In our first session, Sam told me
he was "rebelling" by getting failing grades.
I suggested, "I don't think you are rebelling
at all but you are 'complying' with your
father by screwing up and giving him reason
to yell and be disappointed." I told him,
"If you really want to rebel, you should do
well in school and make your father wrong
about you."
In the course of the therapy, Sam
came late, missed therapy, and continued to
misbehave at home and at school. When he
missed therapy sessions, his parents told me
this was an indication that Sam wasn't
motivated and we should end the treatment.
Asking Parents Not to Give Up. I
argued, "Sam isn't missing therapy because he
is uninterested but because he is testing us.
By missing therapy, he is inviting you and
me to give up on him." It was exactly the
response he was already getting. His father
had given up on him a while ago and his
mother was teetering.
I told them, "If we did give up on
him, he'd know we didn't think he was worth
helping. If we didn't think he was worth
helping, it would strengthen and confirm his
own belief he wasn't worth helping. Then he
would act worse and worse, which was what he
was already doing."
I encouraged his parents to view
Sam's behavior not as evidence that he was no
good, but to see it as him testing us to see
if we would think he was no good. I pointed
out, "When you respond as if he were
hopeless, he concludes that he is a loser.
He then acts like a loser, which makes his
worst view of himself become more true."
In the beginning of therapy, when I
was just getting a sense of what Sam was
doing, he started to miss sessions. I wanted
to tell him that I thought he was putting his
worst foot forward as a way to comply with
how his parents (particularly his father)
treated him, but I didn't have a chance
because he wasn't coming in. I tracked him
down by telephone and, though I don't like
making big interpretations over the phone, it
was the only opportunity I had. I told him,
"I think you are undermining yourself,
screwing up in school and at home, as a way
to justify your father's criticisms of you."
I went on to say, "When you fail in school,
it makes it look like your father is right
about you."
He listened to what I told him over
the phone and then missed the next five
sessions in a row. I kept his time open,
unsuccessfully trying to reach him by
telephone. I kept meeting with his parents
during their time to work on their
difficulties setting limits with Sam and
trying to talk them into keeping him in
therapy. They kept arguing they should end
the therapy because he was hopeless. I kept
arguing that he was testing us.
In the sixth session after our phone
call, Sam walked into my office half-way
through his session, sat down, and said, "I
wanted to get back to what you said about me
undermining myself to make my father right."
He picked up on our last conversation on
the phone without missing a beat.
Therapy by Action. Missing so many
sessions was the way Sam was engaging in
therapy. He was capable of talk therapy but
he, like many adolescents, was engaged in
therapy by action. Not only was he testing
whether his parents would get fed up with him
and pull the plug on therapy, he was testing
me. He did the same thing with me that he
did with his parents, acting like a monster
(note the eye shadow), acting uninterested,
ungrateful, and unmotivated.
When I kept his time open and argued
for the therapy to continue, his parents may
have thought I was soaking them for easy
money, or that I was insane to hold any hope
for Sam. But because I was able to hold his
time and understand that he was testing me,
not trying to defeat me, Sam was able to come
to believe that he had some value. Because I
didn't respond to the way Sam presented
himself superficially and I was able to see
what was underneath his scary, rejecting
exterior, Sam could start to see himself
differently too.
Important or Self-Important?
When Sam
returned, I told him that we should meet
regularly and not miss so much of our therapy
time because the therapy was important. He
looked at me disdainfully and said, "You must
think you're so important."
Sam was testing me in a different
way, by accusing me of being self-important.
This was exactly what Sam said to himself,
accusing himself of excessive
self-importance, because he really felt too
worthless to be important. What Sam sneered
at me was his own internal voice that
ridiculed himself if he ever dared to take
himself seriously.
I told him, "Your therapy is
important, not because of me. Your therapy is
important because you are important." No one
had ever told Sam that he was important before.
As the therapy progressed, Sam
started to elaborate his theories of
government and the role of teenagers as a
politically oppressed minority. I listened
to his articulate arguments with great
interest and respect. Sam stopped missing
sessions. The therapy changed from therapy
by action to therapy by talking.
Sam's aggressive and obnoxious
behavior softened. He started to challenge
some of his unhealthy beliefs about himself
and was able to stop complying with the view
of himself as a horrible monster. He worked
harder at school and his father stopped being
so critical. As a consequence of viewing
Sam's behavior in terms of testing them, his
parents were able to come up with a less
emotional, more successful limit setting plan
based on what worked practically. His mother
set firmer limits and his father backed off
from being so punitive. As they became more
practical and less polarized, his parents
stopped fighting so much with each other.
After less than ten months of
therapy, Sam and his family moved to another
city because Peter was reassigned by his
employer. I got a note from Sam's mother a
few months later saying that Sam got a job,
and that he and Peter had gotten much closer
in their relationship. Sam was able to break
out of his cycle of provoking his father and
screwing up his life.
SELF-FULFILLING PROPHESIES
The concept of children complying and
acting as if their unhealthy beliefs are true
is closely related to another familiar
concept in psychology called the
"self-fulfilling prophecy". Robert Merton
first coined this term to apply to social
psychology (2). He defined a self-fulfilling
prophecy as an initially false idea about
reality that causes a person to take action
based on that belief that eventually results
in the original false belief becoming true.
Merton went on to say, "This specious
validity of the self-fulfilling prophesy
perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet
will cite the actual course of events as
proof that he was right from the very
beginning." (3)
Merton illustrated the phenomenon
with the example of a bank panic. Even when
a bank is financially sound, if a depositor
falsely believes there isn't enough money in
the bank, by rushing to withdraw his money,
he can create a panic. This can develop into
a run by all the depositors to withdraw their
funds. By the end of the panic, the bank
will be insolvent. In that case, the original
false assumption that the bank is in trouble
becomes true as a result of taking action
based on the false assumption.
Merton, R.K., "The self fulfilling
prophesy", Antioch Review, 3, 1948, 193-210.
------, Social Theory and Social
Structure, Free Press, New York, 1968.
Steve Foreman
