The strangest Mother's Day: Follow-up to a pathologically existential client (see previous post)

Adapted from progress note:

As my client has been working on, or at least thinking seriously about, his existential distress – identity and personal and career meaning – for several months with no relief from its desperate poignancy, it seemed necessary to dive into the radical ends of intervention. Intervention #1: He has remained toxically regressively attached – in slavery and hope – to his shaming and physically abusive (and complicit) parents and cannot feel himself, cannot feel free. His starved bond with them has served as anchor and quicksand, making him incapable of feeling, in his bones, autonomous. He would have to “say goodbye and good riddance” to them, reject and disown them, turn away. Only that could make him feel that he could make a clean, fresh start, breathe the air and see a horizon not polluted by them. Intervention #2 was the exact opposite, contingent on the nature of his relationship with his mother. (Father is understood to be a lost cause.) If he can remember any moment from his childhood where he felt his mother’s selfless love, and can remember her clear expression of it, then going to her, in regression and a child’s need, for a re-supply (as it were) of it, could enable him to move on into his adult life. “If it exists, you would need to rejoin your mother’s love.” Internalized, late but forever, that love would make you free.

Neither intervention would apply to individuals whose self-esteem was highjacked but not killed by their parents: Those who live and struggle for the smile of contingent approval their entire lives. While much more successful in prestige and material, these individuals won’t be helped. They have survived on false love while the others have survived on no love. They could only fall and crash, in therapy, the latter could only climb.