Trusting life

We all get to write our story in the pages of the book of life. Although for many of us, we forget we are the ones holding the author’s pen. We forget it is in our hands. Just like a good ‘choose your own adventure book’ we get to decide which page number in life we take next, which direction our story goes in. Yes, there are surprises and challenges on the way, things we didn’t plan. But what we choose to do with those surprises and challenges, is what makes the ending. We are, each and single one of us, the hero in our own story.

When I was at the edge of becoming an adult, someone very dear to me threw a lie into the world, which exploded and shattered my life and the lives of others who were very close to me. For my family, truth became like a hidden treasure in a thick emotional jungle boobytrapped with tripwires and buried landmines. As we ran hunting and fighting others for that treasure, one wrong turn, one misplaced step would set off another explosion of lies and deceit. We made it through the jungle and we found our truth. But as I stepped out of the tangled emotional wilderness into the clearing and onto the path towards the future, I was not only wounded by the battle, I had wrapped around myself a heavy blanket of grief and mistrust. A burden I chose to wear because it served me; because I felt like my grief deserved pity and my mistrust would keep me safe.

So, although I had a cheery disposition, and found love, I defined myself for many years as having a ‘trust issue’. And although sometimes this issue manifested itself against individuals, I realise now it was really an issue with life itself. I did not trust life to be good to me. I did not trust life to deliver happiness.

I justified my issue with trust as a direct result of what had happened in my past. I allowed my past not only to influence my personality, but to also determine what my life looked like going forward. How I interacted with people, how I made decisions, right through to my very state of being.

With age comes wisdom. Wisdom from knowledge gathered from life experience, observing others, looking inwards and reading books. Lots of books. Two in particular have helped me to understand and important fact: that everyone is the creator of their own story. Life is their story to write, no one else’s. We are the hero of our own journey in life and we decide what kind of hero we are going to be.

It took me many years to work this out; and it only really hit home for me recently, after reading The Power of TED (The Empowerment Dynamic). A little book about the drama triangle, and its opposite. A read I highly recommend. The drama triangle is simply a model about how humans interact, particularly in conflict, using three archetypes: the victim, the rescuer and the persecutor. Given our universal and collective understanding of these roles, it is easy to understand.

Destructive relationships are born and fed by the dance of the victim, rescuer and persecutor; universal characters reinforced in our collective psyche and passed down the generations through fairytales, novels, radio plays, films and TV shows.

Every time we utter the words, ‘It’s not fair’ the victim inside us is rising. And many of us don’t know how to live life without our superhero cape: saving friends, families or stray animals. Honourable. To a degree. Honourable, until you discover that rescuers trap victims in their victimhood. This realisation from The Power of TED, cut deep into my soul. Luckily, author David Emerald Womeldorff offers an alternative: be the coach not the rescuer, empower people to help themselves. Be the challenger not the persecutor, hold people accountable but in a positive way, which encourages growth and learning. Be the creator not the victim. This last one had me stumped when I first came across it. I couldn’t understand how being creative and ‘tapping into your inner state of passion’ could be an alternative to being the victim, until I understood it was about being the creator of your own story, with intention. To proactively, deliberately and consciously create your own story. Making choices about the person you want to be, regardless of what is going on around you. And to remember, you may not have a choice about how others act, but you always have a choice about the way you act or react (a lesson I have carried with me for years from Stephen Covey’s writings).

Then, by chance last year, I discovered Alderian psychology through the beautiful book written by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Courage To Be Disliked. I had studied Freud and Jung, but had somehow missed discovering (like many) Alfred Alder, the third giant in the world of psychology alongside Freud and Jung. And twelve pages into this fabulous book a paragraph, a simple quote from Adler, changed my life:

“No experience is in itself a cause for success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences - our so-called trauma - but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.”

Suddenly I woke up. I had a happy and fulfilled life. One with a beautiful family. A job with great people, a job which I enjoyed. Friends I adored, who laughed and cried with me when needed. Friends with who I could be completely me. Or what I thought at the time was ‘completely me’. But my life was never without my blanket of grief and mistrust. The experience in early adulthood was painful and very real, but the experience itself was not my suffering. The meaning I gave it and the attachment of my grief and mistrust to my identity were my suffering. I realised I was gripping tightly onto that archetypal role of the rescuer to run from the victim that I had become. I was busily saving everyone else, because I didn’t believe I could save myself. Because deep down I thought I was indefinitely broken because of what I had experienced. I let the experience take responsibility for who I was. To identify me. And the day I woke up to that fact, was the day I took back that responsibility and started to write my own life story. I shook off the victim, I let go of the rescuer, I became conscious of when I was the persecutor (of myself and others) and I became the hero of my own story. I started to consciously learn how to coach others rather than save them, and how to challenge myself rather than blame myself. It was extremely liberating.

Suddenly, with an open heart, trusting the world again, I realised the full potential of my life had been sitting right beside me the entire time, just waiting for me to be ready to welcome it into my heart. And with my unconscious singing in harmony with the universe, things started to happen. My outlook changed. My thoughts were different. My feelings shifted. My interactions altered. I started something new. I took what at the time was a terrifying step and announced to the world I was a writer; and the words flowed freely. I gave up eating meat and other animal products; and my long term rescuer, alcohol, no longer trapped me as a victim. I began to teach meditation; and random acts of kindness turned up. Opportunities came looking for me. And then beautiful, generous people showed up in my life, and joined my journey. And it has been such a delight and joy to share it with them.

They thanked me for my writing and my meditations. They told me I have a gift and have found my calling. But my gift is simply understanding myself; and my calling, nothing more than trusting life.