Little Church Therapy Girl doesn’t feel safe with me, and I don’t think she should. My history is filled with experiences where I failed to keep her safe. Many of the times when I removed us from bad situations I did so only after she’d suffered more than she should have. I’m a failure at protecting her.
I’ve been feeling significantly different for several weeks, but I haven’t been able to figure out why. This morning, I became aware of one way that I’ve changed recently.
I reject the idea that I can keep Little Church Therapy Girl safe. The reality of life is there are very few things I can protect her from. They’re limited to select decisions that would be clearly unsafe, like trying to fly by leaping off a tall building. Everything else isn’t really in my control in the way I’ve been made to think it is.
I don’t blame Little Church Therapy Girl for having unrealistic expectations of me. She, like every other inner child, was designed with fundamentally tragic flaws—the need for acceptance and approval and the total dependence on other people for the entire first part of her mortal life. She was made like that and then born into a world that isn’t set up to meet her needs.
Her built in weaknesses are not things I can compensate for. I can’t make people be kind to her. I can’t punish them and retrain them if they aren’t. I can’t undo thousands of years worth of oppressive ideologies and the powerful institutions that are founded on them.
I’ve stopped telling Little Church Therapy Girl that I’m going to protect her. I tell her I wish I could, but I can’t. If I could, I would’ve been doing it already. I wouldn’t have let her get emotionally raped in a temple or had her live the first twenty years of her life with parents who were emotionally unsafe to the point that they couldn’t look out for her even when they might’ve wanted to. I wouldn’t have let her stay trapped in a horrible abusive marriage to a terrible man. I wouldn’t have let her get too emotionally involved with a therapist in a pretend relationship.
Instead I tell her that she is welcome to hide if she wants to. I tell her that she doesn’t get hardly any say now in our decisions that way neither she nor I has to keep up this losing cycle of me promising her safety and constantly disappointing her. In a sense, I’ve given both of us our freedom. I’m never going to ask her to be braver than she wants to be or to trust me again. In return, I don’t have to feel like a failure when I inevitably let her down. I’ve stopped our dependence on one another.
I don’t hate Little Church Therapy Girl, nor do I resent her. She doesn’t define me, she just is. I don’t define her either or ask her to change. I accept her as she is without letting my old guilt or my good intentions to make me her servant.
She’s upset and betrayed that I let The Therapist hurt us and I still care about him. The old me tried to figure that out so I could keep Little Church Therapy Girl safe in the future. Now I tell her I’m sorry she got hurt, but for reasons that I don’t understand and don’t have to understand, I don’t dislike him like the other people who have hurt us.
She can cry about it. She can be upset and she can hide and put forever if she wants to, but Little Church Therapy Girl isn’t in charge of what we do. She isn’t capable of handling the big responsibilities and decisions of life, any more than I’m capable of keeping her safe.