Vanquishing the Wicked Witch's Hold on My Life

By Dorian Martin, I Start Wondering Founder

“Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead.” 

Those iconic lyrics from the original Wizard of Oz movie greeted me when I woke in the middle of the night recently. The song that was a celebration for all of Oz on the death of the villainous Wicked Witch continued reverberating in my head until I managed to clear the fog of sleep and realize why: my subconscious was contemplating my paternal grandmother’s death. 

Yes, my hyper-critical, overbearing relative was dead — and had been for 48 years. Yet her outsized influence that had upset me early in my own life still affected me throughout the decades since her passing. 

My grandmother was a highly critical person who was very interested in social appearances and was more partial, whether through providing more attention, praise, or support, to males. Many in my family were not fond of her. In fact, Mom said several times, “If I had known about your grandmother while I was still dating your father, I would never have married him.” 

As a naïve child, I wanted to believe the best in everyone. Yet, when I was around my grandmother, I felt like I was in the constant bullseye of her condescending actions, always worrying whether my manners, posture or conversation were correct and whether my grades and accomplishments measured up in her eyes. I vividly remember her icy response when I ceremoniously presented her with a piece of childhood embroidered art that I had made specifically for her: “That’s nice. You can have it back.”

Her influence has held an outsized hold on my mind and heart throughout much of my adult life. My difficult childhood interactions with her led to the creation of a victim mentality that guided many of my choices, not all of which were healthy or self-empowering. 

Now (finally) I’m slowly but surely changing that narrative—and am leaving the “victim archetype” behind. I’ve learned, like many others, that the third chapter of life is the perfect time to unpack these patterns so I can move forward with less baggage.

The Journey Toward Sovereignty 

As I’ve written before, I’ve focused the past few years on claiming my own personal sovereignty. That means facing and moving past some of the internal demons (also known as one’s shadows) — those insidious thoughts and patterns that plant themselves firmly into the psyche and then continually serve as triggers that lead to reactive behaviors. This work has required regular observation and contemplation around ongoing patterns (some of which are unconscious) that have governed my life, a sense of self-compassion and a deep commitment to exploring a different path for moving forward.

In doing this work, I have explored a wide range of thought leaders but also regularly have turned to some of the ideas of spiritual teacher and author Caroline Myss, who suggests that each person embodies specific and individual archetypes in life. Many of those are ones we embrace, but she believes that everyone also has four archetypes of survival — the victim, the child, the prostitute and the saboteur — that can inform our unconscious decisions and reactions and lead to recurring unwanted patterns.

You see victimhood embedded in culture’s most beloved fairy tales, such as Snow White, Cinderella or Rapunzel who spend days, months and even years waiting for someone to save them, as well as other less-known cultural stories that don’t involve a hero on a white horse. But while the message we often embrace beginning as children is to passively let someone else handle the situation (because then you win the complete adoration of the handsome prince), what does that cost us as individuals? 

The victim archetype is about self-esteem. “It’s all about this journey of moving in perception — moving in empowerment to becoming someone who is not overwhelmed, or terrified, or feeling like you are victimized by forces on the outside world but rather that you make the transition to recognizing that power comes from within,” Myss writes in a post that accompanies a video describing the Victim. “That in fact, you’re not victimized, you’re not powerless.”

That requires being intentionally focused on making choices that are aligned with your best interests, instead of living in default mode through the outsize influence of others. As Enneagram coach Katie Gustafson said recently during an online Enneagram Summit, “The way out of victimhood is creating a new way forward.”

An Inward Journey

When I reached midlife, I finally realized that I had developed a recurring loop when faced with individuals who mirrored my grandmother. In the face of these overbearing psychic doppelgangers, I kept repeating the same reactions – “same song, second verse” – when faced with my well-grooved triggers over and over and over again.

When awareness finally dawned a decade ago, I began the slow process of working to remove my grandmother’s psychic tenacles. Part of that journey involved moving past the fairy tale I’d concocted in my mind that I could ignore the emerging situation because someone would rescue me, which had played out countless times in childhood when my mother would swoop in to create separation when I felt shredded by my grandmother’s comments.  Now as an adult, I finally came to terms with the fact that no one was going to rescue me, and I had to make this journey on my own.  I had to remove myself from always defaulting into the victim role.

That led to committing to multiple undertakings of The Presence Process* by Michael Brown (which we’ve featured in this I Start Wondering Conversation podcast). Reading the book and committing to this process taught me to listen to my body’s reactions (or as some experts describe, to become em-bodied). That sounds basic, but I can’t tell you how many individuals I know who live primarily in their mind (and the victim stories they concoct) and are disconnected from their bodies’ responses and the actual moment they’re inhabiting. 

Instead, I began noticing my automatic physical reactions — such as a clenching in my solar plexus or a constriction in my throat — when an uncomfortable situation arose. I slowed down and became curious, which allowed me to begin seeing how those triggers led me to quickly default to an unhealthy reaction among the “fight, flight, freeze, fawn” group of choices. Once I had a sense of what was going on, I was able to slow down even more, recognize the story I was creating, and begin to mindfully select a different response to the situation that was more aligned to my intentions and values. In some cases, that meant choices that ultimately helped a relationship thrive while in other cases, that meant setting appropriate boundaries.

Over the past decade, I also began to look more closely at my thoughts. When was I handing power over to others? And was this an individual pattern or also something afoot in society at large? 

Soon it was evident that creating drama through bullying and victimhood is everywhere in society, whether you’re looking at reality TV, marketing or today’s political theater. I realized that I don’t like how I physically feel when exposed to those situations and want to get out of that no-win loop that continually floods my body with cortisol and other stress hormones that can be detrimental to long-term health, as the Mayo Clinic noted. That’s led me to continually consider my thoughts and choices through a lens that encourages personal sovereignty and requires integrity.

Through feeling my way through — instead of just staying in my mind — I began to take ownership of my life. I also began being curious about my grandmother. I now see her as a person who had reasons that prompted her behavior instead of just being the wicked witch who had grown to an outsize shape in family lore.

Separating Fact from Fiction

Looking back, we never really knew much about my grandmother’s life. She never talked about her background or her upbringing. But thanks to historical documents long stored in a safe deposit box and a quest on Ancestry.com, I finally as an adult have come to get a better picture of who my grandmother was beyond the unflattering narrative.

The facts are that her family immigrated to the United States from an area in Russia where there was a lot of strife in the late 1800s when my grandmother was a girl. Her father left the family at some point never to return, leaving my young grandmother, along with her two sisters and her mother, to navigate a new country, the immensity of New York City and an immigrant neighborhood on their own. Another fact: English wasn’t her primary language as a girl.

The details get hazy from there. Somewhere along the way, my grandmother met and married my grandfather, but the details of their courtship will forever be a mystery. Old letters suggest that the couple experienced pressure because of their immigrant and religious background, which led my grandfather to change the family’s surname. My grandfather went on to hold high executive positions at leading department stores in the United States and Canada. And, of course, my grandparents had two sons who they encouraged to live the American dream.

The Stories That We Are Told

As that song from “The Wizard of Oz” reverberated through my head, I began thinking about the prequel, “Wicked,” which caught the world’s imagination. I think the 2024 movie version offers a thoughtful depiction of who Elphaba might have been at her core beyond the Wizard of Oz’s loud proclamations of evil that people across Oz bought into hook, line and sinker. 

Similarly, knowing the facts of my grandmother’s background helped me to start understanding the complexities of her life. I eventually realized that my grandmother was a survivor. Her life was informed by the traumas that she experienced as a girl and that her critical nature was linked to the pain she experienced growing up. While I don’t want to replicate her behavior, I’m thankful to have her genes and her grit in this current world we live in. And as I Start Wondering Columnist Danielle Daft Legg wrote recently, it’s important to reserve judgement because people are often doing the best they can under the circumstances.

Leaving Victimhood Behind

The challenge in adulthood is to step out of long-held victimhood and into our authentic power—and that means going against the perceived powers that be and the stories that we’ve been raised to believe. “To return to ourselves and live out that which is unlived within us, we will need to defy those inner and outer voices that exhort us to be agreeable—to meet expectations of propriety and to be accommodating and likeable,” writes Jungian therapist Lisa Marchiano in TThe Vital Spark: Reclaim Your Outlaw Energies and Find Your Feminine Fire.*

Getting out of victimhood also requires us to face and vanquish our old nemesis, fear. And in today’s world where so much is changing and chaos remains supreme, fear has been weaponized and widely broadcast, becoming  a constant for so many. As a result, more individuals have inadvertently stepped into the role of victim – or, even worse, are embracing the role of the bully.

Case in point: Recently I was volunteering with a friend when someone came up and started making disparaging comments about immigrants. Fortunately, my friend cut off the conversation, but I later realized that what I heard during that brief exchange were only a small piece of the hateful comments that my grandmother experienced. No wonder she was bitter, critical and angry—and with so much of that poisonous venom in her system, it was natural for her to offload it onto others.

That conversation helped me understand how easy it is to create ancestral trauma, and how important it is to be mindful of the quality of content — whether it’s a column like this or an offhand comment— that I put out into the world.

I also found myself feeling real compassion for my grandmother and her life and situation. That has led me to realize, like Elphaba sings in the climactic scene in Wicked, how much has changed within me and how I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago. That realization also gives me hope for my future and the belief that others, too, can change if they choose. And I also realized that moving forward, if I’m placed in the same type of situation with someone who is disparaging immigrants, I will share my grandmother’s story in a compassionate way.

Ultimately, we can become the rescuing heroine in our own lives. That takes some work, but wouldn’t you rather be proactively creating a new way forward rather than waiting forever for a hero on a white horse who never shows up?

*All purchases through Bookshop benefit an independent bookstore. Proceeds from the purchase of these books will be used to support I Start Wondering's programming for women who have reached mid-life and beyond.