They Make My Life miserable

I received this email request for coun­sel from J, a sub­scriber, and decided to share our back and forth exchange (with slight edit­ing for pur­poses of con­fi­den­tial­ity) because it is SO rel­e­vant to those of us who tend to believe that oth­ers keep us from being happy. Hope it brings light and empow­er­ment your way. Bless­ings, Lynne

photo credit: evantroborg3000

Lynne,

Thanks for all your writ­ing and usu­ally it helps some, but right now i still feel like I keep going in cir­cles. I want out of the tri­an­gle and the vic­tim role. I rec­og­nize the prob­lems, anx­i­ety, and neg­a­tive self talk that I’ve engaged in, been in bat­tle with, have tried to ignore, but nev­er­the­less, it has still plagued me. I’ve been in years of ther­apy, yoga/meditation, and even though, I have worked to rewrite the songs in my head, the actual real life drama kings in my life keep doing more and more out­ra­geous things to pull me right back to square one again. I have a daugh­ter who has been preg­nant many times with dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals. She has two beau­ti­ful boys with a guy who is in prison and is preg­nant again with a man who has spent time in prison. He is scary. Her life isn’t safe and I keep get­ting sucked in b/c of my grandsons.

Some­how, I have raised a daugh­ter that is attracted to a white trash lifestyle and I don’t want to be vic­tim­ized by her bad choices any­more. I feel guilty just debat­ing whether to close the door on her and what can I do about my grand­sons? I can change my (vic­tim) vocab­u­lary, but I can’t ignore the dan­ger of the path they are being led onto by my daugh­ter, who crit­i­cizes me for being neg­a­tive, and has no conscience.

- J

My response to J:
You are right. It takes more than just chang­ing your vocab­u­lary to get out of the state of Vic­tim­hood. What and how we speak reflects what we think and believe. It is at that level, the level of belief, that real peace, real change must take place.

I am some­one who, per­haps much like your daugh­ter, spent many years mak­ing poor choices. I mar­ried “losers” and had chil­dren with no means of tak­ing care of them. I did drugs, and acted out in all sorts of dan­ger­ous ways. It took every bit of it to bring me to where I am today.
Once, when I was bemoan­ing my past, some­one asked me the fol­low­ing, “If you knew that the road you’ve been on, with all its down sides, pits and falls, were absolutely nec­es­sary, if it were your only path Home to Source, would you want to change it?” In think­ing about it I real­ized I would do it all over again, change noth­ing, if that is what it took for me to find my way Home. For so it is.

We each must travel the path we’re on until we don’t need to any­more. Where we are is where we need to be. How do I know that? Because it is where we are. Real­ity rules. I trust that where I am, where you are, where your daugh­ter is, is where we each need to be for our own life lessons and oppor­tu­ni­ties. Our paths are tai­lor made for us. To see it any other way is to feel vic­tim­ized by life. I choose to see life as a chal­leng­ing, vig­or­ous work­out. Our life always reflects to us our own frame of mind through the sit­u­a­tions and peo­ple we encounter. There are no mis­takes, no acci­dents or coin­ci­dences. What we expe­ri­ence will always be what we on some level believe. How else are we going to real­ize the thoughts/beliefs that are hold­ing us back except by encoun­ter­ing them in the phys­i­cal through the peo­ple and sit­u­a­tions we encounter? Your daugh­ter, like you, is on her path. It is not your path — you do not have to under­stand it or approve of it. Sim­ply trust that she is doing her life journey.

There’s some­thing I learned from Byron Katie (whose book, Lov­ing What Is, I highly rec­om­mend for you) that comes to mind as well. She teaches that there are three kinds of busi­ness: my busi­ness, your busi­ness and God’s busi­ness. She goes on to say that when­ever we are in any busi­ness other than our own, we cre­ate mis­ery for our­selves and others.

Our chal­lenge is to get clear about where the line is in deter­min­ing what’s our busi­ness and what’s not. How your daugh­ter lives her life and the choices she makes is not your busi­ness. Brow beat­ing her for poor choices will not help, as I imag­ine, you’ve prob­a­bly already noticed. Begin­ning to trust that your daugh­ter is where she is for the grow­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties inher­ent there, and encour­ag­ing her to see her own life from that frame of ref­er­ence, on the other hand, CAN help.

When my own daugh­ter started fol­low­ing in her wild mama’s foot­steps, mak­ing what appeared to be highly self-destructive choices, I held my piece, except for those rare occa­sions when she asked for my feed­back. Instead I reas­sured her by telling her I believed she would come through wiser and more mature as a result of what­ever choices she made and that even though I might not always under­stand why she did the things she did, I would con­tinue to sup­port her in liv­ing an inde­pen­dent life — that I trusted the deci­sions she made to be the ones she needed to make for her own growth and expan­sion. I remem­ber the moment I decided that no mat­ter what she did, she could not keep me from lov­ing her. Come to find out that is exactly what she needed from me — to know she was loved no mat­ter what.

We can­not “be vic­tim­ized” by another’s “bad choices.” We are the only ones who can vic­tim­ize our­selves, to give that power to some­one else is to see our­selves as their vic­tim. It’s how we think about, how we inter­pret what we see that deter­mines whether we are liv­ing in a state of Vic­tim­hood, not the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing us.

Here are my sug­ges­tions:
Involve your­self with your grand­chil­dren in the ways you feel led to do … give your daugh­ter back respon­si­bil­ity for her life and love her unabat­edly (which does not mean res­cue her). Mind what is yours to mind and stay out of your daugh­ters busi­ness. Seek out your own lim­it­ing thoughts/beliefs — these are the true cause of your unhap­pi­ness — rather than stay­ing fixed on judg­ing and blam­ing your daugh­ter for your unhap­pi­ness. Model to her what a happy life looks like by find­ing your own inner peace. To live at peace with your­self and her is the best thing you can do for both of you. Show her through the exam­ple of your own life what it is you wish for her.

Sev­eral weeks later, I received the fol­low­ing words of grat­i­tude from J:

Lynne,
I don’t even know where to begin to thank you for this let­ter. I have read it and reread it so many times. I truly don’t under­stand how and why it took me so long to gen­uinely grasp this truth. Prob­a­bly because I was so eager to relate to the way it affected me, “talk the talk but not walk the walk,” which I’ve done for so many years. Basi­cally, I fooled myself (by using the vocab­u­lary) that I under­stood exactly what was going on when actu­ally I didn’t have the true “Aha moment” until just now. The way peo­ple speak of a weight being lifted is so true. I stopped judg­ing and being angry imme­di­ately and it felt wonderful.

My daugh­ter, called and we got along dif­fer­ently straight away. She sensed accep­tance, I know she did. Sud­denly, she offered to let me be with her in the room when she gave birth. I have always wished for this ever since my hip­pie days with my mid­wife and nat­ural births, but my daugh­ter never wanted me to be with her dur­ing her other births; until now.

Thank you so much for writ­ing me this let­ter, Lynne, and for turn­ing on the light I so des­per­ately needed. I was in ther­apy for so long about this, but it seems to me now, like I was being praised for being a res­cuer and sup­ported for being a vic­tim, even by my ther­a­pist. She did the same thing I did — talk a good game, but not under­stand deeply enough to change our beliefs.

Well, I know I had to be there and go through all of this to get where I am now and I wouldn’t trade any­thing either. Even though i have also had some rough times, I know it brought me to my hus­band, chil­dren, grand­chil­dren, home, career, and right now i am feel­ing very blessed. Thank you so very much Lynne.
Namaste’
J

If you have not sub­scribed to my weekly notes on Vic­tim Vocab­u­lary, etc, go to my arti­cle, enti­tled “Faces of Vic­tim” and then click on the pop up win­dow that appears there.