Three Turns of a Kaleidoscope: Healing the Victim Within

By Bonnie Suzanne Johnson

"Bonnie Johnson has given us an easy, step-by-step self-care guide to healing inner wounds. It doesn't matter what particular wound brings pain into your life, Bonnie's guidebook will help you identify it and heal it. What a gift from a highly gifted wise woman and healer!"
Victoria Slater RN PhD, 2002 American Holistic Nurse of the Year
and aut

• Language: English
• Publisher: Choices for Healing
• Release date: Sep 12, 2008
• ISBN: 9781628801903

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Every particle of the world is a mirror. In each atom blazes forth the light of a thousand suns.

Mahmud Shabistari ²

Into my outstretched hand, my older friend places a long and colorful cylinder. With an expectant smile, she directs: Look through the hole on the end. Puzzled and curious, I peer through the pea-sized opening. Dark shadows greet me. Raise the other end toward the light and turn the dial, instructs my friend. As the light from the lamp seeps through and I turn the dial, the dark shadows shift and become a bright mandala. Intrigued, I point the tube toward a brighter light and rotate the dial. Tiny pieces of colored material rearrange themselves to reveal a new image. The delight of the emerging beauty sends me looking for more as I point it toward the morning sun. With another twist of the dial, a new design stuns me into quiet pleasure.

My childhood encounter with a kaleidoscope—from dark shadows to light infused images to quiet pleasure—mirrors this book’s process for healing the internalized Victim. When we find ourselves immersed in the shadowy replays of past experiences that adversely affect our present life, this healing process encourages us to point our metaphorical kaleidoscope toward the light. As we turn the dial, the bits of information reorder themselves and reveal a new image and a new perspective. Seeking more awareness, we search for greater light. Enhanced illumination and another turn provides a shift in perspective that frees us from repetitive and hurt-filled thoughts and behaviors. Surprised, we soon notice ourselves enjoying soothing contentment.

Without light or movement, a particular pattern remains static and hidden. The bits and pieces of these troubling past experiences create a disturbing and enduring pattern of relating to oneself and to others as an inner Victim. Over and over, we view these long ago experiences the same way. Living through a narrow perspective of gloomy silhouettes—without the benefit of light or movement—we remain stuck in the past.

Strangely, our past experiences reconstructed as inner Victims can be the proverbial tap on the shoulder that starts us searching for fuller and brighter perspectives and new images of our past and of our present selves.

The Cries of the Inner Victim

The Victim within us can be heard in our own voices when we grumble: Poor me! Nothing ever goes right for me. We beseech: Why am I to blame for everything that goes wrong? We whine: Why do people treat me so badly? Why don’t people appreciate the good things I do for them? We desperately want to know: Why am I so miserable? Why is my life one big drama after another?

When we ask these questions, this is our inner Victim crying out for help. Too often we find ourselves caught in the frenzy of High Drama and we don’t know how we got there or how to change what is happening.

The experience of the Victim within is not a new phenomenon. We even find the Victim in our sacred stories. In the tradition of the people of Abraham and Sarai, the first man and first woman were innocent, easy going, provided for and protected in the Garden of Eden. Everything changed when they ate the forbidden fruit. When confronted about their illicit behavior, both personify the Victim when they deny responsibility for their actions, shifting the blame to others for their shame-filled plight.

Just as in the Garden of Eden, once upon a time the whole of us was playful, capable, powerful, innocent, and vulnerable. Along life’s journey, we too became separated from our idyllic beginnings. We began to live through the perceptions of our inner Victim, the aspects of us who believe and behave as if we are helpless and powerless. For a variety of reasons—from trauma to socialization—we humans sometimes assume the role of Victim, even when we have the power to change our current situation.

Victim in the Making

The distress, which contributed to the Victim within me, began early in my life. One disturbing event transpired when I was nine years old. My older sister Pam and I had just finished performing at a formal piano recital. Jumping up and down with excitement, I cried out: Mom! Mom! Look, I got excellent! I held my head high and my hands stretched upward as I danced a little victory jig. I knew I had played my piece with precision and perfection—no mistakes. Confirming this was a large-sized EXCELLENT written across the certificate I waved in front of my mother’s face. She barely looked at it or me. Instead, she chastised: Bonnie, you may have gotten EXCELLENT because you played all the notes correctly and Pam only got VERY GOOD because she made a few mistakes but her playing was full of emotion. She put her heart into it. You didn’t. Pam deserved an excellent more than you. My powerful and excited self was crushed and confused.

I lost my excitement about piano playing and I carried the hurt of her words into my adult years. I frequently replayed the scene in my mind, re-experiencing afresh the pain of her words and the loss of my excited powerful and able self. Each time I replayed the scene, I was seeking a new ending, seeking a different way in which my mother responded to my excellent piano playing. My thoughts often went to: Why couldn’t she have hugged me and told me she was proud of me? Why didn’t she say I did a great job? These thoughts were my attempt to change the past and restore my excited self.

I continue to try to restore my excited self in the following scenario. When I was twenty-two, my parents and younger siblings went to Canada for a vacation. I was left home alone in the emptiness created by their leaving. Restless, I looked for something to do. Soon the shelves in the over-sized pantry were emptied and I was deep into sorting and rearranging my mother’s domain. Over several days everything was scrubbed clean and put back in its rightful—according to me—place. As I worked, I imagined my mother coming into the house, surprised and pleased at the conversion from mess to tidiness. I patted myself on the back for coming up with such a brilliant idea for doing something nice for my mother. When my family returned I barely let them in the house before I pulled my mother down the hall and through the dining room to the pantry. My face was full of smiles and my body trembled with the anticipation of her pleasure. As soon as my mother saw her transformed pantry, she scowled and blasted me with incendiary words. She was furious with me for changing her workspace.

My mother did not perceive my good intentions and I did not understand what I had done wrong. In one second, all my expectations turned inside out. Where I anticipated her praise and gratitude, I now received her scorn and displeasure. I was deeply hurt; I saw my mother as mean and ungrateful. I swore I would never again clean anything in her house. I had no idea what went wrong and felt helpless and hopeless to reclaim my happiness. I was stuck in my misery.

These are just two of the countless experiences in which I lose my powerful and joy-filled self and become dejected and trapped with no awareness on how to change. In the midst of these losses, I felt helpless and acted as if I was a Victim of events beyond my control. There is a Rwandan saying which advises: You can outdistance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you. I spent years trying to get as much distance from the misery, confusion and shame running inside me. Often I asked: Why is life always in an uproar? Why does life have to be this way? Caught in the web of obsessive hashing and re-hashing self-criticism, I didn’t know how I got there or how to change what was happening. However, I did realize I was miserable and I wanted my life to be better.

Seeking a Change

In my search for a way out of this misery, information about the inner Victim crisscrossed my life in multiple ways. Books, conversations and personal struggles kept bringing it into my awareness. The Karpman Drama Triangle³, one of the best descriptions of this internalization of the Victim and the ensuing misery-producing interactions, first came to my attention in my own personal counseling sessions back in the 1970's. I was re-introduced in an academic setting through graduate classes in counseling and child development, and later in continuing education study of hands-on energetic healing and holistic nursing.

In designing the Drama Triangle, Dr. Stephen Karpman, a teacher of Transactional Analysis⁴, used a simple diagram of a triangle to depict a complex model of human interactions. Karpman’s descriptions of the three roles—Victim, Rescuer and Persecutor⁵—as they are acted out in the Drama, helped me to notice how frequently I, my family, friends, clients and people I encountered casually in stores, on planes, and at meetings, related to each other as self-appointed, self-perceived Victims, bumbling Rescuers, and emotionally devastating Persecutors.

Through an ongoing scrutiny of the inner Victim, I became aware that much is written and taught that describes the Drama Triangle and its quick changing roles. However, little was available that gave specific ways to heal a high Drama way of relating. As a nurse healer, I started exploring ways to heal this futile and addictive cycle.

Receiving Guidance That Heals

I learned how to meditate from my mother who would have rivaled any Zen master in her methodology. When I was toddler and barely able to sit comfortably, I was given the assignment to sit on the pot until I had produced something. I knew better than to get up before I had. The lightning quick strike of a Zen master was no match for one of my mother’s looks. So I whiled away the time by way of musings. Soon I was deep in contemplation. Creative inspirations would come to me in that meditative state.

Our downstairs bathroom was cramped; the toilet faced the sink with little room between. At three years old, I sat with my legs swinging free off the floor and bumping easily into the sink. Quiet reigned there, away from the bustle of a house full of brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents, cats and dogs. There, without interruptions, I talked with Mary, an invisible Being. I listened, rapt and wrapped in a mystical communication. My face tilted upward and cocked slightly to the left, my eyes widened, and my ears sparked. As a strong vibration entered me, my mouth formed the round O of surprise and enchantment. Her surrounding Light imbued me with Knowing.

My early experiences of meditation and the accompanying conversations with Mary began a lifetime of communications with Divine Presence that has guided me in my daily life. The name for this Presence has changed throughout the years but the quieting and awareness has remained constant. Whether I call this quieting, stillness, meditation, contemplative or centering prayer, I experience a deep and profound connection with a loving and enlightening Presence. When I started studying hands-on energetic healing in the 1980’s, this continuing guidance informed and supported me as I provided healings for others.

I live in a brick and stucco house that sits atop a wind brushed hill in a peaceful, tree rich neighborhood. On the same property is a small building that serves as my holistic nursing and healing office. The surrounding tall pine and cedar, shrubby St John’s Wort, and delicate dogwoods seem to pour their verdant abundance through the office windows and into the healing rooms. The lush green contrasts and enlivens the faint lilac of the inside walls. Here, in 1997, I sat immersed in the vibrancy of nature’s energetic support and went into a deep meditative state. I became aware of the Divine Presence of invisible helpers—angelic, shamanic, spiritual and familiar—who guide and support me. The most familiar, for She and I have been conversing since I was a toddler, is the invisible being whom I now know as Mary, the Magdalena. As the vibration I recognized as Mary began to flow into and through me, I asked Mary how do we do this; how do we heal this dramatic and troubling pattern of humans relating as if we are powerless and helpless Victims? How do we heal this virtual Drama Dance⁶? How do we heal the internal turmoil, which spurs us to run?

The answers—received in numerous meditations and over a period of several years—became a multi-faceted process for healing the internalized Victim. Called Three Turns of a Kaleidoscope, it