Ghosts of Past Relationships

Recently someone came to see me who wanted to meet someone and form a committed relationship. The trouble was that she had had a number of bad experiences in past relationships which had made her wary and made her wonder “what was wrong with her” and whether or not she “deserved” a relationship.

It emerged during that first consultation that the men involved had expressed a desire to form a relationship with her but were also seeing other people and thus their attention was divided if not actively playing with her.

When we talked about these relationships, it was clear that my client still held strong feelings towards these previous partners about the way she perceived she had been treated, feelings that continued to affect her and cause her to wonder whether she would be able to ever form a meaningful relationship.

It transpired that my client had had a father who had effectively deserted her as a small child and had shown very little desire to be in contact with her in any way. A picture of someone who could not easily handle responsibility emerged. Although my client did not remember her father, she had developed a feeling that she simply did not matter to him; that she was not important as a person to him let alone as his offspring.

These kinds of experiences can inform our expectations and attitudes about future relationships. The beliefs about our “worthiness” to be loved and why someone who is a parent would not want to have a relationship with us, can lay down patterns at an unconscious level that inform our behaviour with regard to forming new relationships.

In this case, because my client still had some strong feelings towards her biological father about his behaviour towards her, I decided to use a technique in the first instance that comes from Gestalt Therapy. I explained to my client that I was going to give her the opportunity to offload some of those pent-up feelings and that she should take as much time as she needed to do it as fully and thoroughly as she felt able at the time in the session.

I then guided her into a hypnotic state of awareness and asked her to imagine that her father was sitting opposite her. When she had indicated to me that she could see him, I then gave her the opportunity to silently and mentally express to him everything she felt she needed to about how she felt about his treatment of her and how it affected her and anything else she wanted to say. Once she had done that, I did some other work with her and her father to round off the session.

This kind of work can be very powerful. When someone is still affected by the behaviour of someone from the past, we can say that there is unfinished business. Using this kind of technique can help to “finish it up” restoring the psychological power balance, as it were.

Owing to lockdown, it was a few weeks before I saw my client again. When I asked her how she had been after the previous treatment, she said she felt much lighter. There was and is still work to do, but this is a good start.