What can I do to please you?

 

I saw two clients today, ages 18 and 41, who needed to be told something they do not want to know. Both of them are enmeshed with a bad parent. This is expectable for the girl, pathological for the man, toxic for both to have an axiom of need that, almost as axiomatically, will never be met.

Today’s lesson was that their parents who seem never to be pleased with them can never be pleased and will always be unsatisfied with their children’s conformity to their wishes. The children want their parent to smile upon them. The parent will never smile upon their children.

We want this breakthrough where we can finally release our breath, lungs filled with poison for years or decades. We imagine when our parent opens her eyes one morning and sees us for the first time, and her heart nearly dies in pain and apology then grows in sight and love, and we are finally born, finally given our birthright of happiness.

Unfortunately, mother or father has never moved forward from their childhood into the present and is not seeing us. He only sees through eyes of buried pain. The teenager might become a doctor, as her mother wants, and mother will snipe of an inferior spe­cialty, inadequate income, hospital not highly reputed, no grandchildren, not as successful as your brother, too small a house, too few phone calls.

I said to the girl and the 41-year-old man: Imagine this terrible situation: a second-grader, age seven, who is beaten and shamed and despised nearly every day, under-fed, inadequately clothed, too stunned in pain, too numbed to make friends. Can you picture her gazing at her classroom with all the other children, saying to herself: “My life is so sad and hopeless, but I am so happy for them, these other children who have won­der­ful lives with loving parents, hugs and smiles and songs and gifts and vacations, all the great food and clothes”? That would be impossible. It would be too sick, too monstrously sick to be possible. How could she not be hurt, destroyed, twisted, angry, crazy to see other children living life while she is suffering in a prison cell with torturers?

I said: Your mother is this second-grader. She has never left that place, gazing at you. She can never join you, she needs your obedience, your toil, but never your success, never your happiness. They would make her feel so alone, left behind again.

I don’t say to them that their parent, however, has been successful: The two clients have never really smiled in their months in my office, only as a brief response to a joke. They have been, so far, defeated by a child stuck in the past.