Helga – part 3…

Helga replied that she had needed those six months to get more clarity. Now she thought she had come so far so she would have written to Michelle on her own, without being reminded.

“When you went to Peru it was as if you had died. You probably think this sounds strange, because of course you were reachable, I could have written. I could have replied to your loving letters to keep our contact going. But I couldn’t.

Even if I wrote kind letters to you I experienced myself as cut off from you for ever. For a long time I couldn’t understand this.

It was not until we met half a year ago I found the key which had been missing during the whole long therapy.

First it was Brigit who found it strange that I hardly knew anything about you. She wanted to know how it was when you left ten years ago. I didn’t remember. This surprised me. She said:

“How strange! Your best friend goes so far away, and you have no memory of your farewell? Did you feel abandoned then, after her departure?”

“No,”

I answered,

“I didn’t feel anything at all.”

I said these words calmly, surprised myself over my equanimity. But I discovered that I in some sense felt defiant, as a hurt child who isn’t possible to speak to.

"How come?"

I wondered.

"Brigit is kind; there is no need to react like that to her. She wants to help me. There is no reason for me to reject her."

At this simple truth my defiance broke down, I don’t know why it came then, but I started to cry. Now I suddenly felt the pain in being abandoned (the pain I had refused to feel and had held from myself when you left and with it memories of the whole event). At last I understood how motivated this was.”

When Helga was four her father had died. She was left with her mother, whom had a lot of problems herself and was incapable of giving Helga any security. A mother who strictly controlled her and at the same time clung firmly to her, because she needed someone and there was noone else but Helga. Helga had to take care of and fill her mothers needs and think of her.

It was impossible for Helga to feel or show her sorrow and despair over the loss of her father in her mother’s presence. Her mother first and foremost expected self-restraint from Helga and a good manner, but no expressions of emotions (but, once again, self-control!!!), not least as she was jealous to Helga’s love to her father.

Helga had to cleverly accept that her father was gone, i.e. silently and without emotions “accept” it.

Helga experienced Michelle’s departure in the same way. She couldn’t cry, as if somebody had forbidden it, and in a way she metaphorically "buried" Michelle.

Michelle’s mother had used all opportunities to teach Helga good manners. And maybe Helga thought that if she behaved well her father would return? Helga got used to not posing questions, this was forbidden (she had to figure things out on her own? And as good as she could on her own?).

After Michelle had left Helga met a man, but when she got pregnant this man left her, because he didn’t want the child. Helga had to handle all this. But her inner tension showed in difficulties to sleep. She started to take sleeping pills, and had to take stronger and stronger dozes till she realized that she had to do something about it. And thus the therapy.

But this therapy left her in the same childish state of helplessness and dependency, and the powerless anger which this led to, and she didn’t know how she should be able to change the state of affairs. She didn’t succeed in getting any use at all of all her crying. This state lasted for several years. And it was only the therapist who (greatly) benefited on this.

This man profited on Helga’s constant crying and idealized transference, instead of settling it, and Helga couldn’t break the vicious circle. She had got stuck at the same level as the little girl, who can’t understand what is done to her.

The therapist systematically depreciated all people whom stood her near, even Michelle and her co-workers and cousins, so at last she had noone else but him.

Helga thought the therapist only had figured out how he could intensify people’s childish needs, which aren’t possible to fulfill any more, till they were unendurable, to mitigate them with promises about cure. To reach this cure people are prepared to let themselves be exploited in different ways; economically, emotionally and sexually.

But this affair was so good that he probably saw no need to help her even if he had had those prerequisites, which he hadn’t.

The sexual violation often plays a special role. The women’s humiliation and the alleged intimacy shall prevent them from seeing the one through who is using them.

Helga thought that the sexual relation had given her an illusion of love, and as her therapist stayed alive she could tolerate his infidelity. What she had feared the most was her father’s death, because this had meant that she was handed out to her mother’s universally prevailing power.

But what she to whatever prize had tried to avoid occurred. She had become limitlessly dependent on a person who made her believe that he wanted and could help her, and who without hesitation or doubts wanted to drive her into a psychosis, only for to cover up what he himself had done.

Already with her mother Helga had experienced being talked away from her observations and thus made deeply insecure on her senses; on what she saw, heard, sensed (see Mellody on excessive control of reality or överdriven kontroll av verkligheten). She was so used to this that she had no chance of becoming aware that her therapist did the same thing to her once again. But much more consciously and skilfully.

It wasn’t until she met Brigit that she understood why she had let herself be blended for such a long time by this human being. And been able doing this with Brigit’s help in only six months.

He even succeeded in making her believe in his healing powers by showing her written “proofs”; letters from “healed”, which much later showed to be falsified. Emotionally she had got stuck as the small daughter in this relation, a daughter bravely enduring with her mother in the hope that she should “deserve” her father's return.

She had met with a man who had specialized in exploiting his patients’ special distresses as much as possible for his own aims

What gave him so much power over Helga were her early denied sorrow and the defence against the helplessness she had felt then. He now awoke this in the grown up woman, added fuel to it and exploited it.

When Helga met Michelle again then, six months ago, she wasn’t capable of telling her all she now had told her. It was the return of Michelle that helped her getting access to her history.