Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [135]
My general goals for all clients are to increase their authenticity, openness to experience, competence, flexible thinking and realistic appraisal of their environment. I want to help clients see things in new ways and develop richer, more rewarding relationships. Psychotherapy is one of many processes by which people can examine their lives intelligently. It’s a way to have a consultant on solving human problems. It can be good for everyone; it helps people steer, not drift, through life. Examined lives are indeed more worth living. The ideal life is calm, fun and responsible. Like Freud, I believe in the value of love and work.
Working with adolescent girls and their parents pushed me to reexamine my training about families. Much of the writing in our field views families as a primary source of pathology and pain. The language of psychology reflects this bias—words about distance are positive (independence, individuation and autonomy), whereas words about closeness are negative (dependency and enmeshment). Indeed, psychologists are so prone to pathologize families that one definition of a normal family is “a family that has not yet been evaluated by a psychologist.”
Years ago Miranda and her parents came to my office. Three months earlier she had been diagnosed as bulimic and referred to a treatment center eight hours away from her hometown. While Miranda was in this program, her parents secured a second mortgage on their home to pay for her treatment. They called her daily and drove to the faraway center every weekend for family therapy. After three months and $120,000, Miranda still had her eating disorder and her parents had been diagnosed as co-dependent.
My first question to Miranda was, “What did you learn in your stay at the hospital?”
She answered proudly, “That I come from a dysfunctional family.”
I thought of her parents—Dad was a physical therapist and Mom a librarian in a small community. They weren’t alcoholics or abusive. They took family vacations every summer and put money into a college fund. They played board games, read Miranda bedtime stories and attended her school programs. And now, with Miranda in trouble, they had incurred enormous debts to pay for her treatment. For all their efforts and money, they had been labeled pathological.
Miranda, like almost all teens, was quick to agree with this label. It’s easy to convince teenagers that their parents don’t understand them and that their families are dysfunctional. Since the beginning of time, teenagers have felt their parents were uniquely unreasonable. When a professional corroborates their opinions, they feel vindicated, at least for the moment.
But in the long term, it hurts most teens to undercut their parents. My goal with Miranda was to restore some balance to her concept of her family. When I suggested that her parents deserved some credit for the efforts they’d made to help her, Miranda seemed confused at first, then visibly relieved.
Psychology’s negative view of families began with Freud. He believed that character was fully formed within the family in early childhood. Because of the pathology of the parents, he felt that the character structure of most children was flawed. The goal of analysis was to save the client from the damage done by the family. It is a common view today. Many popular psychology books suggest that if the reader isn’t happy, it’s because of a dysfunctional family. These books ignore the crime rate, the poverty and the sleazy values of the mass culture and our drug- and alcohol-fueled life-styles.