Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Reframing

The struggle with victimhood continues. I’ve been trying to visualize success lately. It’s a good exercise for me. It’s been an uphill climb. Yesterday I finally gave up the battle for positive thinking. I decided to try something different. I let myself feel my feelings.

I took out a notebook and wrote for awhile. I gave up on being positive and just wrote every blunt fear and resentment. I cried, I gritted my teeth, and I allowed myself to feel vulnerable. Those of you who’ve done psychotherapy will recognize the process. Eventually I got to a surprising new perspective.

When I was a little girl, I often found myself feeling responsible for my younger brothers. It was usually when my mother was at work and my alcoholic father was tasked with watching us. There wasn’t a whole lot of watching going on from him, so I took it upon myself to watch my brothers. I couldn’t do much, but I could make sure we were all safe.

One incident symbolizes this time for me. My youngest brother was approximately 8 months old. He was at the age where he crawled everywhere and pulled himself up to a standing position by holding on to furniture. That means that I must have been about 4 years and 8 months old. (Our birthdays are close together.) My other brother was 3 years old.

My 3 year old brother and I were playing a game in the living room, when I suddenly realized that I didn’t know where the baby was. My father was sound asleep in his bed. I looked around frantically for the baby and soon found him in the kitchen. He had apparently crawled out there, then pulled himself up by the stove and turned the dials. When I went out there, he sat down in front of the stove and happily watched the flames that were consuming a plastic cup on the stove and reaching almost to the ceiling. I ran to my father and woke him up. He quickly put out the fire and life went back to normal.

When I’ve thought of this story over the years, I’ve felt a combination of relief and guilt. The guilt started that day, when I realized I’d lost track of the baby. It was my responsibility and I’d failed, which almost resulted in disaster. I remembered how utterly over my head I felt in those days. Whenever my mother was away, I felt a responsibility to take care of my brothers, yet I knew I had no idea how to do that. This feeling of being totally incompetent to care for myself and others, has persisted in my brain to this day. It’s the feeling that I have about money. I feel like death and disaster are always one mistake away.

Yesterday I finally realized that I am the hero of this story. Why hadn’t I seen that before? I struggled through overwhelming odds to do what I thought was right. I felt totally incompetent to do what needed to be done, but I tried anyway. That made all the difference. I averted disaster. I saved our lives. Seriously. At four years old, I saved our lives. I’m a hero. I'm going to try to remember that.

No comments:

Post a Comment