2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
The therapist becomes for the client
that "good parent"
which allows him to push
the boundaries of their "stripped-down self-image".
I have long wanted to write about this!
The information contained in the article meets all confidentiality requirements.
The story of my client Pavel is so typical and so common in the topics of my other clients that I decided to write an article about this kind of therapy based on it. Perhaps you, the reader-user, will find in yourself similarities with the described character, and you, the professional reader, will take something from my article into your work.
A 32-year-old man applied for therapy, he is married and has children. At the first meeting, he spoke about social shyness, about dependence on the opinions of others, about the difficulty of rejecting them, about the desire to be good and the desire to resolve all situations peacefully. (I call this attitude in life - the position of the cat Leopold). He said that one could put up with this if uncontrollable outbursts of aggression did not periodically arise in relations with loved ones (family), after which he blamed himself and shamed himself. And I was also scared of myself. Moreover, those unpleasant and shameful situations in which he could not prove himself as a man - he lacked courage, confidence, firmness, clarity …
In my therapeutic work, I proceed from the axiom that a person is the result of all his previous experience. Especially important is his early experience of relationships with loved ones, which is subsequently reproduced in today's life. It is here that basic self-acceptance is laid and formed. And a parent who is himself incapable of self-acceptance turns out to be incapable of accepting his child either.
It is in these early relationships that the basic programs are recorded that govern a person throughout his adult life. And not everyone subsequently manages to revise them and adjust them to the constantly changing reality of life. Most people remain in these trap programs, a kind of psychological matrix that deprives life of the possibility of choice. They steadily reproduce all their well-established old patterns of interaction with other people and the world as a whole. (I wrote a lot about this phenomenon in my book "The Pitfalls of Life: There Is a Way Out!")
For this reason, I study with great interest and attention the client's previous experience, which is imprinted in his picture of the Self, the picture of the other and the picture of the world. In Pavel's story, I was impressed by his childhood family story about Poop-poop.
Pavel was the only child in the family. His mother, judging by his descriptions, was controlling and anxious, and his father driven and weak-willed. The mother, due to high anxiety, could not allow the manifestation of childish spontaneity and emotionality in the child. The father, in this situation, turned out to be a passive witness of what was happening. Being weak, he was unable to contain his wife's anxiety or support his son in his attempts to discover his self. This is not surprising: a father who has problems with his own masculinity cannot nourish his son with masculinity.
In such family systems, a mother who is not supported by her spouse is not able to cope with her anxiety, and in order to somehow cope with it, she begins to intensely control the child. The inability to rely on a spouse in upbringing leads to the fact that the mother begins to rely on social norms - what is good, what is bad. As a result, all living, spontaneous manifestations of the child are usually mercilessly circumcised.
This was also the case in Paul's family. In those minutes when some kind of emotional impulse broke through him, and he behaved like an ordinary living child - disobedient, active, direct - he was accused and shamed, while calling him Pashka-poop.
This was the case throughout Pavel's childhood and gradually nothing remained of Pashechka-poop. Under the influence of constant “psychological circumcision”, he had to hide deeply in the depths of his personality this “idovish”, spontaneous, living part, leaving for others only the subpersonality of Pashechka - a comfortable, obedient, exemplary boy. So his adolescence and years of study at the university passed unnoticed and without problems for those around him.
And everything would be fine, but only in the adult family life of Pavel, a number of problems, indicated above, were discovered, with which he came to therapy.
What are these people who have undergone psychological parental circumcision?
I will draw a generalized psychological portrait of them.
They are more often obedient, comfortable, hypersocial. They have a rich experience of being a good child and they continue to carry this image in their adult life. They are with a heightened sense of guilt, responsibility, socially timid, dependent on the opinions of others. Sometimes apathetic, weak-willed, or, on the contrary, overcompensated. Often not sensitive to themselves, with a high level of self-violence. Often, when contacting them, there is a feeling of people without a rod, or people with a broken ridge. This is especially noticeable in men. Periodically, they have outbursts of aggression followed by intense feelings of guilt and shame. But they have a negative attitude towards aggression, adhering to the motto: "Guys, let's live together!"
How are people of this type formed?
They are grow up in families with anxious parents who are unable to withstand the high level of the child's emotions, especially aggression. But not only aggression. (See the article Allow Your Child to Be …) Parents with low self-acceptance. Parents who are rigidly oriented towards social norms. Parents who cannot admit and in every possible way hide from others, and often from themselves, their own "poop parts".
And "poop" can be different - harmful, sad, hysterical, capricious, naughty, aching, stubborn …
"Poop" is a child's test of the parent's boundaries of his love.
And, depending on the answers to these questions, the child builds his own boundaries for accepting his Self. Those of the parents who outline very close boundaries for the child for his Self, like a gardener, cut off everything from the child, in their opinion, superfluous.
Parents have a number of pedagogical techniques that allow them to neutralize poop. Here are some of them:
I am not at all for parental permissiveness. Extremes are not good, including in education. Rather, I want to draw attention to cases of excessive efforts by parents to make a comfortable, obedient doll out of a child.
Having passed such a training school, the child no longer needs strict supervisors in the future. Growing up, he himself begins to spread rot, condemn, reproach, devalue, accuse, shame … A strict inner parent is firmly settled in the structure of his personality, who does all this himself. He shames himself, blames himself, scolds himself … (article The parent himself) However, this is not enough for him. Such people are looking for and find such partners who gladly take on these punitive functions. His expectations in "punishment-circumcision" are projected outward and this role most often goes to his partner.
However, the unacceptable "poop parts" are those resources, that potential, that energy that a person cannot use. And then you need to hide your "poop", hide it from others and from yourself. And that in itself takes a lot of energy. The energy hidden in the "poop" becomes uncontrollable by a person. And it periodically breaks through uncontrollably, uncontrollably, out of time and even more frightening.
As a man, it is especially sad for me to watch when parents in a boy “strangle” his aggressive part. Indeed, for a man, his aggression is extremely important. This is the protection of his life values, ideas and the protection of his loved ones, and the ability to set goals, achieve them, compete, and defend their values. This is the ability to be a breadwinner, to provide living conditions for their loved ones. And there is a lot more for which "masculine" energy of aggression is needed!
Therapy
The general therapy strategy with the described client is reanimation and activation of the "poop part". Everyone has their own, and someone has a whole list!
And all of them need to be discovered first, to get to know them, to find the resource contained in them, and subsequently to recognize, accept and love. Or at least admit and accept.
It is very difficult to break through in therapy to accept your rejected parts. The devaluating, non-accepting parent (as I wrote above) becomes an inner parent and is projected onto other loved ones. As a result, it becomes impossible for a person to accept positive information about himself. To people who praise, support, they notice they treat with distrust, ascribe to them various selfish motives - If he praises, then he wants something! All attempts of support, praise, positive reactions, including therapeutic ones, are not assimilated (not appropriated) by the client. The client ends up in the trap of rejection and, in a paradoxical way, he begins to choose as partners those objects with which it turns out to be impossible for him to complete the child's unsolved problem in unconditional acceptance.
Finding and accepting your "poop" in yourself is a long and difficult process. In therapy, the therapist becomes a “good parent” for the client who allows him to push the boundaries of his “reduced self-image”. Often clients, having received permission from the therapist for the opportunity to be like this, are surprised: "What, is it possible?"
And in the treatment of such cases, the therapist will need his skills to treat “everything human in a person” with acceptance, respect, admiration and love, including his “poop”, will be useful to the therapist. It is this attitude towards a person that is healing. And everything else is a matter of technique and time.
Love yourself! And the rest will catch up.
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