Choice

"Destiny is not a matter of chance,
it is a matter of choice;
it is not a thing to be waited for,
it is a thing to be achieved."
- Winston Churchill

Click Here For Success Tip # 003

Start where you are...
Baby steps or 10% change...
Choice..........

What are my choices?
I can choose to stay a victim.  After all it is a choice that I made over and over again.  In counseling, I was offered different choices.  I grabbed it and chose to change.  I chose to stop being a victim....Yes, I hear the outcry now, you can't make that choice.  Viktor Frankl agrees with me.  He wrote Man's Search for Meaning.  He shares that the final choice every person has, including in the concentration camps, is the choice of how to respond to a situation.  He wrote about those that gave there meager meals to someone else, those that did whatever they could to just survive, and then there were those that helped their captors and became worse then their enemies.  At first, I could not comprehend how I could make the choice to stop being a victim.  How did I break the strings that bound me to my abusers as surely as a physical rope could?  I first needed to recognize it was happening.  Say what?  How could I not know that I was being victimized?  What could I be missing?  I was able to see it better watching someone else.  I was neighbors to a woman that was beaten by her husband.  I was horrified by what had happened to her.  She went back to him the very next day apologizing to him for making him angry.  I could acknowledge that she was being abused.  Because I saw this horrible physical violence, I did not recognize the emotional abuse as being equally damaging.  Part of the human psychic is the ability to adapt. I was accustomed to being put down, belittled, called names, criticized, and every boundary violated.  I remember the first time I heard about boundaries in a marriage class.  I came home and asked DH, "What the hell are you talking about?"  Part of the reason I went to counseling so I could learn about what a boundary is.  Without boundaries, I did not recognizing when they were being violated.  I needed to know that choices exist.  I struggled with a life time of abuse and didn't recognize it for what it was because it was what I always known.  I still remember the powerful feeling when I told someone that they could not yell at me.  I was stunned and a little afraid.  Then I was thoroughly pissed off I hadn't done that years before.  I couldn't walk a path that I didn't know existed.  Counseling opened a whole new world, surviving instead of victim-hood.  I didn't need to see the whole picture to take the first step.

I created a prison that I could not see the bars.