This post is an excerpt from a psychotherapy session I had with a client. The post provides deep insight into aspects of PAS, and it also serves as an example of how my telephone sessions typically proceed. The name Carol is a pseudonym, and the content here has been edited and condensed.
Peter – Hi Carol.
Carol – Hi Peter, how are you?
P – I’m good. How has your week been?
C – A bit difficult. This week, every day, multiple times a day, I’ve been really angry and full of hate towards my mother. (Her mother died a year earlier.)
P – Oh.
C – I have felt this before, as you know, and I understand that it has something to do with how my old passive feelings with her get stirred up. But I haven’t been able to release the hatred this week. I believe it’s related to the movie I watched recently—”Mommie Dearest”—about the actress Joan Crawford and her daughter Christina. Have you seen the movie?
P – A long time ago.
C – The movie itself was not, you know, very good. But there were a lot of similarities between our mothers. I made a lot of connections watching it.
P – That sounds important.
C – The problem is that it resulted in … all of these connections resulted in this stronger hatred of my mother (nervous laughter). I’ll give you a couple of examples.
P – Okay.
C – So, is it okay to talk about the movie?
P – Yes, for sure.
C – You’re not going to watch it again, probably. It’s not really all that great of a movie in, like, production value.
P – I see.
C – So, Christina Crawford, Joan Crawford’s daughter, would get lots of presents for her birthday, and Joan, who was her adoptive mother, let her select one present for herself and then make her give the others away after writing thank-you notes for them.
P – Oh, so controlling!
C – When I was six years old, instead of having birthday parties, I had these charity yard sales for the Lord, where I would sell all these things and then give the money to people in need. And it started out like … it was a school for kids with physical handicaps, and I would give the funds to them, and it grew to supporting a bunch of kids in Haiti at an orphanage. This happened every year from the time I was six.
P – It was a one-day event, was it?
C – Yeah – once a year. In my first year when I was six years old, I earned sixteen dollars. But you know to a six-year-old that was a lot. And then they became these really huge events, so by the time I finished—the last one I did when I was a senior in high school—it was like $7,000 or something.
P – That was a lot!
C – I started organizing them in early January and my birthday is in March. That’s when the sale would be, and leading up to it people would bring me stuff to sell and I would spend so much time organizing it and getting all the work done for it. When I was 13, I was going to spend the summer in Haiti and work in this orphanage where the proceeds from those birthday yard sales were going. And that year my mother told me that God wanted me to use the money from the sale to pay for my plane ticket to Haiti. And so, I did.
P – Do you remember having any feelings about that? Any resentment? Or any sense of unfairness?
C – I didn’t at the time. I didn’t make any connections. I believed that what mom told me was that God did, in fact, want me to do that, so that’s what I did. I guess it was just this week that I started to make those connections that, you know, clearly mom didn’t want to pay for my plane ticket to Haiti, and that’s the reason she said that and yet it was … She was the one who was encouraging me to do this ever since I was six. And I really – I really don’t have any recollections about why I started doing that. Every year on mom’s birthday, I always sent her flowers because somewhere along the line I became convinced that she was the one who did all the work on my birthday, so she should be the one who gets the gifts (nervous laughter). In that movie, Christina Crawford did things like that for her mom, too.
P – I see.
C – In the movie, it was so obvious that Joan was using Christina’s birthday for publicity stunts to make herself look good.
P – Yes.
C – Seeing the movie made me think of my birthdays over the years. I think my mother was doing the same thing. And so, like now I hate my birthdays. I just had one this week. In the past, I couldn’t stand the attention, I hated the gifts, I’m always second guessing everybody’s motivation for even small expressions of birthday greetings. So, this week I guess I saw the connection between all of this, and I’ve been hating her all week (nervous laughter).
P – I see.
C – So, the situations are similar. My mother was celebrated locally for her generosity. But she would often have emotional breakdowns, “health events” I called them, when she couldn’t deal with me. I would go to stay with my grandparents, and I enjoyed them a lot.
P – That was a consolation, I’m sure.
C – Yeah. So, I guess I’m like … so I guess I’d like to know how my hatred is related to all of this.
P – Clearly your mother had frequently been insensitive and unkind to you [Carol had provided numerous examples of this unkindness in previous sessions]. When you feel this hatred for your mother, some current situation or event might be triggering these negative emotions. I know you said the movie was a trigger for your feelings, and I imagine your birthday was too.
C – Yeah, thinking about my birthday this week, I made the connection that my mom used my birthday for her to look more godly or pious or whatever.
P – Did you ever make that trip to Haiti?
C – I did, yes – I spent the summer of my 13th. I was there for the summer.
P – The whole summer?
C – yes – when I was 13.
P – Just the one time?
C – Yes, just the one summer.
P – How did it happen that you stopped doing the birthday events? You said your senior year was the last one.
C – It was my senior year in high school so I just couldn’t do it when I went to college
P – Yes, of course.
C – So I knew my senior year that this was going to be my last one. Like when I sent them money that year, I said this was going to be my last one.
P – Was that a relief for you?
C – Yes, they had gotten to be such huge and incredibly time-consuming events. I mean, at the time, I still considered myself to be a Christian and thought that – you know – that was what I was supposed to be doing. But the work on the sales was too much … I was glad not to have all that responsibility.
P – Yes, sure.
C – Faye Dunaway played Joan Crawford. I thought Faye made a parody of Crawford. She kind of did the overacting thing. And Christina, of course, wrote the book about it all. I’m planning to listen to an audio of the book.
P – Let me say what I think is involved here on a deep level. It appears that you get particularly hateful with your mother when you are reminded of the ways she took advantage of you, how she manipulated you and used you for her own purposes. The “Mommie Dearest” movie brings back all these old memories and feelings. It’s likely you now resonate emotionally with the degree to which you were innocent and naïve back then, and just unaware about what was happening. You were understandably passive at that age, and that played into all your mother’s tendencies to impose her agenda.
Now, when these old memories arise, your repressed passivity becomes activated, which then causes you distress. It’s the sense of not knowing what was going on, the sense of your innocence, the sense of victimization, of being manipulated and used for your mother’s purposes. As you remember your vulnerability, you process it through your current lingering passivity, which then brings all the hurt and sense of victimization into the present moment. Now hatred arises toward her. Your hatred provides you with the feeling that you have some force or aggression on your side, that you can strike back at her. This sense of force compensates for the old childish passivity that still resonates within you.
So, to avoid acknowledging your entanglement in that old passive sense of self, you generate hatred toward your mother as a compensating sense of aggression. Of course, you’re not acting out the aggression, it just stews inside you. With people in general, this kind of aggression, this feeling of hatred, often isn’t discharged. It just sits painfully inside us.
C – I hear you.
P – You can feel the degree to which your mother wasn’t there for you emotionally. You feel disconnected emotionally from her, abandoned and unloved, but this feeling also produces an emotional disconnection from your stronger, better self. The more you might feel disconnected emotionally from your mother, the more you can unwittingly be generating an emotional disconnection from your better self. With this hatred toward your mother, you’re not quite seeing how, unconsciously, you are using hatred to deny or cover up your willingness to replay and recycle the passive sense of having been so manipulated and used by her. Of course, you were entirely innocent in that passivity, but nonetheless you are still going to feel the hurt of it if you don’t liberate yourself from it. Now you cover up this deeper understanding when, through hatred, you make her out to be cruel villain and the cause of your distress. In other words, you’re hiding from yourself your unconscious willingness to go on feeling mistreated and dominated by her. What I’m saying here is for you to reflect upon, to decide for yourself what is true. Now, in the movie and the book, was Christina blaming her mother, alleging that her mother was the source of all her troubles?
C – Well, she wasn’t really blaming. She kept saying over and over how much she loved her mother. Joan would get sick and not be able to go to an awards ceremony, and Christina would go for her and accept the award and say how much she loved her mother. This was when Christina was an adult. There were also times in the movie when Joan literally tried to kill Christina—choke her and be physically abusive. But I guess there was a time when there was some revenge. Christina and her brother, Christopher, were about the same age and both adopted. They were really close and grew up in the same room and they had a similar experience of Joan Crawford, who then wrote them out of her will and told them they knew why—though they didn’t know why. It was after that that Christina wrote her book.
P – It’s clear that Christina had resentment towards her mother. That resentment is understandable, but Christina would make it all the more painful for herself if she brooded on the sense of being victimized by her mother. Christina would then be generating within herself that unpleasant passive feeling of being submissive and having been victimized. Again, a child’s submission to an adult is biologically to be expected, but when the passivity continues to be recycled when that person becomes an adult, reactions such as resentment, alienation, and hatred are the lingering, painful price to be paid.
All of this mirrors the relationship you had with your mother. What would it feel like if you were just neutral about your mother when you remember those yard sales? Can you see yourself getting to a place where you just felt more neutral? In other words, you want to become strong enough that memories of your mother no longer have the power to generate hatred. The hatred hurts you, not her. How intense were your hateful feelings this past week?
C – I watched the movie last Thursday, six days ago. The feelings popped up when I wasn’t busy doing something else. So, whenever I was driving, I would get that way or whenever I went walking, I would conjure up those feelings.
P – Let me give you some thoughts to reflect upon and repeat to yourself when you catch yourself feeling this hatred. Of course, if you are thinking about your mother in a neutral way, that’s fine. But when bringing up hateful feelings, you can try saying to yourself, “Look what I’m doing here, I’m stirring up passive feelings. I’m indulging in the passive feeling of being so much under my mother’s influence. I’m replaying the feeling of having been submissive to her. And now, as I feel this hate, I’m covering up my willingness to recycle a deep, vulnerable, passive sense of self.”
As you process this insight, try saying to yourself, “Ah, that’s what I’m doing, I’m sneaking into that old passive feeling. And my hatred serves as a psychological defense to cover up my willingness to cozy up to that old, familiar, passive sense of self.”
If you see this clearly, and you hold onto this realization, the hatred should begin to dissipate, at least for the moment. It could soon come back again, but you would recognize once more the part of you that is unconsciously willing to sneak back into that old pain, which is ultimately the weak, passive sense of self to which you remain emotionally attached. Remember, emotional strength gives you the ability to avoid needless suffering. So many people have stubbornly carried this kind of pain to the grave.
C – Well, I couldn’t get there this week. It’s likely that my birthday and seeing the movie made it all more intense.
P – Yes, for sure. I hope now that you make notes of what we’ve said here. Carry the notes around with you in the coming days and weeks, and make a point of reading the content a few times a day. We all have resistance to letting go of our old hurts and identifications. Unconsciously, we readily decline to take in the knowledge that exposes what’s going on in our psyche. So many of us are highly prone to remaining conflicted between wanting to feel strong while, simultaneously, being determined to remain loyal to a weak, limited sense of self. We go back and forth in inner conflict, one minute feeling strong and the next minute feeling painfully entangled in weakness and passivity. We’re likely now to conjure up old, painful memories associated with this weakness.
Was your father always passive with your mother back then … when you were younger, as he was later?
C – My father worked all the time and I’m sure he did so in order to avoid being around her. He would come home and go smoke his pipe and read his paper and not be present.
P – You had no model for someone standing up to her. So, you were in a vulnerable position. But you can change all this. You can become very strong by freeing yourself from the lingering sense of having been so much at her mercy.
C – Clearly, it would have been great if I could have seen Christina’s birthday party situation and then made that connection to my situation without beginning to feel that hatred toward my mom. It’s interesting to me that I hadn’t made that connection before now, the realization that my mother was clearly manipulating my birthday situation to her own ends.
P – In her mind, she probably felt she was making a good Christian of you and being a good mother. She was casting herself in a good light. She was probably in denial, too, that she was using you to look good in the eyes of others.
C – Right, like telling me that God wanted me to use the money to pay for my plane ticket to go to Haiti. She did that as a way to avoid having to pay for it herself.
P – She would have convinced herself she was being kind. Even when she poisoned your horse [backstory from previous sessions], she might have felt like she was doing the best thing for you.
C – I’m sure she did. I have to keep that in mind.
P – That’s more reason for you not to get hung up on the idea that she was treating you maliciously. The more you get hung up on that idea, the more you deepen your own sense of passivity and victimhood. She was trapped in her own dysfunction. Her behavior toward you was a consequence of how entangled she was in her own inner conflict.
C – And that conflict was what?
P – She had no idea of the likely inner conflict, which was wanting on a conscious level to be good, to look good, to be a loving person. But at an unconscious level she was likely filled with self-doubt about her value and thereby trapped in a place of self-abandonment. She might have been emotionally entangled in self-rejection and self-loathing. Instinctively, she would treat you the way she felt about herself. Very likely she was completely unconscious of this. She was manifesting the harmful symptoms of her underlying failure to feel her own goodness and value. But, of course, as a child you took it all personally.
C – As a child, it’s so hard to see a parent with this clarity.
P – Yes, for sure. Now, whenever you’re hating her, you are descending to her level. As you feel the hate, you resonate inwardly with a dark, painful sense of yourself. The more you hate her, the more you disconnect from yourself and can’t feel your goodness. The more you do feel goodness in yourself, the less interested you are in hating her or giving her so much room in your head.
C – It’s probably better if I don’t listen to Christina Crawford’s book.
P – Listening to it could certainly trigger more unpleasant feelings. If Christina, in writing the book, had seen more deeply her own lingering issues or trigger-points with her mother and acknowledged them, then reading the book or listening to it could be worthwhile. But otherwise, the book wouldn’t have value for you. You want now to get past the hatred by recognizing how you can use memories of your mother to recycle—and thereby unconsciously indulge in—your unresolved willingness to rekindle the feeling of being at her mercy. Hatred of others only serves our own misery. It means we’re not connecting with our intrinsic goodness and value.
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