Goal of Therapy: Dealing With Our Feelings:

Once we are able to bring to the conscious our feelings, a goal of therapy is to:

1.  Identify our feelings (label/put our feelings into words).

2.  Feel our feelings (give ourselves the permission to feel the feelings).

3.  Embrace our feelings (allow ourselves to really feel it).

4.  Understand why we feel how we feel.

5.  In spite of how we feel, we choose to act constructively. This is the hardest part: to feel however we feel, but not act on the feelings when they are not constructive to act on.

Secondary Gain

When we seem unable to stop a negative pattern (as poignantly put in Romans 7:15: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”), there is an unconscious “gain” that keeps the pattern in place. The word, “Gain” is confusing, since we can conscious detest that particular habit/pattern. Nonetheless, our unconscious is “getting” something out of the continuation of that pattern.

For  Example: A patient complains that his children are always dependent on him: that they cannot do anything without his help. Although his children are adults, they still come to him for financial assistance. They don’t even take care of their own automobile, and need daddy to check and change oil to maintain their car. As your patient complains about his children, he continues to respond to his children’s demands and requests. The Secondary Gain could be the sense that he is still needed by his children, or that his children love and feel safe enough with him to approach him - unlike his own relationship with his distant and uncaring father.
 

Treatment Option:

To help a patient to “give up” his Secondary Gain, we need to first help him to become aware of it through exploration. I might say something like, “Psychobabble says that when we keep on doing something we consciously don’t want to do, we might be getting something out of it. If that was the case, what might be the pros and the cons of you continuing to do what you do?”

Repetition Compulsion

When we have unresolved issues with our primary care taker/”primary object,” we find ourselves repeating the similar pattern of interaction with others. This is our unconscious’ way of trying to resolve our relationship with our primary object. We do not consciously look for similar patterns or dynamics in our present relationships – it doesn’t make sense why we would ever want to repeat such similar relationship! However, our unconscious “picks up intuitively” which persons have similar issues with our primary objects, and we become “attracted” to these relationships. The unconscious idea is that, if we are able to resolve the dynamics in our present relationship, then maybe we can “undo” our relationship with our primary care object. The problem is that we cannot turn back time, and the person(s) with whom we are in relationship with presently, cannot fix what was broken in our primary relationship.

 For Example: A person grew up in an emotional abusive household where his parents ridiculed and emasculated his attempts to assert himself. He finds himself attracted to close friends or romantic objects who eventually (usually not right away - as he would know to stay away from such blatant similarity) are dismissive of him, do not respect him and demeans him; He finds himself being emotionally abused by these close friends and objects.
 

Treatment Option:

To help a person to resolve his Repetition Compulsion, we would ask the patient, whom do these present objects remind him of emotionally? We would help the patient to first identify and acknowledge the feelings suffered as a young child under the hands of his abusive parents. We would then encourage him to feel his feelings and to embrace his feelings. We encourage him to mourn what he had experienced, and then choose to forgive his primary object. We would also nurture him the way he needed to be nurtured as a young child, so he can have his needs met as a child, and move forward as an adult.

We would also explore his present relationships and join his present coping mechanism until he is ready to give it up on his own, by saying something like, “To be with the monster we know, is better than the monster we don’t know.”