Today, in class we started watching another intervention documentary about a 36 year old (I think) woman who is a major alcoholic. She has some psychological damage from her father abandoning her when she was a baby, and also from having 3 different step fathers. Her third step father was verbally abusive toward her, only after marrying her mom. On top of that, she was raped by a drunk ex-boyfriend in her own home. She made the decision not to scream because she did not want to scare her dear little half sister. She also decided not to press charges. At a young age she learned not to trust men, and she did not have any positive examples of how healthy relationships work. This caused problems for her marriage.
She met her husband at 24 years old and then married him at 27. They became rich and travelled a lot, to everyone else they seemed like they were very happy. But, Laney pushed her husband away. She wanted to let him in and be vulnerable to him, but she couldn't. I believe that this is an example of repetition compulsion. She had been traumatically hurt by men on three different occasions, and had not really dealt or worked through any of it yet. She subconsciously let these traumatic experiences ruin her marriage. She was trying to recreate the same bad relationships in an attempt to process it, and it ended up in her getting a divorce. This is just one of the psychological term that I felt applied, and I am sure there are many more. Do you guys think that repeating these traumatic events ultimately did help her process things? Or did it make it worse?
I do not think that her repeating these traumatic events ultimately did help her process things because she already knew what it was like to have a bad relationship with someone and so she did not need to directly experience it herself. She truly loved the man that she was married to, and I think that the fact that she ruined her marriage made her even more depressed than she was before and became very very lonely.
ReplyDeleteI also don't think that repeating these events helped her. In the end, I think her inability to move on from her past is what tore apart her marriage. She heard her stepfather in her husband, ordering her around or calling her names, and this correlation that may not have been there is what brought her to not trust him. I also don't think that she was able to process her issues any further after the divorce, because the seeds of alcoholism had already been "planted". After her husband left her, she turned to alcohol to cure her loneliness and psychological issues.
ReplyDeleteI agree, her repetition compulsion was not helpful in dealing with her traumatic experiences, that rather it made everything worse. She didn't deal with them at all, which is what caused her to behave in harmful ways like continuing to drink and harm herself as well as carry her unconscious feelings into her other relationships, like with her family and her husband.
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ReplyDeleteIf you're alluding to the psychological term learned helplessness or transference in her recreation of her poor relationships with men and father figures in her early life, I completely agree with you. However, I think that a more influential term that continues to impact her life later is psychological projection. She projects her feelings of abandonment by her mother and a stable father figure in her life on her relationship with her husband. Ultimately, this drives their relationship apart. I agree with everyone else here in saying that this made her relationships worse and did not help her process things. Overall, I think there is no dispute over the fact that these things affected her life poorly, but there is a dispute about what these things are (the terms) and HOW they affect her life poorly.
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ReplyDeleteAs well as being a display of repetition compulsion, this intervention demonstrated a big example of illusory correlation. Because of the way that she has been treated by the men that surrounded her childhood, she puts her husband into this category even though the only thing they really had in common was their gender. Further more, although it appears that her mother wants to help, it seems like her motives are more selfish and dictated by how Laney affects her, rather than how Laney feels. I think that in a situation like this, affection from her mother was absolutely necessary for Laney's health, but because she didn't receive any, it highly contributed to her drinking problem.
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