After Talking With My Mother, I Die

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

After talking with my mother, I am dying …

This article will focus on things that are familiar to professional psychologists. But for my students who study systemic constellations, it is very important for me to once again place significant accents in the work of a therapist with one very, very important topic.

One of the clients (let's call him Semyon, the name and details of client situations have been changed to maintain confidentiality) said the following about his situation: “I love my mother very much … But every time I call her or talk to her, something strange happens. A feeling of drowsiness and lethargy attacks me. At such moments I have a complete reluctance to do anything, characteristic headaches, inability to concentrate. Sometimes there are short-term outbursts of anger. But after them it's even worse. The degree of emptiness is even greater. I can't even read at such moments. All I want is to feel like a full-fledged person after contact with my mother."

The phenomenon of inharmonious relations between a son (daughter) and mother (father) is very common. And it’s not fun at all. For both. Therapeutic work with this situation can be structured with varying degrees of depth. And achieve different results.

Depth level 1. Dealing with the confusion of roles. To see in the constellation (by the way, it is in the systemic constellation that this can be seen very clearly) that the client's deputy is not next to his wife (husband), but next to his mother, and looks not at his own goals, but at the goals of his mother. Sometimes on her own initiative (he goes there himself), sometimes the mother herself sneaks up and stands next to the client.

The solution in this situation suggests itself. It is necessary to draw the client's attention to what is happening and help to express a new, more constructive position in a permissive phrase and reinforcing gestures: “Dear mother, today I found out that I am playing the role of your symbolic husband. This is too much for me. I can't stand it. I can’t go on like this and will not. I cannot be your husband. I cannot exchange sexual energy with you as your husband. Any man you find yourself will be a better husband for you in this respect than I am. And I refuse this honorable role! I am only your living son! And my place is here (reinforcement is a decisive step into a place in front of my mother, in my place as a younger one in relation to my mother, facing towards my goals, into the future). Of the two of us - you are older, I am younger, you give, I take, thank you for your life. I take from you my life that you gave me as a gift, without any sense of guilt. You are always a mother to me, I am a son (daughter) to you. It's time for me to go about my business! I have my priorities, my goals! Bless Mom! Give me the strength of the family, the strength of life, the blessing of the ancestors. I will take everything and put everything into action. And life will continue and our family will flourish!"

Additional actions (tools) in working with roles can be the following metaphoric moves:

• Talk to the "absent" father, who can be: a) dead, b) alive, but divorced from his mother, c) alive, married to his mother, but performing the role of a symbolic husband of his own mother, d) chronically ill, etc. There are many options. The essence of the conversation with the father is as follows: “Father, I am not your rival, not an understudy, not a competitor, not an assistant … Your relationship with your mother is your relationship. I'm not going to interfere with them. I need both of you. I need you just like my mom. I am only your son (daughter)."
• Remove the confusion of roles … Talk to father and mother, uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers on the topic: “I am just me, Ivan Petrovich Sidorov (Natalya Sergeevna Petrova). Don't confuse me with anyone. I cannot replace you with anyone else. I cannot replace your dead or lost children, brothers, sisters, parents. I cannot replace your loved ones, friends, fellow soldiers, victims of the war. I cannot replace you with anyone else. I am just me. And I live in 2018 ".

Result: As a rule, if this procedure is done efficiently, there is a significant, significant, very noticeable improvement in the condition of both the client's deputy and the client himself (regardless of gender)

But in the practice of my work, such traumatic situations of interaction between a mother and a son (daughter) are repeatedly encountered that this amount of work is not enough for a stable improvement of the client's situation. He, even feeling relief, after a while "slides" into the usual submissively guilty position, into a state of sleepy-passive-weak-willed trance in front of his mother.

In my opinion, the reason for such a slide into the previous ineffective position in communicating with the mother is insufficient contact with one's own feelings and feelings of the mother, insufficient deep clarification of the systemic causes of the current situation.

After all, it did not just happen that the son (or daughter) ended up in the role of the mother's symbolic husband (or any other wrong role). Being in this role is the fulfillment of the unspoken instructions of the family system, the implementation of a number of internal and external reasons, which are intertwined with each other in a bizarre way.

For example, a woman (the client's mother) initially agreed to be married to a man who "is not free, busy with his mother." To agree to this (and this is a very big humiliation and insult for most women), you yourself need to be symmetrically unfree, loaded, “not entirely owned by your husband”. For example, a woman may be involved in such systemic dynamics as grieving for a father who died early, or for the deceased children of her mother or grandmother. In this case, she simply needs an “absent” husband in order to reproduce in her feelings of longing, resentment, aggression and other complex feelings about an “absent” relative with deliberate regularity. This is how the displacement (transfer) of feelings in the family system works.

And then it happened. Two loneliness converged in such a pair - to help each other bear grief and reproduce difficult feelings. And what role do these parents assign to their child? The role of additional glue for their relationship, companion in misfortune! He immediately after conception begins to boil in the broth of their tears (feelings). As psychoanalysts (Menalie Klein) have perfectly clarified, a child, being in an unfavorable environment for himself, cannot imagine that his parents are bad. He can fantasize that he himself is bad (guilty) and then carry this feeling of guilt before his parents to the very gray hair. Rather, not only the feeling of guilt, but the most bizarre mixture of a wide variety of feelings: fear, pain, loneliness, powerlessness, anxiety, excitement, excitement, aggression, anger. And why? And because when a load is thrown on you, not yours, when "not for Senka's hat", the child really puffs up and strains, but there is no result. Self-esteem creeps down!

For one of our clients, a mother, offended by the behavior of her “absent” husband (did not protect her from the attacks of her mother-in-law), transferred the dream of an ideal man to her first child. "Here you are born, son, here you will really protect your mother, not like your father!" The child has not yet been born, and he has already been given a very important role and a heavy burden of responsibility for the well-being of the mother, and the parents' marriage in general.

So it turns out that with a simple clarification of the roles without taking into account the feelings of each member of the family system involved in this situation, the feelings of the participants remain unmanifested (and therefore excluded). Yes, the deputy can feel relief and even take a step in the right direction … But the excluded feelings (pain of the mother and father, feelings of guilt and fear of the son or daughter), like an elastic band, return the situation to its original position.

Therefore, in order to achieve a long-term positive effect of therapy, it is important to be able to identify, perceive, express feelings, even the most difficult ones. And not only their own, but also mothers, fathers, grandparents, dead and living, adults and children.

Depth level 2. Find out and express feelings. Empathy and empathy

Is it easy? No, not easy. It is not always possible for a client to achieve such a level of clarity in order to direct the focus of his attention to feelings (his own, father's, mother's, ancestors). To work effectively with the client's feelings, you need to cook. Sometimes a protective-defensive trance, which acts as anesthesia, habitually protects against the toxicity of the relationship with the mother, does not let the client go deep. "I'm good. I am generally calm. I am not angry. I'm not offended. I just get tired after contact with my mother … Help me to make sure that I do not get tired …"

Why is the client so afraid when he is afraid to look at his feelings and the feelings of his parents? There are options here. He may fear the extent of his anger or fear. "40 years old, dear parents, you are using me for your own purposes … How long …?"

The total fear of a two-year-old child who rushes to protect his mother from the beatings of his drunken father. It is far from easy even for a very mature person to come into contact with this, even in the safe situation of the therapist's office.

He may be afraid that the image of a father or mother will fade in his eyes, and they will cease to be ideal and infallible, but will turn into ordinary people with their weaknesses and passions, with their fear, pain and powerlessness.

But no matter how scary, touching the truth is healing. Contact, real contact with your feelings, and the circumstances that encapsulated these feelings, and turned them into a baton for the next generations, makes a person more mature, adult, responsible for himself and his actions. Ultimately makes him a freer person.

For one of the clients, a simple phrase became a real revelation: “It’s not your mother who makes you empty. You are the one who empties yourself next to your mother. Let's think together, why do you need this? This became a turning point for realizing one's own feelings, secondary benefits from learned helplessness, for realizing the vector of movement towards a new life.

The task of the therapist-constellation is to ensure such contact with the feelings of all participants involved in the situation so that this contact does not become retraumatizing for the client, so that it is within the reach of the client.

Well, it is quite clear that if the constellation therapist's own feelings for his mother are not clarified and worked out deeply enough, then he simply “does not see” the need and ways to clarify and express the client's feelings for his mother. What is the threat? This can leave the client at the first level of depth in their work on their situation. No chance of deepening. This means that it condemns the client to walking in a vicious circle.