(Post 9)

Forgiveness in the Modern Psychoanalytic world has not been addressed directly. Nonetheless, it behooves us to address it as part of the healing for patients on their journey to wellness.

Forgiveness is “For Us”

You’ve heard the saying: “Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” The reality is that when a person has hurt us, s/he continues on his/her merry way and seemingly forgets all about us and the harm they have caused us. When we don’t forgive our aggressor, we are the ones imprisoning ourselves in bitterness, resentment, thus like: “drinking poison,” while the aggressor goes scot-free.

Therefore, it behooves us to choose to forgive those who have hurt/wronged us, so we can release ourselves from this prison we have built for ourselves!

Forgiveness is a choice. When we choose to forgive, over and over again, the feeling of forgiveness – thus the freedom from our pain and bitterness – will eventually follow.

For Example:

Betty was molested from the ages of 6-10 by her uncle who was a teenager at the time. This has caused her to become promiscuous, and contracted various sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) at a young age. While she disdains herself for her sexual behavioral pattern, she detests her uncle as the cause of this pattern. She is stuck in a loop of promiscuity, further exacerbation of her STDs, hatred toward, and sabotaging herself, and bitterness toward her aggressor. Whom, by the way, has moved on with his life, became a Born-Again Christian, gotten married and serves in his church. Betty despises her uncle and hates the fact that he has become a Christian and is serving at his church, while he never apologized or made amends for how he had set her life-course on this vicious cycle.

Treatment Suggestion:

Help the patient to grieve her pain (loss of innocence in this case), by going through the Stages of Grief: 1) Shock/Denial; 2) Anger (toward oneself; toward the Object of the loss/Aggressor; toward God); 3) Bargaining; 4) Depression (both missing the good aspects of the loss as well as feeling a sense of relief that one no longer has to deal with the negative aspects of one’s relationship with what was lost); 5) Acceptance.

In order for one to be able to grieve one’s loss, one needs to first be able to get in touch with her negative emotions from the experience. If a patient has a hard time getting in touch with her anger or empathy toward herself for the wrong done to her, help her identify a young child in her life whom she loves, and imagine this young child experiencing what she had experienced. Help her to put into words her feelings, feel them, embrace them and grieve the loss/the wrong done to her. Help her to identify how her life was effected by this wrong.

Provide psycho-education of how Unforgiveness only hurts us and not the aggressor. Help to choose to forgive the aggressor in order to set ourselves free from bitterness and resentment.

Even though we did not do anything wrong to cause the abuse/wrong done to us, we tend to blame ourselves nonetheless. Studies have shown that when a victim blames herself for the crime done against her, she feels a better sense of control: If we think we did something wrong, we can then do something differently going forward to prevent further wrong done to us. Therefore, it’d be helpful to assist the patient to Choose to forgive herself for her “part/ participation” in the event.

(Post 8)

“A Fear is a Wish”

When we are anxious/fearful of something, it usually is us “writing the script” of that which we are afraid will come true (Please view Post 4 under, “Being in the Moment”). Our fear represents what we think are “doomed” to happen to us. So, a “Wish” is this case, is really a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy…when we are afraid of something, our unconscious actually “makes it” happen…

Frequently, this “Wish” is being fueled by our Core Belief (Please refer to Blog Post # 1). Such that, we unconsciously repeat what we think/believe how life will inevitably “turn out”…

For Example:

Mark is afraid that he will be rejected by loved ones as he was ~ his mother chose his twin brother over him, leaving him in the hospital at birth, while taking his twin home (whom was healthier, and the mother felt had a better chance of surviving). His mother’s excuse was that she was too busy at home caring for his twin, she didn’t have the time to travel to the hospital to look in on him. So, he was left in the NICU for the first six weeks of his life, without being visited by his mother. Mark unconsciously feels “doomed” that he will be rejected by others and is fraught with the suspicion that his wife had an affair early on in their marriage. So, his fear of rejection is his self-fulfilling prophecy, as he is “certain” that his wife has cheated on him (just like his mother did by choosing his twin over him). So, we don’t really know whether or not his wife had actually cheated on him. But to Mark’s mind/belief, he is “certain” that she did…

Treatment Suggestion:

We can provide psycho-education to Mark on this concept of Fear is a Wish, and ask him if this is part of the dynamic, which Core Belief he thinks might be “replaying” in his life? We can help him grieve his primal rejection by his mother as a newborn, while separating his mother from his wife by saying to himself: “My mother is my mother, and my wife is my wife. My wife is not my mother and my mother is not my wife” in order to help him not to displace his rejection onto his wife.

The Interplay of Anxiety and Negative Emotions

When a person is feeling anxious, it is usually coming from one’s feeling of negative emotions or anger. We might not permit ourselves to feel negative emotions, and our anxiety becomes our way of coping with these feelings. Sometimes, anxiety is our unconscious trying to tell us that we have negative emotions…and we react by “morphing” negative emotions into anxiety…

For Example:

Charles was taught/trained to not “entertain”/feel negative feelings toward others. He developed somatic symptoms of indigestion, fainting spills, tremoring, heart palpitations and cold sweats. He continually goes to see various specialists to find what is wrong with him physically, but test results consistently come back as negative for physical ailments.

Treatment Suggestion:

Introduce the idea that his anxiety might come from him not being allowed to feel negative emotions, and ask him to hypothesize which negative emotions might he be feeling, if he had any? If he has a hard time identifying negative emotions, it might be effective to help him to identify with someone whom he loves (ideally, a child), going through what he has gone through in life…how might that person/child feel? Help the patient to empathize with this vulnerable child in order to get in touch with his own vulnerability.

Give him permission to feel his negative emotions by putting them into words, validating and joining these feelings. This brings the unconscious feelings to the conscious - where there’s reasoning, which enables the patient to have better control over these feelings.

Depression is Anger Turned Inward

When we are “trained” to not feel anger toward others, the unconscious redirects that anger toward ourselves, and we implode and become depressed. This usually came from our Primary Object (our parents) not being able to take our negative feelings, especially anger, toward them. Typically, our parents would have reacted to our negative feelings toward them in one or more of following: 1) Retaliation ~ Scolding us, yelling at us, our physically punishing us for being “rebellious;” 2) Crumble ~ Our parent feels so hurt that s/he has been such a terrible parent, that s/he cries, causing us to feel guilty for hurting him/her; 3) Withdrawal ~ Our parent feels hurt or inadequate, and emotionally withdraws from us.

Since we cannot safely express our negative/angry feelings toward our parents, we then turn our anger toward ourselves. Narcisstic Defense is operating here (Please refer to Blog Post # 4), namely, we “protect” our parents from our negative emotions, when in truth, we are protecting ourselves from their negative emotions/ reactions toward us.

Treatment Suggestion:

Help the patient to identify her anger toward the person who has disappointed her, verbalize her anger and feel and embrace her anger. Help her to understand why she feels angry toward the person (explore to see if it’s a displacement of feelings from a Primary Object, or a person who has hurt us from the past, aka, “transference”). And, in spite of her anger, help her to choose to act constructively in the situation. Sometimes, the constructive action might be: to forgive the person; to distance herself from the person; to confront the person; to reconcile with the person…or combination of any of the above (forgiveness is a necessary step to heal us from depression).

It’d be good to also help our patient to direct/verbalize her negative emotions/anger toward us. When she is able to verbalize her negative emotions, we do not defend or explain ourselves, nor withdraw, nor do we attack back (like her parents did). Instead, we invite the patient to tell us more, how we have failed her. We explore how we have failed her. We validate her feelings through joining, and we thank her for telling us her negative emotions, as it took courage for her to do so. So, we model for her what her parents should have done: Acceptance of her anger/ negative emotions; validation of her feelings. And we invite her to “help” us to become a better Transference Object to her (one that sees, hears, understand and accepts her unconditionally). Depending on what she didn’t receive from her parent, sometimes we might need to frustrate her in order to help her build her frustration tolerance: Healthy (re)parenting is a combination of nurturance and frustration.