Understanding Survivor Guilt, Imposter Syndrome, and Testing in Therapy
Survivor guilt, first identified in Holocaust survivors, can manifest as feeling undeserving of success. Imposter syndrome involves feeling fraudulent in one's success and fearing exposure. Passive into active testing in therapy allows patients to work through pathogenic beliefs by enacting them with the therapist, providing a safe space for growth and healing.
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Control Mastery Contributions to Control Mastery Contributions to Psychotherapy Psychotherapy Michael Bader, DMH michaelbaderdmh@gmail.com (415)385-9845 Website: michaelbader.com
--Survivor Guilt --The Imposter Syndrome --Passive Into Active Testing in an Impossible Patient --Treatment by Attitudes or Corrective Emotional Experiences --Why Do We Seem To Blame Parents For Everything Bad --Dreams Teach Us A Lesson --Gaslighting and Other Ways to Drive Someone Crazy --Revisiting Crying at the Happy Ending
Survivor Guilt Survivor Guilt ----------Survivor Guilt was first identified in survivors of the Holocaust. People who had survived while others didn t felt tremendous guilt and seemed to live lives that were grim and joyless as a kind of self-inflicted punishment. Such a person feels that he or she has done something wrong by surviving. ----------Weiss s contribution was to see how common survivor guilt is in people who are simply better off in some important way than their loved ones, especially their parents. ---------- There is a saying that a child would rather be a sinner in heaven than a saint in hell. This means that children don t really want to see or experience their parents as damaged or disturbed or cruel or crazy. The child would rather somehow think and act as if the child is the bad one and the parents are good, or well-intentioned.
The Imposter Syndrome The Imposter Syndrome ----------Feeling fraudulent, like an imposter, is an important manifestation of survivor guilt. It s a feeling that we do not belong in the life we re leading well, in particular, that we don t belong in the successful life we re leading. ----------So people in positions of leadership and authority often wrestle with feelings of fraudulence. ----------People deal with feelings of fraudulence in various ways. Sometimes, they just sabotage themselves or arrange failures. Other times they become almost painfully perfectionistic. ---------- people with the Imposter Syndrome fear being found out, discovered and humiliated. Shame and humiliation are punishments for the crime of being successful or worse for the crime of thinking you deserve to be successful.
PASSIVE INTO ACTIVE TESTING WITH AN PASSIVE INTO ACTIVE TESTING WITH AN IMPOSSIBLE PATIENT IMPOSSIBLE PATIENT Testing is one of the primary ways that patients work in therapy to overcome their pathogenic beliefs. Patients enact in some way their pathogenic beliefs with the therapist as a way of determining if it is safe enough for them to move forward with their unconscious plan to get better, to reach their healthy developmental goals. Weiss said that there were two ways that patients did this: they enacted transference tests or passive into active tests. Turning Passive into Active -- When a patient turns passive into active, the therapist is made to feel him or herself in the role of a child in relation to a parent. Weiss believed that this was an important way that patients test their therapists. The therapist passes such a test by doing things and adopting certain attitudes that are the opposite of what the patient was capable of as a child.
Treatment By Attitudes Treatment By Attitudes The role of the therapist is to figure out how to disconfirm the patient s pathogenic beliefs. Interpretations and explanations are very often an important way of doing this. Sometimes, however, the therapist corrects or disconfirms a pathogenic belief through his/her attitude, his/her way of being, and his/her actions.
Why Does CMT Always Seem to Blame Why Does CMT Always Seem to Blame Parents Parents Especially Mothers Especially Mothers CMT very often locates the origins of patients pathogenic beliefs in early relations with unhappy parents, especially unhappy mothers. This seems to be in line with a long tradition of mother- blaming among psychologists The reality is that the child s dependence on parents is absolute, parents who have an awesome authority to define reality and morality for the child. This is an objective reality, not a judgement Parents, however, were also victims in their own families, plus are embedded in a social and cultural milieu that profound affects their well-being. The world is mediated through the psychologies of parents which then deeply impact children. Thus, in many ways, society is the ultimate culprit
Dreams Teach Us A Lesson Dreams Teach Us A Lesson Dreams don t reflect an unconscious wish, as Freud believed. Instead, they express an unconscious attempt to help us master our traumas and pathogenic beliefs. Dreams can help us in a variety of ways. They can warn us about something. They can reassure us. They can inspire us and give us hope. They can reduce something to absurdity in order to show us something important about reality. They can help us face a painful reality. The meaning of a dream isn t obvious from the content. Weiss believed that the part of the day when we re asleep isn t just restorative to our brains and bodies but has been designed by evolution to help us psychologically as well. The way it does so is through dreaming. Our dreams are not cries from the dark unconscious but helpful guides to psychological adaptation and health.
Gaslighting: How to Drive Someone Crazy Gaslighting: How to Drive Someone Crazy The villain in the movie, Gaslight, alters the reality of his victim and then denies her perceptions Usually the victimizer uses gaslighting to disavow his or her own mental disturbance by making the victim feel that he or she is going crazy. And, importantly, this is a process with which the victim complies. If the person hurting you the parent is also the person to whom you go for love and comfort, conditions are ripe for gaslighting. The child is in an impossible bind having to somehow integrate his or her real experience of abuse, with all of its attendant fear and rage, and then have to integrate that with depictions of the parent as benign, nurturing, and caretaking, as GOOD. What is the child to do? One answer is that the child goes a little bit crazy, adapting to this impossible dilemma by maintaining the almost delusional belief that the problem is in the child, not the parents. Soul Murder, double-binds, and gaslighting
Crying At The Happy Ending Crying At The Happy Ending Review Weiss s class 1952 article Our egos regulate the expression of our emotions, including sadness, according to whether or not it s safe. Safety is at the heart of the matter. Case in point: The film, Billy Elliott. Weiss s focus on safety helps us understand PTSD and the way that psychotherapy cures patients through the creation of happy endings.
