March 1, 2023

Down the Rabbit Hole and Back:
Stop Believing the Lies and Live Your Own Truth
Elisabeth Caetano
Aviva Publishing (2019)
ISBN: 978-1-947937-61-1

New Book Teaches How to Stop the Madness and Become Our Authentic Selves

Down the Rabbit Hole and Back: Stop Believing the Lies and Live Your Own Truth is a refreshing look at how to undo all the roles and expectations that have been placed on you so you can find your true self. Elisabeth Caetano, an author, speaker, professor, and licensed therapist, uses the metaphor of falling down rabbit holes to illustrate the times when our lives go wrong, and then she shows us how to climb back out of them. Each chapter uses examples from Alice in Wonderland to illustrate the various problems we are all faced with when we fall down our rabbit holes. Using Alice’s journey as a metaphor for our own lives, Caetano shows us how we can, like Alice, grow and come to terms with who we really are, despite the world around us, so we can feel empowered to be our true selves.

Caetano is down-to-earth and straightforward in her methods. She begins with a bold truth: “You were lied to. Sorry, we were all lied to. It wasn’t anyone’s fault; it was just that you learned what your parents learned, and they learned from their parents and so on and so forth from time immemorial.” She goes on to explain, “Growing up we learned to do what would please people so we’d be rewarded, not punished, and that made us into someone we were not. Now we need to learn to choose who we want to be as adults.” Then she suggests a new perspective—that “The things your parents taught you were just suggestions. Using that reframe frees your parents and yourself from blame. The programming you grew up with is not your parents’ “fault,” any more than it is your fault. When you get out of the mindset of blame and get curious about the suggestions you were given growing up, you can actively start making changes to the way you think and interact with your world. Now that is empowering!”

For Caetano, we don’t have to find our true selves. We’ve always had them, but we’ve taken on so many titles and roles—and the rules that go with them—that we need to strip some of those away to “unbecome” the person society has made us into to rediscover our true selves. We need to overcome our negative opinions about ourselves and our victim mentality. She offers many ways to change our distorted thinking. She teaches us how to control our emotional reactions to things, stating, “You don’t have to behave the way you feel,” and she models for us how to say “no” when we need to.

In many ways, Down the Rabbit Hole and Back feels like an exposé on how society is set up to thwart us. The Alice in Wonderland metaphor works perfectly in these situations since Alice is continually faced with seemingly mad people telling her what she can or cannot do. In discussing addictions, Caetano states, “Society wants money and tells us through marketing to acquire more things, change our appearance, and drink alcohol; the consistent message is you are not enough.” Caetano goes on to explore how magazines and social media tell both men and women that they are not enough—that they are not strong enough, pretty enough, smart enough, don’t have the right job, or look, or car. She asks, “Who died and made society the arbiter of our worth?”

Part of not feeling enough is the need we feel to control things to gain or retain what we have. This behavior is called codependency, but Caetano immediately warns us not to think of the term as a stigma. “It is used purely to encompass the identifying behaviors that no longer serve you. That’s it.” She offers tools for overcoming codependency, admitting that she is herself a recovering codependent and that when she realized she only had control over herself, it was very freeing. It led her to her truth and the need to live through actions authentic to her. I completely know the power of the tools Caetano offers here, being a recovering codependent myself and having used many of them. Learning we cannot control other people is one of the hardest lessons we all need to learn.

For me, one of the best discussions in the book is about how we become too busy because we are people pleasers and don’t know how to say no. Caetano uses the metaphor of the White Rabbit here who is always too busy and fearful he’ll be late. Caetano tells us, “Busy is the new F-word in my book, right up there with the four-letter-word should. They both suck! I refuse to buy into the notion of my self-esteem being tied to the idea that I am only worthy of respect, love, and belonging if I am ‘busy.’” Caetano goes on to talk about how to set boundaries so we don’t overextend ourselves.

Forgiving yourself is one of the most poignant topics Caetano discusses. She makes it clear that sometimes self-forgiveness isn’t even about forgiving a wrong we’ve committed but about no longer holding ourselves to impossible standards. Here is an example of how Caetano comes across as not just a therapist, but a real person who has struggled with these issues herself. She admits, “When I first heard of the concept of forgiving myself, I was completely thrown for a loop. What in the world had I done to anyone else, let alone myself, that I needed to forgive myself for? It’s not like I was a bad person and went around killing people, stealing, abusing others, so why would I need to forgive myself?”

But then she admits a situation where she did have to forgive herself: “For a long time, I blamed myself for not being able to cure my daughter of her migraines. She was diagnosed at the age of six with chronic migraines, and looking back, she actually had them since the age of four. I tried everything short of snake oil and voodoo to help her. I remember she was about ten years old when I finally had a ‘come to Jesus moment’ where I leaked tears for about twelve hours straight. I could not stop crying because I realized I had been trying to cure her and I did not have the power to do it. I had to give it over to God, as I understood God.”

I could go on to discuss much more about all the valuable advice and tools in this book, but it’s more important that you read the book for yourself. If you feel like Alice in Wonderland because of all the insanity in your life, then Down the Rabbit Hole and Back is the book you need. I have to admit that as someone with a PhD in nineteenth century British literature, I always thought Alice in Wonderland rather a nonsensical book, but now Elisabeth has made me realize what a brilliant work it is because all that nonsense is a metaphor for the nonsense of our own lives and how we need to learn to speak our own truths and set up boundaries against that nonsense. I’ll be seeing Alice in Wonderland through new eyes and with new appreciation now.

I encourage you to take this journey down the rabbit hole and back. As Elisabeth Caetano says, “Hang on to your Mad Hatter Hat” because you’re in for a bumpy ride when you begin to explore your issues, but those issues are holding you back and need to be explored. When you’re down a rabbit hole, it’s an opportunity to heal, grow, and rediscover your authentic self, and in the end, the journey is always worth it. I encourage you to take that journey now.

For more information about Elisabeth Caetano and Down the Rabbit Hole and Back, visit Amazon.

— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Narrow Lives and The Gothic Wanderer