"I hope you have a pleasant life"

Darn. I think it happened again, which means for maybe the fourth time in twenty-one years. And it feels like way too many. I will only know this in a week or two, but I believe I delivered – gingerly yet insistently, compelled by my magnetic wisdom that must rush to its antagonistic pole – the kiss of death to this client’s therapy by suggesting that her parents and childhood were not perfect. She knows all was perfect. I know all was not. Who will win?

Her presenting problem had been situational: overwhelming stress, justified paranoia and unjustified guilt produced by a coincidental series of business disappointments. But the next week, a different subject: her husband. “Serious anger management problems. He’s a child. His friends are always the priority over his family: We are not enough for him. When he has a fit, there’s no court of appeal. You have to back away and shut down. Our (nine-year-old) son wants me to divorce him. He will offend anyone without concern – his best friend’s wife, my parents. I’m constantly on eggshells.” And, “He’s totally a pathological liar.”

I will admit that my first sign of defeat, which I leapt to like smooch to frog, was her face. It smiled with a slight wince, wordlessly saying: ‘Are you questioning my childhood? Are you saying anything blunt and not sweet about my parents?’ I could see from that look that my medicine would land as poison. My info would be snake shit.

When your parents knew you were being hit, why didn’t they urge you to leave him? Might there have been anything in your childhood that put a dent in your heart, your self-esteem? “Nothing! Nothing!” Did they not support you? “No! They respected my independence.” What do your mother and father think of your husband? “My father has been angry with him, but he’d discreetly back away from the situation.”

And then the coup de grȃce. “They would always say to me, ‘It’s your decision to make.’” I sensed that I was looking at, and my client was blind to, her parents’ indifference. Is that too harsh? What else could it be but that they didn’t feel an emotionally protective bond with their daughter. “Live your life.” I do not know how parents become that. It may be the rarest phenomenon I’ve seen. My blind spot is to the neurotic subtlety that formed the parents and became them in the home. They came across to her, growing up, as loving and close, and yet there was this remove. A child wouldn’t be able to recognize it. Maybe once, age two or five or eight, she had felt the life-giving need for compelling drastic clinging love, but her parents had answered it with mild, distant affection and let her boat . . . drift . . . off. A moment, then, of deflation that she would never know was as deep and darkening as the ocean.

Children get fooled. They assume love. They glean the good and bury the bad. And wanting and lost because of the losses, they remain children forever.

Frustration of his desire to be loved and to have his love accepted is the greatest trauma that a child can experience; and indeed this is the only trauma that really matters from a developmental standpoint.*

What was her new presenting problem? “How can I learn to accept him?”

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* Ronald Fairbairn, quoted in Jewish Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Michael Oppenheim, Lexington Books, 2006, p. 116, at http://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Philosophy-Psychoanalysis-Narrating-Interhuman/dp/0739116975. (Quote also used in blog post: “The harsh about domestic violence”.