“You were a child then,” I said. “You’re an adult now. Go to that precious, one-of-a-kind little girl. Be her mother now. Take her hand and tell her, ‘I’m going to take you out of here.’ ”
Barbara’s eyes were still closed. She swayed side to side.
“Hold her hand,” I continued. “Walk her to the door, down the front steps, out to the sidewalk. Walk her up the block. Turn the corner. Tell the little girl, ‘You’re not stuck there anymore.’ ”
The prison of victimhood often gets established in childhood, and even when we’re adults, it can keep us feeling as powerless as we did when we were young. We can release ourselves from victimhood by helping that inner child feel safe, and by letting her experience the world with an adult’s autonomy.
I guided Barbara to keep holding the hand of the wounded little girl. To take her for a walk. Show her the flowers in the park. Spoil her and love her right up. Give her an ice cream cone or a soft teddy bear to squeeze—whatever she wanted most to feel safe. “And then take her down to the beach,” I said. “Show her how to kick the sand. Tell her, ‘I’m here and we’re going to be angry.’ Kick the sand with her. Yell and shout. Then take her home. Not back to the kitchen, but where you live now. The place where you’ll always show up to take care of her.”
Barbara’s eyes were still closed, her mouth and cheeks more relaxed. But a furrow of tension still gathered between her eyes.
“That little girl was stuck in the kitchen, and she needed you to get her out,” I said. “You rescued her.”
She nodded slowly, but the tension didn’t leave her face.
Her work in the kitchen wasn’t done. There were others to rescue.
“Your mother needs you, too,” I said. “She’s still standing in that kitchen. Open the door for her. Tell her it’s time for both of you to be free.”
Barbara imagined going to her father first, to the breakfast table where he still sat in silence, his cheeks wet with tears. She kissed him on the forehead and spoke the love she’d had to hide as a child. Then she went to her mother. She put a hand on her shoulder, looked into her troubled eyes, and nodded toward the open door, the patch of green lawn visible from where they stood. When Barbara opened her eyes, something in her face and shoulders appeared to relax.
“Thank you,” she said.
Releasing ourselves from victimhood also means releasing others from the roles we’ve assigned them.
I had a chance to use this tool myself a few months ago, when I was on a speaking tour in Europe and invited my daughter Audrey to go with me. When she’d been in middle school and high school, training as a Junior Olympic swimmer, getting up at five in the morning for practice, her hair green from the constant exposure to chlorine, her father had usually been the one to accompany her to swim meets all over Texas and the Southwest. This was how Béla and I had managed the demands of our careers and three children—we’d acted as partners, splitting responsibilities. But that meant we each missed out on things. Traveling with Audrey now couldn’t replace the time we’d lost when she was younger. But it seemed like a welcome way to honor our relationship. Besides, this time I was the one who needed a chaperone!
We went to the Netherlands, and then on to Switzerland, where we sank our teeth into napoleon pastries as rich and sweet as the ones my father used to sneak home for me at night when he’d been out playing billiards. I’d been back to Europe numerous times since the war, but it was incredibly healing for me to be there, so close to my childhood and my trauma, with my magnificent daughter, to share silence and conversation, to hear her plans for launching a second career as a grief and leadership coach. One night, after I gave a speech to a roomful of global executives at a business school in Lausanne, someone surprised me by asking, “What’s it like, traveling with Audrey?”
I searched for the words to adequately convey how special this time was to me. I mentioned that middle children often get short shrift in families, and that Audrey had been raised largely by her older sister, Marianne, while I was running their little brother, John, all over El Paso—and even as far as Baltimore—in search of therapies for some undiagnosed developmental delays of great concern. John went on to graduate from the University of Texas as one of the top ten students in his class, and is now a respected civic leader and advocate for people with disabilities. I’m forever grateful he was able to receive interventions and vital support. But I’ve always felt guilty for the ways John’s unique needs occupied my attention and interrupted Audrey’s childhood, for the six-year age gap between Marianne and Audrey, for the burden my own trauma put on my children. Saying this impromptu, in public, was cathartic for me. It felt good to recognize it, to apologize.
But at the airport the next morning, Audrey confronted me.
“Mom,” she said, “we have to change the story of who I am. I don’t see myself as a victim. I need you to stop seeing me that way.”
My chest tightened with discomfort, with the rush to defend myself. I thought I’d been portraying her as a survivor, not a victim. But she was absolutely right. In trying to discharge my own guilt, I’d cast her in the role of the neglected child. I’d put us all in roles: I was the victimizer, Audrey the victim, and Marianne the rescuer. (Or, in another version of the same story, I cast John as the victim, myself as the rescuer, and Béla, whom I was so angry with in those years, as the victimizer.) The role
