When I last wrote about depression, I brought up how some patients can't engage in any kind of active imagination that is positive. They can't imagine that things can or will work out for them, and this often invokes God as the object that they can't fully trust. They can't have faith in him and therefore they can't have faith in their own happiness being possible.
I had patient who was often was hard to follow because she would pause, mumble, or skip to some other aspect of the story once she resumed.
Eventually she got comfortable enough that I was able to be a bit more active with her, and she was able to talk about her past.
She brought up the mistreatment she received from her father and complained about her brother getting all the love and positive attention. She also associated to a memory in which someone commented to her mother about her two sons, and that her mother never corrected whoever she was talking to. I was almost going to start to work on her ideas of sexual difference, but as she continued with her father, I noticed that she mentioned how a couple other people had told her that he was an "asshole." I knew that she had an aggression block that went pretty deep, and that she even let her children walk all over her in various ways. So, I asked her if she could say those words herself and call her father an asshole. She looked at me with a moment of shock, and then tried to bring up some other aspect of what she was talking about, but I insisted. She said the words, and then said it again a couple more times and with feeling. She then told me what a relief she felt. Her communication improved a decent amount after that.
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