The healing triad*

In one week, I have seen two clients reject their parents – cut ties angrily or somberly – and another who could not do it. Her mother has always maintained a friendly relationship with the relative who sexually abused her daughter. We know parents who are so completely blind to their child’s personhood that it seems to be either rank stupidity or psychopathy, when in fact it is that they are so deeply defended against their own childhood injury and death that they are unable to know beyond themselves.

One of the cord-cutters was inspired by a favorite of mine: Fairbairn’s “return to the bad object.” He understood, at the gut and soul level, that he’s continued to beg appreciation from a completely solipsistic father. His final phone call was on fire. The other client, a middle-aged woman, took my lesson in Gendlin’s Focusing process – reading body knowledge which is the truer self than one’s ideas – to heart, and realized on a cold spring day that she didn’t like her mother. The end.

A young woman with Borderline Personality cannot talk about her feelings to her parents or really to anyone she knows, because she can’t suppress the truth: all is lost, all is dark, all is the end. It would be better if they understood that she is less likely to die if she could cry to them. Instead, they hospitalize her every time.

She may, in fact, be less desperate than the client who can’t dismiss her mother. She is a doctor, and in a Type A and conflicted marriage. There’s money and solidity. But if she were to confront her blind and numb parent, even ever so gently, about the friendship with the abuser, and her parent were to react badly, she would have no one. I believe she would feel quite non-existent.

And just now we discovered a likely case of birth trauma that left a child-to-man so agitated, so bursting with free-floating, edgy survival energy, that he could not stop yelling, not stop working seventy to eighty hours a week, drinking, paralyzing his limbs from over-exercise several times a day. This was Janov’s “sympath” imprint: https://cigognenews.blogspot.com/search?q=sympath. For months I, thinking about his neglectful childhood, tried to help him reach abandonment depression, deep feeling. But what if his pain was so pre-verbal, pre-limbic that it was only terror energy? Wouldn’t that be a terrible place to be, pre-loneliness, pre-existence?

We speak of “change,” but that isn’t a one-dimensional product. It may be valid to think in terms of a triad: Healing is composed of the adult’s attitude (cognitive state), core injuries, and core health. Engage only one or two factors and change will be specious.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* This post is a precursor to the more recent “Psychotherapy without the bushy tail,” which details the “healing triad.”