A crisis will occur if any member of the family wishes to leave by getting the “family” out of his system, or dissolving the “family” in himself. Within the family, the “family” may be felt as the whole world. To destroy the “family” may be experienced as worse than murder or more selfish than suicide. Dilemmas abound. If I do not destroy the “family,” the “family” will destroy me.
—R. D. Laing
This chapter will examine three young adults who came to therapy because they were unable to leave their families. The developmental principles discussed in the first two chapters are present in all three patients. They were all emotionally undernourished and all remained stuck in their families by the promise of future love and the hidden desire to reform their parents. Similarly, all three used both the splitting and moral defenses, and these defenses, once their salvation, now made their adulthoods all the more difficult.
I have begun with a quote from the late R. D. Laing’s essay “The Family and ‘The Family,’” because he recognized the seriousness of the emotional damage done to children who were unable to separate from their families. Many unhappy families cling together out of fear rather than out of love or positive attachment. The family members turn to one another in an attempt to protect themselves from the outside world. Often the family impairs the child’s developing identity because his or her development is stunted in order to meet the parents’ need for protection: “If I do not destroy the ‘family,’ the ‘family’ will destroy me.” In order to survive as a fully developed adult, the individual from an emotionally impoverished family must give up his attachment to his family (“destroy it” in Laing’s terms) in order to save himself. Other members of the family will try to prevent him from leaving because any defection threatens the security of the remaining members. Finally, as I have noted in the first two chapters, the ignored, deprived, or abused child is less likely to escape because his unmet developmental needs keep him attached to his family both for protection from the outside world and to keep his unrealistic hope of love in the future alive.
Three Young Adults Who Needed Help to Escape
This chapter will focus on clinical examples of three of my patients who came for help because they were mired in their families of origin. Generally, those adults with the most deprived emotional histories end up with the very weakest identities, and consequently have to remain closest to their parents in order to function. The case histories in this chapter are ordered from weakest to strongest. The first patient, Julie, an anorexic young woman who continued to live at home and whose daily food intake became the major focus in the family, demonstrates the very weakest personality structure. William, the second example, also still lived at home but functioned marginally (he held a job outside the home) and had a somewhat stronger sense of self, but was still in need of help to free himself. Sandy, the third individual, was in the strongest position of the three as she had enough of an identity to live separately from her parents. However, she could not tolerate the reality behind her illusions, nor could she sever her attachment to her failed parents. Eventually, her defenses, which were originally developed to protect her from the truth about her parents, threatened one relationship after another.
Anorexia: A Failure to Separate
At one time in my practice I was seeing twenty-five people a week, five of whom were suffering from anorexia. This gave me a great deal of experience with this difficult disorder, and the following example is a composite of two of these patients.
At first glance I could see that Julie was seriously anorexic, as the sides of her nose were slightly caved in—a very serious sign of long-term self-starvation. Julie was twenty-six, yet lived at home and was unemployed despite a successful college resume. She described a history in which her needs for self-direction were continually overrun by her mother. When she was young, she had been force-fed, and at other times when she refused to eat, her face had been pushed into her plate. So much damage had been done to her identity by her mother’s intrusive attacks on her autonomy (and by her father’s refusal to protect her) that she felt too weak to function independently in the world. Anorexia is often described as a disorder of adolescence; however, Julie was twenty-six and her anorexia was a testament to the fact that she remained extremely attached to her destructive family. She had been hospitalized in a treatment program specializing in eating disorders, but soon after her release she went right back home and resumed her self-destructive eating pattern.
Julie had a history of self-punishment when she gained weight, which is common in anorexia and which served as a window into her developmental history. Her body became a representation of her two separate selves (wounded and hopeful) and she related to it in the same way that her parents related to her as a child. When she gained weight, she saw her body from the perspective of her wounded self and disciplined it with a vengeance, often exhausting herself with exercise or purging with laxatives. The intensity of her aggression toward her body informed me of just how punished she once felt when she failed to please her uncompromising mother. Conversely, when she lost weight, she experienced her body from her hopeful self’s perspective and felt the possibility of love because of her perversion of the concept of “success” (losing weight when you are severely underweight is a very difficult feat)—despite the fact that her body was in a debilitated state. Her adoration of her looks when she lost weight was a repeated challenge to me, since if I became too critical, she would have left therapy. Julie seemed to jump right out of the pages of Alice Miller’s book For Your Own Good:
Her parents insist that they have a harmonious marriage, and they are horrified at their daughter’s conscious and exaggerated efforts to go without food, especially since they have never had any trouble with this child, who always met their expectations. By the manner in which she is enslaving herself, disciplining and restricting herself, even destroying herself, she is telling us what happened to her in early childhood.
(131)
Miller notes in this powerful passage how the intensity of feelings that were once experienced in childhood are recreated by the anorexic in a single-person drama of her psychological relationship with her mother. Parents of anorexics look like they are deeply involved with the child, but frequently, they are most involved in shaping and training their child’s performances, be they academic, athletic, or artistic. They ignore her real needs for closeness, support, and unconditional love. The anorexic child’s hopeful self is created out of actual memories of being loved for her brilliant and precocious performances. However, she is fully aware that the love that she receives is fragile and could be destroyed in a second if she fails to live up to her parents’ standards. Conversely, her memories of punishment for failure created a large and active wounded self that contains all the anger and pain from the rejections that she experienced. Once again, the splitting defense protected her hopeful self from being contaminated or destroyed by the large number of severe rejections hidden in her wounded self. The heartless way she treated herself when she gained weight served as a mirror into her experience of the rejections that followed her failure to meet her parents’ extreme demands.
Julie was almost “welded” to her parents. After our first session, she went home and told her parents everything I had said. This indicated to me that she was fixated at very young age, as she could not maintain any psychological separation from the very people that handicapped her development. Julie also insisted that I get a scale so she could weigh herself in my office. I knew this would place me in the very same position as her parents, struggling week after week over her weight gain or loss. Ironically, her parents, who once dominated Julie, had become her slaves, as they were forced to take care of her long after she should be living on her own. She was once terrified of their disapproval, but now they monitored her food intake and were terrified of her refusal to eat. This pattern of the child learning the parents’ tactics and then turning them back against the once dominant adults can be seen again and again in unloving families.
I was determined not to become enmeshed by Julie’s weight loss so I bought two high-quality scales and had a mechanically minded friend alter the spring mechanism in one, so it read wildly higher. I proudly displayed my new scale to Julie and as she immediately checked her weight she wailed, “Oh my God, I’m over a hundred pounds!” Julie was around ninety-five pounds at the time. A five-pound gain to an anorexic is psychologically equivalent to a gain of seventy-five pounds to a normal person. “I’m so sorry, Julie,” I said, exaggerating my apology. “I bought the scale at a discount house and they said that it might be defective. Bear with me and I will have another one for our next session.” Weight was a deadly serious topic to Julie and she was very angry that I could be so casual and incompetent about it. Her weight was her single source of power in the world, and her goal was to use it as tyrannically against me as her mother had used parental power against Julie when she was a child. The next week I had both scales out and told Julie that I wanted to weigh myself as well. She almost grinned—I was obviously playing around with this very serious issue, and I was as determined to have fun as she was to take it seriously. She tried to reassert her power by reciting facts about her altered body chemistry and her precarious hold on life—facts that she knew as well as any medical doctor. This tactic had managed to intimidate the two therapists she had worked with prior to me, but I reasoned that if she managed to dominate our relationship with her weight, then no progress would be possible. “Well, then you use the good scale and I’ll use the other one,” I said. Julie became uncomfortable with this idea, because weight was her most important weapon in her struggle with the world, and my interest in my own weight threatened to take some attention away from her. Her weight was the important issue, not mine. We stood on the scales, side by side, mine reading over a hundred pounds more than hers. She was pleased that my “good” scale matched hers at home, because she weighed herself several dozen times a day. Then I casually slipped my toe on her scale and gave it a little jolt upward. Julie roared, “That’s it—I’ve had it with you! You’re making a joke about my very life!” “What life?” I responded. “As far as I can see, you really don’t have one.” This awful truth spun around the room like a tornado—Julie looked like she was going to faint. “I do so,” she protested. “I have a great life—probably better than yours.” On and on we went, she claiming that she had a wonderful life except for having to deal with me, her idiotic, bumbling therapist, who was the most incompetent fool she had ever gone to for “help.” During her tirade, she was unable to conceal the delight that she took demeaning and condemning me for my incompetence. This helped her indirectly discharge the resentment in her wounded self against her infuriating and incompetent (yet too important to leave) parents. I became the safe symbol for their failure, and Julie excoriated my “technique,” my office, my clothing—everything about me. Goodness, did she have fun! We began meeting twice a week and she always started out with a sharp criticism of me—criticisms like the ones she suffered as a child, or those that she heaped on herself if she gained weight: I failed to clear the ice off the walkway endangering the very lives of my patients, there were dust bunnies under the radiators filled with lethal germs, the pictures on the wall were so old they were curling up with shame. On and on these complaints would go until she would segue into her life and struggles with her parents. Gradually, over several years her attacks on me decreased as her new identity took form—an identity that was ultimately strong enough to be able to venture into the world, get a job, and begin an independent life of her own.
William, or Life in the Basement
The majority of adults who fail to separate from their families simply remain at home long after their peers have moved into adult relationships. This is a common scenario, one that occurs in almost every extended family. The following quotation, from Peter Wilson’s chapter in the book Narcissistic Wounds, illustrates one of the most common signs of impending trouble:
They have chosen to insulate themselves within an encapsulated inner world, immersed in private preoccupation and phantasy, and occupied in solitary activities…. Many drop out of school or work. They give up their studies and literally disappear into their rooms, often staying in bed throughout the day, only occasionally making limited forays out of the house…. Their self-imposed isolation of course is not absolute; it occurs in the proximity of others who are inevitably concerned. It functions both to defy and to torment those who are around—and paradoxically to call forth the very interference it seeks to resist.
(55)
The similarity of this description to young women with anorexia nervosa is startling. Both withdraw from normal life within the context of their family, which then focuses more and more (consciously) unwanted attention on the child. Withdrawals during the teenage years indicate that the young adult can not yet face the world outside of the family because they are not yet ready to separate from their destructive but needed parents. Today, many young people who withdraw within the matrix of the family become immersed in science fiction, underground music, or the Internet. I have met others who simply retreated into hours and hours of daydreaming. One patient reported that he invented an entire fantasy town in which he served as the mayor, police chief, and star baseball player.
Those young adults who isolate themselves within the family are tempting their already meddlesome (or in other cases, indifferent) parents to try to vault the now higher wall that they have created. In effect, the young person’s wounded self is inviting a fight with the parents. Often, in families where strife is commonplace, the wounded self becomes the major pathway of attachment (motivated by the desire to reform or for revenge) since after years of disappointment the wounded self grows stronger than the hopeful self. When this happens, the young adult usually shifts his efforts toward defeating or defying the needed but hated parent. The troubling aspect of these withdrawals within the family is that the young person’s hopeful self’s fantasies are often extreme and completely out of touch with reality as compared to the previously described illusions about loving parents. Often, these fantasies are barely based on reality and no longer involve an emotional attachment to others, since these young adults were so deeply disappointed in their parents. In effect, the young adult has given up hope of emotional support from the human community and has substituted grandiose fantasies of unlimited power or fame. This was the case with William, a patient who came for a consultation because he was constantly tired despite sleeping most of the day. He was living in a basement apartment in his parents’ home and earning a meager living by stacking shelves in a local supermarket at night. He was at a higher developmental level than Julie because he had a job outside the home; however, he was still developmentally fixated at a preadolescent level and greatly in need of emotional support.
William came in an expensive but old and unkempt suit. He looked like a Beat poet with a long beard and wild and excitable eyes. He had been a high school music teacher but a destabilizing event early in his career forced him to leave that profession, and he took a less stressful job. His supermarket job gave him great freedom from anxiety, since restocking shelves at night afforded few if any interpersonal contacts to upset him. His menial job did not deprive him of income, as his parents supplemented his paycheck every month. He came into therapy both because of his chronic depression and because his dreams of unlimited power were beginning to take on a life of their own. In short, he became concerned that he was going crazy.
William was the only son of European immigrant parents who were once wealthy but were unable to restore their past social and economic status once they came to America. They felt overwhelmed and insecure in this country and disguised their anger and frustration by constantly denigrating everything American while idealizing European culture. William showed enormous promise as a musician at a young age. He attracted considerable attention from his music teachers, who were thrilled to have a student who showed so much obvious talent. Instead of sharing this enthusiasm, his parents were cynical if not outright hostile to his musical achievements, often calling him “the big shot” whenever he reported success in school. His parents unconsciously humiliated their son in order to keep him insecure about his potential. His success threatened to exceed their own achievements in life, which would give them another source of inferiority to face. Had William been encouraged during his development, he would have had enough strength in his identity to separate from his socially inept and insecure parents, begin dating, and perhaps move away, which was another possibility that terrified them. By constantly demeaning him, his parents weakened his identity and prevented him from separating from them. Not unexpectedly, the amount of criticism he faced forced William to develop both the splitting and the moral defense to preserve his attachment to his parents, and the actions of these defenses later proved to be obstacles when he stepped outside his family.
When William applied to colleges, his parents opposed all applications to out-of-state schools, which they deemed too expensive. William complained loudly, but complied, because at some level he too was anxious to separate from the family that had destroyed his confidence in himself. During his college years at a local commuter college, William drew considerable support from his professors and this allowed some positive development of his sense of himself. This newfound strength helped him to challenge (but not separate from) his aggressive and demeaning father. He and his father became involved in a ritualized morning battle. His father would come down to his basement apartment just before leaving for work, seething with irritation because of his chronically oversleeping son. He would demean William as being a lazy “American punk,” who fell far short of the family ideal of a cultured and educated young person in the European tradition. In addition to his musical talent, William had a exceedingly quick wit and he would often pester his angry father with entrapping questions. For instance, he would ask whether his father was “first and foremost a Christian, an American, or a man?” His father, who loved contentious debate, would attempt to respond to these loaded questions. Regardless of the answer, William would pick his father’s response to shreds. This scene was the reverse of his childhood, where many of William’s statements were made fun of by his insecure parents. In effect, this type of questioning became an important part of his attachment to his parents since it helped express the anger in his wounded self. Over time, William became more skilled at this form of hostility than his parents, and he would frustrate and further enrage his already irritated father. On occasion he would so anger his father that the morning confrontation would end with a slap or shove. This reversal is similar to the reversal described in Julie’s case, where the child who was enslaved by her parents’ every opinion later learns to enslave them by not eating.
After graduation, William’s parents bought him a car and suggested that he remain at home rent-free. This sudden switch from hostility to indulgence is common in unloving families, as the parent’s tactics shift in order to keep the young adult at home. Many parents are as covertly dependent on their children as their children are on them. William had the option to leave, but the sudden indulgence played into his unmet developmental needs. It seemed as if he was finally getting some of the support he longed for; and second, at some level he realized that his compromised and stunted identity was unable to support him independently in the world. He used the rationalization that he deserved to live rent-free as repayment for all the hostility he had suffered as a child.
His teaching career began with a great deal of promise. During his first year of teaching, William developed several alternative teaching programs for musically gifted students. He showed his outline to several peers who praised its creativity. The praise stimulated his unrealistic hopeful self and he imagined that the Commissioner of Education (who represented a new loving parent) would praise his work. His hopeful self became increasingly grandiose and he began to fantasize that he would revolutionize the teaching of music throughout the country. His hopeful self exaggerated the praise from his colleagues, which substituted for the support that he craved but did not receive from his parents. His imagined success prompted him to make an appointment with a state official in the Department of Education. He assumed it would be a large meeting attended by the Commissioner and his staff. However, when he went to the appointment he was met by a secretary who took his proposal and informed him that they would call him in a few days—a call that never came. His hopeful self collapsed as he was leaving the building and was replaced by his bitter and self-hating wounded self. He heard the words of his father: “the big-shot dreamer,” and he seriously thought of suicide as he drove home. By the time he arrived home, he was deeply ashamed of himself and unable to face his colleagues and return to work.
William collapsed into an incapacitating depression, and this reinforced his fundamental belief that he was as defective as his father proclaimed him to be. Not surprisingly, his depression made him docile, and his parents readily offered to take care of him until he was well enough to go back to work. After the one year leave of absence that William was granted expired, he was dismissed by the school. He remained deeply enmeshed within his family of origin, bitter and increasingly angry, yet unable to separate. William displayed the pattern often seen in adults who were undermined as children and consequently are unable to separate from their families: they lead uninspiring and marginal lives and occasionally have momentary flare-ups of unrealistic grandiosity.
William’s unhappiness and frustration might lead one to assume that he would welcome help from a mental health professional in his quest to separate from his parents. Nothing could be further from the truth! William brought all of his entrapping questions, his sarcasm, and his absurd grandiosity into his therapy sessions with me. I was confronted with the same type of aggressive questions that so enraged his father. Within the first fifteen minutes of our first session, I felt defensive and frustrated by his verbal onslaught. The enormity of William’s wounded self, and his use of it to relate to me, a benign person who is a “designated helper,” returns us to the issue of responsibility. His cynical, challenging, and provocative behavior produced the same effect in me as it did in his father. Was William a victim of his history or was he now the perpetrator of his own unsuccessful life? Both positions are true, but as we get older, the responsibility for the conduct of our lives becomes more and more our own burden. By provoking angry responses from others, William was able to recreate a world filled with interpersonal strife and aggression, regardless of the good intentions of the person with whom he was interacting.
After a number of sessions in which I was inundated with hostility and distrust, I became less interested in helping him—a human response that psychologists are supposed to be aware of and overcome. I love to clown around, and suspected that if I could work some fun into our sessions, I would be less likely to give up on William as a patient. I proposed that we keep score of the number of times he really skewered me with his hostile criticisms. I would “rate” his attacks in terms of baseball scoring: singles, doubles, triples or home runs. This strategy took the sting out of his nasty aggression by turning it into a game, and paradoxically, urged William to increase his hostility, so he could achieve a high “score.” William replied characteristically, “Sure, any brilliant technique from your grab-bag of flim-flam pseudoscience is fine with me.” Within five minutes we were hotly debating the merits of one of his cruel remarks—I had scored it as a double and William felt it was a homer. “Well,” I said, “we clearly need to hire a referee.” This released another tirade of anger at me, in which he deemed me a “mealy-mouthed weasel that couldn’t even score a put-down.” I was so taken by his creative contempt that I awarded him a triple on this new attack. This aggressive verbal pattern continued but rather than fighting about me, we were fighting over his creativity. I had moved myself into the role of a judge of his productions rather than as the target. This allowed me to have some fun and to not take his continuous stream of nasty comments to heart. It also allowed us to eventually work cooperatively to begin the process of untangling him from his family. I will return to William in chapter 5.
Sandy: Living Separately—but Alone
The following example of Sandy illustrates the next developmental step upward from William. Sandy is typical of many adults from developmentally unhelpful families who have been able to leave the actual family home, but are unable to prevent the severity of their defenses from disrupting their adult friendships. In effect, Sandy carried such intense and powerful images of her family in her head that she reacted to others as if they were from her family of origin. In psychotherapy, this tendency to react to others as if they are family members is called “transference.” Sandy came to see me because of her social isolation, her continuing overwork, and difficulties with the few friendships she had left. She was raised by her divorced mother, a professor of music at a community college. During her childhood, Sandy’s mother was frequently physically abusive toward both Sandy and her sister. They were blamed for their mother’s disorganized, chaotic, and unsuccessful life. Their mother frequently said that she could have been a world-famous performer had she not been burdened with them. Sandy complained about her intrusive and rejecting mother, yet as an adult her attachment remained intense; she called home daily and she never missed Sunday dinner with her mother, despite describing these family gatherings as “dreadful.”
Sandy worked as an editor of screenplays and was financially very successful. However, she was never satisfied with her success and worked at a frenzied pace, constantly looking for a big “break” that would make a name for her in the film industry—just as her mother sought fame in the world of music. Not surprisingly, Sandy was forced by her years of childhood rejection to use the splitting defense in order to remain attached to her mother. This defense became an integral part of her personality that remained into adulthood. The automatic nature of the splitting defense caused her to distort reality by seeing her friends either as extremely good or extremely bad, views which would often change without warning in an instant. This is the great paradox of defense mechanisms: they protect us from crushing anxiety during our childhoods, but then become an integral part of our personality that often damages us in adulthood.
Like many adults who use the splitting defense, Sandy had many relationship problems because the moment she felt frustrated by a friend, her wounded self would jump out of its hiding place in her unconscious and she would “turn” against that person and forget all the good aspects of the relationship. This is just like the child of two who screams “I hate you mommy” just three minutes after cuddling affectionately. Frustration wipes all the positive memories out, and the child is completely caught in the emotions of the moment. These severe shifts of perception and feelings were responsible for many of the relationship breakups that Sandy described. These relationship problems were not limited to male-female romances, as her relationships with other women were filled with strife and she repeatedly got into sudden and unexpected conflicts with a constantly changing cast of friends.
During one session, Sandy described an incident in which she experienced an upwelling of explosive anger toward her current best friend who had “insulted” her sister. Her friend saw a picture of Sandy’s sister in the company of a new male companion. The man in the picture was much older than her sister and was dressed like an underworld character. Her friend looked at the picture and exclaimed, “Some catch, I hope he has plenty of money!” Sandy’s sudden and extreme anger at this remark took her friend by surprise, because they had often joked about the up-and-down romantic life that Sandy’s sister led. Sandy had repeatedly and pointedly made fun of her sister’s lifestyle in our sessions as well, describing her as an exploiter of wealthy men who made her “romantic” decisions based on how much money her various dates were willing to spend. Sandy also felt appropriately slighted by the fact that her sister still lived rent-free in the family home, and frequently borrowed large sums of money from their mother without paying it back. This view of her sister came from her wounded self which had a large number of memories of her sister taking advantage of Sandy’s good will as well.
I began to investigate what life event prompted Sandy to suddenly switch from her wounded self back to her hopeful self’s view of her sister. The answer appeared almost immediately. It was the recent death of her father, a neglectful and completely disinterested parent, who lived in a distant state and had little to do with either of his daughters. The loss of an uninvolved parent should logically have little or no effect on “adult” children; however, because Sandy had never been emotionally supported as a child by either parent, her father’s death crushed any remaining hopeful self fantasies she had about him. The attachments to her family that she did have were weak and supported by her unrealistic hopeful self, and the loss of her father increased the need for even stronger fantasies of attachment to her two remaining family members. Her father’s passing caused her to strengthen her hopeful self’s fantasy that her self-centered mother and exploitative sister constituted a good “family,” and simultaneously she repressed her wounded self’s perceptions completely.
Thus, the pressure from her father’s death provoked her hopeful self to displace her wounded self, and this shift came as a complete surprise to her friend. Her innocent friend had no idea that Sandy was now in a completely different state of mind about her remaining family, and Sandy’s harsh reaction astonished and angered her. Sandy’s excessive anger was prompted by the fact that her friend’s view threatened her now necessary fantasy that she had a close attachment to her sister. Sandy’s aggressive response toward her friend caused their relationship to cool dramatically and eventually she lost the relationship.
The suddenness of the anger and its inexplicability often leaves others confused and offended. Sandy felt absolutely justified in her anger toward her friend since she could not remember the opposite view of her sister, which was now repressed in her wounded self. Sandy’s use of the splitting defense caused an endless series of “misunderstandings” with friends, which left her without any alternative except to remain attached to her dysfunctional mother and sister. This example illustrates how severe defenses can imperil those few outside relationships that the young adult has, which over time leaves them with fewer and fewer alternative relationships to lean upon. With no network of friendships to support them, and no stable relationship with a partner, many individuals like Sandy continue to lead exceedingly lonely and frustrating lives with only their family to “count” on, a sad fate for many adults who already suffered from destructive developmental histories.
“Repetition Compulsion”: Doing “It” Over and Over Again
The greatest irony of a childhood fraught with rejection and frustration is that when the child grows up, he or she tends to recreate similar rejecting and negative situations in his or her intimate adult relationships, assuming the individual even manages to separate from the family of origin. It is the most paradoxical result of a poor developmental history. The recreation of the original family pattern in “new” relationships is a way of remaining attached to the original family in a new location, with new actors in old roles, and this common psychological event is formally called “repetition compulsion.” The obvious healthy solution to a painful childhood would be to flee as far as possible from the pain and emptiness of the early years. Often, healthy solutions are out of the reach of adults who were reared in unloving families, because these families were not supportive enough to allow their children to develop new and healthy identities. Rather, these young adults are left with a vast inner emptiness inhabited by the two opposite and unstable wounded and hopeful selves (instead of a complex personality structure), and their relationships with others are marred by both the splitting and moral defenses.
I was originally introduced to the dynamics of selecting the worst possible mate as a consequence of my consulting job to the county public defender, an attorney with the job of representing individuals who could not afford to pay for a lawyer. In most cases, I would administer a battery of psychological tests to the defendant and work with the attorney to aid in the defense. It was in this capacity that I was introduced to a young man who had been arrested for arson—specifically, he had ignited the gas tank of his girlfriend’s car as an act of revenge. He explained that his girlfriend had teased him to the point where revenge was his only possible response. I was very surprised to find that every time I called on “Tim” in jail, I saw the young woman whose car he had burned waiting to see him during visiting hours. Later, when he came to my office, she came as well and waited for him in the waiting room. I was puzzled by her attachment to the young man who had deliberately destroyed her car.
Tim described his romance with this young woman, Carrie, as stormy, filled with intrigue, and tremendously exciting. Carrie was volatile and seductive—she would tease him by offering to go out on a date and then deliberately reject him at the last moment. This pattern of promises followed by rejection was unlikely to be popular with many conventional young men, those who are not used to or interested in false promises. However, I was to learn that Tim had been severely rejected by his parents, and he developed a powerful hopeful self that lived on either the illusion of love or its counterpart, the rage within his equally powerful wounded self. Carrie’s teasing and enigmatic promises absolutely fascinated Tim, as she appealed to both of his split selves. His hopeful self was activated by her demands that he pass a series of “tests” that proved his love before she was willing to go out with him. These tests provoked long-buried memories of the obstacles he faced when trying to get love from his mother, and they activated his hopeful self, which was sure that love was just around the corner. Conversely, his wounded self was used to severe rejection, and when rebuffed, Tim worked strenuously to overcome and reform Carrie’s resistance to dating him, just as all children initially try to get their parents to pay attention to them. Not surprisingly, Tim had been indifferent toward a past girlfriend who had freely given him affection because it did not feel genuine to him.
The more unreasonable the demands that Carrie placed on Tim as a prerequisite to her surrendering her (assumed) love, the more he became emotionally involved. Carrie’s rejections were humiliating and quite severe, and his wounded self, with its enormous desire to reform the other, was engaged and working at fever pitch. He had a preexisting program of strategies designed to change his girlfriend’s mind when she rejected him. His hopeful self also was completely engaged by Carrie’s promises, which he assumed signaled that she had a storehouse of love waiting to be tapped, although this was on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. The more bizarre, unreasonable, and sadistic Carrie’s behavior became, the more Tim was attracted to her. At this point, early in my career, I realized I was in new territory, and went to my supervisor for a lesson on the dynamics of the human unconscious.
Carrie stepped over the line and became so rejecting that Tim’s wounded self gave up on all efforts to reform her, and in a torrent of frustration he switched to a revenge scenario. Carrie overstepped Tim’s tolerance when she deliberately invited another interested young man to her home after she had also agreed to see Tim, knowing that this would make him jealous. Tim went into a rage, punctured her car’s gas tank with a screwdriver, and ignited the gasoline, burning himself in the process. Ordinary women would be horrified by the hostility of this behavior but Carrie saw his antisocial act as a tribute to her value and to her power.
After he was jailed, Carrie behaved like a devoted family member. She saw Tim as being more powerful and desirable than ever before. Her adoring response provoked Tim to switch back to his hopeful self, and the intricate selection process that underlies repetition compulsion was well on its way. Their mutual hopeful selves were cut off from the memories of her sadism and his violent revenge. Both Tim and Carrie had two isolated and opposite selves that engaged each other in an elaborate dance that not only focused all their energies on each other, but also excluded normal individuals from being interested in either one of them. This emotional drama engaged all of the preexisting mechanisms of both of their personalities. In simplest terms, Tim’s childhood prepared him for this type of relationship, as he could not feel comfortable with a normal partner who would be unable to engage these large unconscious parts of his personality. He found Carrie’s rejections as challenging as were his parents’ rebuffs. His wounded self churned inside him, filled with desires of revenge or reform, while his hopeful self was filled with the expectation of unlimited love. Tim believed that Carrie, who was in reality a bizarre and dysfunctional woman, was a prize catch, and he pursued her with the same zeal that he pursued his original parents. This is the same dynamic that is responsible for the endless attachment between the battered woman and her abuser that I have detailed in my book The Illusion of Love: Why the Battered Woman Returns to Her Abuser.