Sorry, but an overload of bad information forces me to expel it from short-term memory. (It will remain in long-term memory ’til the end of days.)
In the last few weeks I have heard a half-a-dozen young women say this about their mothers: “She makes everything about herself.” This speaks to a pandemic of solipsism.
We think of girls as other-person-centered, and I guess they often are. They are social and empathic, smiling and giving and caring. Like my 17-year-old client who said: “I’m selfless. I care more about other people’s happiness – friends and family. I like helping people. I know I shouldn’t. I stress out when they’re not happy. My mom has always told me to be sympathetic. I’m scared of people not liking me.”
But what if some of them turn from open-petaled flower to hard-shelled turtle when they become parents? What if all this formative-years altruism means that their real self has been starving in its crypt, and it comes out hungry and envelops them? Solipsism is full self-enclosure. It’s the mother who looks at her daughter and says “I do want to be there for you,” but who actually has no ability to leave her one-person planet. She has no ability to listen and care about the other person, because she cares only about her own feelings. Tell her that and she’ll argue, or just blink.
When a girl tells you – therapist – that her mother is all about herself, realize that she may be revealing that no one has ever valued her, no one has ever loved her for who she is. Because if it’s not her mother, her father is in rehab, or recedes from conflict, or “sees both sides,” or lives at work, gym, garage. Her boyfriend is a budding Power & Control neurotic. Her girlfriends will be fellow bleeding cats. You may be the first person who has ever accepted her as exactly and deeply as she is.
That means you have her whole future world in your hands.
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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_20.html
** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2021/07/what-it-means-not-to-hear.html
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.