Presentation: Camelia Stavarache is President of the Integrative Psychotherapy Association, Integrative Psychotherapy Trainer and Supervisor, specialized in Ericksonian and Clinical Hypnosis
Richard Erskine says that these defense mechanisms help the individual protect himself against the breaking up of a relationship. From a life-scenario perspective, shame derives from believing the “Something is wrong with me” scenario, as a result of messages, decisions, conclusions generated by impossibile requests, as well as from defensive control or defensive hopes. Also, shame implies a low self-esteem due to its confluence with criticisms, defensive inversion of sadness and fear, with denying the anger. Moreover, shame can also be an archaic fixation or an introjection. Self-justification, which is a replica of shame, is actually denying the need of relating. Integrative psychotherapy is contact oriented, focusing on investigation methods, syntonisation and involvement.
The patient, whom I will refer to as Braduta, started psychotherapy in February, last year. Braduta was a final-year student of a humanistic faculty. She doesn’t talk much, has a hidden aggressiveness, she is afraid of loneliness and considers herself neither pretty, nor ugly.
She has been depressive since she was 5. Her parents had a volcanic relationship: the father was pseudo-present, while the mother was aggressive. Because the girl was her dad’s favorite, her mother beat her black and blue each time she had a bad day.
THE HISTORY OF HER TRAUMAS:
– at 5, her mother put the girl’s hands of a hot iron, because she suspected the girl to have stolen some money from the house; numerous beatings and other physical ill-treatments.
– at 8, her parents divorced and the father broke the parental relationship with her.
– at 18, she began her sexual life with a “good-for-nothing”. They broke up as friends, but afterwards she was sequestrated and forced to practice prostitution for 3 weeks, before she managed to escape. For the following 6 year, she couldn’t have a relationship with a man. After those years, she had a boyfriend for 3 months and another one for 11 months. Both men were aggressive. Now, she is oscillating, having sporadical sexual relationships with the latter. Se feels depressed and non-assertive. Solving her relating traumas became the objective of the therapy.
Braduta is the second of two daughters. Her sister is 7 years her senior and took part in raising her after the parents’ divorce. Her older sister has always been her mom’s favorite and protected. “No matter what my sisters did, she was right. When she made a mistake, we were both punished, while if I made a little mistake, I was suffering the punishment alone. I remember one time when my sister stole the only pair of nylon tights I had and I couldn’t go out any more. I was 18 years old then. I just couldn’t take it any longer and I showed my anger telling my mother that my sister was stupid. My mom slapped me in the face so hard that I started bleeding.”
The two sisters were often left home alone, with the responsibility of keeping the house clean, preparing their own food or doing their homework.
The every day life post-trauma reaction model is, as follows: she doesn’t express her initial anger, according to the “something is wrong with me” scenario. This particular scenario has been built on the confrontation with a potential losing of the relationship. In this case, the child can feel constrained to take the confluent defensive decision of accepting as her identity the labels put by the ones she depends on.
When confronted with impossibile tasks and requests, children often draw conclusions like “There is something wrong with me”. Through this conclusion, they can defend themselves against the discomfort produced by their unfulfilled contact needs, maintaining a false-appearance relationship in this way.
The belief in the “Something is wrong with me” scenario can appear as a defensive reaction, as well. This reaction is meant to ensure both the control and the hope of a continuous interpersonal relationship, in full contact. When family relations are dysfunctional, “ a child longing for contact-in-relationship can come to imagine that the adult who takes care of him has problems because of him.”
During the musico-theraphy exercise, in “Fighting the dragon inside the labyrinth” Braduta identified the dragon as being her own mother, and the difficulty of getting out of the labyrinth as a mother dependency. I symbolically translated that she needs to live that period of small child in fusion with the mother, the young pupil days, to talk about a 8 year old secrets with the emotionally missing mother. Living, she will learn the daughter’s part, while the mother – the mother’s part.
