Miranda's Story - Part 2

I was very surprised and concerned when Miranda did not appear for her next session. I waited for a while and answered a phone call. It was Miranda's Mother. Of course I had never spoken to her before and I was immediately concerned that there might be bad news.

... not exactly but bad enough. Miranda had asked her to call me and tell me she couldn't make the appointment because she was unwell. I asked her Mother a few questions and found out that her Mother was quite concerned about her as she had been sick with the flu and also a bit depressed. I asked her Mother had anything unusual happened and she said she did not know of anything. She had not been to work for one week. I told her Miranda could ring me any time and that I would see her for her next appointment.

I left it at that and there was no call from Miranda. She did however turn up for her appointment the following week. The young woman who appeared at the door was awash with agony. The look on her face alarmed me. She was pale and distressed.

"So what happened to you?' I asked

"I got sick." She said, "I had the flu."

"And??"....

"Well, after I last saw you, well ... that seems like years ago now, I went straight down to see my Father. I don't know. I just couldn't stand not to."

There was a long pause as though Miranda was waiting to be chastised. Her head was bowed. She was crying quietly. The pause turned into an extraordinarily long silence. Poor Miranda. She seemed lost and lifeless and completely drained.

I indicated that I had no judgment about what she had told me. I maintained a quiet attentive presence whilst neither approving nor disapproving.

She seemed to be about to tell me of what had happened but could not even begin.

After a while she began very slowly, almost inaudibly like a shy little girl. She said she had gone directly to her Father's place without calling him and a young woman answered the door. She was shocked. She knew immediately this was her Father's 'new beau'. The shock for Miranda was made greater she told me, because the young woman who answered the door at her Father's place was around her own age, or maybe even younger.

Miranda introduced herself but refused an invitation to go inside because her Father was not due home for a few hours. Miranda walked back to her car. She sat there stunned. She had a string of confusing thoughts and she suddenly realized she was dizzy and afraid. She sat for a long while just staring and was literally unable to drive her car.

"Where would I go anyway?" she said.

She locked her car and walked to a local park where she sat for a long time feeling stunned and dazed unable to think much or feel much.

As she thawed out from the shock and began to feel again, she said she felt angry and scared and explored the feeling further. To her utter shock she said she discovered she felt a jealous rage because of the young woman at her Father's house. As each surge of rage came she wanted to go back and scream and rage at the woman. She felt desperately angry at her Father. She had the good sense to go for a walk and calm herself down. Eventually she returned to her car not having known how long she had been at the park.

As she was opening her car door her Father drove into his drive way and Miranda slammed her car door shut. She flew into a furious rage. She felt highly irrational and approached her Father who was completely unaware of what had happened or what was going on. She asked to speak to him "away from that bitch inside" as she described her. She was shocked at how angry she felt. It made no sense to her.

They talked in the driveway for a few minutes and Miranda requested they go to the park where she had been waiting for him. Her Father said he would go inside to tell Kate but he did not return. Miranda did not know what to do. She went to the door and heard shouting inside so retreated to her car where she sat in shocked silence and confusion.

"I was so confused," she said. "I had never had that feeling before. My Dad had had girlfriends before but I never felt angry or jealous. I think it was because she is young - and beautiful as well."

Miranda told me that her Father came back out and asked to talk to her in her car. She did not want to talk, especially in her car so they took a walk down to the park. They sat on a park bench and Miranda felt very uncomfortable.

She asked her Father straight out,

" You now when I used to sleep with you every night when Mum was at work, I want to know what you feel about that."

She said her Father looked confused at first and then embarrassed and kind of guilty. Miranda's heart she told me, was almost pounding out of her body.

Her Father told her he was just looking after her and she always came to his bed for company, maybe because she missed her Mother and ... why was she asking?

Miranda said it was so difficult and confusing and she did not even know what to say. She told me all she could do was look at her hands and she stayed silent. From his next statement Miranda believed that his denial could have been an actual confession that he had acted in some way inappropriately toward her. He said,

"I hope you aren't thinking that I did anything wrong to you because I certainly did not."

Miranda became extremely upset. She could not look at her Father. Her head was spinning and she said she could only think of what her Mother had told her of his confession about the little girl he had touched inappropriately when he was much younger. She felt confused and afraid. She then uttered,

"You used me. I know you did. You were drunk and lonely and you liked that I was there because Mum wasn't."

Then all she could think of was the young woman back at his house. She felt savage again, enraged. She told her Father she was too confused to talk any more and they walked back to her car and she left. They had both ended up silent and feeling distressed and awkward.

Within one day Miranda had flu like symptoms and felt very ill and depressed. So here she was with me and I did not say too much. Miranda had a lot to sort out. She wanted to talk about her Dad's girlfriend and her reaction to this young woman Kate's very existence. I listened and she still had strong feelings of envy and jealousy. Well since envy and jealousy toward someone usually come from wanting what they have, what is it that, your Father's girlfriend, Kate has that you want?" I asked her. Miranda was astonished at the question because it seemed absolutely ludicrous to her.

"I want nothing!" she exclaimed, "Absolutely nothing!" After a pause she continued.

"What I really want is for her not to be living with my Father!"

"Well," I said, "If we follow my theory and your jealous rage is about wanting what someone else has, what would you want that Kate has?"

I was sorry to get Miranda to have to think so hard. She certainly applied her thinking at that point. Suddenly she said,

"Well, I certainly don't want to live with my Father or be his girlfriend."

"Of course not, I replied but you need to give that some more thought when you feel more able to because I think there is something there that is bothering you on a very deep level."

Miranda had had the flu and she said she suddenly felt nauseous. She went to the toilet thinking she was going to vomit.

To me, the somatic response suggested that something about it all was making her feel very, very sick. She did not vomit and came back and sat down.

"Well," I do feel very jealous of her and I only saw her once. I guess that apart from wanting her not to be there I would like my Father to love me again. That is what I want that she has, his love."

"Seemingly she has that, yes." I said, "but what you want is his unconditional love, his genuine, unconditional love... the genuine unconditional love of a Father. I think the love he gave you was conditional. Remember how I said that his fathering of you was the wrong way around when you needed him most? It turned out you needed him but he failed you because he was often showing you how he needed you. On a deep level that is part of what you are suffering from ... the lack of genuine unconditional love from a Father who was very close to you while your Mother was otherwise occupied. This is a seemingly harmless thing but that is because, as adults, your parents were not understanding what you were feeling or worse, not feeling. The child suppresses the painful feeling. I believe you have been doing that for a very long time."

Miranda nodded strongly. "Oh wow!" she exclaimed, "That is so true."

Sometimes in therapy there are those moments when the very point reached is a perfect point. There is a perfect moment where a person can hear a truth that has been sitting inside them for a long time but no one has ever met them in that truth. This was one of those times. These realisations will never come unless what is put to them is held somewhere deep inside themselves, deep inside in the place of truth. In this case that person was me, her therapist whom she had grown to trust as an impartial person in terms of the family history, If it is not there in the recorded imprint the person will not connect with it ... not if they are working with me, anyhow. Of course, if a person is dissociated, in a paranoid or deluded state one cannot work in this way anyway. For Miranda, although distressed, she was very driven to get to the bottom of her emotional reaction. She was upset because she did not have any understanding about why she felt jealousy and anger. She felt embarrassed to have such a violent emotional reaction on sighting her Father's girlfriend. It was the sighting of a young woman her own age being with the man who was actually her Father that caused a deep identification point for Miranda. Father to a lover being so close to her present age brought her to the recognition of Father to daughter as a young child and it disturbed her.

Now she understood. It all made a lot of sense. From this moment Miranda was immediately released from her agony. She talked and talked. She went over and over what she had discovered. She was amazed at how relieved she felt.

Over the next few months Miranda became a lot calmer. She never discussed the incident with anyone except one friend who was always there to hear her, especially if some significant shift was going on for her.

Her friend who was only a day apart in age had experienced a similar situation with a baby sitter when she was young. The man who looked after her was an Uncle and he had once tried to touch her genitally. When Miranda was talking with her at one point in this stage of her therapy, her friend Lily asked her whether her Father had done something like that to her.

Miranda replied, "I think so."

Miranda told me at her next session that she remembered waking up one night with her Father breathing heavily and jerking his body. He had his back to her. I asked her why she had not mentioned this before. She told me it was only when her friend told her of her experience that she was able to realize that her Father was masturbating.

As so often happens with traumatic experiences, Miranda had toned her memory down to a point where she had not allowed herself to think consciously of the reality of what had happened but it had sat there in her mind since childhood.

I checked her story out thoroughly with her. Miranda was deeply upset, disgusted and shaking as though terrified. I had her lay down and I stayed with her as she shook and trembled. She looked just like a deeply afraid little girl. She looked pleadingly at me. I could see she was regressed. I said nothing. I just sat with her, taking her in deeply and then she cried. She felt disgusted and ashamed. She felt angry one minute, relieved the next. She told me everything that was going on for her. She never lost control. She would feel the feeling and then tell me how she was feeling. She told me that she had always known that this had happened but had never really let it become a reality in her adult mind. She did not understand what her Father was doing or in fact that he was doing anything. Slowly at last, she could move from the innocence of her child mind. As she explained, when it was happening she did not know what was happening. She only knew for herself experientially, that particular things were going on. Her experience of what her Father was doing felt very weird and strange but the child that she was had no understanding of what was going on. There was no context for her. There was no prior knowledge of such a thing as sexuality or masturbation. None. So she had nowhere to organize the event in her mind. Consequently, 'it had stayed in a hazy weird place' as she put it ... until that very moment. The experiential imprint and uncomfortable feeling of that time had plagued her since she could ever remember. Eventually she collapsed into the deepest sadness. She said she was sad for herself, sad for her Father ... even sad for his girlfriend. It was a time when she could let the feeling of the child come up and then the reasoning side of her adult self would take over. The adult side of herself could accept that this event did happen. It climbed from a mere hazy memory into reality. This was a very healthy sign, to be able to have the adult reasoning to assist her through the child's traumatic events simultaneously. This is quite rare. I later told Miranda so.

Because of that, Miranda trained herself to use her talent of the simultaneous child experiential memory and the adult reasoning to help herself heal and change. This hastened her process dramatically.

Miranda still had a lot of sadness to deal with. I constantly told her it would take time and reminded her it would eventually fade in terms of the hurt and pain she was feeling.

Eventually, as I predicted would happen, Miranda focused on what steps to take regarding her Father. Her anger around her Father had subsided although she became more angry in everyday situations, more angry than ever before. But as her reasoning would have it, when she felt her anger come she would question herself, as taught by me ...

"What is it that I cannot get? And how am I being taken from?

What it is it that I am holding onto that might be taken from me? "

Once she had the answer, the understanding ... the anger subsided. It became quite easy eventually but the anger was constantly arising. Miranda trained herself to practice the elimination of the angry feeling just by using her determination of mind. She was very motivated and became very successful.

At the beginning I encouraged her to wait for as long as she could before she contacted her Father. She agreed wholeheartedly as she had no idea of how to approach him. For a long time she had no idea about how or what she might like to do. For the most part she did not want to do anything. She did not want to see him. He did not contact her.

Miranda had told her Mother about her process but not in great detail and one day her Mother said that a mutual friend had told her that her Father was very ill. This upset Miranda a lot.

She was quite distraught again. She felt guilty for not seeing him. Perhaps, she thought, she had something to do with his illness. Miranda had to see her Father. By the time she got to his town he was in hospital. In some way this made it easier for Miranda ... and it turned out to be just that. She could meet him away from his home. Her Father had heart problems and had had a heart attack. He was quite weak and was being kept in hospital until he was strong enough to be operated on.

Miranda came to see me after the visit. She was much relieved and the most relaxed she had been in a long while. She felt relieved that her Father was still alive and more relieved that there was something around her Father to focus on rather than be preoccupied with what had happened in her process with her childhood trauma. She was very happy that most of her anger had subsided. In fact she felt no anger toward her Father at all and she felt very grateful that she had worked things through without involving him. As she said she would have felt somehow responsible had she confronted him and he had suffered his heart attack afterwards. She felt sorry for him. She felt he looked so vulnerable and weak it helped her feel some liking of him. It helped her heal.

She understood that could change and she was hoping it didn't. Of course it did when young Kate turned up at the same time as she did to the hospital. She cut her visit short and realized she still had the jealousy arising. She still wanted her Father's love. Her child self did not want anyone else to have it. Miranda had to deal with those feelings which I was able to explain to her did belong to the child. Only she could give that love to her child self now. She had to become a more responsible and stronger adult.

We went through some time where she became used to petting and patting her hurt child. She was a little embarrassed to think of doing that but it did work for her. Her Father was never going to understand the little girl in her, let alone the woman she now was so best she learn to give the care and love to herself.

Miranda got used to that and eventually on the odd occasion she saw Kate, she had very little feeling of envy or jealousy. She would remind herself that she had grown up and that there was a child need in her that she would have to satisfy herself and not look for it elsewhere.

Steve, who has not been mentioned for a long time in this account was right off the scene for Miranda. They had drifted apart. There was no other man in her life and she looked forward to meeting someone. She felt much better about herself, significantly stronger. At the same time she was not looking for a 'relationship'.

Miranda finished the last part of her therapy with a lot of work around what she had come seeking in the first place. It was her issue of the inability to orgasm. We had long talks about this subject not only as her particular issue but as a relatively big issue for all women ... and men. She was not particularly worried any more but was very relieved as I encouraged her to explore and become more knowledgeable about the fact that this was a common problem for whatever reason for many women. Not only this, it was an interesting subject in itself. Miranda was still inhibited in terms of exploring masturbation. I left her with her own personal decision and never overly emphasized the point.

Miranda did hint that she had noticed 'energy' sexually and not only that, she had more energy generally. I suggested she take up a regular form of exercise and she had begun pilates and yoga classes before she left therapy. This would assist in keeping all of her body/mind channels open. She would be clearer in her thinking and maintain a much needed level of available energy.

Before we finished we went over every detail of the work she had done with me. She still preferred not to think about her life as an escort and we discussed the fact that the memory would never go away entirely. I reiterated that it was of extreme importance that Miranda link the fact that she was drawn to 'pleasure' men because there was an underlying perplexing confusion inside her, where she had an unconscious drive to please a male and it was partly as a result of the intimacy felt with her Father in those early years. This was mixed in with the longing for his love. We had discussed this many times during the course of her therapy. She understood it very well and the she also understood that, as her awareness deepened, she felt the pain of what had happened. From feeling the pain she integrated the understanding. Further to that she was able to lessen her confusion and discomfort about men, about herself also... and move on each day with a new awareness that was guiding her to her own satisfaction through many different experiences and pursuits.

One very important point of understanding for Miranda was that during her experiences with her Father she had not been overtly traumatised as would have happened if he had made an overt move toward her sexually at the time. Nonetheless, she had been very affected in terms of a kind of intimacy she shared with him as an innocent child when what she was needing was positive reflection, affection and love. This intimacy was overwhelmingly strong, too strong for her to deal with. The intimacy was lived over a long period of time and more to the point, the need in her Father had subsumed her own child needs for love and affection hence the confusion and repressed or 'unhad' feelings of outrage and anger. This kind of anger arises later in life but there is virtually no understanding of why it is there, no connection whatsoever. There is no understanding for a young woman like Miranda when she self identifies with another young woman her own age who is living with her Father... no knowledge, no understanding about her feelings.

Miranda could not possibly understand her immediate rage when, on other occasions, her Father's partners had very little negative effect. Kate's existence brought an immediate identification for Miranda because she saw the woman as being very much like herself, a daughter.

Miranda was experiencing a significantly increased amount of relaxation in her mind. She was happier.

Miranda and I said goodbye. I often wonder about her. I hope she became satisfied in being able to achieve orgasm and I feel that through her 'work' on herself she had a very good chance of that happening when she was back in a relationship with a man. She had removed a significant mind/body block from my point of view. I wished her well and I still do.

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