As one of the many popular therapists in New York City, I treat a lot of clients with fascinating and complex problems. Susan is a great example. Susan knew she wanted Tom the first time she laid eyes on him. He's charming, passionate, clever at his job and knows a lot about wine and good restaurants. And there was something about Tom - she could never quite put her finger on it - that excited her and made her feel wicked. It was partly because he was so absorbed in his work the first year she knew him and it both thrilled and amused her to seduce him away from it. It was also because of his personality which made him a real challenge. Tom is not very easy to be with. He's unbearably self centered, extremely critical and, when things don't go completely his way, he gets hysterical, especially when Susan in one of her saner moments threatens to break up with him. Actually, this is how they got engaged.

One day, after working himself into a temper tantrum on the Pennsylvania Turnpike over how Susan had gotten a little too flabby around the hips and sometimes wore clothes that made her look frumpish, Susan made him pull over, got out of the car and started hitch hiking. He coaxed her back into the car but later, in the middle of Sunday brunch, she just up and walked out on him. That evening Tom called her sobbing with remorse. He begged Susan to forgive him and told her how much he needed her. The following weekend they went shopping for an almost perfect two carat diamond ring.

This scene was one of many in which the same drama was played out again and again. Tom would be hypercritical, overbearing and totally insensitive to Susan's needs. Susan would get enraged but take it on the chin with infinite patience - with a sort of compulsive noblesse oblige - hoping Tom would benefit in some small way from her exemplary behavior and polished restraint. That failing, her rage would turn ice cold. She'd withdraw her affection for Tom in escalating stages, eventually threatening but never quite managing to leave him outright. Tom would respond by morphing into an emotionally starved child and beg her forgiveness. Susan would of course forgive but never forget. Tom would then be, if not lovable, at least a bit more tolerable for a time and the cycle would begin again.

Any reasonable observer would be flabbergasted by the similarities between Tom and Susan's mother. Susan's mother has this suffocating habit of pressuring people to do things exactly the way she wants them done. This is especially true for Susan who's always been her special pride and joy. Needless to say, Tom and Susan's mother hate each another. At family get-togethers Susan withdraws from the line of fire and takes secret pleasure in watching them torture each other for hours at a time.

Susan's father is always unflappable whenever his wife gets heated up over people like Tom. He's survived over 40 years of her hysterical eruptions by keeping his cool, especially when she loses it on car trips or in restaurants. He's learned that he can control her by dishing out affection in just the right amounts, depending on how willing she is to learn from his exemplary behavior and polished restraint. If she doesn't respond, he just withdraws from her in a mean, ice cold sort of way. All in all, Susan's father manages his wife in much the same way Susan manages Tom.

How did Susan get involved with a man like Tom? It's as if she needed someone on which to practice the weird skills she picked up from her father, as if she were actually dedicated to being miserable in a serious, creative sort of way. How did she get caught up in this? Could Tom be giving her a slightly better version of what she got from her mother? Susan has certainly succeeded in controlling him better than the little girl who could rarely, if ever, control her demanding mother. Could Tom also be giving Susan a chance to vent her anger toward men because of her father, not only for the passive-aggressive number he did on her mother but for having neglected Susan. Her father has always been a cold, unfeeling kind of man with a mean streak down his back a mile wide.

At the bottom of Susan's craziness with Tom is her secret fear that she's flawed in some horrible, undefined way. She begins to feel it every time she comes close to leaving him. She gets panicky and thinks she'll never be able to find anyone better. So she stays with Tom, committed to what they've created together, like the helpless little girl who used to be so dependent on her parents and who never once felt she deserved better.

In his book Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes about people like Susan, Ellen, Vinny, Bill and Michelle. He'd say they're caught up in thoughts and feelings lodged in them as they grew up, while their true selves were pushed into hiding. Most of us can only catch glimpses of our true selves in dreams or in conscious projections like the picture on the Psychotherapy Group in the Village home page of roses in Monet's garden at Giveny. This picture is what Jung called an anima projection which really came from someone moved by the beauty of the roses who had to take that picture.

How would Susan feel in Monet's garden? Could she ever begin to sense her true self walking by the roses, without Tom?

A Psychotherapy Group in the Village 
160 Bleecker Street, 9C East, New York

[Home] [Conditions and Disorders] [About Psychotherapy Group] [Challenge of Psychotherapy] [Attention Deficit Disorder]
[Ellen] [Susan] [Vinny] [Bill] [Michelle] [ADD Questionnaire] [Joseph Campbell] [Sexual Seduction] [Psychotherapy Links]