Growing up, whenever the bullies would come for me, I’d pretend I was a friend of She-Ra, Princess of Power.
Oh, she was magnificent and the 1980s version was much better than the current Netflix adaptation (I said what I said). She was smart and strong and didn’t suffer fools lightly. And all of her friends were magical and strong which mean I was magical and strong. For an elementary school-aged girl, this story of strength and survival through magical entities was one of my survival stories.
I’ve had several of these stories growing up where I was strong or traveling away from whatever was happening. During the toughest episodes of growing up, these survivor stories grew with me until I needed them less and less.
But do we ever really stop needing them?
The Netflix documentary, “Misha and the Wolves”, has me thinking that maybe we don’t. That maybe the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that are still with us and that we tell them to ourselves enough times that we believe it to be true.
In this documentary, a woman shares an extraordinary story. She is a Holocaust survivor by escaping her “foster” parents to look for her “real” parents and living in the woods among the wolves.
This tale seems widely suspect, especially in our current era of extraordinary ordinary stories. At the time, however, people believed her. Many people did. So much so that there was an international bestseller of her memoirs and a movie adaptation.
But as the documentary unravels, you see how this jaw dropping story had strands to a truth. Not THE truth but A truth, which created a story to survive another type of trauma.
And this woman, Misha, told this story often enough that she believed it, even after she was safe, married, and living in the United States.
I won’t spoil it for you since it’s a great watch and I won’t say what parts of her story have basis in the truth.
However, this story does show how the brain is amazing. My depression has robbed me of several memories from my childhood but I’m not convinced that it’s not my brain protecting me from moments that would cripple me, make me feel less than, make me feel inadequate in a way.
Unlike Misha, however, I didn’t have to let go of a story of my own design.
In a Psychology Today article by psychologist Judith Sills, this idea of why can’t we let go of things that no longer serve us hits on some primal things.
“At its deepest level, the prospect of letting go forces us up against our three strongest emotional drivers: love, fear, and rage.”
Love. Fear. Rage. What strong emotions!
Letting go of the stories we tell ourselves means having to, in some way, re-confront the thing that we were trying to survive. According to Sills it may mean that the bad guy won, it may mean exposing a fear, it may mean reliving something from another angle.
It means having courage to take off the mask, the armor, and looking at something in the clear of light. It means change and being committed to the change.
It’s literally letting go. And that sh*t is scary.
In my path of letting go of what doesn’t serve, Brene Brown’s book Rising Strong was a life boat. One thought was even though others may have had a hand in putting you face down in the arena (of life, trauma, challenge, etc) you get to rise up. YOU get to write the ending of that chapter.
Like the arena quote impacted Brown, so did her understanding of it impacted me.
Listen, we can pass judgement on Misha and her wolves story all we want. Of course we can. But we were not in the area with her. She was there and what she needed to do to be able to survive was to create a story.
The issue is that at some point one will need to leave survival mode and enter thrive mode. This issue is identifying when that is. The issue is to have to courage to write the ending of your own story, the true ending,
What this all boils down to is forgiving yourself. Having the courage to forgive yourself. It’s overcoming the fear of escaping what no long serves, it’s feeling the rage from the thing that happened, and it’s loving yourself through the healing process.
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