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Psychotherapy with Women at Midlife and Beyond by Katie Amatruda, PsyD, MFT & Lauren Cunningham, LCSW
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| Fifty-two year old Sally sighed. "My breasts used to be suckled and adored by lovers and babies. Now a mammographer squishes them between a compression paddle and a Bucky tray and tells me, "Hold your breath!" or even worse, "Don't breathe!" |
Sally was feeling the loss of her fertility and sexual allure. She came to therapy because she felt dried up and lifeless. When the Bucky plate flattened her breast, she experienced the command "hold your breath" as death. Sally was feeling increasingly constricted in her life and her husband had all but disappeared into work. Her children had grown up but resisted 'leaving the nest'. Her mother had died seven years ago but Sally still couldn't let go of her anger and resentment that her mother had had such bad maternal instincts about her. Her periods came less frequently and she had headaches and insomnia. She worked out at the gym and walked every day but couldn't shake off her extra weight and her hands felt stiff in the mornings. She remembered her mother complaining about the pain in her hands. Sally felt depressed.
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Menopause is a medical
term indicating the absence of menstrual bleeding for 1 year. However,
since neither the onset nor the departure of the final episode of menstrual
bleeding is heralded by flashing neon lights, the term menopause is often
used somewhat imprecisely. In most cases, we are actually talking about
the "perimenopause," which more accurately describes the transitional
period between full reproductive function and menopause.... During this
time, the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis begins to malfunction. The
aging ovaries become progressively less sensitive to stimulation by follicle-stimulating
hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH). Ovulation occurs intermittently,
if at all, and levels of gonadal hormones begin to change. The timing
and character of menstrual bleeding also change, and fertility is markedly
decreased. |
| One night Sally dreamed about a snow storm. The moonlit landscape appeared frozen and white. She had dropped her red lipstick and could not find it. She felt bereft and didn't know why. In her associations she remembered the story of Snow White. |
The Story of Snow White begins:
Once in midwinter when the snowflakes were falling from the sky like feathers, a queen sat sewing at a window, with an ebony frame. And as she was sewing and looking out at the snowflakes, she pricked her finger with her needle and three drops of blood fell on the snow. The red looked so beautiful on the white snow that she thought to herself: "If only I had a child as white as snow and as red as blood and as black as the wood on my window frame."A little while later she gave birth to a daughter, who was as white as snow and as red as blood, and as her hair was as black as ebony. They called her Snow White, and when she was born the Queen died. (This and all subsequent passages from "Snow White" are from Grimms' Tales for Young and Old. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Anchor Press/ Doubleday. 1977. Translated from the Winkler-Verlag (Munich) edition of the Complete Kinder-und and Hausmarchen (Tales for Young and Old) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, first published in 1819. pp 184-191 )
The Random House Book of Fairy
Tales. Adapted by Amy Ehrlich. Illus. by Diane Goode. New York: Random
House, 1985. (This illustration
from Kay E. Vandergrift's Snow White website at:
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/special/kay/swillustration13.html)
| "Growing
up, I always loved fairy tales. I wanted to be the princess. But now I
feel like the witch. I bitch and harp at my kids and they're in their
20's! My head aches. I'm out of shape. I never know when I'm going to
get my period.
She returned to the dream. "The red lipstick in the snow...I used to feel sexy when I put on red lipstick. Philip and I felt like we had invented sex when we traveled in Asia the year before we married. And I had so many lovers before Philip. Now I feel frozen. "I remember the picture of Snow White's real mother, a beautiful queen sitting by the window. She sewed and snow fell outside. Three red drops of blood were on the fabric the queen was sewing. A tear rolled down her cheek." Then Sally started to cry. "Sometimes I feel like Snow White's mother who died when her daughter was born and then like the witch who hated her. I'm depressed or angry all the time. I feel awful." |
Many conditions in fairy tales lead to the appearance of the witch. It is striking how many of the same themes emerge at midlife. Included in these are:
Sally
was on the cusp of menopause. Her mother, like many women of her generation,
had a hysterectomy in her mid 40's and not gone through the irregular periods
of perimenopause. So Sally had not been able to ask her about her symptoms.
Sally was not surprised to learn from 
Columbia
University College of P & S Complete Home Medical Guide: Menopause that
"until recently, menopause has been something of a taboo subject, largely because
it was regarded as the beginning of old age. This may have been true in the
early 1900s when the average age of menopause was 46 and a woman's life expectancy
was only 51."
| Sally complained "There's no older women around in my family who went through menopause whom I can talk to. And I'm now older than most of my ancestors when they died. Who can guide me?" |
I
had no answers for Sally. I too struggled with my own hormonal shifts. When
Sally associated her dream imagery to the fairy tale Snow White, my ears perked
up. I had been looking at these images myself in myths, fairy tales, and literature.
I had been struck by the dearth of queens other than the wife or widow of a
king or a degraded, impotent queen. There were plenty of princesses, and a myriad
of witches and evil stepmothers, but rarely a queen as a female monarch or chieftain;
a mature woman eminent in rank having power and supremacy in her realm. Except
for some recent interpretations like the Celtic Queen Maeve as written about
by Sylvia Brinton Perera (Queen Maeve and Her Lovers, 1999, New York:
Carrowmore Books) the vital queen was absent and perhaps presumed to be dead.
Illustration by V. Konashevich (http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~kvander/snow97.html)
| Cynthia
appeared depressed when we met. At 83, she was isolated and in ill
health. Due to crippling arthritis, she couldn't do needlework or
play the piano that had given her so much pleasure earlier in her life.
She couldn't keep her house as clean as she would like. "I
was like Martha Stewart, a household whirlwind, when I was younger. I
could have had my own TV show too." She reported that she spent much
of her time watching TV. It didn't matter what was on. She just
wanted to hear human voices.
Both
of Cynthia's sons lived on the East Coast and she had few friends.
She alienated the women in her book club with her caustic comments.
She had few outlets and felt alone. |
Cynthia had lost her roles as mother and wife and felt angry and embittered. I felt poisoned after being with her. She helped me experience the pain of her emptiness and hopelessness by her relentless criticism and rejection of everything I offered. Eventually I gently confronted her about the rage and envy towards me that defeated our work.
Cynthia was one of my greatest countertransference challenges. I despaired for Cynthia and for the future she could hold for me. I felt overwhelmed by her pain and frustrated that she wouldn't do anything to help herself. She refused to take antidepressants, which her physician had been recommending for years; she wouldn't swim, even though she claimed it had been her favorite physical activity that she could still do; she pined for a cat but rejected a neighbor's offer of a calico kitten.
Cynthia carried the shadow of aging for me: critical, angry, alone, sick, toxic—everything that I feared and wanted to disavow. In Jungian terms the shadow is what we despise and hold contempt for and then unconsciously project onto others. If you want to get to know your "shadow", notice who you "can't stand " and why. Or ask your best friend to tell you about your "blind spots". People who know and love us have no trouble seeing "behind" to the parts of our personality in the shadow.
Laurens van der Post speaks of the shadow in Jung's Understanding of the Meaning of the Shadow
Jung and the Story of Our Time:
[Jung] had in this journey into his own unconscious self discovered another archetypal
pattern of the utmost significance in this regard. He called it the "shadow"— a pattern that
had at its disposal all the energies of what man had consciously despised, rejected, or
ignored in himself. One sees immediately how aptly the term was chosen, because it is an image of what happens when the human being stands between himself and his own light.
Whether this shadow should be properly regarded as archetypal in itself, or whether it is
another shadow of archetypes themselves, is almost academic. The dark, rejected forces
massing in the shadow of the unconscious, as it were, knife in hand, demanding revenge
for all that man and his cultures have consciously sacrificed of them in the specialized
conscious tasks he has set himself, are real and active enough to keep us too busy for
academics and scholasticisms....
Jung revealed in great detail how the individual imposed his quarrel with his own
shadow onto his neighbor, in the process outlining scientifically why men inevitably saw
the mote in the eye of their neighbor. It was not just out of ignorance of the beam in their
own but unconsciously to avoid recognizing it as reflection of their own. He defined for the
first time in a contemporary idiom a primordial mechanism in the spirit of man which he
called "projection," a mechanism which compels us to blame on our neighbor what we
unconsciously dislike most in ourselves.
© 1975 by Laurens van der Post. Source:http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/LvdP/Jung.html
I knew that I needed to find compassion for Cynthia and for the future that she might represent. But how?
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THE
WITCH AND THE QUEEN:
