John 22yrs old came to his first session with his mother. After an explanation that it would be better for him to attend the sessions without her: she went to the shops and picked him up at the end of the session.
Over the following weeks he came alone. He described his family where his father was an verbally abusive alcoholic, and his mother tried to protect him from his father. His Mother a saint. His Father a devil.

This idea of his family was fixed. John like Min in the previous case study was stuck. Stuckness is to be avoided. We run from it: or try to. Therapists try to fix, soothe, comfort rescue in the hope that someone like John will snap out of it.

Continuing on from the last blog Creative Indifference – The Fertile Void describes a Getsalt principle to create an opportuntiy in the clinical relationship. Something that comes into being: from the potential of emptiness. A new discovery of the self emerging out of nothing. The Void like a blank canvas is ready to be drawn on.

With John he repeated the same Parent narrative over and over. A coping strategy. A wall of defense concealing something behind. I asked him again to describe his family. Always returning to the same narrative. He turned to silence. There was nothing to say. But in the silence which is never neutral there was an emptiness, helplessness, & hopelessness. He started to come late – a precursor to not attending.

I asked him how therapy was going in the vain hope that he might be angry with the therapy or with me. But like his mother – I was the saint – to be protected. We went back to silence. I asked him if there was anything that was different about his life. He shrugged. I felt angry. Rejected. Useless. No impact. As an aside which I didn’t hear the first time he said that he had begun to feel annoyed with his mother. The balance of saint & devil had in that moment shifted.

Over the following months slowly a different narrative came out. Applying a stance of creative indifference through the idea of a Fertile Void John re-invented the parent story. His mother kept on going back to the Father against the pleading of her children not to. The Father had a kind intelligent persona when sober which he understood to be love. The mother a critical person dominated and controlled her children in fear of the Father with little love.

Our childhoods are not want they seem: but we want them to be. Rooted in a child’s perception of good/bad, black & white: understood & warmed in its simplicity. The simplicity soothes us of complexity, nuance and strong opposing feelings.
Our story is a coping strategy: which got us through. We survived.

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