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Mary's Story
A patient of mine named Mary comes to mind. Mary was 46 years old when her husband of twenty-two years, an extremely controlling man on whom she had depended for nearly everything, died. Since the couple had no children, she decided to move from the small town outside New York where she lived into the city.
Without the "safety" of the dependent relationship she had had with her husband (never having had her own bank account, for example), Mary engaged in a string of painful relationships over the course of several months. One person after another seemed intent on taking advantage of her. Her friend asked to borrow money for a week and never made any attempt to repay her. Her new boyfriend told her he was in love with her, slept with her several times, then moved on without explanation. Her contractor overcharged her and delivered poor service. And her lawyer demanded a sizeable retainer, was generally unavailable to her, and did a poor job of protecting her husband's assets from estate taxes.
Mary came to me with low mood and low self-esteem, wanting to know whether she was a "magnet" for abusive people. She intuited she wasn't just having bad luck; she worried she might be making her own bad luck.
When I spoke with Mary it became evident that she had indeed invited people to be irresponsible and untrustworthy towards her. She had disclosed the sizeable amount of her inheritance to her new "friend" during the first lunch the two of them shared. She insisted on picking up the tab for that lunch and several more. She "pushed" her friend to take the loan that the woman never repaid. The first time she met her new "boyfriend" she told him how lonely she felt and how she was inexperienced sexually. She paid her contractor in full, in cash, before he started work. And she not only forgot to ask for a retainer letter from her attorney but told him she was entirely in his hands because she had no financial expertise, whatsoever.
Mary had positioned herself as a potential victim, again and again. The question was why?
The answer went back to her childhood. After spending more time with Mary and gaining her trust, I learned that her mother had died when she was just two years old, leaving her with her father, a man who had very little interest in Mary's thoughts or ideas and had a bad habit of not turning up at her dance recitals or gymnastics meets or even graduations. The only thing Mary could truly rely on her father for was to be very kind to her whenever she was frightened or sad or ill. Her father, her sole support in the world, responded best to her when she showed weakness.
Mary had never outgrown the fear that leading with strength would leave her alone in the world. When she married, her husband replaced her father as the one who embraced her wholeheartedly when she was needy, but never when she was strong. And if Mary ever thought of leaving him, she was kept in check by the deeply buried, powerful fear of a little girl who had lost her mother and couldn't risk separating from her dad.
Once Mary and I made the connection between buried pain from her past and the interpersonal conflicts with which she was struggling in the present, she began to notice how often she described herself as foolish or helpless or "out of it." She remembered many other times she had been hurt by people after "inviting" them to take advantage of her.
She began to take notice of all the times in a single day she portrayed herself as weak. Stopping herself from doing so, however, took practice and didn't feel normal right away. She wasn't used to being treated as anyone's equal and wasn't sure how to stay on equal footing with others and still connect with them and inspire them to care about her.
She persevered. She started to speak more about "surviving" the loss of her husband than feeling "devastated" by it. She stopped describing the idea of taking over her own finances as "hopeless" and started describing it as "something worth sinking her teeth into."