Change the world at home for 2022

 

Christmas Eve day, I saw a few clients. One was a personality-disordered woman, age forty, whom I’ve worked with for over two years. In that time, the best I’ve been able to do is have her question, ephem­erally, some of her destructive behaviors toward the men in her life and toward her children. Current problem is that her 17-year-old son has been extreme­ly rude and disrespectful to her. What she can’t stand, simply cannot accept, is his lack of gratitude for everything she’s done for him over the years. The irony is so bitter because her children have been her life – “all I live for.” She was devastated, most recently, by his contemptuous, dead-eyed response to her breaking down and weeping before him. She had consciously chosen that reaction, she said, as her only alternative to striking out in rage. I know – many of us can know – why he acted as he did. He was feeling the bitter, burned, acidic, ancient injustice of his life of being invisible to his mother, of being the too-late-to-help old child. How could he care about her pain when his had never been seen, when in literal effect he had never been allowed to be born?

I pointed this out to her – we could go drastic after two years – but understandably it may have been too much to swallow. I brought the problem to the surface. For most of my life, I told her, I had never possessed the capacity to feel gratitude for any person. The gene was missing. I would accept gifts, charity, kindness from family or strangers and feel absolutely nothing. How could this be? A child can’t feel gratitude if he is still waiting for the first gifts: to be seen and accepted and loved for who he is. I am sure my client would have known this if she had returned to her childhood and felt the barren­ness of it. But she was a mother, needing the supplies she’d never been given (along with the delusions of adulthood: I can feel gratitude!). And her son became her poison container* and need meeter.

I said to her: Stop expecting gratitude. Need it no more. Return to the past sometimes with him. You won’t be his therapist. He won’t be receptive. But you can be a minor saint, a Mother Mary who will not get angry at his pain.

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* Lloyd deMause’s conceptualization – https://psychohistory.com/about/.