While watching a House TV series marathon recently, one of the shows made me teary-eyed. It was an episode in which a homeless lady was diagnosed with a terminal disease. In doing the diagnosis, the doctors tracked down her history and discovered that she had been in an car accident a couple of years earlier, one that killed her husband and son.
Because she was driving the car, she blamed herself for the deaths of her husband and son. She began living in the streets, not taking care of herself, and ending up with the worst sort of medical condition.
At the end of the show, one of the doctors pretended to be her husband (she had become blind) who had “come to forgive her.” That was the tear-jerking part. It caused me to think of all the people who are carrying around guilt for something that is not their fault. Such people often wind up alone with nobody to care for them and nobody to pray for them. They live in misery and often die in misery.
All of this reinforced to me the key message from a book I had just read, Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl’s Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work
Our thoughts can imprison others, as well as ourselves. This is the well-known Pygmalion effect. For example, if you think of your adult children as being incapable of taking care of themselves, you are harming their ability to be self-sufficient. Your thoughts show up in your actions and inactions, the children pick up on it, and their thinking about themselves is negatively impacted. Their actions and inactions are then modified.
Well, I’ll leave it at that. The above gives us a lot to think about, doesn’t it? The millions of homeless people in the world. The countless who are guilt-ridden over something that was not their fault. Our imprisoning ourselves, and sometimes others, through our thinking patterns.
Your thoughts?