The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

(this is raw unedited text transcribed directly from the audio)

Dr. Kenner:      Susan, you have a 16-year-old daughter who is not talking?

Susan:             Yeah.

Dr. Kenner:      What’s going on?

Susan:             She’s actually been a quiet girl for her whole life. She’s been quiet. But she is with her friends and she’s more extroverted.

Dr. Kenner:      Interesting.

Susan:             But she’s extroverted with her friends very much. She takes part. She has a small group of friends. She’s very selective. But at home, and there’s just the two of us at home. The family situation broke up years ago. But she doesn’t smile. She doesn’t talk. I’ll have a friend come in and engage her in conversation about something personal to her, like college, and everybody is all loving and laughing and chatting. She doesn’t even laugh. She doesn’t crack a smile. A friend of mine said today she was talking to her, when she was here on Saturday we were all talking, and she said it was like she wasn’t there. My friend was very frustrated trying to talk to her because she just didn’t get a response back. I said, “That’s the way she is all the time with me.” I came home this evening with great news about a project she had done and it was met with great success. She’s a very talented girl and met with great success, “Oh my God, they loved what you did. They were all excited. They said they got shivers.” She’d done a video for somebody. She didn’t even have an expression. I said, “Isn’t that great news?” She never says I love you, ever, ever, ever. She doesn’t, when I go to kiss her or hug, I can kiss her, but she still is very reticent. She pulls back. I don’t know where her feelings are.

Dr. Kenner:      What is she protecting herself from? What pain?

Susan:             I mean, I can think of it, but I can’t get to it.

Dr. Kenner:      What do you think? You know her better than anyone, if you’ve been living with her. How long, you’ve been divorced for how long or?

Susan:             Well, I raised her on my own. Her father was always very inconsistent, still is inconsistent.

Dr. Kenner:      Is he in the picture at all?          

Susan:             He lives in another state. She hasn’t talked to him for weeks. She saw him in July. No, he’s come and gone. I’ve raised her on my own. We were only married for a couple of short months. And sometimes I think, and she’s angry a lot. She’s just angry.

Dr. Kenner:      Angry means something is not fair. That’s her injustice detector. What are the biggest things in her life that, if she – again, we’re guessing what is going on in her mind. I can’t guess but you can guess –

Susan:             I can’t even get to it.

Dr. Kenner:      Is it that she’s angry that she doesn’t have her father or that her father is distant? Is she angry with you? Were there any traumas in childhood? Was she abused at all? Any hidden secrets?

Susan:             No, nothing like that. Sometimes I think that it is that it’s not fair, or I think if she’s angry, she’s got to be angry at him. Sometimes I’ll bring it up and the last time we had a big conversation, less than a year ago, and she said, “Don’t worry. I’m not traumatized. It’s fine. I know.”

Dr. Kenner:      When people are in such pain, if they repress their emotions, if they give their subconscious an order, “Don’t feel,” you know, sometimes a wife will cheat on a husband and the husband says, “I never want to feel that pain again of having been betrayed like that. I’m not going to get close to anyone again.” It may be in a very powerful, private moment that they have this conviction that my coping strategy from now on is to never let anyone get too close because I don’t want to ever be hurt with that depth of pain again. And then they kind of bury that and just say, “Don’t feel.” Your subconscious here is, “Don’t feel,” so you don’t get the highs and you don’t get the lows. You see a person who is emotionally flat. But what you need to do, I mean, you can’t do it – this would be up to her – but as the mom, I would recommend therapy for yourself.

Susan:             I’m actually going now. But I’m just getting a response, the response I’m getting is, “This is the way she is and you have to respect her space.”

Dr. Kenner:      Yes, you can’t force her to talk, because the more you pursue her, the more she’ll clam down. She’s protecting. Her coping strategy is that she’s protecting herself from some feelings, from some pain, from some recognition of reality. Vietnam vets or the vets that come back who have been combat vets very often do that. They alienate themselves, they shut down, because the pain and trauma they experienced, their mind is their own enemy. They don’t even want to go to sleep at night because they’re afraid that their memories will haunt them, the memories of all the trauma.

So in your case, I think that it’s so sad for a mom not to have that connection, especially when the two of you are together. And I don’t know all the details – there may be other details – but if she is angry, if you’re sensing she’s angry, I would give her invitations to talk. “Honey, I know that you’re angry at something and I’ve tried to put my finger on it. I can’t name it and I’m puzzled. Anytime you want to talk about it.”

Susan:             I’ve pretty done that. Sometimes I use my humor or I’ll leave the room and say, “I don’t know what you’re angry at. Please tell me what you’re angry at.” And she’ll just, it’s very –

Dr. Kenner:      So you’re planting the seed. You could go to therapy with her. Whatever it is, when people have opened up with me, when they’ve been that repressed emotionally, they go through a stage typically that’s called flooding. Once they give their subconscious permission to talk, it all comes out in a disorganized manner and it overwhelms them. It’s like it’s so hard to talk about it and get clarity on it, and so maybe it’s hard for her to open the floodgates. But something is hurting her that she’s trying to run from. You can never run from your own mind. It’s much better to face it. I would recommend, if you could get some family therapy with you and your daughter, a few sessions, maybe she could even come to your therapy?

Susan:             I asked her to go to a therapist last spring and she said, “I’m not crazy.” I asked her to go just a couple of times.

Dr. Kenner:      If she thinks therapists are crazy, it’s really thinking skills.

Susan:             We went to this woman three or four times.

Dr. Kenner:      We’re right at the end of time, Susan. I would look up cognitive therapy. Go to the website AcademyofCT.org. Thank you so much for your call and I wish you success with your daughter. I’m Dr. Ellen Kenner on The Rational Basis of Happiness.