When we start loving ourselves, we start patching up the holes in our hearts, the gaping places that feel like they’ll never be filled. And we start making discoveries. “Aha!” we learn to say. “I didn’t see it that way before.” I asked Emily what discoveries she’d made in the last eight months of turmoil. Her eyes brightened.
“I’ve discovered how many wonderful people I have around me—my family, friends, people I didn’t know before who became friends during my therapy. When the doctor told me I had cancer, I thought my life had come to an end. Now I’ve met so many people. I’ve learned I can fight, that I’m powerful. It took me forty-five years to learn that, but I’m lucky I know it now. My new life is already beginning.”
We can all find strength and freedom, even within terrible circumstances. Honey, you’re in charge, so take charge. Don’t be Cinderella, sitting in the kitchen waiting for a guy with a foot fetish. There are no princes or princesses. You have all the love and power you need within. So write down what you want to achieve, the kind of life you want to live, the kind of partner you want to have. When you go out, look like a million-dollar baby. Join a group of people dealing with similar struggles, where you can care for each other and commit yourselves to something bigger than yourselves. And then get curious. What’s next? How’s it going to turn out?
Our minds come up with all sorts of brilliant ways to protect us. Victimhood is a tempting shield because it suggests that if we make ourselves blameless, our grief will hurt less. As long as Emily identified as the victim, she could pass all the blame and responsibility for her well-being on to her ex-husband. Victimhood offers a false respite by deferring and delaying growth. The longer we stay there, the harder it is to leave.
“You’re not a victim,” I told Emily. “It’s not who you are—it’s what was done to you.”
We can be wounded and accountable. Responsible and innocent. We can give up the secondary gains of victimhood for the primary gains of growing and healing and moving on.
The whole reason to step out of victimhood is so we can step into the rest of our lives. Barbara was trying to navigate this pivot when she contacted me a year after her mother’s death. She looked young for sixty-four, her skin smooth, highlights in her long blond hair. But she seemed to hold a heavy burden in her chest, and her wide blue eyes were full of sorrow.
Barbara’s relationship with her mother had been complicated, and so her grief was also complicated. Demanding and controlling, her mother had sometimes explicitly reinforced Barbara’s victimhood, fixating on problems like bad grades and breakups, stoking Barbara’s belief that she was flawed and helpless and would never amount to much. In some ways, it was a relief to be free from her mother’s distorted and critical perspective. But she also felt restless and unsettled. A recent back injury had interrupted the job she loved at a local café, and she had trouble falling asleep at night, her mind churning with questions. Is my time almost up? What have I failed at? What have I done to be remembered? What is the outcome of my life?
“I feel sad and anxious and insecure,” she said. “I just can’t come to any peace.”
I often see this happen to middle-aged women who have lost their mothers. The unfinished emotional business of the relationship lives on—and death makes it feel impossible that there will ever be closure.
“Have you released your mom from the past?” I asked.
Barbara shook her head. Her eyes filled with tears.
Tears are good. They mean we’ve been pierced by an important emotional truth. If I ask a question that prompts a patient to cry, it’s like striking gold. We’ve hit on something essential. Yet the moment of release is as vulnerable as it is profound. I leaned in, all present, no rush.
Barbara wiped her face and took a long, shaky breath. “I want to ask you about something,” she said. “A memory from childhood I keep replaying nonstop in my mind.”
I asked her to close her eyes while she described the incident, to tell it in present tense, as though it were happening now.
“I’m three,” she began. “We’re all in the kitchen. My dad’s at the breakfast table. My mom is standing over me and my older brother. She’s angry. She lines us up side by side and says, ‘Who do you like best, me or your father?’ My dad is watching it happen, and he starts to cry. He says, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t do that to the kids.’ I want to say that I love my dad best; I want to go over and sit in his lap and hug him. But I can’t do that. I can’t say that I love him or I’ll make my mom mad. I’ll get in trouble. So I say I like my mom the best. And now…” Her voice cracked, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Now I wish I could take it back.”
“You were a good survivor,” I told her. “A smart cookie. You did what you had to do to survive.”
“Then why does it hurt so much?” she said. “Why can’t I just let it go?”
“Because that little girl doesn’t know she’s safe now. Take me to her there in the kitchen,” I said. “Tell me what you see.”
She described the window facing the backyard, the yellow flowers on the handles of the cabinet doors, how her eyes were exactly the height of the oven dials.
“Talk to that little girl. How is she feeling now?”
“I love my dad. But I can’t say it.”
“You’re powerless.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks to her chin. She wiped at them, then cradled her face in
