Often a woman will enter my office (since most of my clients are women) for relief from her heartache rather than to gain insight into her problems. Most of these women (men too) want their circumstances to be different, but they often don’t want to change their behavior that is contributing to their pain.
What a good therapist is supposed to do is learn from their client’s history in relationships and help them identify their particular pattern. Focusing only on an isolated incident isn’t very effective because most people believe it is a one time occurrence caused by circumstances beyond their control.
I began to notice that within my group there were many women who were involved with men who were alcoholics. Their stories were different and yet they all had an eerie pattern of familiarity. They found the men “exciting” and felt an instant “chemistry” and couldn’t understand how the same man could turn out to be so mean, insensitive and hurtful.
I saw this pattern repeated so many times that I stopped counting. Usually by the third relationship I and the group had enough “evidence” to show the woman in question their relationship pattern with men.