So sometimes therapy is about timing. I posted about the role of father's in girls lives and the value they have to developing self esteem and expectations about romantic relationships. The post was based on a wonderful young woman and her absent father. It was based on the story she told of how she tolerated crap relationships from men because there was no role model in her life for what she should be able to expect.

An hour later I was able to reflect on that client and use her story for another. A man in his thirties walked in accompanied by his partner and father. He explained that he had spent many years recovering. he had been a poly drug user, using anything that came his way including a nasty heroin addiction. He developed a drug induced psychosis and has been traumatised for life. He stopped trusting himself after recovering from searching the roof for the cameras "they" had placed in there. He has used methadone to manage his addictions for years.

For some time now (we are talking years) he has been employed and has managed to provide for a family. The family includes an eight year old daughter, a partner and step children. He has become "respectable." He has become a traditional bread winner. Until the GFC came around and he lost his job. Suddenly he has lost his role, feels useless and worthless and has become suicidal. Really seriously suicidal.

I was able to describe in details the girl who had left only an hour before. I could describe her father's role and how important he was - regardless of how much he earned or where he worked. She just wanted him with her to love her. To teach her how to be loved as an adult and what she should expect from men who claim to love her.

Together, they both brought me to tears (again). More ...

So much joy and satisfaction in adulthood is learned in childhood. We must learn to love knitting, to value art, to enjoy cooking to appreciate travel to wonder at a sunset, to value fitness. It all comes from what we learn. We use these skills and enjoyment and activities when happy but also when we need to sooth hurts. When sad we need to reach for activities that make us feel better. We have a bath, walk on the beach, go fishing, replace a brake lining, listen to music or write in a journal.

What happens when we spend the first fifteen years of our lives spending weekends in the car park of the local pub? What happens when we spend weekend after weekend watching mum and dad get drunk and then fight? They are busy with their own lives not even looking at the children they are raising. When no one teaches us to knit, to fish, to listen to music to cook? When we have no time for learning the skills and tasks that give meaning to life.

Our practice is filled with adults who never learned these meaningful activities. Their lives, as children. were barren. They spent their days following their parents from car park to car park, from club to club. When asked what they love to do, what they do when they need self care, they are unable to offer anything beyond substances and maybe a PlayStation. No one ever stood with them and spoke of the joy of a sunset, or taught them how to plant a tree, to write down worries or to sing a song. There are people, plenty of them, who cant do the basics. People who cant identify anything they do that gives them pleasure. They cant identify goals or pleasures because they dont know, they have never experienced them. They can't make themselves feel better, they resort to drugs and alcohol, they are very often depressed. Now that is real poverty. More ...

eHe was sent for "anger management." A father of two teenage girls and husband of a wife with (at least) drinking problems, he has been a client for many months. We have had little success with either moving forward or moving back. Change in any direction just didn't seem to want to happen. Part the way to separation and she suddenly became nice again, or part the way the drug and alcohol counselling, the conflict escalated until it was unbearable. Yet the family continued with violence and with occasion police intervention. The girls were struggling in a very big way. I sat with him wondering why. why could nothing be changed and why did he continue to sleep in the lounge room rather than just doing something- anything decisive.

The answer became clearer when he confronted me over a conflict. I wasn't able to help when he expected me to. The situation had escalated again and I asked him to wait an hour for an appointment. He left my office in a temper. I hadn't fulfilled his expectations and he felt very abandoned. He was willing to walk out and desert the change process; to give up, to chuck every thing in. I was willing to walk out and not change a thing. A pattern, I suspect, oft repeated at home. Again I had the privilege of seeing people as they really are, not just how they'd like to look. Again I had the privilege of not reacting like his wife; of not becoming angry myself; of just sitting and waiting for his return. What a wonderful moment when he came back and learned about himself; about how that pattern has failed him in the past and needs to change. Aahh...long term therapy can indeed be a important thing. More ...

He has been married for over forty years. The last five have been dominated by a belief that his wife was unfaithful. He has become angry and irritable. He thinks about it all day, every day. He replays the imagined scenario over and over and over. She denies anything happened. The only evidence he has is a middle of the night door opening and closing, seeing his best friend walk past a door way and then his wife returning to bed. The "evidence" is sketchy at best. He has not left her but he wont believe her either. He looks for evidence of her crime at every opportunity. He sees it in the fact that doesn't talk to her "other man" and that she does. He sees it in her distress and in her lack of distress. She describes herself as anxious and he figures that "must be" because she really did do it. He punishes her at every opportunity for her disloyalty by cranky, snappy and irritable.

The interesting thing is that it is only a small step to other paranoid thinking. Paranoid people find evidence where there is none, they look for the tiniest confirmation of their belief, they see patterns where there is only randomness. They find a conspiracy of secrets and lies when other people see innocence. they see signs and symbols of the "truth."

In this case it is interesting that his daughter has been diagnosed with paranoid psychosis. More ...