Voicelessness and Emotional Survival--Holiday Blues

body, to locate her self. She begins to imagine our next session--what she will say, what my response will be. This gives her solace.

Patty had two tasks in therapy. The first was to understand her history and her family from a different perspective. Dysfunctional families often create their own mythology in order to hide painful truths. In the L. family, people were supposed to believe that Christmas was a joyous, loving occasion. Anyone who challenges this mythology (as Charles did) is seen as crazy and difficult. Unless challengers change their minds and apologize, they are pariahs. Patty could not verbalize the damaging subtext in her family. All she knew was that when she spent time at her house, she shrank to nothing.   But this she considered to be her problem, not theirs. Deep down she believed she was defective and the family was normal. She was also rewarded for thinking this way: as long as she maintained these beliefs, she could remain a member in good standing.

In fact, Christmas was hardly a joyous family holiday in the L. family, but instead an occasion for each member to remember how they had been chronically unseen and unheard and, in response, either diminish their expectations even further (like Patty and her father) or to resume their desperate quest for voice (like Walt, Estelle, and Charles).

Voicelessness is passed from generation to generation. A person deprived of voice may spend their whole life searching for it--leaving their own children voiceless. If a parent is continuously striving to be heard, acknowledged, and appreciated, there is little opportunity for a child to receive the same. As Estelle and Charles illustrated, often this results in a "voice war" where a parent and child continuously fight battles over the same issues: do you see me, do you hear me, do you appreciate me. Charles experiences his mother's preoccupation this way: "Why is the meal (and Walt) more important than I? Why can't you pay attention to me?" He senses the holiday has little to do with him, and more to do with his mother being "on stage." Nevertheless, he can't say these things. After all, he is a grown man and not a child: admitting such vulnerability and injury is not masculine. Furthermore, he knows what his mother's response would be: "I cooked this meal for you." Being partially true, the statement is unassailable. Instead, he drinks, acts out his need for attention, and alienates everyone. This solution, while indirectly addressing the problem of voicelessness, is really not a solution at all: ultimately, it is self-destructive.

Patty is temperamentally different from Charles. She can't aggressively do battle. But she craves voice just as much. If only she can be good enough and flexible enough, she will receive tiny scraps of attention here and there. During her childhood, she subsisted on these scraps--she asks for little more from anyone in her life. Now, her relationships with men are all the same: she contorts herself to fit their narcissistic needs.

The first task of therapy, understanding one's history and one's family from a different perspective, is, by far, the easier of the two. Patty understood the personal histories and destructive patterns within a few months. But, insight was not enough.

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