumstances that caused deep emotional strain. Through lived experience and reflection on Gurbani ; particularly the Laavaan ; I came to see that Sikh teachings guide us toward safety, dignity, and healing, not silent endurance of harm. Our older daughter struggled to form healthy relationships, and this last one in particular severely affected her mental health. I had navigated a similar experience in 2021 when she was refusing t...

Habhae saak koorraavae ddithae: Deflecting Guilt, Revealing Truth

By the time the new year arrived, the emotional landscape of our home had hardened into something dense and unmoving. The children kept their distance; not out of defiance, but out of instinctive self-preservation. And my husband and I existed in a parallel rhythm that bore little resemblance to a marriage of nearly three decades. We shared space, not intimacy. Silence replaced conversation. Coexistence stood in for partnership. Each morning began with a familiar ache; a longing for the family we once were, and a growing fear that whatever had been broken might now be beyond repair. My body began to register what my heart had been carrying. Sleep became fractured. I woke in the dark with my heart racing. My appetite shifted. My shoulders stayed braced, even in stillness. I cried often; sometimes quietly in the shower, sometimes alone in my car, parked just outside the house I no longer felt safe inside. My therapist reminded me that grief does not only follow death. Sometimes it a...

Habhae saak koorraavae ddithae: Sticky Notes and Survival

After mid 2021, our family slowly unraveled. What had begun as stress fractures during the pandemic widened into lasting separations, silences, and wounds that refused to heal. Our younger daughter, who had moved to New York in October 2020, returned home every few months. During one visit, she noticed the physical toll it took on me to drive daily to Los Angeles just to spend time with her. Out of concern, she asked her Vaddi Masi if she could stay with her instead. My sister lived barely ten miles away, yet even that short distance came to symbolize how divided our family had become. After months of pleading, my husband finally agreed to couples therapy. I entered it with hope; I left each session feeling more alone. It never felt like shared work. Instead, it felt as though I had been invited into his therapist’s space, expected to absorb accusations rather than participate in healing. Very quickly, it became clear that while I was there to repair a marriage, he was there to defe...

Habhae saak koorraavae ddithae: Broken Wheel of Marriage and the last snap

By the end of 2020, as the pandemic tightened its grip on daily life, I was forced to face a reality I had been resisting: our family was breaking. Our youngest child had already distanced herself from her father , worn down by anger that had become impossible to reason with. Grieving that loss while continuing to parent the children still living around him felt unbearable, yet there was no pause button. I poured my energy into protecting them and into salvaging what I still hoped might be repaired in my marriage. On New Year’s Eve, confined to our home and searching for meaning, my husband and I participated in an online Kirtan program. We stepped into 2021 with quiet promises and fragile hope; the kind you cling to when you’re not ready to admit how much damage has already been done. That hope did not last long. Just days into the new year, a seemingly ordinary moment turned volatile. I entered the bedroom simply to say goodnight and was met with sudden rage. I was told I had no...

Habhae saak koorraavae ddithae: Holding the Fort

Grief-stricken, I sought help beyond the walls of our home and began seeing a therapist. Fall 2020, August through October, our season of birthdays, we celebrated each milestone twice: once with our younger daughter, without her father, and once with my husband, without her. What should have been joyful gatherings became quiet negotiations, divided loyalties, and an unspoken acknowledgment that our family was no longer whole. In therapy, I could no longer avoid the truth I had been naming around for years. I had lived in an abusive relationship since the earliest days of my marriage. I had softened it, called it “his anger issues,” learned to work around it, learned to endure it. I told myself I stayed because I did not want to be divorced twice. Because I did not believe I could raise three children on my own. Because I feared my family would not stand behind my decision. So I waited - for the storm to vanish. I waited for the children to finish high school, to leave for college, t...

Habhae saak koorraavae ddithae: The Beginning of Estrangement

July 2020 brought no relief. The weight of the pandemic, financial pressures, and the constant tension within our home had created a level of stress we could no longer outrun. Every day felt like we were bracing for the next emotional blow. Our younger daughter needed both of us to serve as guarantors for her new apartment in New York. I gave her my income information and encouraged her to get the same directly from her father. What should have been a simple, routine conversation quickly spiraled into another confrontation, another moment where she felt fear instead of support. All this stemmed from of his need to secrecy . By the end of it, she reduced her communication with him to polite greetings, a shield she created to protect herself from further emotional harm. Her work start date was pushed to October, adding another layer of uncertainty to an already fragile situation. I tried to handle the practical pieces, to protect the children from stress, to hold our family toget...

Habhae saak koorraavae ddithae: Locked Down, Breaking Apart

By May 2020, our younger daughter graduated online, a milestone we had hoped to celebrate together despite the pandemic. We surprised her with a banner on the garage door, danced out of sheer happiness, and tried to create a moment of shared joy. But the celebration was clouded by a belittling comment my husband made about our son, diminishing the joy of his Bhangra performances, an therapeutic outlet he had relied on to manage the emotional strain of our home environment. It wasn’t just a thoughtless remark; it was a reminder of a recurring pattern; belittling the children instead of nurturing their efforts. Our older daughter’s mental health was already fragile in quarantine. She felt unheard, unsafe, and misunderstood, especially after repeated confrontations over trivial things and my husband’s insistence on rigid authority. The children were beginning to withdraw from him; emotionally, physically, and in their trust. Communication at home felt like walking through a minefield...

Habhae saak koorraavae ddithae: A Daughter’s Silent Struggle

By April 2020, the world outside had slowed, but inside our home, tensions only accelerated. The pandemic forced everyone to stay indoors, yet the emotional distances in our family stretched farther than ever. Every day, I tried to hold the emotional temperature of the house steady. I answered questions about the virus, reassured our younger daughter that New York’s nightmares weren’t following her here, monitored the smallest shifts in our older daughter’s mental health, and reminded our son to give himself grace for losing the structure he once depended on. All the while, I hoped my husband would notice the depth of my efforts to keep everyone afloat. But his attention was elsewhere. After he pushed our son away in March 2020 by yelling at him over a routine insurance decision and treating his honesty as defiance; he left our first-born elder daughter without the support she needed. The house was full, yet I had never felt so alone. Caregiver fatigue is invisible until it breaks ...