Jennifer Beall, LCPC, LCADC
I have a friend that I’ve known since childhood; I’ll call her Jessica. She has an older sister, “Melissa.” Their mother, “May,” was depressed and usually angry when they were growing up, so Jessica and Melissa did what they needed to do to survive her abuse.
In my last post, I described three responses to danger: fight, flight, and freeze. There’s also a fourth response, “fawn.” Melissa and Jessica used all four of these strategies.
Melissa would sometimes fight by talking back to May. She’d “fly” by going to her room in the basement, where May never went. And sometimes, when May took her into the TV room and closed the door, settling in for a long session of berating her, Melissa would “freeze” by dissociating.
Jessica, who was significantly younger than Melissa, didn’t talk back to May until she was a teenager. May didn’t allow her to “fly” by going to her room, so she tried to avoid May’s anger by fading into the woodwork.
Jessica’s other main strategy was fawning. She did her best to stay safe by trying to do everything May wanted her to do. She spent a lot of time complimenting May, including calling her the “best mom ever,” in an attempt to stay on her good side.
Jessica knew that May, who was a teacher, was capable of being kind to children. May often talked about how much fun she had with her students. Jessica figured that if she could just do the right things, May might like her, too.
Like all abusive parents, May was sometimes kind to Melissa and Jessica, which almost made things worse, because they never knew what to expect from her. One minute, she might play a game with them, tapping out the rhythms of songs for them to guess. The next, she might yell at them for not eating something that she’d given them for lunch.
Because Jessica never knew what mood May would be in, or what was going to set her off, she constantly walked on eggshells around her. Jessica was hypervigilant because she always felt threatened.
Jessica tried to read May’s mind and be what she wanted her to be. It didn’t work, though, because May’s moods were never really about Jessica. They were about what was going on in May’s head.
Children’s sense of worth (or lack of it) comes from seeing themselves reflected in their caregivers’ eyes. If May had been mentally healthy, she would have accepted and loved Melissa and Jessica for who they were. That acceptance would have taught them that they were worthy of being loved without having to change themselves. But May was unable to give Melissa and Jessica something she herself had never been given.
Melissa and Jessica carried that sense of unworthiness into adulthood. There were plenty of people in their lives who treated them with respect, but they assumed that if those people were able to see who they really were, they wouldn’t like them anymore.
After May died, Jessica did what she wished May had done; she entered therapy. Melissa tried therapy for a while, too, but eventually decided that she was just an unhappy person who couldn’t change, so she stopped going.
Jessica got a lot of benefit from talk therapy, but it didn’t go deep enough. She still didn’t believe that she deserved to exist. I recommended that she try EMDR, and it worked. She was finally able to truly believe the things she knew intellectually.
Maybe you, like Jessica, have benefited from talk therapy, but have found that it doesn’t go deep enough. If that’s true, I invite you to consider EMDR and the other “bottom up” approaches that I offer: Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, Brainspotting, and sandtray therapy. If you’re ready to discover which approach(es) fit you best, please fill out a contact form, book a consultation, or call or text me at 410-888-0590.