The never-serene self

Twenty-nine-year-old married mother of an infant and a toddler. Excerpts from two progress notes:

“Client said: ‘I may have anxiety or depression. I'm not sure what is causing it but there are many days that I wake up with no energy to do anything or there are days that I can't stop feeling anxious. I have noticed that I have bad mood swings when I am feeling this way so for my family and work I wanted to speak to someone to get help.’ She said: ‘I have no motivation,’ a problem that comes ‘at random. I don't want to get out of bed.’ She described the depressive feeling as ‘empty, nothing.’ She said she has ‘no reason to be feeling like that.’”

“On two separate but related occasions, she informed her father that ‘I'm your daughter. You should care about my feelings more than your own.’

“Client was asked to look at her assumptions about her relationship with her father, whom she has feared from childhood to now, from a different perspective. She had told him that he should care about her feelings more than he cares about his own because ‘I'm your daughter.’ I suggested that he should care about her feelings because ‘you're an adult and should be respected by him as an equal.’ It was pretty clear that she is not comfortable with the idea that she is an adult of equal status, and that she would prefer to remain her father's 'little girl,’ in fear and injustice.

Which perspective, which principle, is right? To be the adult-child whose parent should be in perpetual reparations mode for all the past harm he’s done: the accepting, empathic and self-sacrificial “bigger” person? The adult-child who should finally be important to her parent, who is owed love long delayed? To have a parent whose own never-met childhood needs for understanding and respect must be set aside for his daughter’s long-delayed justice rather than immaturely imposed on her?

Or to be the ascendant adult who survived her nearly killed childhood and will not be victimized and needy anymore? The adult whose natural self-esteem could not form in the poisonous air of abuse but who has adopted logical self-esteem: knowing with brittle conviction that she is her parent’s and anyone else’s equal in dignity and mentality and autonomy, and that she must be treated so?

Are both inner child and adult valid? Do they both exist in the same person? Can one be invoked, then the other, by chance or intent? Or must they coexist simultaneously in some way, some strange fusion that can only reconditely be expressed?

Should my client both make demands of, and prostrate herself before, her father? Or should she show herself to be the real adult, the fragile adult who rejects him for his endless failure of unconditional love? Should her father always care for himself as a wounded soul who was never given nurturance and healing, see this as his ineradicable truth? Or should he once again bury his real self, as he had to in his childhood, for the sake of his daughter?

This is the unsolvable paradox of the person and of therapy.