“I want to kick my son in the balls.”
A mom I’ll call Susan had written to me that she wanted to get support with having her kids do more chores around the house. But within the first 10 minutes of our coaching session, she said, “I want to kick my son in the balls.” I liked her fearless honesty immediately.
What emerged was that Susan didn’t want to kick her 7-year-old son in the balls ALL the time – only when he shouted that he didn’t care what she wanted – which he had done recently on a school holiday that she’d hoped would be full of family fun.
We discovered this was because when he said that, he reminded Susan of her husband. And when her husband didn’t seem to care about her needs, she wanted to kick him in the balls too. Bottom line, she was terrified she was raising her son to be like his dad.
I had a strong hunch that her own internal conflicts were fueling the external ones. I asked if there were any sensations in her body as she thought about her rage and fear.
Susan said she could feel a bunch of tight energy in her belly. I asked if her husband reminded her of her father.
She said that she didn’t remember her father. He’d died when she was 15 in an accident. Even though she’d worked with shamanic healers and therapists, she hadn’t been able to grieve his death because whenever she tried, it was like a wall came down.
I asked her what the wall was protecting her from. That question was like an express train to her unconscious. She blurted out that it was keeping her from remembering the loving parts of him so that she wouldn’t be sad about missing them. If she didn’t grieve, she could focus exclusively on how enraged she felt about the ways that he hadn’t cared about what mattered to her. She said it would be too painful to know that she loved him. It would be easier to hate him.
I asked the bunch in her belly if it had anything it wanted to say to the wall. It said, “I can go away if the wall comes down, my inner child is healed.” Then Susan could feel confident that she could advocate for her needs and she wouldn’t want to kick either her husband or her son in the balls any more.
We concluded the session discussing what sort of ritual Susan could do to grieve her father’s death.
Susan’s mother came and stayed with them for a couple of months. These sessions were about strategizing how to watch videos of Susan’s father with her mother and the kids in a way that would work for everyone and checking in about what it was like for Susan to talk to her mother about her dad. She said that she felt like she was sitting beside a lake of grief.
Susan’s mom had returned home. Before she’d left, Susan had overstretched and agreed to take her and the kids on a short vacation that completely exhausted her. She’d broken her elbow and was furious with herself about that and also furious with her husband for not cooking breakfast more often. She said, “I feel ashamed because I consider myself a self sufficient and modern woman, but I’m carrying the whole family on my back.”
When she’d tried to talk to her husband about it, he’d sat in silence with his arms crossed. Susan was convinced that meant that he didn’t care about her. We examined this belief closely and all the reasons she believed she couldn’t speak up – her fear that if she pointed out her husband’s lack of capacity he’d explode and that if she tried to actually connect with her husband and it didn’t work, they’d be out of options and get a divorce and it would be all her fault. In the face of these fears, she’d freeze and feel so hopeless and hurt that she’s not getting what she needs, that she’s incapable of saying anything. She said the only recourse she has is to want to kick him in the balls.
But Susan had done so much grieving since our first session that she was able to see for the first time that her belief that her husband’s silence meant he didn’t care about her might not be true. She vowed to talk to him and find out.
A week later she sent me this email: