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 triangular pattern that poked and bruised me in the same way each time. It may be something you’ve experienced as well in the navigation of family systems during childhood or beyond disclosure of SSA in adult life, so I thought I’d share it here and lend you a mantra I found helpful.

In the 1990s, that decade where my three children were born, there were three women who were part of a family system I was walking close to. I wasn’t trying to join them. They were just regularly in my space. The system clearly had a tough history, there were hard edges, a mean girls vibe, they shared intergenerational trauma that had not been resolved, and invisible rules. A family. A triangle. A trio as such.

I saw, felt and knew all of that, and still accidentally walked into it, feeling welcome. It would have started with someone offering something nice, then one of the others becoming jealous at that, suddenly the welcome turned into destruction, they would turn, and take me down.

Their nastiness hurt, it burned for a day, a week. Those burnings were them externalising something. One would usually reach out later, when I didn’t add to the dynamics, or fight back, in a rescuing ‘they’re so mean, oh poor you’ kind of way… drama triangle triangulation. The situations left me feeling ashamed for being in their midst, vigilant again. I felt humiliated by the gossip and the nastiness they shared.

Each time I got myself out of it. I did that twice, which may seem like not much, but each time it was a hard thing to rally back from. After that, I paid attention to my maturing intuition.

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:

‘Step back from the cauldron.‘

The movie Hocus Pocus had screened, coming out in 1993.

The image above captures the feeling for me. It is something I still easily visualise, smile and pause and say to myself: ‘It might be time to step back from the cauldron.’ The three witch characters leaning over their steaming brew, each adding their own insecurities, fears 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 triangle.

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

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

I stayed cordial. Present. Kind.
I witnessed 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.

That old line from Macbeth — “Double, double, toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” — sometimes drifts through my thoughts when I picture these three witches. Not as a witch’s chant, but as a reality check.

All of these witchy words do make me smile when I write them today, because it feels like an internal shifting from heavy emotions to self-aware lightness now and an acceptance that we do all have a choice. You’ll know it. That sense that something is brewing and knowing that it isn’t ours, and that we have a choice whether we continue to be pulled toward it or not, that’s magic!

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

Triangulation, fears, shame, roles learned in childhood. One that I’ve been learning about recently is Lateral violence – the sideways heat of a family or organisational system unable to speak the truth. The Drama Triangle I’ve spoken about in Resolve, a triangle of reactive, fear-based roles, is a shape I and others have 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 read Resolve, you might remember me referring to the heavy feeling in a different way, from other times in life, in a conversation with Rose the psychologist talking about psychic daggers. That’s also mentioned in this blog from May 2024, titled A Gift of Self-Love.

Pay attention to your intuitive heart.

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.

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 poisonous concoction.

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 triangles.

There’s even a healthy alternative triangle that we hold within our hearts and minds.
We can better spend our time finding and nurturing 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.

Sharing this today as a milestone day where we co-hosted an international first, the Seven Conversations on Sibling Sexual Trauma and Abuse Symposium. The contributors in conversation today will give us much to talk about and write about in 2026.

Shared with love,
Alice Perle

If you’re curious about what words followed the ‘Double, double, toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble’ chant (because I know that writing this blog had me go looking for it), NoSweatShakespeare offers a full modern-English translation including Act 4, Scene 1.