ISD AND THE MIND: FAMILY ISSUES – PAULA’S CASE HISTORY
We probably do not need to remind you that your family also left you with certain impressions about sex itself. But you might not be aware that your interpretation of the events that occurred may have convinced you that feeling sexual desire is a dangerous thing to do.Paula, a single, thirty-eight-year-old financial planner, was raised by a passive, long-suffering mother and a hot-tempered, domineering father who not only “called all the shots” but also physically abused Paula’s mother. “My mother loved the bastard,” Paula claims. Clearly, her anger at her father has been buried alive. But unlike Dan, who put his mother on a pedestal, Paula’s attitude toward her mother is decidedly unsympathetic. “She was a fool, a slave to him. She put up with everything he did because she didn’t think she could live without him. If there was one thing I learned from my mother, it was not to let that happen to me.” And Paula learned that lesson very well.Today she is financially independent and plans to stay that way if she ever gets married. “No man’s ever going to know how much I’m worth or be able to get his hands on my money,” she says proudly. But then, it is unlikely any man will ever get a chance to try. Paula’s relationships rarely last longer than a few weeks. They start out “hot and heavy,” since Paula feels plenty of sexual desire right up until the moment when her latest lover indicates that he wants to see her more than once or twice a week. Then her sexual desire quickly begins to fade. “I don’t think it through ahead of time,” she claims, and we believe her.”It’s the weirdest thing.” She shakes her head in bewilderment. “I wake up one morning thinking, ‘What’s this guy doing here?’ Even if we had great sex the night before, I don’t want him to touch me, because he not only doesn’t turn me on any more, he actually repulses me.”Although she is aware of her determination not to get into the kind of relationship her parents had, when she came to us for treatment, she did not realize that, at some level, she saw intimacy and any relationship as threatening. For Paula, ISD was an unconscious defense that protected her from becoming “a slave,” and prevented her from developing a stable intimate relationship.If you grew up in a confusing or chaotic home, you desperately tried to understand what was happening around you. After all, that is the fundamental task of childhood, to create an inner picture of the world and how you fit into it. This background constructs a script that makes sense to you and will one day help you function independently. Unfortunately, sometimes your family may have handed you a script that made little sense in the world you lived in then or the world you live in today.As a child, using the limited insight that is available to someone so young, you attempted to organize this script somehow; you created explanations for the unexplainable and managed the unmanageable by interpreting events in a way that made sense to you at that time. The conclusions you reached were stored away in some remote, largely unconscious corner of your mind, and will continue to influence you until you consciously confront and rewrite them.*101\261\8*
