Download Author: McArthur, Dorothea Ph.D. ABPP

14 eBooks available.

Affirming Changes of Growth: Epilogue

When patients are ready to graduate from the therapeutic relationship, the five statements articulating the presenting problem are now replaced with the affirming conclusions, which represent the working through to understanding and the resultant healthy functioning:

Supporting Literature

Describes the relationship between Borderline terminology and Impinged-upon Adults.

Therapeutic Issues and the Therapeutic Process

Patients and therapists discuss many issues over the course of therapy. They consider present relationships and problems, the presence of commands or myths, past memories of significant others, and the relationship occurring between them.

The Patient’s Relationship with the Therapist

In addition to the working alliance and transferential relationship, impinged-upon adults must be allowed a real relationship with their therapist that encourages and guides the birth of a whole individuated self, separate from family.

Impinged-upon Adults’ Relationships with Others

  • THE ROLE OF CONSTANT ANXIETY
  • PSYCHOSOMATIC SYMPTOMS
  • THE STANCE OR POSTURE OF IMPINGED-UPON ADULTS
  • RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS FEEL UNEQUAL
  • PATIENTS’ REEVALUATION OF THEIR RELATIONSHIPS
  • PATIENTS’ CONFUSING PRESENTATION OF THEIR CAPABILITIES
  • PATIENTS’ RELATIONSHIPS WITH THEIR OWN CHILDREN
  • THE PRESENTATION OF A CREATIVE SELF
  • THE SEARCH FOR A PARTNER

Commands Given by Impinged-upon Adults

This chapter examines the way in which impinged-upon adults try to compensate for their incompleteness by developing their own set of commands to give to other people. Many of these impinged-upon adults have managed to enter a profession but remain burdened with a sense of confusion and guilt. They are aware of their talent, on the one hand, but on the other, they feel insecure, guilty, and angry about their lack of support for success.

Separation Issues and Process

During the course of psychotherapy, patients change their view of their parents. First, patients lift the denial surrounding the pathological interactions sustaining enmeshment. Then patients see, for the first time, the limitations that result from the maintenance of a close family. Patients then recognize the commands and myths, feel anger, see why their parents imposed such restrictions on the family, and gradually turn to the task of repairing the incompleteness within themselves. This chapter explores the step-by-step change in thinking and feeling necessary for the birth of a self.

Commands Given to Impinged-upon Adults by Fathers

Many of the commands from fathers are designed to support the commands from mothers. The fathers satisfy many of their psychological needs at work, and leave the role of taking care of the mothers’ psychological needs to their children. Since their marriage may often be unfulfilling, these fathers issue commands that request their children to provide some of what is missing.

The Patient’s Relationship to the Family

In this chapter we will consider some of the complex ways in which symbiotic families remain as a unit longer than is beneficial for the individual growth of each member. These interactions cause troubling feelings of confusion, guilt, despair, and helplessness for children.

Birth of a Self in Adulthood

This book is about the treatment of a large clinical group termed borderline, referred to here as impinged upon adults. She clarifies the underlying pathological commands given without conscious destructive intent by parents to their children. The author describes the step-by-step changes necessary for the birth of a self that can occur as a result of psychotherapy. (329 pages)

Reviews

“Dr. McArthur succinctly and cogently pulls together and explains the variety of depersonifying messages (commands) that disturbed parents, themselves victims of identity-distorting depersonifications within their own families, direct toward their children. Her book fills an important niche in the psychodynamic literature devoted to personality disorder, family dysfunctionality, and their treatment. It richly deserves, and will undoubtedly achieve, a wide lay and professional readership.”
—Donald B. Rinsley M.D.

“Birth of a Self in Adulthood sensitively captures the drama of how implicit, unconscious messages sent by parents bind us to them, to fulfill their unmet needs and wishes. Dr. McArthur clearly describes the unconscious character of these message that become internalized as if they were commandments, which we must not break.”
—Donald R. Fridley Ph.D.

“Birth of a Self in Adulthood is a very readable work, rich in clinical examples and free of psychological jargon. The book concisely describes how some parents, due to their own feelings of profound psychological incompleteness, use members of their families to achieve a sense of personal wholeness, and the emotional damage this causes to everyone involved.”
—Charlotte Fletcher Ph.D.