Madonna/Whore Complex (part 7)

[Crazy Eddie]

That EFT looks like some good stuff. If he can drop his defenses and embrace it wholeheartedly, I see good things happening for y'all.

But that's just the point CE - H says as much as he "knows" what the ST is telling him and can understand it, there is "nothing that can be done to change it" and it's "the way I am" and if I have to hear "it's the way I am" one more time, I will scream for sure.

Don't get me wrong, we have come a long, long way in a relatively short period of time. H acknowledges his main problem logically stems from the attachment theory (even he can't deny that) but this is where we run into his resistence to do anything about it (sounds like another Cemar to me - OMG NO!!!!!) He says it is "nice" to know what has caused all of these problems in his life but you can't change someone from what they are - of course, I TOTALLY disagree with this. I have seen so many people turn their lives around, people I wouldn't have imagined in a million years could have changed, but they did.

I keep telling him how intelligent he is and how I believe if there is anyone that can do it, he can. The response I get is "why are you trying to change me"

So, let's see if I can translate this correctly. "I'm really messed up. I'm so messed up, that she won't accept and love me and let me be unless I change who I am into something better. I don't know if I can do that... a lot of people go into therapy and never get fixed... they either get stuck clinging to therapy as an excuse or they just miss the real problem or avoid the real problem because no one knows how to fix it. And if she really loved me, she'd still accept me as I am without having to be fixed, and she wouldn't threaten to leave me or to keep after me if it turned out I didn't or couldn't be fixed. And I could lose her if I don't get fixed. Also, that means that I'm really, really messed up, and I don't want to think about how messed up and idiotic I am to keep doing this even though I know it's dumb."

The EFT sounds like the perfect answer for him. The bottom line is that he's not "messed up" or "stupid", but that he's formed long-standing habits of thought and action that actually made sense at the time he started practicing them. He did, thought, and felt something perfectly reasonable giving his circumstances and knowledge at the time, stopped paying attention and reevaluating it after a while and mostly forgot about the problem and the solution, and kept up the habit long after it made sense. If he'd never had that habit, he'd certainly never be dumb enough to start it now... it makes no sense in his present situation. And it's not part of the "core" of "who he is", assuming such a thing can even be defined; it's something he started doing at some point in his life and it's something he can stop doing at another point in his life once he sees the situation clearly and learns better ways of dealing with things and thinking about them and feeling them.

And best of all, all of that will come from an impartial observer he respects, not someone with a vested interest in the outcome and certainly not someone that will ever even be tempted to say "I told you so".