2 relations to the need for punishment.

Usually based upon my assessment of whether I'm dealing with a narcissist or echoist, I've found it valuable to use two self-statements.

The first uses the word deserve, and appears when the person represents their own wish or hope for something to happen or work out.

A patient brings up his mother's death and how he used to be upset with God for taking her. He said he got past it in treatment, and I ask him what his relationship with Him is like nowadays. My patient replies that he prays that things will work out sometimes.

I ask him if it feels true (or not, or partly true) if he says "I don't deserve to have things work out". He admits that it feels true and goes on to talk about how he's lied to his parents and and a more specific incidence in which his dad stood up for him based upon my patient lying about things.

Another patient is very upset with her ex-boyfriend for trying to get custody of their child. She swears and death wishes come up. This anger seems too strong, but no one else is appearing in her narrative that this could be a displacement for. Her ex wants to take her child from her, and she also doesn't have her other children (who are in DFS custody due to her drug use and criminal charges), so I turn it into a self-statement "I don't deserve to get my children back". She cries before even saying it and then gets into how she "wasn't there" for them and let them down. Through a few sessions this develops more and in hate for another "baby-daddy," she recalls how she told him that he'd never be in his son's life.

With echoistic patients, and specifically, object altruistic ones, deserve almost never feels right for them.

When the person puts themselves in risky situations, when accidents that seem life threatening seem to happen to them more than once, and when you detect more loneliness than hate in their life, the self-statement is always "Does it feel true if you say 'I don't care if I live or die'". With one female patient who was putting herself in situations in which (group) rape seemed possible the statement "I don't care if I am raped or not" was answered in the affirmative.

Generally, this leads back to a parent or love interest in the person's life, but sometimes, in keeping with object and ego drive parallelism, a rejection by one's group of friends appears.