Caroline: Introduction I

• Thoughts on Vic's Questions by Jessica, 3/27/98
  
  

As for the question about CM and bonding, just let it go as something I regretted saying as soon as it was posted. As for the statements regarding Jamie and Caroline's sponsor inadvertently leading Caroline to feel sorry for her parents, refer to the 5/18/97 post entitled "CAROLINE: Work: Seduction or Success?"

The reason I chose the Caroline case study even though it's a bit inconvenient to discuss here is that Jamie's description was detailed enough to allow me to speculate with some assuredness about what may be going on even though of course I never met Caroline. I would like to outline my view of Caroline's therapeutic process in several posts.

I'd like to begin by quoting Joseph Weiss: "The power of pathogenic beliefs derives from the fact that they are acquired in infancy and early childhood from parents and siblings, whom the child endows with absolute authority….when in conflict with his parents, he tends to perceive them as right and himself as wrong….Pathogenic beliefs reflect the child's egocentricity, his lack of knowledge of causality, and his ignorance of human relations. The child tends to take responsibility for whatever he experiences. He may take responsibility for anything unfavorable that a parent does, or for anything unfortunate that happens to a parent. For example, he may take responsibility for the depression, illness, or death of a parent, or for the unfavorable ways his parents treat each other."

As these statements suggest, parental lessons take on the aura of absolute truth, not merely truth about this particular child's relations with these particular parents and siblings, but truth in the form of expectancies regarding the child's relations with every other human on the planet. To use Weiss's word, the child "overgeneralizes."

As a child develops, it finds that its worldview doesn't quite square with the actual outside world. Children and adults it meets do not seem to notice that it is as "stupid," "fat," "ugly," or "clumsy" as one or both parents have contended. These encounters do not have much of an impact on the child's self-image, however, because the child searches for ways to interpret these apparent discrepancies so that they are consistent with the worldview. That is, the child uses its worldview as a touchstone when interpreting extra-family relations. So the child may view friendly outsiders as being too nice to say what they really mean or as people the child has tricked by being on its best behavior.

As time goes on, the discrepancies begin to mount, however. Another influence that challenges the worldview, I believe, is the native sense we all have to the effect that we are all alike, that what others have and enjoy should be open to us, too. So over time, the child starts testing the expectations derived from its worldview in furtive and completely unconscious ways. This is done unconsciously because doing it consciously would involve a premature commitment to a dangerous course of action, dangerous in the sense that failure could cause sufficient pain as to lead the child to never again pursue that life goal. Unconscious, uncommitted action permits a degree of freedom to fail. Thereby we open our lives to experiences our worldview says should be dangerous, and thus loosen the hold of the worldview a little by discovering that there was no danger at all or that there was but we could handle it with some effort.

What I am indicating is my belief that the testing CM talks about begins long before the patient's first day of therapy, and, further, that the person often becomes a patient precisely because his own growth initiatives in one or more areas of his life have led him to confront much more formidable issues elsewhere. When he unconsciously realizes that he cannot master these issues alone, he calls for help. Since the issues must still remain unconscious, his call takes the form of symbolic dramatizations. He creates symptoms or proclivities for destructive behaviors--entities that are recognized consciously as definitely not being normal and which become a burden to the person in his daily life. Finally, the person seeks therapy to be rid of these self-creations.

All this seems to imply that a person has an unconscious life plan in mind, if not as a series of specific goals, at least as a generalized sense of where he wants his life to go, a sense that gets refined as life goes on. I believe that is true, and that all too often people truncate their quest by "settling down" upon becoming an adult. About that time, they may begin imposing their dreams onto their children, who have a right to dreams of their own.

In my discussion of Caroline's case, I will stress three areas of pathogenic concern:

1. Pathogenic beliefs derived from her childhood.

2. Pathogenic behaviors that she developed through imitation of her parents and in dealing with them, behaviors which, however, impede her in attaining her adult goals.

3. Pathogenic attitudes regarding psychological growth. These are really pathogenic beliefs, but in #1 I will talk about the beliefs that impede her from being "normal" in a generalized sense. In this section, I will focus on the impediments to her exploring her individuality to the fullest.

As I finish this post, I realize that I never directly addressed something Jim Duffy mentioned--the relationship between CMT and my view of dreaming. This turns out to be relevant to the case in question, and I do have something new to say. So there will be two introductions instead of one.

• more thoughts? by Jessica, 4/1/98