In both cases, had I looked at what I could see or do as though it involved another family, I would have called the police and laid charges. "Following your heart" may be much more than a romantic notion; it may lead, instead, to inner truth the logical mind cannot understand. After recalling those two particularly harrowing events, I thought "any normal woman would have seen, would have called the police, would have laid charges..." and understood that because of emotional trauma, I was not a "normal woman" at the time.

The Power of Belief: Believing the Labels

Normal? That's not what you feel when you're going through trauma. A few years ago I was working with an adult student who was attending upgrading classes, parenting children, going through a custody battle and carrying memories of incest. Keeping up with class work while dealing with her emotions proved too much, and while I knew what she was going through, the school did not. Her instructor told me the student was lazy and manipulative; she gave up and dropped out.

The effort to appear "normal" through an unstable time was too much for this woman. She told me she was "no good"—and blamed herself for failing to keep her grades up. Ellen Langer's (1989) messages about the labels we and others place on ourselves resonates. In Mindfulness, she says we "experience the world by creating categories" (p. 11). Langer (1997) also says we create categories and labels and then act on the beliefs we have formed "...Rigid mindsets we hold about ourselves affect our performance" (p. 98).

I found myself recalling labels given to me—rotten kid, spoiled brat, such a good girl, housewife, fashion illustrator, graphic artist, skater, overeater, battered wife, rape victim, teacher, mother, good mother, good cook, literacy worker, expert, student—and the labels I seem to have placed on myself: not good enough, not smart enough, not pretty enough. I think the last three appeared when I was small and being bullied, and my reasoning was that if I were only good enough, smart enough, or pretty enough it would stop—after all, I was told (by the older, bigger, bullies) that I was getting what I deserved. (Bigger kids should know, right?)