After weeks of feeling I was getting nowhere, I can honestly say that my therapist and I have made some headway. In a previous session she had used the word ‘victim’ to describe me and asked me why I continued to allow myself to get hurt. This has rankled me and I have often thought about it since. In the early days I kept what was happening in the therapy very much to the hour and locked it up again for another week. Now I realise that I am mulling things over between sessions and making progress on my own, too.

I do not see myself as a victim and I wanted her to explain what she meant by it. Up until now I have been accepting her pearls of wisdom without challenge. Well, at least, without a verbal challenge. Now we have embarked on more of a dialogue. I am as likely to say, ‘So you are trying to tell me...?’, as she is. This conversation we are having is all about effective communication. It is so easy to assume that each of you is making yourself understood. This seems to take up as much time in a session as getting to grips with the issues.

The other thing that has changed is one of my preconceptions. I was expecting my therapist to make lots of links. In fact, I have come to therapy having made a number of links and what’s happened is that I’ve been ‘de-linked’. What my therapist has done is to disentangle the different relationships and show me that they are separate. I had feared that history was repeating itself, that my relationship with my son was on a course I was powerless to change. Sure, on the surface there are coincidences between the relationships I have with my mother and my son, but the circumstances are different. My therapist kept telling me that there was a mismatch between what I was feeling and what I was saying. The de-linking means that what I feel and what I do and think have been brought closer together.

I had been feeling bereaved, that I had lost my son forever. I rejected my mother at roughly the same age and although these days we are outwardly civil, I have not had what I regard as a close relationship with her since. Because of that experience, at an emotional level I had felt that it was all over with my son. Now finding myself in the mother role, I had been feeling the pain that I imagine my mother might have felt. I have had to take on board that I could have inflicted that much pain on someone. My therapist has shown me that, unhelpfully, I have been projecting feelings from one relationship onto the other.

She has helped me understand that intellectually I am not behaving as though I believe the situation with my son is over. My actions are those of someone who sees hope and a future and where change is very much in focus. I am making a choice not to stand up to Michael. Standing my ground might be the right thing to do on one level, but it may well make Michael do something irrational in the short term and mean that in the long term our relationship is irreparably damaged. I love him and want the best for him so I am prepared to keep quiet about my pain and wait it out until he gets through this phase. The fact that I was coming over as a victim rather than someone who has made a choice was because I was feeling the pain of the relationship with my mother.

The other thing that my therapist has helped to make clear is the different ways that I build bridges to restore the intimacy and friendship of close relationships after a disagreement. She has separated out my different relationships. With my lover, make-up sex can be passionate and reaffirming. With my youngest child the intimacy is restored by our mutual love and a belief that we have to stick together, never any question that we will fall out for good. One of us will always say, ‘Let’s make up. I love you.’ With Michael our love and respect was much less acknowledged. The way we restored intimacy was through humour and through disclosing and sharing. I had been aware that we didn’t laugh any more and have said, ‘What’s happened to your sense of humour?’ Michael knows that if he doesn’t laugh with me he can keep me at a distance. I know that I have to get him to laugh. 

All of this unravelling and separating feels very fragile and intangible, like I am trying to catch a light that flickers off and on. I need to go back to my therapist to go over it again, to check that I do understand it and to assimilate it effectively. I may not be a victim, but where I am seems more unclear than ever.  

Some details have been changed to protect identities.