When I moved back to India in 2023, I expected culture shock. I expected logistical adjustments. I expected to miss certain things about living in the U.S. But I didn’t expect the emotional regression - the strange sensation of being 27 on paper, yet suddenly feeling 17 again.
I left home for the U.S. almost a decade earlier. The last time I lived with my parents, I was a teenager: stubborn, easily frustrated, and always pushing for independence. So when I returned home as an adult, I thought things would be different. I had lived alone, worked, earned, traveled, made decisions, navigated life. But under my parents’ roof again, all of that experience seemed to vanish.
Small disagreements started to fill the house. What I wore. When I came home. How late I stayed up. To me, these seemed like petty, unnecessary conflicts. To them, these were familiar patterns - the same anxieties and expectations they carried when I was younger. We weren’t fighting about the present. We were reenacting the past.
It took me a while to understand that moving back home didn’t create new issues. It simply revealed old ones that were sitting quietly beneath the surface, waiting to be acknowledged. And this time, I wasn’t navigating them as a confused teenager. I had something I didn’t have before: therapy.
One day, during a session, my therapist said something that shifted everything for me. “It’s not that your father doesn’t want to be emotionally available. He just never had the vocabulary for it.”
I sat with that sentence for a long time.
I began to imagine what it must have been like for him to grow up in a generation of Indian men where worth was measured by how much you could provide, not how openly you could express your feelings. A world where you were taught to be strong, even when you were scared. Where crying wasn’t an option. Where silence was the closest thing to vulnerability.
Seeing him through that lens didn’t excuse everything, but it softened the edges. It helped me approach our conflicts differently- not with defensiveness, but with curiosity.
Those nine months at home were not easy. There were moments when I questioned whether I had made a mistake. But gradually, something surprising happened. The conflict that I once avoided became a doorway. A way to understand each other differently. A way to rewrite old patterns, not just repeat them.
I used to think conflict was the opposite of connection. That if you loved people deeply, you avoided hurting them, avoided raising your voice, avoided saying anything that could create distance. But living with my parents again taught me that conflict isn’t the end of love. Often, it’s where deeper connection begins.
So the next time you find yourself fighting with your parents, pause. Stay in the discomfort. Reflect - maybe with a therapist, maybe with a close friend. Because sometimes the most painful conversations are the ones that finally set us free.