My patient began session talking about how, after the work we had done, he is now able to watch parenting in movies and say how the parent should act even though he still couldn't act that way for himself. He had watched The Little Prince, in which a very successful, but busy professional parent only parented by creating intensive schedules of homework, chores and self-improvement lessons for her child. He drew comparison to how his father used to hate when he played video games as a child and one day even smashed his gaming console into smithereens.
Then, he shared a recent event that left him feeling terribly rejected. He had a scheduled a "catch-up" call with a casual friend, who was demonstrably more successful than he, but this friend couldn't take the call because they were in the middle of working on a project with someone famous in their industry. He felt furious at himself for not being worthy enough to be chosen in that moment. He assumed that this friend didn't value him at all, even though his friend rescheduled the call for later in the week. He felt that the call would be an audition to prove his worth and was thinking about canceling it.
He resolved his obliterating shame by directing anger at his friend instead, judging them for being inconsiderate and irresponsible with scheduling and time management.
He knew his reaction was too extreme but didn't know how else to get out of it, so he asked me how he should think about it instead. My gut already told me not to comply (especially since I am loathe to give concrete advice), but I couldn't figure out why. So, we entertained some other possible explanations for his friend's behavior, many of which were more charitable in their assumptions, but he grew more and more angry and eventually smashed his laptop on his bed (and I saw the ghost of his father enter the room). I asked him what made him so angry and he shared that he imagined fake "enlightened" people pretending to be better than him patronizingly telling him how he should act.
I told him that my gut was right to think this line of discourse would prove unproductive. I didn't think the issue was how to change the way he should positively reframe the event but rather how he should feel even before the so-called "rejection" had ever occurred. You see, he carries a deep-rooted presumption that he is always worthless and undeserving and he spends a great deal of time and effort in his life proving otherwise. I told him that I thought that this event triggered an emotional flooding of that core experience and that we needed to get to the root of that experience.
He asked how, but I had no idea!
He couldn't think of anything that literally mapped onto a similar experience, such as a historic rejection from his peers, though granted he had experienced more than his fair share of bullying and ostracizing.
While looking at his father's ghost metaphorically lingering in the air, I said that I think it's about his father. He didn't see how that memory connected.
I didn't know either!
Then, I was given the memory of a conversation with another patient and also how our session started with The Little Prince, and I realized that in his rage he was feeling, "I'm never good enough am I? I can be the perfect son with perfect grades and perfect arpeggios but you still don't care enough about me that you would want me to just play and have fun, let alone play with me."
He solemnly nodded that maybe this was right and he settled into this feeling just a bit.
Exiting the session as we had come in, the muse guided me to ask him what he as a parent would say to this child who felt so rejected. He said he would do something fun, like take the child outside to play catch. Visualizing my own child, I added that I would tell the child, "I love you so much! No matter what!"
And tears uncontrollably fell over his crumbling expression, released from its prison of pain after all these years.