SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER
SEND US YOUR LIFESTORIES

SOLVING A FAMILY DILEMMA
© Belinda Gore, Ph.D.

Let’s review some basic information about Audrey’s client and her family.

Audrey is a Six and has been working with Rachel, 40, for several years since the breakup of her marriage to Steven. Steven is a Three and Rachel is a Nine. Their daughter Lindsay, now 17, is a Four and has been having emotional outbursts that are increasingly intense and verbally abusive.

Audrey identified Steven as having a Narcissistic personality disorder and believed that Lindsay was following in her father’s pathological footsteps. Therefore, she advised Rachel to set limits with Lindsay and to refuse to interact with her when she acts out. In many ways, this advice fits with common practices in family therapy, based on the intention of not reinforcing inappropriate behavior. However, this advice seems not to have worked very well and in fact the behavior has been escalating.

In this case, the therapist has been advising Rachel to do what comes naturally to her as a Nine, that is, to withdraw in the face of conflict. Retreating to the bedroom and locking herself in was the “tip off” behavior for the group of therapists with whom Audrey was consulting. It is likely that throughout the months and years of marital conflict, Rachel coped by withdrawing from interaction with her husband and consequently may have also withdrawn from her daughter. She would not have been emotionally available for Lindsay during an already difficult time when an adolescent Four was struggling to find some sense of identity. Since Lindsay’s father was at best an average Three, he was not emotionally attuned to his own vulnerability or to his daughter’s needs. If anything, he was advising her to be emotionally strong and to demand from her mother what she felt entitled to.

As a Four, Lindsay is in the Heart Center triad of types and has as a central issue the challenge of discovering and claiming her identity, answering the question, “Who am I?” While Fours are in the withdrawn sub-group, they are more prone to dramatic gestures in an attempt to get the self-affirming attention they somehow seemed to miss in their formative years. Actually it is a good sign that Lindsay is persisting in trying to make an emotional connection with her mother rather than retreating into alienation and depression.

In reviewing Riso and Hudson’s levels of development (see Understanding the Enneagram), the group discovered that Lindsay’s behavior was representative of level Five, that she was holding her own in the average levels despite her rudeness to her mother. The more her mother put up walls, the louder she became. Because Audrey, the therapist, identified calm Nine behavior as an ideal for herself (that is, the point of integration for herself as a Six) she overlooked the fact that Rachel was not responding as a healthy Nine. To support her movement toward a higher level of functioning, the group recommended that Audrey help Rachel practice staying present with Lindsay during her outbursts, letting her know that she could see and hear her daughter’s distress and anger, and helping her find more appropriate ways to express those feelings. It sounded like we were talking about a three-year-old instead of a seventeen-year-old, but that was how Lindsay was functioning and needed a response consistent with her internal reality. Teaching Rachel to make eye contact and to listen for the underlying communication rather than retreating could be a powerful change in her own self-development and at the same time diffuse her daughter’s escalating tantrums that, we believed, were a misguided effort to get her mother’s attention.

Lindsay certainly had some annoying attitudes of entitlement and overt arrogance toward her mother. However, if these attitudes were interpreted as symptoms of an adolescent’s ungainly efforts to establish a sense of self, then her mother could focus on her developmental need rather than rejecting her as narcissistic and too much like her father.

Considering this case was instructive for each of the therapists in the group. We appreciated the reminder that we bring our own personality blinders to the therapeutic encounter. We may tend to idealize behavior associated with our own point of integration and need to discern the differences between average and healthy behavior in that type. Audrey mistook her client’s shutting down behavior for a healthier ability to remain calm in the face of chaos, a trait Audrey would like to develop in herself. Similarly we may be overly critical of behavior that we associate with our own point of disintegration, just as Audrey was prone to conclude that Lindsay’s acting out was narcissistic behavior to be eliminated rather than investigated.