There are no hapless victims. Certainly, it seems that there are hapless victims. What about a battered wife, you may ask? Wasn’t she stunned to be battered? She didn’t see it coming.

Beloveds, even the one who marries a batterer, on some level, chose it. On an unrecognized level, she chose. She chose to be in this role. She wouldn’t choose it, yet she did, just as the batterer chose. He is not a hapless victim either. He had choices to make and made them.

And for all those who are married to men or women who are less than what they had expected and would not consciously choose again had they known, they chose. They might not choose their partner now, but they chose then. They chose to go down one road and not another.

If you are one of those who would not choose now what you chose then, take the responsibility for your choosing. You did choose. You may have hypnotized yourself, blinded yourself, closed your eyes, would not look, yet you chose. You chose to hypnotize yourself. You chose not to see. You chose to be fooled. You chose. No one made you choose as you did. You may say, “If only I had known…”

I am saying that you did see, you did know, you had forebodings although you did not let yourself acknowledge what you saw and, yet, deep down, knew. You saw what you wanted to see. You saw your seeming dream. And then you saw the dream under the dream. You saw what you had chosen. No one chose for you.

In terms of marriage, you may say you chose what your parents wanted. Or you may say the bride or groom wanted you so much and they were so strong, they chose you, and it was their determination that made your choice. Well, then, you chose their determination. That was your choice.

You can wonder forever why you chose as you chose. It has been said that there are no mistakes, no accidents. At the very least, you chose as you chose because you chose.

If you must put responsibility somewhere, get on with it and put it on your shoulders. No matter what transpired, you chose.

Chalk up hard times to experience. From every experience, you gain. Unwillingly, even painfully, you gain. You do not have to be worse for wear. You can make the choice to come out like a shining gilded rose. Your choice.

And sometimes you have hard choices to make. If you cannot let life keep going on as it is, then you have hard choices to make. Easy choices are not always the best. You may have to try a hard choice now. There may be no easy choice.

You can stay as you are and let life propel you, or you can take the rudder of your life and steer yourself through the rapids. You cannot wait for a prince on a white charger to come rescue you. Change the configuration of your life yourself. Set the course of your life.

Acknowledge your responsibility. This is a great step forward. From acknowledgement of your responsibility, change can come. If everything around you is someone else’s responsibility, then you have made yourself a victim and irresponsible.

You have also chosen your children, and they chose you. Are they not reflections of yourself? You may not want this to be true and can’t believe it, yet it is true. They may have chosen what you would not choose, and yet they are still a reflection of you.

Change the parameters of your world. Change what has to be changed. Change yourself, and when you seem to be unable to change yourself, then make the changes that need to be made. In some cases, We are talking about survival. We are talking about preventing disaster.

When you feel that life cannot keep on going on the way it is, you are often right. It may well be necessary to choose something now before choice is wrested from your hands. Your choice.