"The work of therapy...involves both story making and story breaking. The therapist helps the [client] at once to tell a story coherently and also to allow for the story to be told in a different and perhaps more healing light."Jeremy Holmes (1)
When a client starts therapy with a rosy story of his or her parents, many therapists almost automatically (although silently) question that picture. We know that no parent is perfect. Therefore, when a client only says good things about his, we wonder if he is protecting himself from unbearable memories or negative feelings with one of a number of unconscious psychological defenses. We may also think that he is stuck in idealization, a normal developmental stage of childhood that is supposed to be replaced by a stage of disappointment. (see my last posting) Unfortunately, these assumptions reflect a problem in much psychodynamic thinking these days: Therapists often think that our most important task is to help our clients see "the truth" about their parents - meaning the ways that their parents failed them. This is what happened in my work with Andrew* (3).
"I'm not happy," he said when he called to set up an appointment. "My wife says I need therapy." They had been married for two years and were still deeply in love. Now, as they had begun talking about starting a family of their own, Andrew's wife, Melissa , was worried about repeating patterns from their own childhood. "She says our parents screwed us up and we need to make sure we don't do the same thing to our own children," he said. Andrew told me that he came from a very tightly knit family. His parents had their problems, but they were not bad people, and were very close to his brother and sister, their spouses and their children. However, Melissa had always complained that his mother was intrusive.
When I asked him to tell me what bothered Melissa, he said that his mother continually supervised her about how to take care of him, telling her what he liked to eat and how he liked his shirts. She made comments about how they had decorated their apartment and even moved their furniture around when she came to visit. Andrew said, "Her intentions are good. She's just a very anxious person, and her phone calls and worries just show that she cares." Still, Melissa was so angry at his mother that she was refusing to talk to her on the phone or to go with him to visit the family.
It takes time to untangle the threads that lead to the kind of personal crisis that drove Andrew into therapy. Melissa might be bringing some unrecognized issues from her relationship with her own parents into her relationship with her mother-in-law; but I thought that she might also be expressing some feelings that Andrew could not allow himself to feel or think about his own family. These emotions, which the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas called "unthought known,"(2) are difficult to bring into the therapeutic dialogue and generally take time to unfold. In a case like Andrew's, with a concrete crisis on the horizon, there is little opportunity for the hidden psychological meanings to become clear.
The process can be further hampered when a therapist gets caught in a theoretical model that doesn't fit with a client's experience. For example, therapists often use our own feelings to help us understand unrecognized parts of a client's story, but we can run into trouble if we assume that our feelings always reflect an accurate picture of what is going on. Similarly, when we accept that theories about parenting and development are always valid, we may fail to ask important clarifying questions about a client's history. This is what happened when I was working with Andrew. Fortunately, he was able to set me straight.
Based on the story that unfolded over several sessions, I had started to draw some conclusions about Andrew's parents - intrusive, over-involved mother who was having difficulty letting go of her son; withdrawn, unexpressive father. Then Andrew told me that when he was little his father had been the person he turned to for support and comfort. "I remember him coming into my room when I was scared at night. He would tell me funny stories, and he would stay with me till I fell back asleep. I felt so safe with him." Then, Andrew told me, his father had suffered from a severe depression, and his mother had taken over the role of support and comfort of her entire family. "She did a pretty good job," he said, "but I think she was overwhelmed by it all. I sometimes think her being so intrusive is what happened when her worry and her attempts to take care of all of us and make everything right got blended together."
As we began to talk about what these experiences had meant to Andrew, he said, "I think I felt frightened when my dad stopped being strong and comforting. I thought maybe he just didn't like me much anymore, and maybe he had gotten tired of trying to make me feel better." Andrew said that he thought he had pulled away from his father at that time. "Maybe," I suggested, "you felt overwhelmed by your disappointment in him." He nodded, and then added, "yes, but maybe that hurt his feelings. If he was depressed, he might not have been able to recognize that it was just because I was a kid."
Once a client is able to acknowledge his parents' failings and his own angry and sad feelings about them, the next step is to integrate a complicated mix of thoughts and emotions. The goal is not simply to see all the things our parents did wrong, but to develop an ability to see their good and bad qualities. Ultimately, this acceptance of human imperfection can be applied to everyone in our lives - including ourselves.
*Not their real names. All names and identifying information in my blog have been changed to protect individuals and families.
References
1. Fonagy,P.,Gergely,G.,Jurist,E.,Target,M. (2005) Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of Self. New York:Other Press
2. Bollas, C. (1989) The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Unknown. New York: Columbia Universities Press
3. Barth, F. (2009) Frozen in Time Frozen In Time: Idealization and Parent-Blaming in the Therapeutic Process" published in The Clinical Social Work Journal. http://www.springerlink.com/content/q15522764q265qp3/
