Page 36 - eBook Living Water 2

There was one session where we had to go up on the stage to
be confronted with an EST staff yelling in our faces drill sergeant
style. They explained beforehand, not to believe what was being said
to you. It was just to show how much power we give other people in
what they say to us. Even though I hated it (still suffering from
performance anxiety), I made the commitment to stick it out for the
sake of the seminar. Many people ended up running out during this
exercise, as well as at other times during the seminar, which was part
of the point about giving other people power over us, and making
commitments and not keeping them.

I understood about running away because I had done that a lot
in my life. As a matter of fact, through marriage therapy I had
learned that my running away from Fred and his anger, actually
intensified his deep fear of rejection and abandonment, triggering him
into physically trying to restrain me from leaving.

Fred had many early childhood issues surrounding
abandonment. As a baby, his parents worked eighteen hours a day at
their drive-in restaurant and they also went to Florida one month
every year, leaving him at home with his elderly grandmother. His
brother, who was six years older, pushed him down the stairs when
Fred was a three year old, breaking his collar bone. He remembered
the pain and loneliness of being on the phone with his mother who
was vacationing in Florida and being told by his grandmother not to
tell her what happened because she didn’t want his parents to worry.

His brother, John, who was a rebellious and unmanageable
child, was sent away to a military boarding school at nine years of
age. John had also instigated some inappropriate behavior towards
Fred with a group of neighborhood girls. I remember friends of
Fred’s family, who knew him as a small child, mentioning to me how
they remembered him often banging his head against the floor in fits
of tantrums.

At my final night of graduation, the trainer asked us to think of
something in our lives that we might be running away from. He said