Baby First Step

After Lily had been practicing Real Love for several months, she found that she could make choices from confidence and peace, instead of reacting reflexively to fear with anger, withdrawal, and victimhood. She was very happy about this, but one day she wrote and told me that sometimes she lost her confidence around people who were critical or unkind.

I explained that she was just beginning to learn an entirely different way of living. “This is like moving to another planet,” I wrote. “You’re taking great leaps of faith, which are real, but your footing isn’t entirely certain yet. That’s to be expected. The people who taught you how to live in the past simply did not know how to be loving and happy. Now you’re learning to follow the guidance of people who do know. You’re learning the language of new voices. Just keep practicing—continue to follow the voices of those who understand and love you—and you’ll become more and more sure of who you are and what you’re doing.”

She responded: “Thank you. When I hear those other voices, I get stupid. It reminds me of when I was a little girl. I had a doll called Baby First Step, and it would walk in a straight line until it hit a wall, where it just kept banging into the wall until I turned her or the batteries ran down. When I listen to the voices of people who don’t love me, I go back to the same behaviors I’ve always used—banging into a wall over and over, like a mindless doll—until I’m exhausted. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

You were taught to feel empty and afraid. The pain in your life was inflicted on you from early childhood, and you tend to react to that pain reflexively, all through adulthood. You bang our head into walls over and over—bleeding and in pain, but utterly confused about how to stop it. But now you can learn a new way to live. You don’t have to react mindlessly to people and circumstances. You can make real choices—loving and confident choices. With practice, your entire world can change.