Tough Choices in Life

Life is all about choices. Big choices, small choices, choices we gruel over and those we barely realize we've made. Our choices reflect who we are and where we've been, not just the options presented. They affect who we become and the future choices we make. There is always a choice in life and I can think of no exception. Oftentimes, we cannot choose what happens to us but we always have the choice of how we react to it, internally at least and usually externally.

That said, choices are quite often not simple matters of stating a preference and acting on it. Options may be equally appealing (chocolate cake or an ice cream sundae?) - or equally horrifying (let a loved one live as a vegetable or turn off life support?).

We each create a checklist, a set of parameters by which we make our decisions. Everyone's checklist is different. It is generated by experience - we learn to make choices by making choices. If our decision-making skills are guided and encouraged and we experience reasonable results (rewards or consequences in a degree that is consistent with the weight of the choice), we learn to make choices that are effective and healthy. If we are not exposed to making decisions or if the results of those choices are corrupted against us (too weak, too strong, not connected, not predictable) we learn to distrust our own decision-making capabilities. We may come up with a set of parameters that rely on external input (what does that person want me to choose?) rather than internal (which choice meets my needs?). We may even be conditioned to believe that is the way decision-making should be approached. Stripped of an internal barometer, we are subject to the whims of circumstances and lose much of our personal power.

If our power to choose did not develop into healthy patterns as children, we will carry those patterns with us until we do something to change them. The key here is that we can change them. The ability to make choices is a learned process, developed and strengthened through practice and repetition. We can relearn that process - create a different set of parameters - and through that same process of practice and repetition, change the ways we make our decisions and therefore the choices we make. Given time and practice, the new way will become comfortable, it will become habit.

(Analysis over - I find it easier to introduce an emotionally volatile subject with a factual assessment of where my head is on the topic. Here comes the "hard" part...)

I have severe difficulties with the issues of choice. Making decisions poses a threat to me, it triggers my fight or flight responses. Ironically, the smaller and less apparently meaningful the choice, the more difficult I find it to make. When it comes to larger issues, I can generally work through them and come to a reasonable conclusion. But ask me what I want to eat or what I want to watch on television or where I want to go on a date and I will freeze up. I will use every available tool in my arsenal to determine what response would most please the person asking and that will carry the biggest weight in my slow, eventual decision-making process on these seemingly trivial subjects.

I find this to be a problem in my life. It causes me considerable anxiety on a daily basis and extreme anxiety in social situations. For example, when going out to eat with friends, I find myself agonizing over what I am going to order off the menu from the moment I learn of or make the plans, even if that is weeks prior to the event. I make lists of things that I like from the menu and put them into categories for easier elimination based on the behavior and choices of those around me. I try to remember what kinds of things the people I am going with like to eat so I can order something similar. I think about how much things cost so I can order something around the same amount. I try to think of something from each category on the menu from appetizers to desserts so that I can be ready no matter type of food the others are ordering. I will go around and around with this until the moment arrives and we are all sitting around and ordering. My heart feels like it is going to explode and my head has been invaded by a hive of angry bees. I try to find out what the others are ordering and then I narrow things down based on that. Heaven forbid if there aren't enough criteria to base my decision on!

As per my custom, when things bother me, I try to figure out why. If I can figure out where something originated, I can better see whether this is a valid pattern to continue or not and replace outdated facts and models and coping mechanisms with ones that are more suited to my current circumstances. (Easier said than done most times.)

(deep breath)

Every time I hear the word "choice" these days, my mind goes to one place; I hear one voice in my head, offering me a choice and one voice answering. I have read a lot recently about victims of childhood sexual abuse. (Wow - that took over two hours to write that phrase!) One thing that I have read over and over from the professional point of view is that a child cannot be held responsible for an adult engaging in that kind of behavior with them. They emphasize the child's lack of ability to fight back. They talk about abusers creating a psychological atmosphere that make it impossible for the victims to effectively say, "Stop" and have it be taken seriously. There are threats and insinuation, emotional blackmail. Things like "Tell me if you want me to stop" seem to be common "choices" that these kids were presented. And they were too afraid to say stop and too afraid and too ashamed to tell.

But that isn't how it was for me. The default choice wasn't compliance. The default choice was the way out. He gave me a choice, over and over. Did I want to do those things with Him or did I want to go wake up my parents right then and there and tell them what we had been doing together, tell them everything - all the lies, all the gifts, all the games, and all the payment He received in return - and see who they got mad at? It was my decision every time. I had to say, out loud, what my choice was. Did I want to do what He wanted (by the name of whichever act - or rather the name He gave that act - that He wanted at the time) or did I want to go wake my parents and never have to do those things again? If I refused to answer, He would tell me that if I woke parents up, how angry they would be at both of us and how I would never see Him again. But, He said, if I didn't answer, He would assume that was my choice and together we go wake them up. He wouldn't touch me if that's not what I wanted so I had to ask for it, literally ask for it.

All I had to do was not answer Him if I wasn't strong enough to go tell my parents. But I made my choice. I CHOSE to be with Him. I told Him I wanted to do what He was asking. And most times after being given that choice, I then had to initiate the action myself. It's not like I was scared into passively allowing those things to happen. I - quite literally, and knowing full well that I had the option of never having to do those things again - asked for it and went after it.

So when the books say that those victims didn't have the choice that their abusers wanted them to believe they had, that they didn't actually make a choice by simply remaining quiet, what I hear is my own voice asking for what happened to me. Whenever I hear someone say that it is never the fault of the child because they didn't have the power to stop the person from doing that to them, I remember that all I had to do was not do it, and I chose otherwise.

No, it wasn't the fault of those kids. They didn't have a choice. They weren't strong enough to stop it from happening. But that isn't what happened to me. I did have a choice. And I was too selfish and spoiled to make the right choice. I didn't want to lose Him and so I chose to do those things to Him instead of risk losing Him. I chose to Pay the Piper. My choice, my actions, my mistakes.

And now I despise making decisions, especially when someone asks me a direct solicitation of my opinion. Because I make bad choices. I do bad things. I want the wrong things. I can't trust myself to want what is right. Sometimes either choice is horrific but one is clearly correct. If you choose wrongly, there is too blame and with it comes the shame. Heavy, like a wet, velvet blanket, smothering me in darkness that is cold and wet and paralyzing.

Life is all about choices. And I am quite practiced at making the wrong ones.