Unconscious Plans

One of the most appealing components of CMT for me is its insight that patients develop unconscious plans and execute them in part by testing their therapists. I believe this sort of thing is an everyday reality, too. We are adaptable beings, which means that experiences will have an effect on us, for good or ill, whether we like it or not. So we need to be careful about opening our lives to only "safe" experiences, experiences that will help us take our lives in directions we sense we want to go. But our foresight is not very good, neither is our anticipation of what an experience may forebode. So we find unconscious ways of testing the waters first. We devise unconscious strategies that will give us the experiences we need to judge better. The strategies are unconscious precisely because we are not ready to commit ourselves to the tentative directions new experiences might take us. It's only after a lot of unconscious testing that we can fully commit ourselves to a particular direction. At that point, we become conscious of making a life choice.

Charlotte's parents were among the most destructively intrusive parents ever to walk this earth. Charlotte needed desperately to establish a barrier against them if she was ever to have an independent sense of self, but could not bring herself to consciously decide to cut them off. Part of the reason is that, because of her parents' destructiveness, she could not be confident that an independent self was worth having. But she had an inkling that might be true, a measure of hope she derived from her therapist. Unfortunately her therapist would also inadvertently suck her back into the morass now and then, as would her sponsor, by suggesting that she should feel sorry for her parents.

Charlotte had to find a way to establish a barrier and educate her therapist and sponsor as to her need for separation at the same time. She accomplished both unconscious goals, I believe, by developing the mind-set that any influence that would tend to draw her back to her parents would be met by a dramatization to the effect that suicide could possibly result.

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