My decision to divorce Béla was unkind and unnecessary, but it was useful in one way: it created more silence and space for me to start to face my past and my grief. It didn’t liberate me from my emotions and trauma, from flashbacks, from feeling numb, anxious, isolated, and afraid. Only I could do that.
“Be careful what you do when you’re restless,” my sister Magda had warned me. “You can start to think the wrong things. He’s too this, he’s too that, I’ve suffered enough. You end up missing the same things that drove you crazy.”
And I did miss Béla. The way he danced and wore joy on his sleeve. His relentless humor, how he made me laugh in spite of myself. His steadfast appetite for risk.
Two years after our divorce, we remarried. But we didn’t return to the same marriage we’d had before. We weren’t resigned to each other; we’d chosen each other anew, and this time without the distorted lens of resentment and unmet expectations.
“Your husband is getting your anger,” I told Marina. “But maybe he’s not the one you’re really angry with.”
We cast others in the roles that help us enact the story we’ve decided to tell. When we tell a new story—when we come home to our wholeness—our relationships might improve. Or we might find that we don’t need them anymore, that they don’t have a place in the story of freedom.
You don’t have to figure it out in a hurry. In fact, it’s best to stop figuring and figuring and trying to understand. It’s an answer that will come only by playing more, by living your life as fully as possible, and being who you already are: a person of strength.
KEYS TO FREE YOURSELF FROM RESENTMENT
Change the dance steps. Many couples have a three-step dance, a cycle of conflict they keep repeating. It starts with frustration, escalates to fighting, and appears to restore harmony when they make up. Until the initial frustration is resolved, the peace won’t last for long. What frustration triggers keep going unresolved in your relationship? How can you change the dance at step one, before you fall into the old cycle? Decide on one thing to do differently the next time frustration brews. Then do it. Take note of how it went and celebrate any change.
Take care of your own emotional business. Reflect on a message about love that you may have learned as a child and may be carrying into your relationships. For example, Marina was carrying the message that if you love someone, they leave. What did your childhood teach you about love? Fill in this sentence: If you love someone, __________.
Would you like to be married to you? What qualities do you think create a comfortable and thriving relationship? Would you like to be married to someone such as you? What strengths do you bring to the table? Make a list. What behaviors might be challenging to live with? Make a list. Are you living in a way that brings out your best self?
Chapter 9
ARE YOU EVOLVING OR REVOLVING?
The Prison of Paralyzing Fear
I’d been teaching psychology at a high school in El Paso for a few years—and had even been awarded teacher of the year—when I decided to return to school for a master’s in educational psychology. One day my clinical supervisor came to me and said, “Edie, you’ve got to get a doctorate.”
I laughed. “By the time I get a doctorate I’ll be fifty,” I said.
“You’ll be fifty anyway.”
Those are the smartest four words anyone ever said to me.
Honey, you’re going to be fifty anyway—or thirty or sixty or ninety. So you might as well take a risk. Do something you’ve never done before. Change is synonymous with growth. To grow, you’ve got to evolve instead of revolve.
In America, the slang term for a psychologist is shrink. But I like to call myself a stretch! To meet survivor to survivor, and guide you to release your self-limiting beliefs and embrace your potential.
I studied Latin as a girl, and I love the phrase Tempura mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis. Times are changing, and we are changing with the times. We aren’t stuck in the past, or stuck in our old patterns and behaviors. We’re here now, in the present, and it’s up to us what we hold on to, what we let go, and what we reach for.
Gloria is still carrying a heavy burden. She fled the civil war in El Salvador when she was four, grew up in an extremely violent household where her mother was repeatedly beaten by her father, and then, when she was thirteen and visiting family in El Salvador, was raped by her pastor uncle, the man who had christened her. He assaulted her on Christmas Eve, destroying her faith along with her sense of safety. No one believed her when she came forward about the assault, and the uncle who raped her is still a practicing pastor.
“I’m holding on to so much anguish and hurt,” she said. “Everything is covered in fear. I don’t want to lose my husband or children to the past. I need things to change, but I just don’t know how to change, or where to start.”
She thought that pursuing a degree in social work might help her find purpose in the present and unlock the hold of the past, but hearing her clients’ experiences of victimization only deepened her sense of despair and helplessness, and she abandoned the degree. She hated feeling defeated, hated that her children saw her struggling. Now, along with the frequent intrusions and feeling of panic from the past, she lives every day terrified that her
