Being brought up by someone who takes pleasure in your pain and celebrates things going wrong for you while resenting your successes makes living hard.
“How do you forgive the people who are supposed to protect you?”
– Courtney Summers
There are some things we can forgive, and some things… well, the jury is out.
Parental ‘weaknesses’ such as addiction or feckless immaturity can at least be understood by their offspring. They may still have some love and affection. Plenty of adults come through a neglectful childhood and still appreciate their parents or can at least relate to them.
But what about cruelty inflicted coldly, not just in the heat of anger but with malicious, sociopathic calculation? When all the parent seems to want is what’s worst for their child?
Sometimes I’m shocked by what my clients have been through. One such client can be seen inside Uncommon Practitioners TV. Just watch how James – not his real name, and I’ve also blurred his face – describes some of the effects of the cruelty he faced as a child. He was so nervous at the start of the session that he was shaking uncontrollably.
He talks about excessive drinking, ‘imposter syndrome’, and low self-esteem. And when we learn of his mother’s campaign of cruelty, it’s easy to see why.
‘”A mother from hell”
James and his brother were left alone a lot with their mother as their father, who by all accounts was a gentle-natured man, was working much of the time.
Watch here as James describes a moment 15 years earlier when his mother called him (within his hearing) a “waste of space”. As you can see, it cut deep.
James had always been hardworking, yet his mother ‘kicked him when he was down’ by calling him a waste of space just because he lost his job, through no fault of his own. It was clear she hated men generally and had always resented James’ gender.
One of the overriding symptoms of low self-esteem is immunity to disconfirming feedback. In other words, compliments, praise, even great success can have little impact on self-esteem until the person learns to feel and think differently. We can see this in play with James, who felt like an imposter even when he had achieved great successes, as he tells us here:
It seemed the worst James could do to his mother was be successful or happy.
James was a gifted child and was the youngest person ever to be accepted into the Edinburgh School of Art! His mother hated this success. Upon his acceptance, she laughed at him and told him it was stupid and that he was no good. The result? He never took up his place there.
This wasn’t just an absence of love and support, but its exact opposite.
But it gets worse, as you’ll see.
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Cold, hard physical abuse
James told me how his mother would bite and scratch him and his brother, tearing their skin. She would do this not only when she was angry with them, but even if she was simply in a bad mood. She would, of course, make sure they were covered up when they went to school so no one would see the effects of her abuse.
James had to be careful not to react, as she would get even angrier if he did. The bitterness is palpable as James describes this here:
This kind of cold abuse – using the boys as objects upon which to take out her personal frustrations – really does feel unforgivable.
The very person who should have been caring for James and his brother, protecting them, encouraging them, and loving them, was the one denigrating, belittling, and wounding them. James’ brother later spent a long time in a psychiatric unit.
“I needed to protect my son from her”
James had already cut off contact with his mother, wanting to protect his own son from her influence. However, she had been surreptitiously calling James’ son and had begun to belittle him too, calling him useless and trying to repeat the destructive pattern.
That’s when James, determined his son wouldn’t suffer the same consequences he had, cut off his son’s contact with her too. But the effects of her extreme cruelty lingered, and determined much of his life.
So how might we work with such a client?
A key question to ask
When working with people who’ve had terrible childhoods, we need to locate their personal strengths and resources as soon as possible.
I find it useful to ask how, despite what happened to them, they still managed to find success and some fulfilment in the world.
- “How are you still here after all that happened to you?”
- “What is it about you that enabled you to still function after all of that?”
- “Why don’t you feel even worse than you feel?”
In this way we start to locate and reinforce our client’s internal resources.
James treats other people well, and he’s honourable and successful despite what he went through. These facts tell us something important about James.
When James describes some of his achievements, it’s clear that even running highly successful businesses and raising a family with love and respect isn’t enough to overcome his mother’s brainwashing of “you’ll never amount to anything!”
Being brought up by someone who takes pleasure in your pain and celebrates things going wrong for you while resenting your successes – cold, cruel narcissistic abuse – makes living hard.
So how did I work with James?
Understanding, reframing, and undoing the brainwashing
As with all clients, I needed to listen, try to understand, and demonstrate that understanding by asking clarification questions as well as solution-focused ones.
I used therapeutic hypnosis to try to undo some of the effects of the almost constant negative childhood emotional conditioning. I used reframing during hypnosis, partly through the use of therapeutic metaphorical storytelling and other hypnotic interventions.
As we see here, by the second session James says he’s already being kinder to himself, not “whipping himself” so much.
In this session I do a lot more therapeutic work with James, both in and out of trance. We talk about the brutal messaging his mother always gave him: the matter of being a “waste of space”. You can see us exploring this a little here:
During the trance work, I address the truth that all through James’ life, his mother has described him as a “waste of space” by suggesting that James is in fact a “fulfillment of space” and that space and the future “welcome” him.
Sometimes therapy consists in just saying the truth to a client in a way they can deeply accept.
As I suggested to James before he left that second time: No one needs to be confined to the dirt by someone else when, in fact, they can fly.
Get Video Answers to Your Therapy Questions
This might sound a bit space age, but right now inside Uncommon Practitioners’ TV, you can use our Video Assistant tool to find examples of Mark working with clients in exactly the way you’re interested in. So, for example, if you wanted to see a questioning technique for a depressed client, plug it into the search bar and this amazing tool will give you up to six examples of just that. Click on the link, and you’ll jump right to the point in the video where Mark uses that technique. Told you it was space age! Read more about UPTV here.
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About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
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