In What is the Meaning of My Resistance to Psychotherapy?, T. Mouque recounts what I image could be a stressful experience for many, when she threatened to kill her therapist. As a child experiencing gross abuse by her mother, she constructed a story about how her mother was a "good mother" and she was a "wicked" daughter. This splitting of her psyche was done in order to survive and protect herself from further damage. She locked this wicked part of herself in a dungeon (for 57 years) and was content to live as a false/incomplete version of herself that everyone loved. Though pathological, it enabled her to get married, have a family, become educated, have a career, and be relatively happy with those aspects of her life. Overall, this article has given me a renewed respect for the psyche.
After she began therapy, she become aware of repressed and forgotten memories. She began to feel threatened by her therapist and wanted to discontinue her treatment, but instead she was able to find that (1) she had resistance to psychodynamic therapy, (2) she had repressed memories, and (3) these things never occurred to her. Through the valuable tool of transference, (she transferred feelings for her mother onto her therapist), she was able to name the problem she had for years, which caused her undo stress, made her unsympathetic to herself, and attributed to her remaining guarded in her most intimate relationships. She began the journey of reclaiming herself, and found psychodynamic therapy and a heuristic approach effective in getting to the root of her problem. She used narratives to uncover past events and their meanings, which primed her to move towards wholeness of self.
It’s interesting that this “good girl” false version of herself persecuted her, protected her, and was protected by T. Mouque. This is further evidence for how precious our mind is. I wish the heuristic approach was more defined in this essay. I understand it to be finding a method of expression that best works for the patient so that they can tap into their consciousness more totally (in this case writing narratives). Nonetheless, this approach was key for T. Mouque and vital to her success.
The death threat, which was the climax of her realization that she should no longer run from her problem, vaguely reminds me of the healing crisis. In order to heal, T. Mouque had to go through a unique violent cleanse of her psyche. Some events that advanced T. Mouque's progress sounded unorthodox to me. Once, she was reading a personal experience to her therapist, then her therapist began to cry. Initially, T. Mouque felt indignant and displeased at the therapist's reaction. I wonder how appropriate this is? Doesn't that focus attention on the therapist and off the patient? The patient is concerned with the therapist's show of emotion, why it has come about, and its relevance. Though it is acceptable to emotionally engage with a patient, the patient didn't cry first, which would have given the relationship that intimate space. Later, T. Mouque realized that it IS okay to show vulnerability. As naturopaths, we want to know where the emotional boundary lays. However, we must define our individual parameters within it as to best help our patients with comfort and without embarrassment.
Freud said that transference is a normal tool of psychotherapy. T. Mouque sites that Freud says you can't fight a problem that is out of range. This is why she transfers her problem (her mother) on to her therapist. This is very interesting to me. I'm sure it’s happened to most people in life (displacement of anger). T. Mouque was happy when she could definitively point to the origin of the problem. I found myself very proud of her and relieved at the same time.
