We hypothesize that Ingrid turns separation into abandonment and then seeks connection through sadness. Mitch takes it personally when she does this and then gets angry and feels unappreciated. I want Mitch not to take it personally but to be clear with Ingrid that although she cannot fix Ingrid’s sadness, she can bring her joy nonetheless.

Rachel’s boyfriend could not believe that he was enough for her, that she actually was satisfied by him and with him. He needed her reassurance and he needed her to faithfully pick up the phone when he called. In my formulation, he was endeavoring to stave off debilitating feelings of inferiority that surfaced immediately when she was unavailable, feeding the need to cling to her all the more tightly. Right away, as if regressed to a childhood place, he imagined her with another lover. Rachel’s spontaneous cry, “What are you, twelve years old?” was off, in my view, by six or seven years.

Shirley is striving to be “indifferent,” in her words, to her exhusband’s complaints, but I know there is an alternative to indifference that is closer to equanimity with a dose of compassion. Of course her ex is enraged and of course she feels unfairly attacked but, from an emotional

perspective, he has a point. Just as a mother has to bear the hatred intrinsic to being a mother, Shirley will have to accept the consequences of her decision to divorce. Craving understanding from the person she has left is not going to get her anywhere.

Rather than clearly seeing what was wrong, and laying the responsibility on her parents, she had remained vague, telegraphing her pain to those around her while simultaneously taking the burden upon herself. “You had to shut yourself off,” I tell her. “To protect yourself, but also to protect your parents. You loved your father,” I reminded her. “His behavior didn’t make sense. You took it on yourself instead.

His mother was a compelling figure, the center of the household, who indulged Steve as long as he did not question her, but ignored him when he did. We might say she was there as an “object-mother” but erratic as an “environment-mother.” This created a big problem for him. There was no room for integrating his anger in this relationship, no possibility of Steve’s mom ever admitting a flaw, and no acknowledgment of Steve’s independent point of view. The natural give-and-take of a mother-child relationship, in which both parent and child get disappointed with one another but learn to tolerate, and forgive, on the road to becoming

interpenetrating centers never happened.

Steve, we began to see, was never given the chance to work productively with his own aggression. It was as if he had no guidance through the inevitable disappointments of early life.