I come from a musical family. Music is a large part of what I do, how I think, what speaks to me when nothing else can. When I watched Disney's Mulan for the first time, I identified with her so very much when she came back home after a disastrous experience trying to conform to family and society expectations.
Here she is, singing that song as it appears in the movie:
The girl had spent her entire life trying to please someone else. I could understand that. I could understand not knowing who the person was that I saw in the mirror in the morning. And I had no clue how to find out who that person was, or why nobody seemed to like her. In fact, I was afraid to find out. I thought that if I knew who she was, I wouldn't like her either.
God used my obsession with other people, my compulsion to "fix" them, to bring me further and further down the path of frustration until I had to admit that I needed help to cope. I thought I was getting help so that I could fix my husband and my children, so they would change and I would THEN be happy.
But God had other plans. He usually does. By my second counseling session I was confronted with the idea that it was I who needed help. Not my addicted husband. Not my out-of-control kids. ME. My counselor looked at me at the end of that session and said, "Judy, I think that in trying to live your life for other people, in trying to rescue them, fix them, have some sort of influence over them, along the way somewhere you've lost yourself."
I burst into tears. "I don't even know who that person is." The words gurgled from my lips past a tight throat.
He handed me a tissue. "That's what I'm here for."
Since that time, I have discovered who I am. Surprisingly, I found out that I was starting to like, even admire, this person. (Who knew?)
And the more I got to know myself, the more I recognized the same lost-ness in others that I once had, that driven-ness to have an impact on my loved ones, on my world. "Gotta." "S'posta." "Should." "Oughta." "Must." "Hafta."
Living like that was so stressful. It wasted so much energy. And what's worse, the more I obsessed about what I should be doing or how others should be behaving, the more I pinged around trying to "help" (in other words, MAKE) people understand what they were doing to themselves, the worse things got. My efforts were having the opposite result from what I wanted. I gave in to temptation - more times than I can count. I lost my temper, I manipulated, I threatened, I threw guilt trip fits. My husband drank more, and my children resented me more, and openly rejected the God I believed in.
Something was wrong and I couldn't figure out what it was. I felt nobody would listen to me. I was right. But I didn't know how to GET them to listen... until I realized that what I was stressing so much about ... didn't matter. God was more interested in getting ME to listen to HIM. He had some amazing things in store for me and He did whatever it took to get me to the place where I was sitting across from this particular counselor and spilling my guts.
He - and I truly believe he was used by God to teach me this - introduced me to the power of admitting TO MYSELF that I was powerless over others, and that in trying to exert power over them, my life was a mess.
That was the first step on the road to healing.
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