Step Back From the Cauldron

I loved my early twenties, the years of working in a city office and building a life with my husband that felt entirely ours. My days were full. I poured my mind into getting work done for my lawyer boss, then as if flicking a switch, I’d head home into a life that felt easy and chosen. Bands on weekends. Long walks through national parks. Dinner somewhere simple. It was a good rhythm, and I didn’t notice until much later how little time I spent with my family of origin.

That was deliberate, although I couldn’t see it then. I had set myself free. Maybe it was also because we were pre-mobile phone times. That phone in the hall was my only connection if I chose to answer it. Life done my way. Safety built through distance. I hadn’t disclosed my childhood SSA to my husband by then — that came when I was twenty-five and a new mother.

Motherhood shifted my world

I was at home. The things I needed to focus on changed. My days were either hectic or slow, sitting half-asleep after a feed. By the time our second daughter arrived, I knew there was no medal for perfect housekeeping. I let that go. Nurturing became the priority. I worked part-time, and we kept life as simple as possible.

Our children were growing, as were the families of our siblings. I found myself pulled back into contact with my wider family more often. I won’t repeat what’s told in Resolve. I’ll simply say this was the era when adult disclosures were still making the air static, and when the old family dynamic rearranged itself into something that looked like “happy families” on the surface while the bomb beneath it all ticked louder.

A wisdom without a name

Amidst all that, something else was forming in me. A small instinct for self-preservation. A wisdom without a name.

I often wonder now about my paternal grandmother. She died suddenly when my father was a teenager. We never asked about her, because any mention brought him to silence. But I feel her presence in me at key moments across my life, a kind of loving steadiness, as if she left me a thread to follow when I needed it most.

There were the good times, of course. Women in kitchens balancing plates and babies. Weekends in parks chasing toddlers. Cups of tea with neighbours. Life in the messy middle of early motherhood.

And woven through that sweetness was a repeating pattern that bruised me in the same way each time.

You know those circles of women who give off a need to control, wound up tight, kind of vibe, bored with life in the most part, so sustain their relationship with drama and gossip. I have known them and loved them, and then I would be invited in. Welcomed. Drawn closer, we’d chat, laugh, share a little (later realising it was too much to give them) in response to a question. Then suddenly the air changed. A tightening. A coolness. A quiet nastiness that arrived from nowhere. Words I had spoken in trust moved through whispered channels. A look passed between the women, and I knew I had been discussed when I wasn’t there. The circle closed, not loudly, but decisively. That has been translated later as ‘it’s because we love you’. Really?

There were three women who were “part of a family system” I was walking around the edges of. I wasn’t trying to join them. The system clearly had a rough history, there were hard edges, old loyalties, mental illness, shared intergenerational trauma that had not been resolved, and invisible rules. A family. A triangle. A trio as such.

I saw that, and still walked into it, then got myself out of it, twice.

What’s the saying, ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a pattern.’ I didn’t tolerate their behaviour long enough to make it a pattern. Something in me refused to keep walking into that same fire.

How I avoided that third time was I remember vividly my inner voice stated a phrase. A private, protective humour at first, and then a mantra I drew upon, and you have to say it slowly and express each word clearly:

Step back from the cauldron.

Around that time I had seen Hocus Pocus (1993).

The image above captured the feeling: the three witch characters leaning over their steaming brew, each adding their own hurt and bitterness to the pot. Their faces glowing strangely in the rising vapour.

While much of the Hocus Pocus script is comedic, one line stood out symbolically that fit my new phrase beautifully: ‘I Smell Children.’ Those three witches could sense, almost smell, when someone came too close to their circle.

Not literal of course, but symbolically, that was the feeling.
Like being the final ingredient they were preparing to toss into their boiling drama.

So I stepped back.
Just enough steps to be safe.

I stayed cordial. Present. Kind.
But I no longer leaned close enough to be pulled into their toxic broth. I watched how they listened too intently, loved stirring the pot, how stories passed between them, how their insecurities looked for fuel. And I simply refused to be that fuel.

Later in life, I have learned language that explained it all

Triangulation, fears, shame, roles learned in childhood. One I’ve been learning about recently is Lateral violence – the sideways heat of a system unable to speak the truth. The Drama Triangle I’ve spoken about in Resolve, and in this blog, a triangle of reactive, painful roles, is a shape I had been living inside long before I ever learned its name.

But back then, all I had was the image of those three witches and their cauldron.
And it saved me.

If you’ve felt this too, the sting of learning that unkind words were spoken about you, that would never have been said to your face, the sudden shift in atmosphere, the circle that closes, making it clear you weren’t in that triangle of theirs anymore, you are not alone.

I referred to this in a different way in Resolve, from other times in life, in a conversation with Rose the psychologist talking about psychological daggers. That’s also mentioned in this blog from May 2024, titled A Gift of Self-Love.

Pay attention to your intuitive heart.

You are not imagining it.
You are not the cause of it.
And you do not have to stand at the rim of a cauldron that was never yours.

Step back.
Not far enough to stop caring.
Just far enough that no one can toss you into their angry broth.

Whatever game they were playing, it was never about you.
It belonged to the people stirring their own unhealed stories.
It’s their pain, their fears and their inherited ways of surviving.

There is life beyond those circles.
Connections that do not burn.
People who do not gather around a pot of old wounds looking for someone to throw in.

You deserve a better kind of belonging.
And you are allowed to walk towards the life you choose.

Shared with love,
Alice Perle