Gestalt Therapy For Women Experiencing Divorce Or Breakup

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

It happened in my life that almost at the same time I began to engage in gestalt therapy, divorce my husband and part with my loved one. At the same time, I had my first clients. These were women going through a divorce, about to get divorced, or experiencing unrequited love. I still do not understand how they found me, I suppose that my own inner experiences caused a strong resonance in the environment. Almost four years have passed since then, I have accumulated some experience in working with such problems, I will try to share it in this article

What united these women who came to me to consult? All of them experienced severe mental pain, consisting of a cocktail of feelings: resentment, anger, guilt, shame, fear, love. Almost everyone, in one form or another, had a request: help me return it. At the first stages of therapy, we had to support the game of "returning the departed husband." There may have been some other way to keep these clients in therapy; undoubtedly it existed, but as it worked and worked, some husbands returned, much to my surprise and the delight of the clients. But they did not return to everyone, and then the question arose "what to do next?" This question arose from me, and by this time my clients usually had a counter question to me "What is happening in your life, Yulia Alexandrovna?" In some confusion, I tried to decide whether to say that I am now also undergoing personal therapy, and in my life everything is not so cloudless. Customers' reactions to this information varied. "Why am I going to see you, what kind of psychologist are you if you cannot improve your life?" Or "Perhaps you can understand me better if you yourself are experiencing it." My countertransference manifested itself with a sudden headache or uncontrollable tears after the session, but thanks to this, I learned to track it well.

And now about what I had to work with. In the first few sessions, most often it was about working with merges. Clients largely identified themselves with a departed husband or loved one. "I have the feeling that a part of me has disappeared, as if I had lost an arm or a leg." This is probably one of the most striking statements characterizing the condition of such women. The women complained that they did not understand how to live now, what to do with themselves, how to act, and now and then mentally consulted with their “ex”. It was very painful to think about the future, it was even more painful to look into the past. Therefore, in the present, they were engaged in the study of feelings in relation to the "former", and also gradually learned to touch their mental pain, experience it and let it go when it was possible. And the feelings were very, very destructive. Anger seethed inside most of my clients and threatened to tear them apart from the inside.

- How dare he, scoundrel, go to this nasty painted bitch?

When I asked these women if they were expressing anger towards their spouse, it turned out:

- If I get angry, he will never come back to me. Therefore, in his presence, I always pretend that everything is fine. I even pay only for you. He sometimes comes home and doesn't like it when I'm crying or unhappy.

Seeing the defenselessness and humility of the abandoned wives, the men became more and more impudent. Someone stopped paying alimony, someone registered a mistress in an apartment shared with his wife, and one simply disappeared for a year and a half (moved to his mistress in Moscow). There were stories that were calmer and more intelligent, but they were less remembered. My clients and I slowly learned to be aware and express anger, for this I even united them into a group. In the group process, things went faster, and since there were women who were already “leaving the pain zone,” so to speak, there was enough support in the group. In general, I think such groups are good for dealing with post-divorce issues, but it's hard to lead them alone.

In the process of realizing "negative" feelings and accepting them in oneself, a mass of various, as I call them, "female" introjects surfaced.

- "Girls shouldn't be angry", - “if you want your husband to love you, bear with me” (I still don’t really understand what you need to endure, probably everything), - "married - be patient" (again it is not clear what exactly).

With all of these, we slowly sorted out, translating anger into a constructive channel, as far as possible. Once a question arose in the group: "Why, in fact, are we angry?" And we get angry, it turns out, because we loved before, and somehow it was understood by itself that this was for life, that “in happiness and in sorrow,” that we hoped to “live happily ever after and die in one day” that "I have been faithful to him all my life, and now who needs me." And suddenly the anger went away, and behind it was a deep bitter resentment, someone had love for the departed, someone had the guilt "I was probably a bad wife", and I was confused "what to do with all this?" I still remember them, the first five people, how they cried at this lesson, each to herself, each about her pain, how I wanted to cry with them, and how they asked me “Will this pain ever end? " It's good that I had an affirmative answer to this question: my own pain had dulled by that time, and it was quite possible to "get along" with it.

This answer of mine occasionally served as a support for clients, but in every group lesson I was spinning like a pan with the thought "what to support and how to support." At that time, I still had little experience, and from time to time it seemed to me that if the client did not die because of the departure of her “evil ungrateful” husband, then she would definitely die if I didn’t support her enough. But seriously, during this period, children are a strong support for women. The maternal instinct works, and the woman is kept afloat for some time, since the children need her. It is important not to go too far here. One of my clients turned her eleven-year-old daughter into a friend. At first, she tried to manipulate her husband with her help. This is a very common toy: if you see a child, you will not see a child. Then she began to complain to her daughter about her father: "let us unite with you and we will be friends against dad together." And after a while she began to take the child with her in the company, discussing her fans and lovers with her.

The situation with support is worse if there are no common children or they are already adults. This was the case with one of my forty-five-year-old clients, whose husband went to live with a young woman, two sons lived separately. At the same time, the woman has not worked for a long time, since her husband has always provided a good family. At first, trying to unwind, she wandered now to Cyprus, then to Greece, but this quickly got bored, and then existential questions appeared in therapy: why am I here, what should I do with my life, why have I been given all this suffering? These questions have always been quite painful for me, I still don't know what I was feeding this client of mine, but she held out in therapy for a long time, still calls and sends clients. In the last conversation, she said that she is engaged in charity work, nurses her grandson and feels happy. I was very envious of the last phrase.

With other clients we tried to find out what they would like in life, what they would like to do, what their interest is. And then I ran into unexpectedly big difficulties:

“I don’t want anything other than this man.

- And if he was there, then what would you do?

- I wouldn't do anything. We lived once before, ate together, watched TV. What else do you need to do?

- What interests you in life?

- Yes, there are no special interests, we live like everyone else, we watch TV, we go to the movies.

For me, the strongest support is work, my way of getting out of a relationship is to come up with a new training and assemble a new group, but for this I have to be very angry with my partner first. Not all clients managed to find something that would be support for them in the professional field. I still do not know whether the work is uncreative, or, indeed, there is no interest, or it is not realized. Some women changed jobs during this period: some managed to find their interest, while others needed more money. Both are, in general, not bad.

Returning to the work with resistances, literally at once you come across the classic of the genre: the projection onto the rival. She, they say, “a vile thief, stole someone else's husband, I suppose, she didn’t run around the garrisons with him, she didn’t toil in other people's apartments. Decent women (meaning the client herself) do not do this. She is mean, and there should be no mercy for her. " In the process of work, the projections change “She is beautiful, young sexy, and I am unnecessary to anyone; no one will ever pay attention to me, but she should whistle, all the men will run to her short skirt”. The funniest thing was to hear about youth and beauty from a woman whose rival was five years older than her. Along with the return of projections to women, confidence and calmness returned. It was much worse with sexuality. It was difficult to talk about this topic, perhaps, for me too at that time. “Sex is not for me - it is for young people,” says a lady who is barely forty. At the same time, a wide variety of fantasies about the sex life of the husband and his new girlfriend are played. “She’s probably doing this in bed in there that I’m ashamed to think about it.” Women from different social strata, different education and upbringing came to me for therapy, therefore, their views on the relationship between men and women were very different. “In sex, he was definitely good with me, she lured him with cunning. I flattered him like a fox, I always told him the truth about who he really is. " Nevertheless, in all cases, the female identity was wounded, and women, as best they could, restored it. Some of them, as if headlong, threw themselves into sexual relations, someone collected compliments from all the men who came across around. Those who had more money with them bought new outfits, invented new hairstyles and makeup. It is good if there were "objects" who could appreciate all this. If this did not exist, which happened more often, the women came to the next session very disassembled. If I were not a gestalt therapist, but, for example, a behavioral therapist, then I would forbid women to have sexual relations with their “departed”, “leaving” or “ex”. At the moment of intimacy, it seems to a woman that it is still possible to return that the relationship has remained the same, there was only a small conflict. But the man leaves, and the pain becomes even more acute, unbearable, the loneliness is even more unbearable. In the treatment of such problems, kickbacks are inevitable, but most kickbacks happened precisely after sexual intercourse.

Usually it took from three months to six months, while the woman began to perceive the departure of her husband as a reality, the hope for a miracle disappeared: “in the morning I wake up, and everything will be the same again.” For myself, I called this stage in therapy "The Funeral of Santa Claus." Sometimes he had to be buried several times. True, after that, dramatic shifts in therapy began: a miracle will not happen. It is necessary to somehow further plan your life. I am thinking about how this article now resembles our work with clients: scattered, unkempt, backward, painful, but, in my opinion, honest.

And so we worked, worked and refined to deeply hidden shame. The shame was different and was disguised as guilt, anger, confusion, or God knows what else. At that time I knew very little about shame, I remembered two phrases from Vladimir Vladimirovich Filipenko “shame is a lack of support in the field” and “shame can be toxic”. For myself, I realized that there can be as much support in the field, but a person cannot take it for some reason, although for a client the inability to take support is tantamount to its absence. And behind shame, deep parental or social introjects appeared again:

- it's a shame to be lonely, - ashamed to get divorced, - it's a shame when a husband leaves: husbands don't leave good wives, - ashamed to tell someone that her husband is gone.

And they didn’t. One of my clients hid from close people for almost a year that her husband had left her. She went to her parents alone, her husband at that time was "sick", "earned money", "was very busy." When someone from her husband's acquaintances called home, she said that her husband was asleep or had just left. The first few sessions with me, she blushed and looked at the floor, and when I asked what was happening to her, she replied that she was afraid of my condemnation for the fact that she was now without a husband, and at the same time for the fact that she had been lying to everyone for so long. There and then a condemning mother figure who gave her daughter in marriage for life and who is afraid of shame in front of her neighbors "came up". Shame was unraveled for a long time, tracing the paths of their appearance, they got stuck in shame and got stuck, apparently, I had a lot of my own deep, unconscious shames and fears. I remember very well how the client's story echoed in me:

- I can't even get into the trolleybus, it seems to me that it is written on my forehead that I am divorced, that I am lonely, I start to blush involuntarily. It seems that at the entrance everyone has already noticed that the husband has left, the grandmothers on the benches are talking about only this. I try to sneak home quickly and quickly after work and not leave the house anywhere. I also don't go to visit, there are all married couples, I feel lonely there.

The big problem after a divorce is a change of environment. Old friends were often in common, it is not clear how to behave with them now. There is a lot of confusion, fears, and shame. Shame leads to the loss of social and family ties. Paradoxical situation - it is impossible to get much needed support, as it is blocked by a feeling of shame. Interesting things happened in therapy. It seems that during the session, shame was experienced, the client came to life, she could more or less calmly experience the situation causing shame, but, getting into her life context, she again experienced shame, almost of the same intensity (according to the client's story). Then I decided that, apparently, the introject behind the particular shame was not being worked out well enough. Sometimes the same place, which, it would seem, has already passed, came up in therapy several times. I later read something similar in an article by Robert Reznik, "The Vicious Circle of Shame: A Gestalt Therapy View."

An interesting passage about shame, which I remember almost literally (about the tenth session):

- I cannot say at work that my husband left me, I am ashamed and scared.

- Tell us more about your feelings.

- There is more fear than shame, In general, everything is very confused, It seems that all the women of our team will start pointing fingers at me and laughing.

I was always a "prima ballerina" at work, I "gave instructions" to my husband by phone, the whole room heard it, everyone asked how I managed to bring him up like that.

At the same time, the client blushed.

- At our work, among women, it is customary to brag about their husbands and children, now they will take it out on me, there is no one behind.

At this point, I deeply thought about how to support her. Women, indeed, compete fiercely … While I was thinking, I was convinced once again that the clients are tenacious people.

“Don’t worry so much about me. I'll find myself a lover, even cooler than my husband, I have one here in mind.

In parallel with the work, fears surfaced with a feeling of shame. Again, they are completely different: real fears, fears generated by introjects, existential fears. Together with our clients, we wandered through their labyrinths, were scared, upset, figured out what is our own, what we project onto each other, what is parental, and what is due to society. The two most commonly reported fears are the fear of poverty and the fear of loneliness. Poverty frightened everyone, but the most vulnerable to this fear were women, whose husbands provided them well, and they had long been accustomed to taking money from the “bedside table” and living on an amount of money that far exceeded the average monthly salary of Belarusian citizens. The sad thing is that they didn’t know how to work, and they didn’t want to. In this place, the support was often provided that when the client "gets on her feet and ceases to depend on her 'ex', she will finally be able to tell him everything she thinks about him, to take revenge for all the last years of humiliation." Truly, anger is a great driving force. For me, the question is still open whether it is possible to change something in your life just as constructively on the feeling of love.

The fear of loneliness was covered with shame, usually women talked about it very quietly, as about something very intimate.

“I don’t know if I can survive alone;

- One is ashamed to be (again);

“What if I’ll never find anyone again;

- I can survive and I will, but I will not be happy for sure.

My question is "What is loneliness for you, what do you know about loneliness?" plunged my interlocutors into deep thoughtfulness, confusion.

- I have never been lonely, at first all the time with my parents, then I got married early, children appeared, what loneliness is there, I am alone scared and uncomfortable, I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m alone.

Women began to get acquainted with some of their new facet, with that side of life that they had never encountered before. It frightened, but at the same time attracted with novelty and some previously inaccessible experiences. This work on separating oneself from her husband, from parents, from children, on the awareness of oneself - separate, was long, but for me it was especially interesting. At this stage, the pain of my clients weakened to a completely bearable level, interest in themselves, in their personality came to the fore, for many of them it was the first experience of getting to know themselves. Introduced parental and social prohibitions began to surface again.

- I would like to go on vacation alone, but they always told me that it was indecent, I always went with my husband or with children;

- I want to change jobs, I already know exactly what I want to do, but neither my husband nor my parents would have supported this, and I'm scared alone, suddenly nothing will work out, then they will all rush at me "We told you …"

Again they returned to questions of choice, responsibility, to questions of the right to realize their desires. Own desires have already appeared, but in order to realize them, it was necessary to revise life beliefs, values, and their formed self-concept. Previously, everything was clear: I am a wife, I am a mother, I am an obedient daughter, sometimes I am an employee of an enterprise, everything incomprehensible was simply moved away somewhere further, and it seemed that it would always be like this, the world is orderly and orderly. And then at one moment everything collapsed. And who am I now? In the first place was I-mother. And in fact, the children, suddenly deprived of the attention and constant presence of their father, clung to their mother, demanded that she was always there. And at first, women were very supportive: they were necessary, even necessary. But as we left the phase of acute pain, I wanted to devote more time to myself, my life, my desires. This, again, ran counter to some social norms, to upbringing.

- If I go on a weekend out of town with the company where I am invited, then I will have to leave the children to sit in the city without air. What kind of mother am I after this? I won't be able to rest, I will feel guilty all the time.

It was very difficult for me to work in this place, because my daughter was then eleven years old, and she really needed me. Every time I left, I felt guilty, angry, pleasure was often poisoned. One of my clients unexpectedly supported me, saying something like this:

- Children need happy mothers, what's the point that we will moan around them, completely unhappy.

I seized on this phrase and for a long time ate it myself and fed the clients. Feelings of guilt became less, and more pleasure.

Many women, in parallel with the issues of relationships with their ex-spouse, stated numerous health complaints, most often headaches and various gynecological ailments. They also somehow tried to deal with this. In one case, headaches and fainting were classic manipulations:

- He can't leave me when he sees that I feel so bad. Patients are not abandoned. (?!)

Fainting and sudden lightheadedness recurred every time the ex-husband came to visit the children and was about to leave in the evening. And behind this it turned out: - My parents always stayed with me when I was sick, no matter how much we quarreled.

In some cases, when it was possible to deploy retroflection, there was suppressed aggression towards the husband, anger, irritation. Once, while working with a chronic gynecological inflammatory process, they found the disgust intended for the ex-husband. I like doing this kind of work in a small (5–6 people) group of women with similar problems. Classic exercise: be a sick or rejected part of the body or identify with a symptom, speak on its behalf. Usually a lot of energy is released, all sorts of unexpected things happen.

“My husband is cheating, I know about it, but I cannot reject him (for various reasons), then I get sick with some acute inflammatory process of female genital organs with a ban on sexual life (it hurts) and, thus, I reject him.”

Or.

“My husband has a mistress, I know about it, but I continue to sleep with him. It's a dirty relationship, and I'm dirty because I participate in it, so I get candidiasis (get dirty inside). " At the same time, again, there is a lot of anger at the "villain-husband".

Quite a funny episode about difflexive anger at her husband, which one of the clients told me, terribly embarrassed, somewhere in the twentieth session.

- I was so angry with him, so angry, I just wanted to kill him and this girl. Then I went to the village to visit my relatives and learned there how to do spoilage.

Then I found out where my husband and his lady were renting an apartment, went and threw this damage under the door when they were at work, and still “poked” needles into the door. The request to me was: "what to do now, when the passions have faded away, there is a lot of warmth left for my husband, and what if something really happens to him?" I didn’t find anything better than to advise you to go to church, to atone for sin. It seemed to work.

It was getting harder to work in this place. With the "bad" feelings somehow sorted out, but what about the "good" - then? They got angry, offended, ashamed, and it turned out that there was a lot of warmth, tenderness, a desire to take care of, a desire for deep intimacy inside. And it is completely incomprehensible what to do now with all this, to whom to give it. It turned out that many of these women have many such feelings, they just overflow. Unfortunately, before they themselves did not know this, did not realize it, they were embarrassed to show it, and if they did it somehow crookedly, violating both their own and other people's boundaries. It turned out suddenly that, in general, there are a lot of men around, and they like them, and excite them, and now we need to learn to build relationships. In many ways, life has become more difficult, although more interesting. How to get through the pre-contact, for example, if a man is out of fear himself ready to just slip through it? How to keep your boundaries and not reject your partner? How to reject and not offend at the same time? How to deal with inevitable rejection? How not to compare new partners with your ex-spouse? (egotism?). Should you enter into relationships with married men? And how to experience loneliness if new interesting relationships still do not appear, and you no longer want uninteresting ones? And is it possible to build several relationships at once, in parallel? Here we recall the well-known postulate that “there can be one piece in the field”. And if there is more than one energy? Or is it already diffusion? And, in general, how to get pleasure from the relationship? At this stage of the work there are more questions than answers. Mine? Or my clients? Or our common ones?

Summing up this work, I can say that although I have male clients, I have never worked with the problem of a man experiencing a divorce or breaking up a relationship. According to rumors, and from the experience of several of my partners, I guess that men also have this. It would be curious to find out how it happens with them.

This is how I managed to sketch out something about my experience in such a work plan. I planned to write in a more detailed way, but unexpectedly ran into my own resistance. Perhaps not everything is still ill …