Dissolving the Walls We Build in Our Minds

Last week, my mom and I visited my aunt at her place near Sarasota, Florida while her partner was traveling. It was a multi-purpose visit – we were there to spend time together, but my mom and I were also there to make sure my aunt was safe. Her memory has been slowly deteriorating, and we weren’t certain she would remember to eat while her partner had to be away.

This period of time was challenging. My aunt has been a fiercely independent person her whole life. She opted out of marriage and children, and prioritized her career as an attorney for a large insurance agency, a role that demanded much of her, but gave her powerful critical-thinking brain constant challenge and satisfaction. She recognized, at least subconsciously, that my mom and I were there to care for her, and she was not pleased to feel her independence slip.

My mom found this time challenging too. There were plenty of moments when my aunt seemed like her normal, independent self, and just like before her memory started to falter, she could be exacting and sharp. When a lamp failed to turn on in her living room, she called her partner on the phone to say irritatedly, “Marsha f—ed up the lamp” for us both to hear.  

There were also moments when we felt caught in my aunt’s tension of knowing she needed our help to provide for her and her deep denial that she should need anything from anyone.  

My mom and I went for walks together while my aunt read the paper in the morning, and our conversation turned to worrying about her, to thinking about what we were going to do, to ruminating over her cutting words.

At some point, we realized our thoughts were getting away from us. We were devoting a whole lot of energy to thinking and talking about things that we had no real control over and that weren’t helping the situation. It was then that we decided to do a little exercise that I inherited from a good friend by way of a therapist: the game of 10 positive things.

10 Positive Things:

You can play this mindset shifting game leading up to any situation, but I encourage you to try it before events that you are dreading or prior to encounters with people you find difficult but can’t avoid. I’ll also preface this by saying that your time and energy and boundaries are important and valuable, and if you feel that a mindset shift is not enough to keep you safe from someone, by no means should you try to think yourself out of it. Trust your intuition; you can always choose to leave a situation that feels unsafe physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually.

Leading up to the moment you are dreading – maybe it’s bedtime with your 5 -year-old or getting home to the apartment you share with a difficult roommate, or caring for an aunt who is mourning the loss of her independence – think about 10 things you appreciate, admire, or respect about the person. Write it all down if you want, say it out loud if you want, whatever feels right.

For my aunt, we found much to fill the list:

1.     She was a pioneer, and did much for women in the legal field in her day

2.     She has traveled the world

3.     She helped those who needed a champion, like through her volunteer work at Planned Parenthood

4.     She was a highly competent and successful lawyer

5.     She has excellent taste in art and great stories about where her artwork came from

6.     She is frugal and has been great at managing money

7.     She is courageous, living according to her own values even when they did not match the status quo

8.     She loves her family and comes to every family gathering, even though she has to fly from Florida to Massachusetts for most of them

9.     She is thankful for our help

10.  She values time outside and takes care of her physical body

As my mom and I played this little game, we stopped focusing on the things that were driving us crazy and we focused instead on all the things we loved about my aunt. We planted little seeds of love and gratitude for the person she is in our minds.

And then a beautiful thing happened – our interactions with her shifted. The nature of our interactions, the topics of conversation – inevitably they changed because of the little seeds we had planted. At lunch, she opened up about her work as a lawyer, about defending clients who had sometimes committed acts of violence. She grieved the moment when she had to construct a case against a mother mourning the death of her child in a car accident – (Who was watching the child?).

She softened just a bit, allowing herself to connect with the parts of her memory she had intentionally built walls around to protect herself. Like most of us, she has many walls. But in sharing this memory with us, we were able to hold a mirror back to her to show her the gift she gave instead – that person who killed the child needed compassion too. Their life was forever altered too, and she provided them with love and understanding that would have been incredibly hard for most folks to provide.

The point here is that at any moment, we have tremendous power to hold space for someone else, especially someone vulnerable, especially someone radically eschewing help. We don’t push help away because we don’t want it – we push it away because we don’t think we deserve it.

We all carry the trauma of our perceived wrongdoing, whether it’s defending in court someone who killed a child in a motor vehicle accident or something else. What if we chose to see the best in one another instead? What if we set the intention always to meet each other first with radical compassion?

Perhaps our walls could come down before it’s too late to make a difference.