Mother As An "inverted Transitional Object" In Therapy

Video: Mother As An "inverted Transitional Object" In Therapy

Video: Mother As An "inverted Transitional Object" In Therapy
Video: PSYCHOTHERAPY - Donald Winnicott 2024, March
Mother As An "inverted Transitional Object" In Therapy
Mother As An "inverted Transitional Object" In Therapy
Anonim

When I started writing a series of notes about mothers, I repeatedly drew attention to the fact that any long-term therapy from some moment will be "about mom." It doesn't matter whether our client is 22 or 45, he is a socially successful person or a lonely and unhappy person - with enviable regularity, sessions return to the themes of childhood, to the problems of relations with parents, first of all, with a mother.

Recently I thought: why is this happening? Don't people change? Are childhood traumas, introjects, "engrams" not being worked through by a person in the course of a further more successful and productive life? Probably, it happens in different ways. But more and more often I began to think that this pattern is part of an important process of finding oneself, my I, my identity.

Fritz Perls once wrote the catchphrase: "Maturity is the transition from reliance on others to reliance on oneself." How often mature people come to us for therapy, who can mostly rely on themselves, trust themselves, be able to gather and calm themselves in difficult situations? Of course not. Therefore, the process of gaining maturity is very long and difficult. It presupposes the rejection of those very "social props" - first of all, parents. Moreover, these can be conditionally "good" and "bad" supports. If a generous, kind, supportive and giving mother is the undoubted "inner support" in the life of even an adult, it is much more difficult to refuse her than from a criticizing, devaluing and unsupportive mother.

I would like to highlight several aspects in the topic of "support"

1. Is it obligatory refuse from parents as from supports? My answer is that it all depends on the degree of freedom of an adult child. His freedom to live by his own rules, to choose, to love, to raise children … If the mother - more precisely, when the mother begins to “care”: criticize, help, give money, demand respect, strongly recommend what to do, etc. - an adult child can either agree or refuse. Both co-dependent behavior (yes, mommy, you're always right) and counter-dependent behavior (no, whatever you say, I'll do the opposite) are the flip sides of the “lack of freedom” medal.

It is impossible to rely only on yourself - this is nonsense. An adult gains the ability to choose. And in situations where he can and wants to do something on his own, he reserves the right to politely, firmly, clearly thank those who want to help (help without asking, of course) and refuse. In situations where help is needed, the same adult is able to ask for care, assistance, support and can accept it with gratitude. So it's not about total rejection - it's about the ability to make choices.

2. How distinguish "good" support from "bad"? This is a difficult question. Often an adult ruins his family life because of an exorbitant sense of duty to his mother. He can sacrifice the interests of his spouse and children for the sake of quirks and maternal manipulations that are noticed by everyone except the "child" himself. “She did so much for me”, “I owe her so much”, “My duty is to take care of my mother, she is so lonely and unhappy” - all this makes it impossible to invest strength and energy in children, career, and self-development. Such clients perceive the internal bad object - mother - as good, and do not notice the catastrophic destruction in their own lives. Or, noticing, anyone is blamed for them - just not the mother.

It happens the other way around - a really good and loving mother is rejected and everything she has done is devalued. An adult son disdainfully says to his retired mother: “You don’t know how to live,” although the mother, who came from the village to the capital, who had no education, who worked all her life at the factory and who had been tormented by her alcoholic husband for many years, did everything so that her son had a decent life and a good education. However, he "forgot" that his prestigious work and money is not only his merit, but also the hard labor of his mother, and her voluntary sacrifices, and her efforts.

Confused "plus and minus" in the soul leads to the fact that the good that comes from the outside often seems bad, and the bad - good. The therapist of such a client has a difficult job of "polarity reversal" of the inner and outer world.

3. What if we meet with fear of "throwing crutches"? If a person does not believe in his strength, independence and believes that only thanks to his mother he survived (this may be true), works, has a profession, housing … And "betraying" mother is scary, ashamed, impossible? Does he not believe he will survive without her support?

I must say right away that we are not talking about people with special psychophysical development, but about ordinary, completely healthy individuals capable of autonomous existence. But in their head for many years - almost their entire life - a "virus" has been living. If they part with their mother, they will die. They won't survive without her. At heart, they are small children with disabilities without handles and legs. That is why the process of therapy is so long, so painfully and slowly it is necessary to find out all the nuances of childhood traumas, analyze scenario beliefs and unviable mottos …

But I'll go back to the beginning. Why does everyone - both children who had "good enough mothers" and those who have definitely not good mothers - why does everyone go through a stage of aggression towards their mother?

I would like to start with a quote from Clu Madanes: “It's good to blame your parents. It helps us to protect our relationships with others. In most cases, parental love is unconditional. We can attack and accuse them as we please, knowing that in the end they will forgive us anyway and will love us as before. And this usually cannot be said about our spouses, friends and colleagues."

I think this is one of the important explanations. But Clu Madanes did not mention another type of relationship that can be destroyed by the release of a large amount of aggression in the therapeutic (and in any life) process.

It's a relationship with yourself.

We often scold ourselves. Sometimes it's fair, sometimes not. Sometimes it helps, but more often it makes the situation worse. Say to yourself “I’m bad” - and now the Inner Sadist is happy to torment that part of me that is “guilty,” “lazy,” “prone to procrastination,” “did not guess” … Some people spend most of their lives in self-criticism, that is "Eat" themselves alive. The extreme degree of such auto-aggression is suicide or its attempt, a gesture of despair and disbelief in the fact that you can change your life and become happier.

Who's guilty? Different people who were in a relationship with us are to blame. And then, when we grow up, this is ourselves. When we can defend ourselves - but we prefer to keep silent. When we can fight - but cowardly we draw our tail. When we can love, but we are so afraid of intimacy that we prefer loneliness …

What is there to do?

There is an interesting answer in Judaism, and his name is the scapegoat. All the sins of the Jewish people were symbolically laid on this animal, after which they were sent to the desert. Ever since then, the metaphor "scapegoat" has meant a person who has been held accountable for the actions of others in order to hide the reasons for the failure and the real culprit.

Obviously, Mom is the perfect scapegoat for anyone. All our problems can be reduced to unsolved problems of one of the life stages at which mom:

1) was and "screwed up";

2) was absent and therefore "screwed up".

Blaming mom for everything - well, or a lot - is a universal tradition. But let's try to answer the question: why? Why is mom most often blamed for all problems?

In search of an answer to this question, we need to "descend" to the very beginning of our life. To our infancy when mama was MOM … She was everything - the universe, the universe, life itself.

But in the child's life there were situations when mom was not around. And at a certain age, according to the views of D. V. Winnicott, children have a so-called transitional object - an object that creates, in the absence of the mother, the feeling that she is near. This allows the child to calm down, achieve comfort, and not feel abandoned, rejected or unloved. Each of us in childhood had something - a small pillow, a soft toy, which was a substitute for mother and provided us with the opportunity to survive in the fight against loneliness and uselessness. Such an object is a reflection of our eternal attempt to maintain the illusion that a kind, supportive, soothing mother is with us. A mother you can always rely on.

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According to the views of psychoanalysts, in later, for example, adolescence, derivatives or derivatives of the original transitional objects can be found. These transitional objects, or, in a broader sense, phenomena, are simultaneously perceived as "mine" and as "not mine."

Transitional objects and phenomena play an important role in the separation-individuation process, making it easier for the child to adapt to the fact that he has ambivalent feelings for the mother. And most importantly, these objects play an important role in the formation of our I. Each in the process of development needs to form a stable identity, including the “image of I” and “image of the Other”, which is “not-I,” as well as ideas about the world, about reality that can change. And when reality is unstable, when everything is crumbling around, when everything familiar turns into its opposite, when there is crisis and instability around, the issue of supports in our life is again actualized.

Why is it the mother who becomes the place of the “drainage of aggression” in therapy, when the client begins to change himself and his life, when, as in the song, “often the simple seems absurd, black - white, white - black”?

It seems to me that the mother in the process of therapy becomes a kind of "inverted transitional object." If in childhood a child is looking for something in the outside world - something where he can project a good, caring part of the mother - then in adulthood, on the contrary, the mother often turns into an object onto which all the pain, sadness and injustice are projected, which had to go through, or rather, to experience a person throughout his life. In the course of therapy, the search for a connection between the actual experience, the actual situation and the past experiences almost invariably leads us to childhood. And there - mom …

The displacement of aggression towards the maternal figure in therapy fulfills an important therapeutic task. If a person realized that he himself is the cause of most of his troubles, the amount of auto-aggression would go off scale and lead to a collapse. After all, the main defenses make it possible to shift responsibility, guilt and shame to others, and make it possible to “cleanse” oneself at the expense of cathartic projection. And therefore, good therapy allows a person to reproduce a picture of a split world, which ultimately comes down to a simple dichotomy (I am good - mom, she is the world, bad), then see the elements of "goodness" in mom, and "bad" in himself, and then, in the process of long-term work, to realize that this happened, my mother had her reasons and motives, difficulties and problems, and the past, in general, cannot be changed. But there is something that can still be changed. It is I AM or I AM.

And since during the therapy we have already realized that there are no absolutely good and absolutely bad objects, total aggression towards the mother, resentment, rage, contempt are slowly transformed - for someone into warmth and gratitude, for someone in understanding, for whom something in harmony and humility. The mother from the "inverted transitional object" becomes what she always was - just a person.

And we can get angry, while preserving the energy for creativity, and take offense at someone, realizing that we have again fallen for the bait of an "unsigned contract of love", be ashamed without numbness and petrification, a little envy. And most importantly - to love, to be happy, to work, to maintain sincere relationships, to feel everything that is happening … We can finally become adults.

And stop considering mom the source of all troubles.

Because at some age we no longer need a teddy bear that saved us from loneliness and fear.

And at some point, we cease to need a mother - a monster, a mother - a fiend of hell, a mother - a source of world evil.

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To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre: “What matters is not what my mother did to me, but what I myself did in the course of therapy from what she did to me”.

She gave me life - and I myself must take responsibility for this life and fill it with meaning. And move on.

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