I met Donna, a woman in her 70s. She was Mom to one of my clients, Tess, who suffered from severe depression and alcoholism.
At the outset, in my first meeting with Donna, she talked more than listen and make demands rather than cooperate with her daughter’s recovery. She’s not exactly pleasant to chat with.
Tess spoke painfully about her Mom during our sessions. She lamented her Mom’s rudeness, bluntness and insensitivity. That made Tess and her three other siblings pull back from her.
Lately, due to social pressure from relatives and the pain of her children’s alienation, Donna finally agreed to see a psychotherapist.
Self-centeredness is a considerable source of unhappiness. Coupled with inability to listen, coercion, or inflexibility, self-centeredness creates unnecessary emotional pain in relationships.
Donna, as well as many others, was afflicted with this virus. She regularly ran over other people’s feelings or make a scene anywhere with the weight of her own psychological wounds, anger, and misery, even wickedness.
Writer and social worker, Wendy Lustbader, once wrote, “The parts of ourselves that we neglect lie in wait for us, like an accusation.”
Self-centeredness, like other unresolved internal issues, benefits from attention. Correcting the neglect such as in a therapeutic space brings a forward movement to healing and restoration of relationships.
Secrets of Your Self:
www.kobo.com/ph/en/ebook/secrets-of-your-self
Dr. Angelo Subida is a clinical psychotherapist, author, and speaker. He is author of books "Inner Healing," "Secrets Of Your Self," "Chess and Life," among others, blogs, and articles. He has appeared frequently as an expert on psychotherapy/life recovery issues on national television, radio broadcasts, print media, and webcasts, including GMA 7, TV 5, ABS CBN 2, Q-11, 700 Club, Radyo Veritas, Inquirer Radio, Smart Parenting Magazine, Business Mirror, among others, and has served as resident therapist/counselor for parents and kid-artists in the highly popular ABS-CBN 2 Voice Kids TV singing reality show. Dr. Subida is an eclectic, multidisciplinary therapist and originator of his own revolutionary high-tech, high-touch counseling plus model. His areas of specialization include parent-child therapy, clinical infidelity treatment, relationship/marital counseling, separation/divorce therapy, anger management, depression, addictions, psychotherapy-spirituality integration, and innovative chess therapy. For more of Dr. Subida, you can find him at www.drsubida.com.