by Geneen Roth
The emotional reaction to the trigger (which is often simultaneous with the physical reaction): feeling small, young, abandoned, incapable, lost or unloved, doomed or dumb, isolated or valueless. Or all of the above. Although the trigger doesn’t create particular thoughts or feelings or judgments, it does catalyze latent parts that have not been fully felt or understood. Everyone’s got those parts—it’s impossible to be born into this human, vulnerable body and escape unscathed—and until we meet them with compassion and openness, we are lived by them; they are who we take ourselves to be.
No one can cause you to compare, shrink, or shame yourself; a trigger is created when you believe your thoughts and the feelings they evoke.
The bully-aunt seemingly comes to the rescue by telling you what you should or could have done to avoid feeling this way now. Its main message is: “If only you had done that, then you wouldn’t be feeling this.” And: “There is only one way to live, I know that way, and you are doing it wrong.” Unfortunately, we don’t hear the judgments as if they are coming from the bully; we hear them in the first person as proclamations of truth, as if they are coming from a wiser, better, all-knowing part of ourselves.
If I had taken up tai chi, I wouldn’t be feeling so afraid or doomed. And I could heal myself if I got cancer.
If I hadn’t decided to start my own business, I wouldn’t be terrified of not having enough money now.
If only I had lost ten pounds, I would be in a relationship now and not be so lonely.
In each circumstance, the bully is shouting an underlying, deeper criticism from the wings:
You didn’t take up tai chi because you’re lazy and now your health will be ruined.
You are worried about having enough money? Well, guess what? It serves you right for believing you could start your own business.
You’re fat because you are sloth with no willpower; no wonder you’re not in a relationship.
Ouch.
Engaging with this voice is like mud wrestling with a pig, which never ends well, since the outcome is always the same: “You both get dirty and the pig likes it” (says George Bernard Shaw).
Over the years, I’ve tried and taught a variety of disengagements: defending myself by saying go away or fuck you; listing the crazy aunt’s attacks by writing them down in the third person; thanking it for trying to protect me by shutting me down and, therefore, keeping me from making further mistakes. But the only one that has ever truly worked is awareness itself: noticing that I feel as if the ground has suddenly fallen away and I am living the wrong life; at that point, even if it is days later, I can backtrack, name the trigger, notice its accompanying sensations, and question the doom to which I’ve been wedded.
But—and here’s the snag—since most of us believe (and are afraid not to believe) the criticisms leveled at us from an inner bully, we also believe that being loved and/or having the life we envision means obeying the One That Knows how to do it, have it, be it. So, although we may be peripherally aware that we feel as if we’ve shrunk, we are convinced that this-that-we-are-now is our true self, and we are back where we belong.
Disengaging from this voice requires a willingness to consider that we’ve spent our lives hoodwinked by suffering, and that it’s possible to be free. This, in turn, requires a willingness to see that what most of us call “me-myself-I” ricochets from one insane voice in our head to another.
Choosing not to believe the crazy aunts is like choosing not to diet; it’s radical, frightening, and exhilarating because, let’s face it, it’s comforting to have a voice in your head that is absolutely certain about what’s wrong and what’s right, as well as what you need to do and eat to be loved, safe, and successful. And since most of us prefer to have company than be alone, we don’t question our loyalty to these decades-old instructions or the fact that we often find ourselves wandering in the twilight zone of worthlessness and despair. We keep choosing to stay loyal to our past and our parents’ instructions rather than to be free.
It takes courage to question our comparative judgments because we’re not sure who we would be on the other side. In the same way that we believe that without a strict diet we would hunker on our couches, uncontrollably eating pizza and ice cream, we also believe (without knowing we believe) that we need shame and judgment to keep us in line. Freeing ourselves means seeing that we are more than the sum total of our accomplishments, our relationships, our so-called failures, our body mass index and weight.
Being free takes first realizing we’re in prison, and then questioning what imprisons us.
Peace takes naming what keeps us unruffled.
Joy takes realizing what separates us from it and challenging our familiar stories. And then giving up the wet, moldy baby blanket of identity we’ve been carrying around for our entire lives.
It’s a process, not a onetime event; you’ve got to want your life back more than you want anything. You’ve got to have a glimpse, a taste that you aren’t who you thought you were, and then you’ve got to want freedom so badly that you’ll do whatever it takes. Which is to question each time you start comparing or blaming yourself or anyone else (because the aunt in the attic works both ways; it can either turn on you or on someone who happens to be standing by).
Is it true that I am lazy? What’s the proof?
It’s a process, not a onetime event; you’ve got to want your life back more than you want anything. You’ve got to have a glimpse, a taste that you aren’t who you thought you were, and then you’ve got to want freedom so badly that you’ll do whatever it takes.
Is it true that learning tai chi will save me from a horrible death by cancer I have not been, and may never be, diagnosed with? What’s the proof? (Michael knew tai chi, but it didn’t save him from prostate cancer.)
Is it true that my life is a mess because I gained ten pounds?
Was my life better before I gained the weight or were my thighs just thinner?
If thin or rich or famous people really have better lives, why are they always in rehab, getting divorced, or killing themselves?
Am I really the most screwed-up person on the earth? Really?
A wild joy follows when you realize you’ve been caught and are now free, when you fling open the prison door, walk outside, and gulp air and light for the first time in hours or days or weeks. Then you realize that instead of being either the bully or the child, you are the one who notices both. You sense who you were and what you knew before you defined things as good or bad, fat or thin, right or wrong. Before you became what you needed to be to be loved, you knew the holiness of trees and water and rocks. You knew the adults were a bit mad, but you loved them anyway. You had no doubt, not one, about who you were; you had wings, and now, you have them again.
In my fevered state, I saw myself as old, cantankerous, swaddled in Depends, and still bitter about the now-dead people who hurt me fifty years before, even if I couldn’t remember their names.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
* * *
The Four-Month Virus
When I called my doctor, two weeks after he told me that I would feel “right as rain,” to say I was still sick, he replied, “I think you might have the four-month virus.”
I had already spent six weeks splayed on the couch in my Cat’s Pajamas nightgown with dirty hair, a hot-water bottle, and uncontrollable shivering followed by high fevers. I’d watched my entire list of take-me-out-of-my-misery movies: Love Actually, The Devil Wears Prada, The Blind Side, Something’s Gotta Give, Sleepless in Seattle, Notting Hill, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and Groundhog Day. I’d listened to Middlemarch twice on my iPod, and fallen in love with Matt Bomer after watching five seasons of White Collar. The fact that he was gay, married with three children, and young enough to be my son did not mar my devotion. And although I could watch him and his swaying hips forever, I was done with being sick.
“I can’t do this for another two and a half months!” I sputtered. “I have classes t
o teach, a book to write, and three trips that I’ve already bought airline tickets for! You told me I’d be better by now.” I felt like a five-year-old on the verge of a tantrum.
“I thought you had the three-week-or-so virus,” he said, “but apparently, you don’t. And this four-month version is really going around; I’ve had quite a few patients with it. Since there’s no bacterial infection in your blood, antibiotics are not going to help, so you’re just going to have to see this one out.”
When I put the phone down, I went into my familiar “This can’t be happening” routine, followed by my usual “It could be worse” rationale: “Your house isn’t getting bombed, you’re not a sex slave or living in Iraq, you don’t have Ebola, and water still comes out of the faucet. So you have to stay on your couch for two more months. It’s not the end of the world.” Nothing helped. I was tired of being in my own skin and I wanted out.
In situations like these I give myself five minutes to “have a moan,” as a friend says. I complain if someone will listen. I make a mental list of all the ways it isn’t fair, how everyone else is meeting their best friends for lunch in cheerful restaurants with potted red geraniums and real white linen napkins while I am home, coughing in a flannel nightgown. I resent them all for being healthy and bright-eyed. And I resent them for not calling me hourly, bringing soup made with pastured bone broth, and asking what form of massage I’d like to have next.
On that particular day, I realized I was either going to spend the next few months in abject suffering because I didn’t want what was happening to be happening or I was going to find a way to live as if I’d chosen it. I recalled a story that I’d read in a Byron Katie book when she visited someone with cancer in the hospital who was crying about her swollen body. The woman lifted the covers and showed Katie that one of her legs was twice the size of her other leg. “Oh,” Katie said, “I see what the problem is: you think both your legs should be the same size.”
Then I remembered working with Katie on my outrage when my father was dying and his wife wouldn’t take him to chemotherapy, or remove the area rugs on which he tripped because of his shakiness from Parkinson’s disease, or give him his medicine. After a few initial questions, Katie asked me for proof that my stepmother should be acting the way I wanted her to.
“That’s what a wife does,” I answered.
“But not your father’s wife,” she said. “And isn’t the proof that it shouldn’t be happening the way you believe it should that it’s not?”
“Possibly,” I said. I didn’t like the direction this was going.
Her next question was who I would be and how I would feel without the belief that my stepmother should be different than she was. I was so surprised by the question that it was impossible to fall back on my well-oiled indignation, so without thinking I said, “Sad that my father is dying, and no longer at war with his wife. Peaceful, somehow.”
“Yes, sweetheart,” she answered. “It’s your thoughts about your stepmother that are causing you suffering, not your stepmother herself. You are responsible for your own suffering, but only a hundred percent of it.”
In her answer I could sense the sudden freedom of “a sky powdered with stars” (as Milton wrote), and the possibility that I didn’t need other people to change before I could be content. On the other hand—and there is always another hand—it meant pulling in the tentacles of blame, which was a radical reversal of my lifelong conviction that other people were misguided, but with a little more direction from me, they could be trained.
Just in case Katie was wrong about my thoughts being the cause of my suffering, I spent sixteen years after my father died testing out her theory by continuing to blame other people while appearing as if I was taking responsibility for my thoughts, feelings, and actions. The result was that I had a list of people with whom I had grievances, and toward whom I felt righteous indignation. But the news of the four-month affliction left me smack in the middle of my mind and its web of negative thoughts without the usual distractions of work and wasting time on the internet. I was so listless that I didn’t care about work, the misdeeds of the oligarchy running the country, or the newest celebrity with botched face work.
Without my escapes, I started being acutely aware that living inside my mind was not a pleasant experience: on the same day, in the same two-hour stretch, with nothing happening but a cough, a fever, and my familiar negative thoughts, I could feel puffed up and resentful, or hurt and enraged at the people who had wronged me years before. In my fevered state, I saw myself as old, cantankerous, swaddled in Depends, and still bitter about the now-dead people who hurt me fifty years before, even if I couldn’t remember their names. Since I knew that someday, even if it was during the last, possibly immobile month of my life, I would be alone with my thoughts, I decided to make friends with my mind by questioning my unwavering belief in my thoughts and opinions.
Questioning long-held beliefs about other people, reality, what was and wasn’t possible, freed me from seeing myself as a child in a hostile universe with big bad people doing big bad horrible things over which I had no control.
I began by making a list of everyone in my “doghouse,” as my husband called it. (I needed two pages.) I wrote down what they did to me, what I thought they should have done, and how I felt about them.
The first person on my list was my colleague Larry, who had lied to me and broken our contract together. Every time I thought of him, or worse, saw him at the grocery store by the avocados, I’d remember what he did and hate him more. I now focused on his face and our interactions. I asked myself whether it was true that he should have acted differently (answer: yes, yes, and yes), followed by the question about whether it was absolutely true that he should have acted differently (reluctant answer: no, because he did what he did). Then, I asked myself how I interpreted what he did (answer: that he had no regard for me, that our many years of working together meant nothing to him, that he was an immoral, corrupt, evil human being).
Even as I wrote that last part down, I knew my interpretations were lies. When I put my feelings of betrayal and anger aside, I knew that our years together were valuable to him, and that they had catalyzed his new career. And I remembered the well of support, love, and encouragement he’d given me. That he’d spent hours with me constructing an outline for a talk, which had then turned into the initial structure for one of my books.
Then I asked myself whom I was hurting by “shutting him out of my heart,” as Buddhist teacher Stephen Levine called it. I also questioned whether I had any part in his actions. This last query was the sticky place because when I was fierce about telling the truth, I could no longer see myself as a victim. I had to acknowledge that I also had lied (by omission) to Larry. I saw that he was unhappy and didn’t ask him why. I knew that he wanted to work for himself, not me, and didn’t say that out loud. Then I thought about the people, even if it was twenty years ago, with whom I had broken agreements and acted selfishly. I realized I was capable of doing (and had already done to others) everything of which I accused him.
It took two and a half weeks of going through the doghouse before I started the process with my mother, and quickly, albeit reluctantly, I saw that I’d been wrong about her (as I always was in this part of the inquiry, with anyone, everyone). That she loved me as much as she could love me, that she did the best she could, given her circumstances, and that, as my friend Kim reminded me, although my mother had pulled me across the floor by my hair once, I’d dragged myself across the floor hundreds if not thousands of times by replaying that memory for fifty-five years.
When I saw my own part in the drama with my mother (or anyone), I no longer felt like a victim. It wasn’t that I condoned what she or anyone else did—the abuse, broken contracts, or lies. But questioning my thoughts and the feelings they produced (which amounted to questioning long-held beliefs about other people, reality, what was and wasn’t possible) freed me from seeing myself as a child in a hostile universe w
ith big bad people doing big bad horrible things over which I had no control.
As the weeks in viral confinement turned into months, I kept reminding myself that it was my thinking, not the situation, which was causing so much flailing. That there was nothing wrong. It took being vigilant with myself, refusing to get hysterical about how long it was taking to feel better, to stop the flailing. The more I stopped fighting the battles I’d already lost—having a sick body, arguing with events that had happened years before—the calmer I became. The lighter I felt.
By the eighth week of the virus, I started to feel inexplicably, unbelievably joyful. Living as if I’d chosen this respite, along with no longer being racked by late-night Black Dog thoughts (as Winston Churchill famously referred to his moments of depression), started to feel like a wish I’d granted myself behind my own back, since I knew that I would never have chosen to spend months at home without being ill. I was now savoring the fact that I didn’t have to get in my car, or push myself to accomplish ten more things than there was time for in any given day. My new exercise routine—five-minute walkabouts in the garden (instead of my usual hour-long mountain hikes)—was slow enough to notice every step, every scent, every bird trill.
The more I stopped fighting the battles I’d already lost—having a sick body, arguing with events that had happened years before—the calmer I became. The lighter I felt.
By the ninth week of the virus, I felt as if I was treading on holy ground, as if I’d been given 3-D glasses and could see that what I’d previously experienced as a lackluster world was suffused with joy and tenderness, not for a particular person per se, but for this messy magnificent life. For the suffering we unknowingly cause ourselves and other people, and for the eternity of love waiting with quiet affection beneath it.
