"I hope you're scared of only ordinary shit"

Listen to me read the post…

(CW: Suicide, religious trauma, abuse)

I hope you settle down, I hope you marry rich
I hope you’re scared of only ordinary shit
Like murderers and ghosts and cancer on your skin
And not your soul and what He might do with it
- Noah Kahan

This post is going to be raw. I’m writing it anyway. If you’re reading it, that means I chose to let it live outside the safety of my own computer.

I’ve been trying, for a few weeks now, to write a post about Noah Kahan’s song The Great Divide – about how he evokes, in beautifully succinct language, what it means to spend your life trying to shake off the fear of hell that a religious upbringing can instill in you. I wrote about this in my book, Where Tenderness Lives, but there is always more to write, more to deconstruct, more to heal. Something about this song soothes a scared little girl who still lives in me.

But then something happened this morning that sent me back into that trauma in a more tumultuous way than I was expecting. Perhaps unwisely, I started my day reading a suicide note.

R.L. Stollar, whose work I am only vaguely familiar with, chose to end his own life a few days ago. Before he did so, he posted a suicide note online. (I’m not going to link it here, but if you want to see it, it’s on the blog on his website.)

Having lived through childhood abuse and religious trauma, Stollar was an advocate for victims of abuse, especially those who grew up in Christian homeschooling. His final letter made it clear just how much that trauma still lived in him – how, despite years of healing and deconstruction work, he was still deeply wounded and angry.

That part of the letter was painful to read, but what made it even more painful for me was the burden he placed on his wife’s shoulders. The post starts with an announcement that his wife was divorcing him, and the header above the post is a photo of the two of them where his wife’s face is scratched out. Though he doesn’t say “it’s my wife’s fault that I’m ending my life”, the implication is undeniable. He put enough thought into communicating that that he edited a photo for his suicide note.

For those grieving his death, I am deeply sad. For his family, and for all those who found healing in his work, I am sad they’re facing such a great loss. For those who found hope in his healing, I am sorry they’re now grappling with the loss of that hope.

BUT ALSO... I am angry.

I am angry on his wife’s behalf. After spending a lifetime trying to run away from the trauma and shame left by others in his body, he chose, as his penultimate act, to purposefully leave behind trauma and shame in the body of someone he claimed to love. That’s an act of unfathomable cruelty. He knew the pain his letter was leaving in its wake and did it anyway.

Both things can be true at once. He was a man living with pain. AND he chose to leave pain behind for someone else to live with.

I don’t know his wife, but I know some of her pain. For too many years, I stayed in an unhealthy marriage because I was afraid that my leaving might result in me carrying a similar burden. For too many years, I thought it was my responsibility to keep my husband alive.

Twice in our marriage (once while I was pregnant with our first child and once when I was about to launch my own business) my former husband attempted suicide. In both cases, he did it after I’d fought for weeks to get him help and keep him from making that choice.

It took me years to unravel the belief that, especially for our children’s sake, it was my responsibility to keep him alive. I stayed far too long, after those suicide attempts and after realizing the marriage I’d hoped for would never materialize, because I thought my leaving would trigger his third and final attempt.

Now, many years and much healing later, the unraveling continues. When I read a letter like Stollar’s, I still find myself reaching back to the young mom I once was, wanting to protect her from the pain, wanting to let her know that it should never have been her job to carry that burden.

Yes, it’s awful to watch a person you love struggle with the torment of mental illness. Yes, it feels utterly helpless to not be able to stop them from making horrible choices. Yes, as a kind and loving person, you want to do everything in your power to help them.

AND ALSO... NO! It is NOT your responsibility to fix them!

No matter how much you try to save them, no matter how much you abandon yourself for their sake, no matter how much you argue with the demons in their head, it is still THEIR choice and THEIR life.

You can love them, support them, and even hold space for their suffering, but you can’t fix them. You can’t do the work of healing on their behalf.

I know nothing about Stollar’s wife, but I am glad she found the courage to walk away. I hope that she has the support she will need to get through this dark time without blaming herself for his death.

I once wrote an allegorical story of The Girl in the Velcro Dress (which later became part of my book, Where Tenderness Lives) about a girl who realized she was carrying around a lot of baggage that people had left on her dress – beliefs, values, social conditioning, etc. That story emerged at a time when I was doing my own unraveling, trying to understand what was at the root of the codependent patterns that made me stay too long in an unhealthy marriage.

Here are a few of the beliefs that a childhood in a patriarchal, evangelical religion left on my dress:

• It’s the job of a wife and mother to look after the emotional needs of the entire household, even when her own emotional needs are unmet.

• It’s the duty of a good Christian to save another person’s soul from eternal damnation, therefore it must be their duty to keep someone from death at their own hands.

• To make it into heaven, one must be self-sacrificing and abandon oneself for another.

• Marriage is forever. Divorce is sin. Hell is the punishment for sin.

• To end a marriage is to selfishly condemn the children of that marriage to life in a “broken” home.

When something has been on your Velcro dress for a long, long time, it can take years to pick away at the threads that hold it there. Just when I feel like I am free of a belief or relationship pattern, I notice its left some threads behind.

Slowly and carefully, we unravel. Slowly and carefully, we build the scaffolding for new beliefs, new relationship patterns, and new ways of treating ourselves.

Some of that scaffolding took shape in the books I’ve written and the courses I’ve created to help others be in more healthy relationships with each other and with themselves. When I think back to the writing of my first book, for example, I realize just how much of my writing on how to hold space is about “how to release yourself from codependency and from taking on too much responsibility for fixing another person’s life”.

No, the work is not finished, but when I look back at the woman I was back then, I am SO grateful for the ways that I set her free. I am SO grateful that I found the courage to walk away, to choose myself, to live with a little less weight on my Velcro dress. The unraveling was worth it.

If you want to learn to hold space for yourself and for others, to move away from codependent patterns and to stop trying to fix people, join us for our How to Hold Space - Foundation Program. It starts in October.

If you want to learn how to support people and how to develop better relationship patterns, join us for the next module of Become a Grounded Guide. It starts in August.

Learn more about the in-person work I’ll be doing in Europe in the Fall.

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