Feminist Counselling in Action by Chaplin Jocelyn;

Author:Chaplin, Jocelyn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1024083
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Limited
Published: 1999-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

MARY

At first Mary could remember very little about her childhood. It had been very strict, but she could not remember her parents quarrelling. In that family all the anger had been repressed. Mary thought that she had been well behaved, as there wouldn’t have been any point in being naughty. No point? Was there a clue here? Had Mary given up making demands, sticking up for herself even before she started? Mary would shrug her shoulders and say ‘It’s no use’ several times in each session. We looked at where that expression had come from, but Mary insisted that it was her own and had come from her own experience. Even if you asked for what you want, she thought, you wouldn’t get it, so why ask? Other people usually win, so why fight?

What were the sort of things she might ask for, I wondered? This proved to be a useful path to take her down. At first it was hard for Mary to get in touch with what she felt and wanted, but eventually after spending time at home writing lists of ‘what I want’ she had some clues. She found that she wanted space and time for herself. She wanted to be listened to, taken seriously and treated as an adult. Just stating these wants was an important first step. Then Mary was able to use some of the wants as clues to explore where her feelings of depression and powerlessness came from. She began to remember many times, both in childhood and recently, when she had been interrupted while talking. She had always been the quiet little one in the background. She had been the bottom of the family hierarchy as the youngest, always being told by others what to do. ‘They’ were all bigger than her, so what was the point in questioning or disagreeing with them. No wonder that she had made an early decision to give up trying.

It was easier with Mary to look for more recent clues to her problems. She described incidents when her husband had decided what they were going to do, when and how, without consulting her. Once again she was not being listened to, and she felt dominated. On exploration it turned out that she was really angry about being bossed around so often. Her needs were not being met. Her husband didn’t do the things she wanted him to do, such as putting up those kitchen shelves. It felt as if the hierarchy between them was rigid and oppressive, perhaps like the hierarchy in her own family. Mary wasn’t sure about this connection and just went on insisting that her parents were happy and never quarrelled. She could not easily express her own anger, as she had no model from her own parents of people expressing feelings honestly to each other.

As Mary told me more and more of the things she wanted from her marriage, from friends, from life itself, she began to express more and more resentment at not having met those wants in the past.

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