This Messy Magnificent Life by Geneen Roth

Author:Geneen Roth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Questioning long-held beliefs about other people, reality, what was and wasn’t possible, freed me from seeing myself as a child in a hostile universe with big bad people doing big bad horrible things over which I had no control.

I began by making a list of everyone in my “doghouse,” as my husband called it. (I needed two pages.) I wrote down what they did to me, what I thought they should have done, and how I felt about them.

The first person on my list was my colleague Larry, who had lied to me and broken our contract together. Every time I thought of him, or worse, saw him at the grocery store by the avocados, I’d remember what he did and hate him more. I now focused on his face and our interactions. I asked myself whether it was true that he should have acted differently (answer: yes, yes, and yes), followed by the question about whether it was absolutely true that he should have acted differently (reluctant answer: no, because he did what he did). Then, I asked myself how I interpreted what he did (answer: that he had no regard for me, that our many years of working together meant nothing to him, that he was an immoral, corrupt, evil human being).

Even as I wrote that last part down, I knew my interpretations were lies. When I put my feelings of betrayal and anger aside, I knew that our years together were valuable to him, and that they had catalyzed his new career. And I remembered the well of support, love, and encouragement he’d given me. That he’d spent hours with me constructing an outline for a talk, which had then turned into the initial structure for one of my books.

Then I asked myself whom I was hurting by “shutting him out of my heart,” as Buddhist teacher Stephen Levine called it. I also questioned whether I had any part in his actions. This last query was the sticky place because when I was fierce about telling the truth, I could no longer see myself as a victim. I had to acknowledge that I also had lied (by omission) to Larry. I saw that he was unhappy and didn’t ask him why. I knew that he wanted to work for himself, not me, and didn’t say that out loud. Then I thought about the people, even if it was twenty years ago, with whom I had broken agreements and acted selfishly. I realized I was capable of doing (and had already done to others) everything of which I accused him.

It took two and a half weeks of going through the doghouse before I started the process with my mother, and quickly, albeit reluctantly, I saw that I’d been wrong about her (as I always was in this part of the inquiry, with anyone, everyone). That she loved me as much as she could love me, that she did the best she could, given her circumstances, and that, as

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