What do therapists do with a client who is always the victim?
Brad was a victim. I know because he told me so, often, and with great and passionate sorrow.
Brad was touched inappropriately at least once at age 12 by his stepfather. As a result, he did not relate well to women and was occasionally violent toward his wife and daughter, but only when people gave him alcohol.
Brad had asthma as a child, due to his parents’ smoking in the house. As a result, he was unable to work in jobs requiring physical exertion.
Brad was emotionally abused by a teacher in middle school who told him he would amount to nothing. As a result, he could not hold a job. Brad’s being in therapy was a mistake, since the judge who ordered it didn’t understand the pressure Brad was under.
Brad was hard to like. In fact, he annoyed me because I was certain that soon he would add me to the list of people who had victimized him, no matter what I did. I decided to try a double bind without much hope it would work.
I enthusiastically agreed with him. I completely endorsed the idea that all those things made him helpless, useless, incompetent, and worthless—no use to anybody, including himself, merely a hopeless victim, utterly powerless to do anything.
I sympathized with it all and fully acknowledged that Brad was completely helpless. I merely fed it all back to him and let him know I accepted everything, absolutely. I repeated the litany for emphasis, with conviction and without a hint of sarcasm.
Eventually Brad was a little pissed off. He wasn’t completely useless, he said, listing accomplishments. I disagreed and said he’d really convinced me, and probably somebody else deserved the credit if he did anything worthwhile.
Brad got genuinely angry with me for agreeing fully with his basic worldview. It was a breakthrough. What I did in no way reflected my normal approach to therapy, though it was underpinned by unconditional positive regard and a sincere desire to help, by holding up a kind of mirror.
It did create a breakthrough in somewhat successfully challenging an irrational belief system, the deeply ingrained mythology that Brad’s identity was his universal victimhood, a permanent and immutable state.
It got him to start talking to me, and we actually had a conversation.