ENTRAPPED BY MARK AND MIMICRY: PATTIE BOYD

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Just born, we are perfectly true, wise and content and feel a natural state of unity with all being.  Right from the start - the people we met - the circumstance - the culture - the ancestries - had it's effect on us.  What is modeled is mimicked, often without realizing and by osmosis.  
What comes from the outside first becomes part of us and then consistent with us.  We learn to speak what is spoken in the family and in the land.  The mark has become an imprint, lodged in us like a virus.  Some, if not many, of the marks did not serve us. 
We slowly learn to look at ourselves as others look at us.   Our true and wise being is pushed back in oblivion.   Covered with layers of foreign and false (foreign because is comes from the other and false because it belongs to the other), our unique voice and true color go faint, until barely perceptible.   We have gotten mixed up in beliefs and goals, projections and distortions imposed on us by someone else.   We confuse image - what others see - with essence -who we truly are.
We become conflicted in our identity and self-esteem, or divided against ourselves.
The mark becomes a permanent nature, a fate.   Now we live the expected, instead of our essential being. In the words of Sartre: "Being oneself becomes being other than self."

She was envied by thousands of girls from all over the world.
On January 21, 1966, she had married Beatle George Harrison in a pinky red Mary Quant dress and a red-fox Mary Quant fur coat, creamy stockings and the most perfect red shoes, while being chauffeured around in a gleaming Rolls-Royce Princess.   They spend their honeymoon in Barbados in a fabulous, fully staffed rented villa, on top of a dreamy hill, overlooking the deep blue sea.
They waved to the Queen of England while out in the lavish garden, frolicked on the white beach, had romantic dinners to the sound of tree frogs, and back home in England they covered the front of their bungalow in psychedelic art, then bought Friar Park, a real life estate with gardens, lakes and caves, one of them an enormous replica of the Blue Grotto at Capri.
From now on Pattie Boyd would be living in paradise.   Or so we thought.
Born on St. Patrick Day in 1944, Pattie honored the given name through her saintly loyalty to others.   Her mother married young, not in love, but it was expected.   The couple knew next to nothing about each other when they walked up the aisle.   Both parents came from privileged families with a history of sacrificing their children by shipping them off.
Pattie too spend her childhood on the shunt between aunts, grandmother and boarding schools, literally since the day she was born. "I have practically no memory of my mother during my childhood, apart from the smell of her Dior perfume and her singing voice, which was beautiful."
At age four her extended family moved to Kenya, where Pattie was in the care of the protective Kikuye servants and led a charmed and roaming existence.   Eight years old, she was send to boarding school in Nakuru. "I felt completely and utterly bereft – unloved, unwanted, unimportant." To make matters worse father began an affair and mother moved in with a "new father" in a new home, "In my childhood nothing was explained; everything was a mystery." "We still don't know the truth."
Soon mother vanished completely, traveling back to England, while Pattie and two siblings were left behind. "I felt as though my world ended; and I don't understand to this day why she did this. I was desolate. I started sleepwalking and waking up night after night by the locked four-door trying to escape."
Some time later Pattie arrived in England to attend another boarding school.   Mother was never interested in Pattie's education, during holidays the "new father" beat the children and her birth father did not care to be in her life, since she was nine years old. "It was us, the children, against them, the grown-ups... the grown-ups represented everything that was unsafe and untrustworthy." "We had to look after ourselves and we developed our own strategies for coping."
The parental mark was multi layered.   Sacrificed, she learned to sacrifice herself.   Invisible, she learned to doubt her worth and rights.   Ignored, she learned to doubt herself and be uncomfortable, even ashamed about her needs and feelings, stifling them instead of asserting them, never setting boundaries.   Overwhelmed by secrets and her parent's dysfunction, she learned to feel helpless, just like mother did.
Patties coping strategy simply became to hide the "me", become what others expected her to be and play the game of image and illusion.   At photo shoots she knew how to manipulate her body to its best advantage, knew how to project the fantasy.   She became the beautiful white screen on which one could project one's innermost needs and longings.   Inside she had come to believe, the magic was in the other, never in her. 
She met George playing a schoolgirl in the film A Hard Day's Night.  It was a small step from being a model to becoming a muse, then a hostage.
George was a generous and good man, yet always seemed to be away, either touring, or recording or meditating.   There was hardly private time, since Brian Epstein did not allow wives on tour and George had invited numerous people to live and work at Friar Park.   Slowly Pattie became hostage to a life-style that did not allow for privacy or intimacy.   Having given up modeling and with no children, she was forever throwing dinner party's, feeding people.
But who was feeding her starving soul?
When George hired a cook from India, she felt she had lost her place. "What George wanted counted more than what I wanted." "I played the part of the little woman." "I suppose I didn't really think of Friar Park as my house." "I felt undermined and unloved." "I felt more and more alienated."
Pattie was right back in her parental home, feeling just as unimportant and helpless as she felt back then, masking her feelings just the same, keeping up appearances.   Blinded by marks, wounds and scars from the past, it was hard to detach, take a breath and see that George's decision might be a wake-up call, even an opportunity.
Yes, George had reserverd his intimacy for the Beatles.  Yes, this was eerily familiar, very painful and definitely not fair to her.  Yet why not taking a step back, find out who she was and what she wanted out of life.  Why not decode the lesson, learn to love herself, learn to feed her soul and for once not look to the other.
Instead of becoming reacquainted with herself, she did what most of us tend to do, she succumbs to the seductions of knight Eric, in sparkling armor, who looked to the other too, claiming she got him on his knees.   "I had taken the easy way out." "I had let something special go without analyzing what was happening between us."
The "rescuer" had been waiting in the wings for years with passionate love letters, poems and the famous song "Layla", inspired by the Middle Eastern story of a man who falls hopelessly in love with a woman who, alas, is unavailable.
Life with Eric Clapton was a whirlwind of excess and escape, intoxicating, a terrific therapy for their deep wounds and unrequited needs and longings.   Or so they thought.
They married on a bet, yet they were used to longing and chasing, instead of having and holding. Slowly Pattie came to realize that this castle too became a prison of the past, yet this was not a game anymore of fantasy and illusions, it had become a game of reckless rage and betrayal, in which she now was hostage to incessant intoxication and infidelities.   The appropriate reaction was indignation, setting boundaries and asserting needs and rights, but that seemed to risky an endeavor.   Once again Pattie was right back home with her absent and unfaithful parents, powerless over de demoralizing situation. "I felt numb, as if I was invisible." "I did not want to be disloyal."   That she held out as long as she did, speaks for her resilience.
The woman who inspired George's " Something" and Eric's "Layla" – "Wonderful Tonight" – "She's Waiting" – "Just Like A Prisoner" – and "Same Old Blues", found herself in a tiny flat with hardly any furniture.   "... an ex-wife with nothing."
She never questioned it, how could she, she was marked to think it was all about them, never about her.   "If I was not Mrs. Harrison or Mrs. Clapton, who was I?"
Thus she, like her mother, was living the expected, the surrogate, and the sacrifice. 
Pattie Boyd got stuck in the muck of mark, mimicry and merry go round and could not believe she could change and attract something new.  Her hope lies in realizing that if you've been taught something, even if you've been programmed or brainwashed, you can un-learn and re-learn. 
Her hope lies in becoming aware of beliefs and habits and questioning beliefs and habits, as well as understanding that she is perfectly capable of challenging and breaking her fate.  Her hope lies in reconnecting with the power of her glorious spirit, her free will and choice and her incredible mind.

To find out how to make changes in your life, find meaning and happiness and support your children in a meaningful future, read: Making a Positive Mark with Mirroring, The Merry Go Round: Eric Clapton and Breaking the Mold and Making Luck.
Quotes from: Wonderful Tonight. George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me, by Pattie Boyd, 2007