Archive for March 10th, 2012
exaggerate the importance 2
Laura: “It sounds absurd when you put it that way, but I guess I have been fighting all my life to succeed and not fail.”
Therapist: “And this test is make or break, isn’t it?”
Laura: “Yes it is. When I was growing up, my father made it very clear that success was good, failure was bad, wrong, evil. It wasn’t acceptable. If I failed, I felt worthless. I had to succeed.”
Therapist: “You defined your identity as a good child in those terms, and you became the prisoner of your mistaken definitions of success and failure.”
Laura: “Well, it has all caught up to me now. I feel like I did when I had a chance to go to music school and blew it. I feel like I’m going to go down the drain all over again.”
Therapist: “You are prophesying disaster and working to bring about the fulfillment of your prophesies, which is not very hard to do. But tell me about the music school.”
Laura: “It was my dream. I’ve always been good in music, all through school. I played piano at graduations since sixth grade. I was the accompanist for every musical show they put on. I loved it.”
Therapist: “What happened?”
Laura: “My parents never encouraged me. They gave all their attention to my brother. I wasn’t sure I could compete in music school with really talented kids. The PTA gave me a $3,000 scholarship. I asked my parents what I should do. My father said nothing. My mother said, ‘Oh, do what you want.’ I could see they didn’t even care. I felt so alone, so discouraged, so afraid of making a mistake. My boyfriend at the time was interested in social work, so I went into that, and here I am.”
Therapist: “Here you are. Very depressed, very anxious and right back where you started from, about to watch history repeat itself. About to ‘snatch defeat from the jaws of victory’.”
Laura: “Instead of the other way around. Why do I keep doing this to myself?”
Therapist: “Because you are still angry at yourself for making the ‘wrong’ decision about music school, still feeling that you made a stupid mistake and that your unhappiness ever since is all your fault in the bargain. You are suffering from a very painful basic mistake, and it will have to be corrected before you can study, before you can get any sleep, and before you can permit yourself to enjoy the success that you have earned for yourself.”
Laura: “What is a Basic Mistake?”
Therapist: “A Basic Mistake is a fundamental faulty conclusion that a young child draws from a life experience. Yours is called, ‘I have lost my Golden Opportunity’.”
Laura: “That’s right. That’s how I feel. But it’s true, I have lost it – I’ll never get another chance. Why do you say it’s a mistake?”
Therapist: “Because you have exaggerated the importance of that event into cosmic proportions, as though not getting into grad school were the end of the world. Has this happened to you before?”
Laura: “Well, it seemed like it to me. I see a pattern of getting close to success and then letting it slip away. I’ve lost boyfriends that way, I threw away the best summer job I ever had by calling in sick and then getting caught at the baseball game. They said I had very poor judgement.”
Therapist: “You are having trouble trusting your judgment right now. Your parents discouraged you, they made you feel that your judgment wasn’t good enough and you fell through the trapdoor, you decided not to decide. You lost out on music school by default.”
Laura: “I thought I was playing it safe by not deciding. I only made things worse for myself. What can I do to improve my judgment.”
Therapist: “The truth is that your judgment is all right. The problem is that you won’t leave it alone. You expect it to betray you, to keep you from achieving the success you have worked so hard for. You wind up succeeding negatively. Now, you have a painful conflict between wanting to trust your judgment as an adult while maintaining the consistency of your childhood role as she whose judgment is poor, “who wants to succeed but never does.”
Laura: “That is what is so scary now, I am in danger of succeeding.”
Therapist: “It’s scary to make a break with twenty years of role playing.”
Laura: “If I make it, I don’t know who I will be. If I don’t, it will be the end of the world, like music school all over again. I can’t take it. It hurts too much.”
Therapist: “In reality, though, music school was not the end of the world for you. Your life went on. You see, it wasn’t a golden opportunity. It was an opportunity, that’s true. But you chose another course. The problem is that you are convinced that you made a fatal mistake in the past, as though music were the only true path to happiness. You have never questioned that conviction. You have been too busy blaming yourself for blowing your chances ‘forever’. Your anger at yourself is contributing to the terrible anxiety that you are feeling right now. When your anger is out of control, you are out of control. You cannot use your adult judgment effectively when you are drowning in self-anger and self-contempt.”
Laura: “I don’t have to be so angry at myself, do I? There are many paths to happiness. There is no guarantee that I would have been happy as a professional musician. I might have come to hate it for all I know. So I wasn’t really stupid, was I?”
Therapist: “No. You were just an imperfect human being with imperfect attitudes and expectations. In your discouragement, you behaved in ways that were consistent with your pessimism and despair. If we can remove these sources of your pessimism and despair now, you can make choices on the basis of self-respect. Then you can be happy whatever you do.”
Laura: “I feel better already. I wasn’t stupid. I was only an imperfect human being like you said. I am not doomed to be unhappy forever. And I don’t deserve to miss this golden opportunity now. I don’t have to be angry at life anymore, do I?”
Therapist: “No, you don’t. You can choose instead to forgive yourself for that ‘imperfect’ decision so many years ago. You have the power of choice. You have had it all along. You can choose to take life as it comes and use your adult judgment to make an appropriate decision. As your Homework, you can choose to catch yourself predicting a disaster in the future and consciously choose to live in the present.”
Laura: “Yes, I can. And I feel so much better already. I have to go home and study now. I have a final next week.”
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