Pythonic approach to defining __init__ helper methods?

Question

Please excuse me, I'm new to Python and trying to learn the Pythonic approach. I'm designing a class that essentially initializes its state from a number of different sources (files). I've isolated this behavior to a single instance method, _load_from_file(file). It's called a number of times in __init__, but I typically like to keep my constructors at the beginning of a class definition, and my internal helper methods towards the end.

However, if I were to take this approach, _load_from_file isn't defined at the point in __init__ where I'd like to use it. How do you pythonistas lay this situation out?

To elaborate:

class Thing(object):
    def __init__(self, file_path):
        f = open('file_path')
        _load_from_file(self,"someData",f) # ISSUES!
        _load_from_file(self,"moreData",f) # WRONG!
        f.close()

    # Interface
    #     ...

    # Internal - Where do you guys put this stuff?
    def _load_from_file(self,thingToLoad,file):
        # logic

Answer 1

Are you sure it won't work in the order you're already using? Remember, you're not using C. The called method doesn't have to appear in the class definition before calling code, so long as it has been defined by the time it gets called.

I would, however, change this:

_load_from_file(self)

to this:

self._load_from_file()

Any name-not-defined error you were getting was not because your method call was at a file position earlier than the method's definition, but because you tried to call it like a global function instead of via an object on which the method is defined.