Article - Victim No More -- A Life Song
Bernice's insightful account of the specific role that several of the LifeSong writing and singing assignments played in her journey from suffering to celebration shines a useful light on how her shift from perspective to perspective helped her gain distance from the detail of her story and begin to see it in a more universal frame:
The Fairy Tale was particularly powerful. That was the first time of taking it out of my own narrative and making it into something that was slightly less about me and more of a story. I used archetypes - goddess archetypes - and as I played around with them, I was able to see how I could put myself into this archetype story but, gee whiz, by doing that I could just as easily write myself into this story or that story or that story.
The introduction of singing in the performance of the life-prayer and the life-song brought a powerfully transformative intensity into the multi-perspective process:
The Prayer was very moving. It was the first time we used our voices in LifeSong as a singing voice. I was surprised to notice how challenging it was for me to sing when it was something from my heart. I remember I cried. And that was a part of my experience of LifeSong too. I cried so much of myself out in LifeSong that there started to be room for more ways of living.
Bernice's Ballad demonstrated the weakening of the grip her victim story had on her life as the LifeSong process facilitated a total reframe of her understanding of her earlier life.
The Ballad [the life-song] was a humungous turning point. I took the fairy tale and put it into a ballad and that ballad became my own personal little lullaby. I still sing it to myself all the time and it's just a wonderful reminder of, "here's where I came from, and here's what I did, and here was my prayer for myself all along, and here I am."
Her life concept presupposes parts, aspects of the self, that do not always cooperate but that need to be integrated for life to be fulfilled. With the reiterated re-visioning of her story came insight into the multi-faceted complexity of her inner life and, in particular, the disproportionate influence that just one of those parts, the "victim" part, had played in influencing how she saw herself in life.
[As] I found myself recreating or telling myself in different ways, I realized how many different pieces there are of me and how the victim piece was just one piece. In fact, it wasn't even me, it was a piece of what happened to me. And it was LifeSong in large part - at least it was the final important kerchunk in that process that took me out of identifying as a victim, an abused person, and took me into seeing that I had the power to create myself, create my life... I turned myself inside out and birthed myself during that ten-week program - I birthed myself out of victim.