Joan of Arc Meets Mary Poppins: Maternal Re-nurturing Approaches with Male Patients in Ego-State Therapy

American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, Jul 2004 by Phillips, Maggie

Many patients with posttraumatic fragmentation demonstrate a positive response to the corrective possibilities provided through ego-state therapy. However, full resolution of presenting symptoms may not occur for individuals with significant childhood histories of parental abuse and neglect without opposite sex, as well as same sex, re-nurturing interventions. This presentation emphasizes the use of maternal re-nurturing methods with men who struggle with the effects of significant attachment deficits in early life. Case examples feature male patients with long-term difficulties in their adult relationships with women that had proved refractory to other therapy methods. Following Ego-State Therapy interventions with maternal symbolic figures, however, these problems improved dramatically. Therapeutic implications for cross-gender re-nurturing with patients who report different types of maternal attachment trauma are explored and discussed.

Keywords: Ego-State Therapy, gender differences, maternal re-nurturing

There is a growing branch of hypnotic literature that emphasizes the development of positive feelings about the self which can be fostered through various ego-strengthening approaches. Within the realm of Ego-State Therapy, these approaches are emphasized throughout every stage of treatment (Phillips & Frederick, 1995). Since Ego-State Therapy is focused on the repair of divided-self issues and the development of more integrated functioning across various personality states, ego-strengthening methods play a crucial role in the growth of the personality as a whole as well as of individual ego states.

Although there are a number of ego-strengthening approaches of demonstrated effectiveness that are regularly used in ego-state work (Frederick & McNeal, 1998), the area of corrective re-nurturing and self-reparenting is of particular interest when considering clinical needs that require the treatment of developmental delays and attachment deficits. Since maturation of aspects of the self appear to proceed along several simultaneous dimensions, the therapist must consider multiple issues, including psychosocial and cognitive as well as object-relations, somatosensory, psychosexual, and affective/emotional needs.

From the perspective of Ego-State Theory, parts of the human personality are believed to originate as dynamic responses to early and ongoing needs for adaptation to complex environmental demands, as well as to inner requirements for coping with overwhelming traumatic events and developmental crises. Along with ego states who reflect ages along the entire life span, the resulting internal family also includes introjected parental figures, those who have nurtured the developing individual personality, as well as those who were abusive, damaging, abandoning, or neglectful (Watkins & Watkins, 1997).

Individuals who have been victims of early childhood abuse, neglect, loss, and other types of trauma often evidence wide variation in their need for developmental repair. Some ego states may be exceptionally mature, demonstrating consistent success with interpersonal boundaries, and may initiate and sustain wholly appropriate selfactualizing experiences. Others, however, may be dramatically immature, unable to soothe distress in relation to significant others, woefully inadequate in terms of object relations, and unable to engage in higher-order thought and emotional processes (Phillips & Frederick, 1995). With many developmentally immature ego states, effective intervention is needed in order to meet the maturational goals that will allow them to form cooperative relationships with other self states. There is an inherent danger in fostering dependency on the therapist during corrective maturational experiences due to challenging transference and countertransference reactions that can arise, such as the desire to be "loved into health" by the therapist (Kluft, 1993). Hypnosis may be uniquely suited to access inner resources in ways that will not be regressive or intrusive to the patient.

Hypnotic Re-nurturing and Self-Parenting Approaches

There are many types of hypnotic re-nurturing methods that have been advanced to address these needs. Within the Ericksonian tradition, for example, many professionals have explored applications of Erickson's "February Man" technique (Erickson & Rossi, 1989). As most students of Ericksonian hypnosis know, Erickson worked with a woman who wanted to conceive a child, but was conflicted about becoming a mother because she had experienced a lack of maternal nurturing in her childhood. In a series of hypnotic age-regression sessions, Erickson visited the little girl state that had missed being mothered. Through suggestion, Erickson came every February to visit her as a friend of her father's, providing in trance experiences many nurturing encounters that had been lacking.

Within the hypnoanalytic tradition, Joan Murray-Jobsis (1990a, 1990b, 1998) has offered a series of creative re-nurturing scripts that can be used to repair deficits in a variety of developmental areas that were created because of damaging or inadequate parenting. First used with psychotic and borderline patients (Scagnelli-Jobsis, 1982), they are now more widely employed with the whole spectrum of ego-state problems. Jobsis weaves various types of nurturing possibilities into age-regression scripts, potentiating experiences such as early bonding and forming a positive sense of identity in the early weeks and months of life, discovering a more secure sense of being held, soothed, and fed, exploring the pleasures of the physical body, and beginning to enjoy separateness (Murray-Jobsis, 1990b). Her method invites the patient to use his/her imaginative capacities to travel back in time as an infant or young child in order to reexperience a more complete life beginning, adding nurturing experiences that may have been missed or inadequate.