A young woman was distressed about her relationship and afraid of losing it. She was no fan of mental health therapy, considering herself strong and independent. Life had thrown her several curveballs and she handled them by herself. Reluctantly, she came to Valley Community Counseling Clinic for help, as a last-ditch effort to save the relationship.
We met and I listened to her distress and confusion. It was painful to hear and, I imagine, difficult for her to acknowledge. She said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” and described her many failed attempts to fix things with diets, exercise plans, self-help books, and firm resolutions to just stop feeling insecure. Those attempts didn’t work. The relationship remained painfully damaged by fear, jealousy, and cruel outbursts of anger. These powerful and difficult feelings arose in her seemingly from nowhere.
I suggested her discomfort that seemingly came “from nowhere” might be coming from her internal world or filter, developed in childhood, that prevents or distorts a better experience of current relationships. I was reminded of the insight of Melanie Klein who wrote “the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of early ones, and that every child for the first years of its life goes through an immeasurable degree of suffering.” i
The patient robustly engaged with therapy, presenting dreams, memories and current feelings that revealed significant pain, as well as a rich and complex ability and desire to give and receive love. Her initial feeling, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” was modified. She developed increasing understanding and insight into her internal world and, correspondingly, better capacity to tolerate the ups-and-downs of everyday life, including her relationship.
This patient’s modified and improved understanding of herself recalls the hope and challenge found in the process of therapy:
My experience has shown me that we are not in a position to judge either the amount of love or of hate which is present in any person until we have understood the ways in which love can be buried under hate and the reactions which have then again been formed against this hate. ii
More broadly, the process of therapy can and should improve the links, and appreciation, between our internal unconscious mind and our external perceptions and lived reality.
[T]he inner world of the mind has a continuous living reality of its own, with its own dynamic laws and characteristics, different from those of the external world. In order to understand the dream and the dreamer, the psychological history, symptoms, or normal interests and character, we have to give up that prejudice in favor of external reality, and of our conscious orientations to it, that under-valuation of internal reality, which is the attitude of the ego in Western civilized life today. iii
By Scott Turner
Photo by Scott Turner
i Melanie Klein (1927). “Criminal Tendencies in Normal Children” in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945 (New York: Simon and Schuster).
ii John Steiner, ed. (2017). Lectures on Technique by Melanie Klein, pp. 37-38 (London: Routledge).
iii Susan Isaacs (1948). “The Nature and Function of Phantasy,” Int. J. Psycho-Analysis, Vol 29.