A middle-aged woman said that her father was absent in her childhood. “I didn’t like him.” Growing up, she felt that she always had to be “big, strong and brave” because “there was no one to take care of me.” Her stepmother beat her severely. “That’s why I’m angry at women.” Despite “good” therapy a few years ago, her inner child still feels alone and afraid.
“I don’t give mercy and grace to women.” “I don’t like weak women.”
When she got cancer, her husband failed to be her caretaker. “He was concerned for himself.” However, she was “independent.” She joked about having to “kill him.”
Once she was a “pathetic people-pleaser,” a codependent enabler. No longer.
I confronted one of her statements: “I don’t like weak women.” What did she mean by “weak”? Sensitive, feelings easily hurt. I told her that she had been a child whose feelings mattered to no one, she had had to be “big,” and still feels she must be brave and strong and independent. She doesn’t dislike “weak” women: She sees sensitive, feeling women and her aged child feels envious, down to the soles of her feet, of their normal humanity. She was made to be a hard shell and they could be filled with hurt, love, need, life.
She saw that this was true. What could help her? Grieve her stolen childhood, the greatest tragedy that can happen to a person. Dismantle the barbed barricade around her heart. But that unraveling would demolish her powerful anger, her identity attitude, her bigness, her “independence,” her strength. She gave me a saucy stare.
We should all be able to predict, correctly, that she is a Trump admirer and voter.
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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.