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Description and Word for Word Transcription of
Structure with “Kathleen”
led by Albert Pesso December 2003
Including Kathleen’s comments on the structure and her poem Copyright 2004 Albert Pesso and Diane Boyden-Pesso Not for publication or duplication She was a fascinating mixture of vulnerability and lurking threat. Her dark eyes filled quickly with tears but regularly flashed wordless challenges to me. Her skepticism was clear at the outset of the program, “I don’t think anything of value can come of just two days of work with you,” she said, and followed that up by telling me that she had been in therapy for eighteen years without any good effect. She gazed intensely at me as she silently dared me to think I would do any better. Though the barbs launched from her down-turned mouth and angry eyes fell upon me with chilling effect, I could not ignore the nearly simultaneous expressions of helpless suffering and pleading for relief that leaked out around the rims of her bold hostility. We are in a European city where I am launching the first day of a research program on the efficacy of PBSP for use with clients with traumatic histories in conjunction with the university in that city. Four clients with traumatic history have volunteered to be subjects. Days before, they had each filled out psychological questionnaires and then were placed inside an fMRI scanner to make records of their brain activity as different images were flashed on a screen before them. This was done to establish a baseline prior to the two days of the workshop with me. After the workshop they will be asked to fill out a second questionnaire and then be given a second run in the fMRI scanner to see what changes show up in the various brain structures that could be affected by the work. Kathleen is a very intelligent, talented person who has lived in despair and unhappiness all of her life. Our work together had a shaky, precarious beginning. Before I begin to make therapeutic interventions, I like to establish a clear contract with the client that she is going to follow her own impulse to heal and will bring the work of a structure (the name we give to the therapeutic process) to a good end. In a structure we review and illustrate clients’ negative history with the help of role-players or objects chosen by the client to represent the figures in their past. The purpose of this is to provide a stage where the memories and consequences rising from past failures of maturational needs can become clear and consciously experienced. Then we can construct a supplementary, symbolic history with alternative, life supporting figures that we call ideal mothers, fathers, etc. who, had they been in the client’s life, would have provided the necessary interactions that would have naturally led to a more fulfilling and happier life. This contract negotiation with Kathleen was fraught with pitfalls. It soon became clear that her idea of the therapy would be that I would make suggestions and she would follow them. That smacked of a state of surrender (and disguised passive aggression) on her part and I told her firmly, but gently, that this was not a contract I could agree to. I said, “If you are following me, then you are not being you.” I told her that in PBSP the therapist follows the client, trusting that the emotions (felt consciously as affect and unconsciously as sensations in the body) that arose in the work contain the seeds and energy that would result in a healing reorganization of perception and action in the present. “My contract is to follow your desire,” I said. She grew silent, her eyes, downcast. Then she said, “I feel split and it feels kind of strange to speak for one.” I said, “Everyone has different parts and we will give room for each one. I assume there is one you with many parts.” “It seems that a part would never stop crying, and there is another part that sees an ideal world.” I said, “That is the part that has hope. There is the part of you that is still longing for something. I call that the soul, the part that is longing to have it the way it should be.” “When I was a child there was the crying child.” I asked her why she was a crying child. And she said, I was always sad, worried and afraid.” “Children are never those things for nothing,” I said, “you must have seen sad things, things that made you worried, seen things that made you afraid.” For long moments she looked at the ground, deep in thought and I imagined she was reviewing old images in her mind. “What’s happening inside,” I asked. “I remember big people who tried to care for us but had many troubles themselves.” “I said, “Do you remember I said in the theory in the beginning when big people have problems we try to solve it ourselves?” She looked at me and nodded glumly. “I’m guessing you did that.” “Who arre the big people?” I asked. “Mother, father and grandmother,” she replied “Who was the one who needed help themselves?” I asked. “All of them, She said. “Even your grandmother?” I wondered aloud. She nodded sadly in assent. Holes in Roles Here she presents a classic example of the negative consequences on a child’s life when significant role figures do not or could not carry out their necessary care-giving responsibilities and have unfulfilled needs themselves. This is a double whammy. First, her basic developmental needs are not met and that has negative consequences on her normal maturational processes, which would result in the absence of emotional security or a regular sense of well-being. Second, her innate capacity for compassion has been too early awakened and over-stimulated by the sight of suffering loved-ones. The consequences of this are deep, dark (in the sense of unconscious) and disastrous to her natural inclination to act (without guilt) in her own self-interest. This kind of history is the foundation of a life-long pattern of attending to the needs of others at the expense of neglecting one’s own needs. The unmet needs of her childhood development, never having been fulfilled, continue to stay unfulfilled fueling her unending misery and disappointment with life. If she had only suffered deficits of her needs at the hands of uncaring or unable parents, the usual PBSP intervention would be to supply her with ideal parents who would have been caring and capable enough to do so. This would be enacted in the session, always with the client’s agreement and control. Each event that highlighted a deficit is re-played and satisfied/solved both verbally and non-verbally. At the end of such a structure we help the client anchor and imprint this symbolic/virtual event in what we call the mind’s body – a repository of remembered age states, actions and interactions that are the data base out of which people construct future anticipations of interactions in the real world. In other words, our history predicts and produces our present and constructs the foundation for our future. A negative history, uncorrected, tends to produce a negative present and prepares one for a negative future. A positive history, reinforced, tends to produce a positive present and leaves one with justifiable hope for a positive future. This healing intervention with ideal figures, so successful with clients who have had just a single whammy, so to speak, will not work at all with those, like Kathleen who have had a double whammy. That brings us to the heading topic of Holes in Roles. By that phrase, we mean several things. One, that there is an innate, genetic, evolutionary, biological or what you will set of interior maturational, developmental needs that, when satisfied lead to the attainment of a generative, adult state. A successful adult is one who has had had their personal needs met at the right age and with the right kinds of figures. An adult with that kind of history fulfills the first rule of existence, i.e. appropriate and successful maintenance of the self. Such an adult is then better prepared and happy to carry out the second rule of existence, which is maintenance of the species, that is, to replicate. A more romantic way of putting it, would be that an adult person, having been loved, is now prepared to love and take care of others, i.e. to find an adored mate, to create the next generation of adored children. Love leads the way. What has this got to do with holes in roles? Not only do we innately know what we need, we innately know who the relational figures should be out there to satisfy those needs. We know the roles and we know the role-behaviors before we enter this world. By that I mean that that information is stored in our genes, our dna, our nervous organization, that oversees the development of our systems of perception and systems of action. After all, sensing and moving have everything to do with staying alive and making more life possible. We know beforehand what kind of world we should see that would make life possible and what kinds of figures we should see during our maturation that would enable this outcome. When those figures out there are deficient, that means they have holes in their roles and that has negative consequences. Their offspring will have equivalent holes in their developmental makeup. Such unfortunate people are able to wait and do wait forever to have those holes filled later in their lives, in their education, in their marriages, on the job with their bosses and even in their own suffering families with their own offspring. That is, if they don’t go into therapy and have the job done cleanly and appropriately. Now about the other kinds of holes in roles. When parents and other care-givers, i.e. grandparents, aunts, uncles and other antecedents (sometimes even going back generations) have suffered maturational misfortunes in their own lives, their off-spring, just like Kathleen, note that unhappiness and do some remarkable things to themselves to make things better for the grown-ups they need and love. I learned later in the work that Kathleen felt that her mother did not really know how to take care of her, or even want to. Her mother let her know at various times that she did not really want to marry her father, let alone have children with him, thus discounting Kathleen’s very existence. She naturally turned to her grandmother for succor and that she received to some extent. Thus her grandmother filled in the holes in her mother’s maternal functions. However, her grandmother had deficits in her own upbringing and they were massive. “What kind of help did she (her grandmother) need?” “She had health problems…she was very emotional. She was often sad and nervous.” As she said those descriptive words I could see by the look on her face and the interior gaze of her eyes that she was seeing those emotionally loaded images of her grandmother in her mind’s eye. Her face and body immediately and accurately showed the impact of that memory. Her eyes were sad and lowered, with a look of heartfelt concern, coupled with resignation and long endured hopelessness. Her face was moist with the residue of wiped away tears. I said, “If a witness were here, the witness would say, “I see how much sympathy you feel when you think of your grandmother having problems, health problems.” The witness figure is a PBSP hypothetical construct posited as a benign, caring figure who sees the emotions one shows on one’s face and body, gives them a name and places that emotion in the context that produces that emotion. The naming of the emotion is done by the therapist – who hopefully can accurately assess what is showing visually – but posited as a third figure in the room. When appropriate, the witness figure can be represented by a role-player in the group. In that case the words for the witness figure are nonetheless supplied by the therapist. Her face flooded with tears and she wiped them away with a tissue. Her face had the ache of inexpressible and helpless longing to do something about the scene she was seeing inside, She was actually looking downward toward the floor, her head slightly turned to one side, but it was not the floor she was seeing. She might well have been back in time looking at the event from above. “Do you see how that makes you cry? That’s sympathy or compassion. And it’s coming from your image of your grandmother.” She took in a deep involuntary breath and held it. “It must have awakened so much compassion in your little child’s heart, I think, to see her like that.” Her eyes closed, her lips pressed together, trying to suppress the feelings that were welling up. “So you’re not crying for nothing, you’re crying for her right now.” I said to her, “Whenever there is a strong emotion that means that is an important figure. And now your strong emotion is coming from your grandmother. Would you like to have someone or something represent your grandmother who had health problems…since there is so much emotion there?” The intention here is to externalize the images that are seen in the mind’s eye in the interior theater of memory and imagination and have those scenes and figures represented in the room. Not in the sense that it is happening now in the actual room, but hypothetically constructing a virtual stage that could move through time and space and be seen with present day eyes. In a way, the scene she was looking down at from above inside her brain with her mind’s eye, would now be actually represented in the room to be seen with her real eyes. Thus, the scene in the room could be a perfect replica of the scenes in her awakened memory. “Could you pick something?” Leaving her the option to pick an object or a person. She looked side to side, let the air out of her chest, turned toward one of the group members and said her name, “Marjan?” Both saying her name and asking her at the same moment. I said to the group member who had already indicated that she would accept the role, “Say, ‘I will role-play that part of your grandmother who had health problems.’” The contracting procedure for taking a role is very important. Group members are told beforehand that they have the option to turn down a role and that if they choose to accept the role they have to follow some clear rules. They are asked to understand that they are not personally identified with the role and that it is not their personality that the group member has in mind, but the personality of the relative she is seeing so vividly in her mind’s eye. The role player is simply the superstructure upon which the client can project the qualities she knows so well from the past. At the outset of the group they are taught that when they are given instructions by the client how to take on that role and what to say in that role, that they should not deviate from what they are told. They are not expected to invent the role or to make up the words that the figure would say. Only the client knows those facts and their vivid and emotionally laden memories are the guideline to be followed. So the contracting statement is important. They are not asked to be the figure, they are asked only to role-play that figure. Thus the group member does not have to find inside themselves the qualities that the client remembers in her grandmother, but simply be themselves saying whatever lines are required. In other words, they don’t have to be “Method” actors who try to generate or awaken the characters feelings in themselves. The client is already seeing and hearing so much authentic grandmotherly qualities in her mind, she only needs external place-holders, so to speak, to make it vivid and believable in the room. If the client did not have powerful interior images we would not make the intervention of having someone role-play such a figure. Some role-playing techniques attempt to awaken interior feelings by exterior figures. This is not what is done in structures. We only place figures in the room when they are already seen interiorly and powerfully responded to, without outside influence or pressure. At the end of the structure, the role-player makes a de-roleing statement, whereby they say, “I am no longer role-playing that part of your grandmother who had health problems, I am Marjan.” In that way, they shed the role and no longer assume any part of the role in whatever contact they have later with the one who is having the session. The point here is to maintain the distinction between symbolic relationships and literal relationships and not to confuse or combine the two. “Do you want to place her?” She said, “Yes,” leaned forward and touched a spot on the ground to her left side with her left hand. She rubbed her eyes, looked like she was seeing the actual room now and was preparing herself to see her grandmother represented there. “Which way should she face,” I asked. Spatialization is important here. Emotional events and emotional memory always has spatial characteristics. Placement is not the least random. It is not for nothing that the part of the brain that holds emotional memories, the hippocampus, is also the mediator of spatial awareness. With clarity and conviction Kathleen indicated the direction she should face. Wanting the figure to be accurately portrayed, I asked, “Was she sad herself…when you think of her was she sad? How did you see her when she had health problems?” “She wasn’t very sad, she was kind of brave,” she said with quiet admiration and respect as she surveyed that image inside. I suggested that witness figure could say, “I see how much respect and admiration you feel about your grandmother, even though she had health problems.” “Is that correct?” I prefer to always check witness statements with clients to be sure that it truly reflects what emotions they are having. She nodded yes, solemnly. “What kind of health problems did she have?” “She had chronic asthma and the beginning of tuberculosis.” “She got cured.” I let out a quiet, involuntary “Wow” at this point because what she said awakened a theoretical notion. “So she really had breathing problems,” I said. “Can I talk to you a little bit about theory,” I asked, hoping she would say yes so that I could make the next step of applying that theory. She looked up at me with a combined expression of interest, impatience and slight irritation. Her interest was enough of a signal for me to continue. “Sometimes in this work when people have a history with problems of breathing, sometimes it is an indication they had missing fathers in their lives. And I was wondering if that was the case for her.” “She was an orphan,” she said. “So she didn’t have a father,” I underlined. She shook her had sadly and said, “No,” in a way that conveyed her sense of the injustice that that condition implied. Looking downward, her tone weak and resigned, she voiced a long known, painful reality, “Neither mother nor father.” “Actually her father died when she was a little baby,” she added. When she said those words she had an expression on her face that made me certain she was now bodily reacting to a vivid scene in her mind’s eye of her grandmother as a fatherless little baby. She undoubtedly constructed those images when she had first been told that story when she was a little child. Then each and every time that story was recounted she very likely refreshed and reinforced that emotion-producing image. And to this day, it still had the power to produce -- within her present, adult consciousness --the same aching, sympathy, compassion and longing that it could have been different for her grandmother. “And her mother died when she was eleven or twelve.” “Right,” I said softly, indicating that I understood what that kind of history must have been like for her grandmother to bear. “So if we were to give her anything,” – as she heard me speak those words which implied a new possibility (she immediately understood where I was going for I had detailed the theory of how to deal with holes in roles at the outset of the session) -- she shifted her gaze from the floor and met my eyes with interest and anticipation, in marked contrast to her mood, milliseconds ago – “we would give her an ideal father who wouldn’t die…” Hearing this she put her lips firmly together, blinked several times in understanding and nodded her head in strong agreement and acceptance. “…and a mother who wouldn’t die.” “Shall we do that for her?” She nodded again, indicating another yes, but her raised eyebrows and slightly down-turned mouth also suggested a touch of skepticism with a dash of a “why not?” attitude. “So, pick an ideal father and an ideal mother for her?” I hesitantly put forward. She turned to her left and reached toward the floor, about to pick objects to represent those figurative possibilities. Quickly, I suggested, “Maybe pick people.” I thought that since she had chosen a person to role-play her grandmother it would be more believable to Kathleen if she first saw actual people taking care of her grandmother. Kathleen very likely tried to satisfy her grandmother’s need for parenting by creating an imaginary mother and father for her out of some of the stuff of her own being without ever consciously knowing she had taken on such a weighty, through strangely inflating, life-long burdensome task. The healing scene is constructed with an eye to relieve clients of the awesome responsibility they had unwittingly shouldered on others’ behalf while endlessly postponing the satisfaction of their own needs. “Okay,” she said as she straightened up. She scanned something in her mind, looked to her right, turned forward and scanned interiorly once again. She seemed to be making some evaluations or judgments about both what kind of person could fulfill such a role and/or what person in the group might be able or willing to represent such a figure. “Elias?” she asked as she looked at him from the corner of her eyes, her head bowed, with a hesitant and a slightly pleading expression on her face. “Would you be the Ideal…” “He’s going to role-play the Ideal Father for your real grandmother?” I said, feeling the need to clearly define the role for the role-player so that he would make the correct contract statement as he took on the role. She looked over to him to see how he would take it. “Could you say that? I asked. She watched him carefully as he made the statement, “I will role-play the Ideal father for your real grandmother.” “Then pick an Ideal Mother.” She turned again to her right and looked at a female member of the group. Her eyes lit up with a fond expression and with a smile of budding hope she said, “Would you be the Ideal Mother for my grandmother.” And then shot a glance at me to see how I reacted to her choice. The group member made the contract statement and I suggested, “They should go behind her now.” She nodded in vigorous agreement. We, together, are beginning to choreograph a visual, virtual event for her that will let her see with her real eyes someone representing her real grandmother receiving what her grandmother had lacked in her actual childhood. This outside scene is constructed with the intention of offsetting the effect of the inner scene she had originally constructed in her mind’s eye and emotionally reacted to so strongly when she had first heard those family stories. She was not just hearing the sounds of words back then. Those words had the power to produce images which awakened feelings in her young mind and body that influenced the way she feels and thinks, even to this day. She not only heard those stories but simultaneously saw those stories as they were enacted in her imagination and seen in her mind’s eye. Just as someone listening to radio dramas “sees” the events that are only described by words and reacts to those innerly “seen” events with all the appropriate emotions that would come from actually seeing similar events with one’s “real” eyes. It is not for nothing we say, “Seeing is believing.” But she is not only seeing and reacting emotionally to the dramatization of those stories in the room we are illustrating with role-players. I believe that the more important drama is the one she is seeing and reacting to simultaneously in the theater of her own imagination that she is constructing from my word pictures coupled with the placement, action and statements of the role-players. One can perhaps say that she is actually having a kind of stereoscopic experience whereby she is simultaneously seeing an inside scene and an outside scene both of which are linked emotionally and cognitively in her mind. The outside players are really only the stand-ins and the controls for the more important inside, truly believable, figures that we cannot control in any other way. What is happening in the therapy room is being inextricably coupled with the remembered imagination of her grandmother as a little child. With the addition of the new symbolic event, now carefully being choreographed, Kathleen’s imagined, abandoned child image of her grandmother is “seen” on two, parallel levels. She can see her grandmother from the outside, with her real eyes as she is being represented by the role-player in the room. Simultaneously, she can see her grandmother from the inside, with her mind’s eye as she uses the outside believable event to construct a new, more satisfying image of her grandmother’s past in her imagination. Thus, the grandmother is “seen” and planted into memory, being cared for – not by her real parents who died, but by the figures designated as ideal parents. Not neighbors, not baby sitters, not a sister or a brother. Each one of those kinship relations are good in and of themselves but only parents are charged in our psyches with the special significance that comes from our innate (genetic) tendency to wish and experience that our parents have consciously and lovingly supplied the sperm and the egg, which combined, has become our ticket and license to enter into life. This is part of the PBSP technology of making new, believable memories. To be effective over time, they must be emotionally connected to actual memories and the satisfying event must be based on fundamental, natural, genetic human drives and tendencies evolved and honed over millennia to make life more possible and more satisfying. We have learned to enumerate some of those innate life tasks and events that all children must experience in order to arrive at the stage of generativity. Only after experiencing such satisfactions at the right age and with the right kinship relationships do they feel willing and able to be of service to life without impossible strain. With such satisfactions in their background they will more likely produce more life for the future with offspring, art or service to the world. First one has to have sufficient time and satisfactions for their self interest and then, from that foundation, be ready and comfortably able to have interest in the welfare of others. In Kathleen’s case, she abandoned self-interest early on, as that was not to be satisfied appropriately in the family she found herself born into. She then took upon herself, far too soon, the burden of being responsible for the care and welfare of others with the secondary hope that those efforts would somehow bring satisfaction to her own life. Later, I will go into more detail about the secondary effects of inflation of parts of the self that this responsibility produces unconsciously, but nonetheless has powerful effect on the quality of one satisfactions and interactions in the future. With Kathleen’s agreement, I instructed the role-played Ideal Parents to place themselves on each side of the role-played grandmother. “Be on your knees so that you will be taller than her,” I said to the role-players, thinking that the visual height difference would be noticed to by Kathleen. She watched the ensemble being put together with curiosity and interest. “And put your arms around her and look at her.” I added. “Lean your head against them,” I instructed the role-player representing the grandmother. Kathleen leaned forward to see more of what was going on. “What happens when you see that?” I asked. She took in the scene with all its implications and associations. I am sure part of her was remembering her actual grandmother without such loving support and that may be what produced the tears which she wiped with a tissue as they rolled down the side of her nose. She nodded softly as people do when they see something that they deem is fitting and right and said, “I am happy for my grandmother.” I noted that state by constructing a witness statement, “A witness would say I see how relieved you feel, that your grandmother has that….kind of possibility.” “Is that right?” She flashed a quick upward look at me…she was busy blowing her nose and seemed a bit impatient with my intervention, but nodded in assent that it was right. She looked again at the scene with renewed interest. I said, “Maybe it would be a good idea that the Ideal Parents would say, ‘If we had been her ideal parents we would have taken care of her and you wouldn’t have had to worry about her.’” My idea was to make the relationship and its implications more explicit by those words. “What do you think about that?” I asked. “I would still have to worry about her,” she said emphatically, with great concern and a look of childlike, helpless trepidation in her tone and on her face. She didn’t say those words looking at me, she was looking downward and inside and was very likely seeing the interior scenes of remembered events when she indeed did have to worry about her. “Why is that?” I asked. After some silence, I ventured, “I think you’re worried about her because there was nobody there, is that right?” She was still looking down and after a pause, said softly and with some hopelessness, “I am worried because later in her life, she had a daughter, my mother….she was very emotionally dependent on her.” “Aha,” I said softly to myself noting that she had shifted from seeing her imagined picture of her real grandmother being an infant to an actually remembered picture of her grandmother in a painful relationship with Kathleen’s mother. “She shared my mother’s view on the world. Although she was a strong and nice person, the older she was the more she suffered.” Her voice broke as she began to weep. “But I don’t think these parents could have helped it.” She added, with challenging conviction. Here arrives the first hint of what I have come to call the “entity.” When someone fills the holes in roles for others with a fragment of their own psyche it produces a surprising but (explainable within this theoretical model) unconscious, omnipotent splinter of the total personality that has some stereotypical behavior patterns. This separated aspect has very different behaviors and intentions than the rest of the “normal” more unified/integrated soul or self. When it pops out, as in this moment, it is in surprising contrast to integrated/soul emotions that express a longing for satisfaction in interaction with others. “Only I could have solved that need,” that omnipotent entity seems to imply. It always takes the position that there is no other beside itself that could have the power and position in question. And that is the hallmark of omnipotence. Omnipotent figures act on the assumption that they are the one and only and will fight ferociously to maintain that station. It makes me think of territoriality and that part of our genetic heritage or dna or primitive brain structures that is wired to battle for the singular ownership of some turf. All well and good in the service of integrated human behaviors but the entity is not a party to regular human behaviors. In its essence it is non-interactive. Now how can I say non-interactive when the entity features arise out of a child’s wish to interact with a needy care-giving figure with the goal of attending to the care-giver’s needs The normal self is born in interactions with significant others. A child has to have its basic needs of place, nurture, support protection and limits met first in literal, concrete interactions – when it is an infant; then in satisfying metaphoric interactions as it grows older; and only after those stages are sufficiently satisfied does the person become autonomous. Having internalized the behaviors of the outside, trusted care-givers such people are enabled to care for its needs on their own. This is the route to healthy self-reliance. Thus, one can say that the unified, complex self or soul is born/cultivated in satisfying interactions. To repeat, essential care-giving first has to be externally supplied and further, only after maturity and reaching generativity, does one become a non-omnipotent supplier of the needs of others. By this definition, entities spring into being in children who have not had their needs met by care-givers when those very children see that those unhappy care-givers themselves are in need of essential care. People are born with inherent capacities to take on many kinship roles in their lives. We all have something like modules of potential roles pre-packed in our psyches. They contain the seeds that will flower into future behaviors that will be manifest as we play out those roles. Our human nature anticipates and enables us to become mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers and so forth as those roles in life normally occur. But those roles should be taken on in “due time” during the normal maturational process. Especially the parenting roles. One should optimally become a parent only after one has been successfully parented and only after one has developed the maturity needed to become an effective parent. Let me see if I can paint a graphic picture for you that will illustrate some of the above points. Make a picture of a child in your mind with little circles inside that child representing the various role modules in their latent state. Those modules are cultivated and awakened by interactions with the appropriate figures in the outside world who demonstrate those behaviors in relationship with that child. So the natural development of those roles is accomplished through satisfying interactions. Further, I make the assumption or at least I posit the notion that we all contain an innate picture or interior pre-knowledge of the web of relationships that are required for successful living. That web of relationships represents a goal or a gestalt or an attractor for the energies or forces that will lead to the fullest organization of life. When there is a disturbance or a gap in that web, there is inner psychic pressure to complete it in one way or another. Now lets place your picture of that child in a network that is full of gaps, as there was in Kathleen’s life when she was a child. Let’s imagine that child sees its caretaker, let’s say it is Kathleen’s grandmother suffering a sever life deficit or hearing about her suffering a severe life deficit. The first thing that happens is that Kathleen or that child feels a wave of compassion for that beloved and/or needed figure. That compassion is her soul’s reaction to the pain of another. However, that very compassion awakens the need to complete the gestalt in the shattered web where so many figures are missing. What does that child do in the face of such a picture? Here is my metaphoric way of describing what might then transpire. Imagine that that child sees there is a missing mother and a missing father and is moved to do something about it with her own undeveloped resources. It is rather like a child who hears that her parents are having financial difficulties and then is moved to offer the contents of her piggy bank as a way to help out. But in my picture the child does not reach into its piggy bank, but reaches into its psyche and plucks out the seed of mothering and fathering inside itself and extends that portion of itself outward to fill the empty slots in the network. Another image is that of an aneurism. Rather than the child reaching inside itself, the empty space acts like a magnetic pull irresistibly drawing out a non-interactive, quantity of the child’s banked resources and fills the network’s empty space with that non-interactive, untamed “id like” entity of a potential, future, complex interactive identity. On the one hand we still have a picture of a child, endlessly longing in loneliness for its needs to be satisfied. On the other hand we have this golem of an entity expanded out of the body of the child taking up a huge space, larger than itself that will solve the networks need for gestalt and completion. This entity has a life of its own that is not in harmony with the goals of the soul. It is rather god-like in its omnipotence. Only It could do the job. It would then want to be the only It and would fight to the death if another authority tried to replace it. So it wasn’t too surprising to hear that Kathleen didn’t think the Ideal Parents could have filled the job. However, a much more complex picture began to emerge. Upon remembering that she said her grandmother had been dependent on her daughter, Kathleen’s mother, I said to her, “I think what could be valuable at this time, is to give your mother an ideal mother because your mother had to take care of her mother …..from what you say. Is that right?” She doesn’t respond. Coming up with a new hypothesis I said, “I think you’re feeling bad for your mother now.” “I think my mother had an ideal mother,” she said, emphasizing the word “had” with a tone of resentment and implied criticism of her mother, adding “except she was a bit ill.” This last said with a feeling of protectiveness and tender acceptance of her grandmother’s physical disability. “And also she was dependent, you said,” I reminded her. “Later on,” she corrected me. “That’s the time I’m talking about,” I said, letting her know we were not in conflict about her grandmother’s dependency. She nodded in satisfied agreement and I felt our alliance was still intact. “I’m seeing now you’re worried about your mother and you’re worried about your grandmother also.” “No, I’m angry with my mother,” she said forthrightly, “because she made my grandmother suffer so bad when she was so old and vulnerable.” “My mother made my grandmother very sad. But she was very old.” She looked so wan, depressed and hopeless as she said this. Her mouth set with endurance and pessimism. “I see,” I said softly. I proposed a witness statement that a witness would say, “I see how unfair it feels that your mother made your grandmother very sad.” “Shall we bring your mother here, the part of her that you are so angry at?” In response she looked to the left and right on the floor near her and I said, “Maybe you can use an object for that.” She reached for a bottle containing mineral water and leaned forward placing it a few feet in front of her, rather near the figures representing her grandmother and her ideal parents. As she viewed where she placed it she looked concentrated and her cheeks kind of puffed out as if she was going to blow out some breath. “So that’s the part of your mother,” I confirmed. Then I offered this possibility, “Maybe they could have protected her…” She looked at me squarely and with no trace of sadness or vulnerability, “….because if she is that close she’s gonna hurt her again,” I surmised questioningly. She nodded in silent agreement. “So maybe we should bring in a protector for your grandmother?” “Yes,” she agreed with some hint of relief. “Who could that be?” I wondered for and with her. She blinked, took a breath and said, firmly, “Me.” A soft, “Whoa” of instant recalculation effortlessly escaped my lips. So many emotions flickered across her face as she tilted her head to one side and wiped her face with a tissue. I thought I saw a glimmer of pleasure or pride at her prowess, a shine of love for the grandmother and a touch of sadness that I surmised was the little girl who wished it all wasn’t the way it was. However, I framed a witness statement saying that a witness would say, “I see how responsible you feel to be the protector for your grandmother.” “Is that right?” She nodded her head while all those different emotions continued swimming across her face and she said with pain coupled with a kind of prideful apology, “Well there wasn’t anybody else.” And I thought I saw a hint of a smile that for an instant poked through her regularly tearful demeanor and was instantly squelched, followed by an onrush of new tears. I offered a witness statement that said, “I see how alone and helpless you feel that there was nobody else.” After some silence, I asked, “Where was her husband?” thinking that perhaps here was another empty role that she had to fill. “Her husband died,” she said and bit her lip only her left side, leaving an uneven shape on her mouth. “So in a way you became her protector and took the role that her husband would do as a protector,” I hypothesized and suggested at the same time. “So maybe we should bring in an Ideal Husband for your grandmother, who would have stayed alive and protected her against your mother?” “So we save you from that trouble.” She nodded in acceptance of that idea. As you can see, I am following a procedure that allows us to fill in all the holes in roles with so-called Ideal Figures in this structured setting. This step fulfills the innate wish and expectation embedded in everyone’s soul for a gestalt, closure and completion in the family network. These Ideal figures appear to provide enough satisfaction to people’s core selves and the relief it brings seems to be enough compensation to overcome the entity’s hubris and arrogant power. When it works, the aneurism seems to shrink back, the psychic reserves invested in others too soon can be returned to their original account. The interest in the other – too early awakened – is abated and self interest in one getting one’s own needs met returns as an appropriate priority allowing a stunted maturation process to resume its evolution. “Why don’t we bring in somebody to be the ideal husband for your grandmother?” She looked thoughtful for a while, then looked about the room and gestured toward one of the men with her hand. “Would you?” The group member said, “I will role-play the ideal husband for your grandmother.” “And he should be right in front of her to protect her from your mother, I think,” suggesting this in the knowledge that in that spatial configuration he could visually appear as a shield between her mother and her grandmother. “Yeah, but they used to be a nice couple,” she objected, seeing this man as a replacement of the living grandfather and as an act of disloyalty. “But that was before he died and before your mother was attacking her. So this is at the age when your mother was attacking her.” She nodded in acceptance and understanding and looked over at the figure to renew her image of the time that was being attended to. “And then she should have protection.” Now she saw the picture and nodded in relieved agreement. “Because if she has no protection, you will go there to do it….I’m sure.” She set her lips in firm acknowledgement and nodded her head in agreement as her gaze turned inward, in all likelihood remembering events when she actually had taken that protective position. “Let’s put him there.” Once again, she nodded in understanding and agreement It took some moments for the role-player to understand and place himself accordingly. She watched with interest looking at me giving instructions to the role-player and then over to the role-player who didn’t understand English sufficiently and was hesitant and placed himself at the wrong angle and in the wrong direction. I felt it was important that the visual picture be accurate otherwise she would not believe his words of protection as his position would not be visually indicative of a shield. What was occurring in real time was a kind of test to see if even here in this symbolic setting it would not turn out right and she would have to be the replacement once more. I remained insistent and emphatic that it should be done properly, while others in the group translated my words to Czech for the role-player. Thus in the transference, my zealousness that it should be correct was reassuring to her. If I had failed in that endeavor and if the position finally taken was not indicative of protection, the following words of protection would have been simply a verbal charade and therefore totally unbelievable. Then, when it came time for the role-player to make the statement, “If I had been the Ideal husband for your real grandmother I would have protected her from your mother, and you wouldn’t have had to do it.” He stumbled over the lines and had to say each portion slowly after being given the words to say for each portion of the statement. Kathleen’s expressions during that process were fascinating to watch. I think she looked at him, both as the real Czech role-player having difficulties, (for whom, I am sure she had some compassion and sympathy for his difficulties) and as the stand-in for the new picture she could build in her mind for an ideal husband for her grandmother during the period after her real grandfather had died. A warm, hint of a smile flickered over her face, the first time in this session that a positive emotion had appeared. Kathleen is an intelligent woman and could see the situation in all its ramifications. She seemed to both like and appreciate the role-player as himself – willing to take on the role, though it was clearly difficult for him – and also to like and appreciate the fact that someone other than herself was on duty as the protector of her grandmother. She could both suspend disbelief when the theatrics were so plainly being constructed and be able to totally believe the construction as if it were “real” after the scene was organized correctly.” Thus, she was able to be in the position of being both the co-organizer of the scene and the audience of the scene at the same time. I directed the role-player to hold his hands in a position as if to stop, the mother. She looked up at that figure holding his hands that way with an expression of appreciation, warmth and relief. Quite another face was showing. Young, a bit impish, even a bit mischievous but clearly satisfied. Then when she turned her gaze toward the object representing her mother, sadness came over her face. “What happens when you see that?” I asked. She silently continued to focus on the scene, especially attending to the extended protective hand of the ideal husband over the object representing her mother. Wiped her nose and eyes and said, “It feels good.” I proffered a witness statement, “I see how relaxed and relieved you feel when you see how it could have been with his protection.” Is that right?” In doing so, I thought I would connect and anchor the moment consciously with that witness statement. Linking the relaxation and relief with the protective figures actions and its place in time. For some reason, I said, “So you had a lot of responsibilities then.” For long moments she kept her eyes on the object representing her mother. I imagined she was reviewing or seeing something in that context and did not interrupt her for about a minute, then I said, “What’s happening now?” wanting to get information of what had just occurred before that moment would disappear and a new context come up without resolving what had just been happening. Another half minute passed, then she said, “I feel kind of empty.” “Yeah,” I said. “I think what happens at such a moment is what I call the entity.” I knew I was going to make some explanatory remarks and watched her face to see how she might take my notions. “When we take those roles, (it, the entity) suddenly lost its job. And then we don’t know who we are.” Without shifting her gaze, still almost hypnotized by the figure, she nodded in understanding. “Some of our identity is tied up with the entity,” I explained further. She reset her lips and rapidly nodded her head indicating she caught the implication of what I said. As I spoke she occasionally looked up at me and then turned back to the figure. “So it’s a little disorienting you see.” “’Now what’s my job if I’m not doing these things?’” I said, paraphrasing what her internal dialogue might consist of. “Do you understand that?” I asked. “I do,” she said nodding, her eyes glumly fixed on that object. “It happens to me very often when everything comes back again.” She stayed silent again for a moment. “But right now, he’s doing the job,” I reminded her, hoping to offset the statement that everything comes back again. She accepted that statement with a nod of relief. “And I think,” she looked up at me with interest, “a part of you is relieved.” Appealing to her soul that wouldn’t have wanted the job in the first place. She raised her eyes from the object to me nodding, seemingly both in agreement with that observation and appreciation of the fact that this image had produced relief. Trying to fix the relief in the appropriate time-line, and not only a phenomenon of the absolute present, I said, “Let yourself imagine being, at whatever age, and having this sense of relief.” Her face became markedly more animated, she blinked her eyes fairly rapidly during the next moments as she processed that suggestion. “And you’re looking at your mother, what do you see and what do you think of?” I wondered aloud. “What do you feel when you look at her?” trying to give her a way to look for what emotional information she could access in sensing what was going on in her body. “I’m feeling some pity.” She said ruefully. “Pity for your mother?” I enquired. “Pity that she wasn’t a better daughter.” She answered with a tone of regret and disappointment. “Pity for your grandmother?” I said, suddenly realizing the object of that emotion. “Maybe we should give an Ideal Daughter to your grandmother?” I said, realizing that here was another role she might have filled. “Hmmm,” she murmured, eyebrows raised with interest in this unexpected possibility, all the while nodding with anticipation. “Do you want some object to be the ideal daughter for your grandmother?” I offered. She immediately looked to one side and then the other then rose from the floor where she was sitting. She picked a red pillow and I suggested, “Place it so that it’s near her.” She walked over to the person role-playing the real grandmother and placed it beside her, then went back to where she had been sitting. To confirm and formalize the designation of the pillow I said, “And that figure represented by the pillow would say, “I’m role-playing the ideal daughter to your real grandmother. Is that right?” Still sitting, she reached over and made a small adjustment of the pillow, placing it in a way that seemed that she was arranging it “just the way it should be” to represent that figure and simultaneously both answered me and I thought also grunted, her satisfaction of the shift of the pillow with a sound like, “Hmm.” “And what happens when you imagine she has an ideal daughter? What would the ideal daughter do?” I asked. She pressed her lips together in thought, tossed her head a bit side-wards and back – making some strands of her hair swing for a moment. “She wouldn’t have transferred all of her own problems back to her,” she said with a slight tone of pity that it had been other than that with her real mother. I took the gist of what she was saying and proposed a statement that the ideal daughter could have directed to her, Kathleen, as if she could speak over the span of time and place where this new symbolic event was being staged and tell her in this present moment, what she would have done that was different in the manner that Kathleen had already formulated. “Right, so this Ideal Daughter is talking to you now, saying, ‘If I had been your grandmother’s Ideal Daughter, I wouldn’t have had problems’” --- I put it this way to conform to the notion that she was the Ideal daughter and therefore would have been different than the real mother in that regard --- “ ‘and if I did,’” – putting it in that way so that in that particular hypothetical case, she nonetheless would have acted differently than her real mother had in relationship to her real grandmother. Then I took the statementword for word that Kathleen had made in describing the attributes of this ideal daughter, “ ‘I wouldn’t have transferred them onto my mother.” In this way, she could take those words and hear them coming not only from the figures outside in the room, but more importantly hear them as if coming from the figures she was simultaneously constructing in her mind. Those figures would consist of the remembered image of her real grandmother in combination with the newly constructed image of this ideal daughter organized/choreographed to be in marked contrast to what she had actually remembered seeing in the past between her real mother and her real grandmother. She sat in silence as she registered that statement and ran it through her imagination. “And what happens when you hear that?” I asked. She nodded twice, still looking at the scene inside her mind and said with a soft voice, “Nice.” I then formulated a witness statement based on the expression on her face and the sound of her voice, saying, “A witness would say, ‘I see how good you feel to imagine, the justice, the fairness, that your grandmother would have an ideal daughter who wouldn’t have transferred her problems.” “Yes,” she said softly in understanding and acceptance, still looking at those designated objects outside while simultaneously seeing her imagined, populated scene on the inside. Just for a point of clarification, I did not posit the witness as saying how good you feel that your grandmother had a daughter that said that. That would make it seem as if it had actually happened. To anchor the ego and the fact that this is a fabricated symbolic reality, I frame it appropriately by saying how good you feel to imagine. For that is what we are doing, we are making a new memory via imagination. We don’t for a moment suggest that we are making a new reality. However, we have found, that a contrived new memory made this way and placed appropriately in the mind has the power of an actual memory. Watching her face, I asked, “What happens now?” She composed her lips, shifted her body and blinked rapidly, seeming to organize the thoughts and memories that were filling her mind, then said sadly, and with some resentment, “I was just remembering how mother very often complained about me and my sisters…” she shrugged her shoulder as if trying to sluff off the unpleasantness of the memory… “to grandmother and….” She paused to let some air out of her chest with a sound that conveyed a sense of stale frustration. Trying to compose that scene more accurately in my own mind, I asked, “What did she say about you and your sister to her?” “And father,” she said, finishing her sentence before answering my question saying, “I don’t know,” she said with a tired, impatience. “She was complaining about you? I asked, as a way of reminding her of what she had started saying a moment ago. “She was complaining about everything all the time,” she said with a sense of long endured resentment of mistreatment. This was a cue that she herself could now be receptive to being ministered to. “So maybe we need to give you, now, an ideal mother who wouldn’t have been complaining all the time.” She nodded with a flash of eagerness and said, “Yes, please” emphasizing “please” in a way that made me feel she was aching for the relief that could be experienced in the possibility I had just described. Since her grandmother’s needs had been attended to by giving her an ideal protective husband it had become more possible that her own self-interest could be satisfied. “Who shall we have for your ideal mother?” I asked. She looked thoughtful, sighed a bit, her mouth a bit glum, turned her head toward one of the women in the group and then said that person’s name, “Kathleen.” That other Kathleen said, “I will take the role of your Ideal Mother.” “Place her as your Ideal Mother,” I said, emphasizing the word Ideal. I did this as I felt that when she was thinking of making the choice, she had conjured up unpleasant memories of her real mother – indicated by the glum look on her face – and I wanted to make sure that she completed the task of choosing someone to represent an ideal mother and not the real mother with whom she had experienced so much unpleasantness. She looked about herself for the space to locate this new possibility. She looked down to the space at her right side, then turned her head from side to side and uttered a confused and bewildered “where?” wondering aloud whether it was even possible to find a place for this new interactive phenomenon. Picking up this hesitation, I said “and she wouldn’t be complaining,” as a way to remind her this was an Ideal Mother and not her real mother who had always been complaining. “Maybe she says that?” I added as a way to help her register the difference. The role player is then instructed to say, “If I had been your ideal mother, I wouldn’t have been complaining all the time.” The idea here is to provide Kathleen with the reverse of what her real mother had been doing, rather than simply have the ideal mother make a general benign, kindly statement. Kathleen looked directly at the role-player as she said those word and nodded with welcoming acceptance and agreement. Kathleen seemed satisfied that this was indeed the ideal mother talking and said, “Okay, maybe she sits over there,” pointing to the direction on her right side where she had first looked a moment earlier. “And does she look at you?” Checking with her about that element of the role-play. “Yeah, she doesn’t have to look at me,” she responded. “Which way should she look,” I said trying to arrange the setting so it would match her wishes. “She looks in her own direction,” tossing her right arm upward, as if she was discarding something and indicating the wished for position with a single gesture. I saw that as a cue to give another dimension to the qualities of the Ideal mother based on that wish of hers, and said, “So she could say, ‘If I had been your ideal mother, I would look in my own direction.’ Do you like that?” Kathleen nodded eagerly in agreement to this proposal. The ideal figure says those words and then I offered another possibility as a reversal of what the real mother had done, “And maybe she says, ‘I wouldn’t have complained about you?” with a hint in my voice that there was another quality coming after this one, “and I wouldn’t have attacked my mother.” The role player said those words following Kathleen’s agreement that she would like to hear that from her. “What happens when she says those things?” She was silent for a while, clearly reviewing something in her mind. Perhaps she was seeing it as it had been; perhaps she was seeing and hearing what might have been. “Could you say what goes on inside you?” I asked softly and gently. After a moment she said, “It’s very ideal,” emphasizing the word ideal. “Yeah,” I responded. For a moment I was not sure whether she was pleased with the experience of something ideal or she was being a bit sarcastic. I came to the conclusion that the final quality she was conveying was a bit of sadness that had come from noting the contrast of this present image with what she had actually remembered experiencing with her real mother. “It’s far from reality.” “Exactly,” I said in confirmation of that remark. “Reality was very unhappy, and now we are inventing a new possibility. That’s what we do, we make a new possible memory,” I said in explanation of the entire procedure. “That’s not just in your mind,” I added, meaning the scene we had been arranging “but you can see it,” indicating the spatial setting she had arranged for all the figures. “I always think that it would be this way,” she said with longing for the kind of idealism she spoke about at the outset. This was her soul speaking, with hope based on an innate knowledge of how things should have been in the world. The justice, just so-ness, the rightness of what we all feel should be due to all people. Her emotions prompted a witness statement, from me, “A witness would say ‘I see how much you long that it could have been this way.’” Underlining her hope and her newly felt relief that it could be so. “Well I always mostly imagined it could be this way,” she said plaintively. “I always struggled to put it in the right way.” The longing for that kind of outcome coupled with helplessness and despair that she could not accomplish this in reality was clear in her voice and on her face. Trying to help her understand the unconscious pressures on her motivations and behaviors provoked by the Holes in Roles in her family setting, and reviewing what had been represented in the role-playing, I said, “I think what you did when you struggled to put it in the right way, I think you ‘became’ your grandmother’s mother, I think you ‘became’ your grandmother’s father, I think you ‘became’ your grandmother’s husband and I think you ‘became’ your grandmother’s daughter. As I reviewed this she listened attentively though she was also busy blowing her nose as she looked at me from under slightly lidded eyes – all the while nodding in understanding while shifting her body and kind of rearranging herself, perhaps in readiness for something new. I went on to say, “And I think, you filled in all those empty spaces, I think…,” at which point she coughed and simultaneously nodded in rather simple and open agreement to my conclusion. “and that’s a big job,” I said with a note of appreciation of the cost it must have been to her. She nodded briskly, saying with emphasis, “There was no forget.” This seemed to imply that no job could be left out. “So you took even more jobs, maybe now we can see why you’re so split in so many people, like you said. You had to take on a lot of jobs.” “So far,” I said indicating the filled in roles that had been assigned to take care of the grandmother and mother, “there’s less jobs here now.” This was to underline the fact that at least in this imagined arena, more appropriate others had taken over those care-taking functions she had assumed as her responsibility so long ago. Then to continue the survey with less ballast, I said, “What were the other jobs you took?” She took a breath that sounded like a gasp and said, “Because my mother was complaining all the time, I was trying to make her happy.” “Make her happy by…..what…?” I paused, reflecting on what role that could have been. Without stopping to hear what I might come up with, she continued, “Doing everything she wanted (me) to.” She said expressing a complex combination of obligation, resentment and long endured weariness. “So you tried to be the ideal daughter?” I asked, watching to see how she reacted to my wondering about that possibility. She nodded a ‘yes’ that was different than any of the other nods she had responded with. This nod was longer, larger, or deeper than the others and it gave me the impression of an obedient child who was solemnly (and perhaps somewhat sullenly) prepared and accustomed to say yes to whatever was asked of it, no matter what the cost. “So let’s give your mother an ideal daughter,” I said with an optimistically rising tone to convey that such a step was now an obvious good idea as well as part of the continuing pattern we had used in representing all the other figures and thus not a bit difficult to install. “So that it doesn’t have to be you,” I emphasized. “I don’t know that she thinks that it exists,” she said despairingly, in marked contrast to my optimism. “So a witness would say, ‘I see how hopeless you feel that your mother would ever be satisfied.’ Is that right?” “But maybe she needed more than I daughter,” I said to open the door of another possibility. “Maybe she needed a mother and a father.” I offered. “Maybe she needed a husband,” I added. She dabbed at the tears welling up in her eyes. “She had all of this,” she said hopelessly. “But it didn’t satisfy her, did it?” I said sympathetically knowing that Kathleen must have felt as if she were a failed daughter as she shook her head sadly in agreement. Further, I knew that by emphasizing that the mother was not satisfied by those relationships I would be showing her a step that could lead to the discovery of what kind of figure the mother would expect to get satisfaction from. “What can we do to make…..to give your mother the things that she needed….” I said to help get her mind on that track. “I don’t know,” she said, almost wailing, her body slumped and limp. “that it wouldn’t be you?” I finished the question. “A little dog,” she said emphatically with more than a hint of resentment and perhaps some jealousy. “Let’s give her a little dog.” I said as if that were a simple task to accomplish in this symbolic setting. “Pick something to be a little dog for your mother,” I offered. She looked immediately to her left side and picked up a varicolored blanket, folded it, held it to her chest for a moment as if it were a doll or a baby, stood up and placed it on the floor beside the bottle that was used to represent her real mother. She then tipped the bottle so that it rested on its side on the blanket. As she settled back to her place on the cushion, I offered a possible statement that the little dog could make that would exemplify what had just been organized. “Perhaps the little dog could say (if it could speak) ‘If I had been your mother’s little dog, she could have rested on me.” I put it this way, to highlight the relationship that had Kathleen had designed and also to bring to light that this was a kind of support that the dog was providing. She tilted her head to one side as I said that sentence and took a breath. “I think you wanted your mother to rest, because you let her lay down.” I explained. She made a kind of “oof” sound as she let her breath out. It made me think there was a sob that was ready to be expressed right behind it. “Is that right?” I inquired. “She’s got a little dog now and she seems to be very happy with it,” she said sadly, but with a bit of irritation. “Yeah, So a witness could say, ‘I see how disappointed….or something….I don’t know what the emotion is that you feel….that she’s finally happy with the little dog.” “We should have given her that little dog a long time ago,” meaning that if there was indeed a need for support it should have been posited as arriving at a different age for the mother rather than in the immediate present. “And since she’s resting on it, it looks like it’s giving her support,” I explained. This would be moving into a problematic area because it could certainly imply that her grandmother, her mother’s mother, had not provided sufficient support for Kathleen’s mother during her childhood. This possibility would surely not rest well with Kathleen as she would certainly feel that such an explanation would bring doubt to her grandmother’s worthiness. “And support is what people need from their parents do you know?.” I continued on that track nonetheless. “So maybe inside the little dog is (the principle of) Ideal Parents who would have supported her when she was a child,” I opined. “Because I think that that’s what the little dog’s function is,” I continued. She didn’t respond, so I took a further step proposing, “So maybe the little dog talks and says, ‘If I had been in your mother’s life, I would have been a mother and a father for her when she was a child.” I wondered if this would bring some history of her mother’s childhood or some irritation at me for suggesting her grandmother was insufficient. “So she could have been resting on a mother and a father,” I continued the exploratory dog statement, “’and not just on me as a little dog.’” “So maybe we could kind of put a mother and a father there for her when she was child.” I stubbornly continued my proposal. “Anyway, that’s more theoretical speculation,” I said, giving room for disagreement and doubt about the validity of my ideas. “She really needed parents,” I continued nonetheless. “But she had parents,” she said emphatically. “Her mother loved her too much…” “Right,” I said softly, internally noting I was about to hear important new details about how she felt about her mother. “… there for her all the time, putting her in the first place all the time,” she said with some annoyance. “You sound resentful, so maybe the witness would see, ‘how resentful you feel that even though your grandmother loved her so much, and put her in the first place so much, that she was still not a nice person and not happy,’ Is that right?” As she listened to those remarks, I noticed that Kathleen had an expression on her face that made me think of a very young, forlorn child. When I finished the witness statement, Kathleen shrugged her shoulders as if noting something that was incomprehensible “She was unhappy that she was married,” she said sadly. “What happened when she got married?” I asked, knowing that an unhappy marriage impairs a child’s sense of belonging and rightfulness in having a place in the world. Kathleen stared at the ground, but she was not seeing the ground, but perhaps seeing her mother’s unhappy face in her memory. “She said that was when her unhappiness started,” she said lifelessly, her face slack and unmoving. I decided to externalize the image she might be seeing in her mind by verbally describing a hypothetical moment where her mother, might speak those words, as if she were somehow in the room, though presented as if it were some time in the past. I pointed to the object representing her mother, saying, “So she’s talking.” I said that to help her organize a believable scene in her mind’s eye where she was “seeing” an image of her real mother. She says, ‘My unhappiness started when I got married.’ That’s what your real mother is saying,” I reiterated. I watched her face to see how she reacted to my coupling those words she had just used to describe her mother’s feelings with that remembered image she was still fixated on. Kathleen nodded, both in acknowledgement of the truth of those words and the rightness of how it fit with her memory. “So she’s blaming marriage on her unhappiness?” I partly asked and concluded. Kathleen nodded in agreement, then added another component saying, “and father and her children.” She sniffed in a short breath with a sound that led me to believe she might be feeling a hint of indignation. “So she’s blaming her husband and her children for her unhappiness?” I said with a rising tone indicative of my own astonishment at such a conclusion. Kathleen blinked back tears as she nodded in acknowledgment of that truth. “Now when you say that,” I took the moment to teach, “it opens up the topic of place again.” Then continued by affirming, “That your mother didn’t really want children. It only brought her unhappiness.” Kathleen confirmed my view of her mother’s attitude in a very quiet, resigned way saying simply, “She didn’t. She said that.” “Whoa,” I let out of my mouth, spontaneously, knowing how devastating it would be for a child to hear those words from its mother. “So a witness would say, ‘I see how lost and pained you are to remember your mother saying, ‘Children brought me unhappiness.’” Her head slowly tilted back and sideward until it rested against the wall behind her. Then she blinked rapidly several times and tightened her lips in an effort to hold back the cries that would have accompanied the tears that were welling up in her eyes. “That suggests, even though you said was happy in her childhood, she didn’t really get to what I call a generative stage, where she (would have) wanted children” I said beginning to teach the notion of what it means to mature and to reach the stage where one is naturally inclined to produce something valuable for the next generation. This has to do with the concept behind the fifth basic task of life, which is to find and fulfill one’s personal uniqueness and potentiality, i.e. to “bear fruit.” When one is mature and has reached the generative stage, interest in others naturally takes prominence over interest in the self. “She was not generative, she didn’t want children,” I said, noting to myself that Kathleen nodded in agreement with that statement, “so something was really missing even though you say she had a happy childhood,” I further speculated while continuing to watch how she reacted to my speculation. “She was not generative. She didn’t want children.” I said, with clearer conviction. “So something was really missing there,” I said with a note of sympathy for her mother, knowing that this statement would open the notion that her mother had suffered some important deficits in her own life. I watched Kathleen’s face as she silently took in what I had been saying. She stared, unmoving, as if seeing some inner pictures that included scenes that confirmed or underlined her mother’s personal history in this regard. “I don’t think your mother was ready to be married,” I repeated, knowing that introducing the idea of readiness would lead to the understanding that her mother had not been provided the necessary interactions in her upbringing which would have led to that rite of passage. “And wasn’t ready to have children. She didn’t mature, I don’t think,” I said. “She was thirty one,” Kathleen said, meaning the age when her mother was married. Then added, with resignation and a flatness of tone, “And thirty four when I was born.” “You were the first one?” I inquired, wondering what was behind that way of stating those facts. “No, the third one,” she answered. “So that means she had three children in three years?” I asked with some astonishment. Kathleen took a deep breath and then reported, “She had my sister…an older sister. The she had twins,” she added, explaining how there were three children but only two pregnancies. “Twins,” I said softly to mys | 
