How we picture ourselves is important. The narrative of our lives is our own movie. I have seen my grandson and other small relatives literally change into various superheroes just by putting on a costume or even just a hat. They wont answer their given names any more. They have to be Batman or Captain America or Elsa from Frozen. As we all get older it is interesting to think how we define ourselves. What is our narrative? How do we get there? One of my first memories is standing in a playpen and watching Howdy Doody on a tiny black and white television. Buffalo Bob, Clarabelle, and the puppets that seemed so real are still very clear in my head. It’s hard to explain the part TV played in growing up. Saturday morning cartoons, Walt Disney, Davey Crockett, Roy Rodgers were all important parts of my childhood. Even in grade school we would come home for lunch and watch Lunchtime Little Theatre with Uncle Johnny Coons (until he showed up drunk one day and shared some new words for us kids). Our parents had the radio, but we had real TV. We didn’t have Batman costumes, but we had coonskin hats, cowboy hats, Lone Ranger masks or something similar. I think every one in my generation from the southside of Chicago has a picture somewhere of sitting on a pony with a cowboy hat.
On rainy Saturdays there were movie matinees on TV. Our parents could just park us in front of this small black and white box to watch a collection of B movies that all seemed to have the same plot. Jon Hall, who was also Ramar of the Jungle on Lunchtime Little Theatre, seemed to have a starring role in all of them. He was always a sailor/explorer/etc who endured some type of shipwreck/kidnapping/disaster and ended up with a native tribe. He would fall in love with the chief’s daughter. Everything would go well until this massive volcano or monster showed up. The only way to stop it was to sacrifice a virgin who was always the chief’s daughter. The rest of the movie was about their struggle to escape. They would endure fights with animals, reptiles, and nature itself to get out. As I got older I wondered if a simpler mechanism would just have been for Jon Hall to have sex with the princess so she wasn’t a virgin anymore – but that would have been a different kind of movie. It probably wouldn’t have made it to Saturday afternoon.
I often used the plot of that movie to talk about the role of savior and scapegoat in families. Both play very important parts and often have the same function of distracting families from the real problem. I would even use it in talking to women who were in abusive relationships and just couldn’t find a way to leave. I would ask if it was worth sacrificing yourself to calm a volcano who would still end up destroying the rest of your loved ones .I remember one very petite woman who was a construction manager for a very large company. She would end up bossing and criticizing all of these contractors who weren’t living up to her specifications. She was very successful at this job, but not so much in her own marriage. She had a very suspicious and abusive husband. He would continually accuse her of having affairs. He even put a tape recorder in her car to catch her. No matter how abusive he was, physically or emotionally, she stayed. When I asked why, she told me she had no other options. I began to tell her that she was like a female version of Clark Kent. She would start off from home in her mousy little outfit and somewhere on the way to work she would turn into Superman. Once there she was unbeatable. On the way home she would change back. This went on for about 15 months until she discovered her husband was the one having the affairs. She was then able to confront him and eventually divorce him. She continued to blame herself for the end of the marriage. She was unwilling to let go of that part of her own narrative that “if only I had done—“ the marriage could have been saved. She just couldn’t accept a new story.
The movie/story analogy is a good one. What happens if you’re stuck in a bad movie? Do you continue to watch it? Or do you walk out, turn it off, and go do something else? You can do the same thing with your life. It is just harder, but any story can be rewritten and there really are a lot of good movies out there. This again gets down to the ultimate question of how people change and when they are ready to do it.