Laurie still and always feels like a lost little girl. She knows she's almost 60, but she recognizes her pattern of trying to get her parents to "see" her, of choosing narcissistic lovers and crashing when the relationships end.
When I asked her what drew her to the narcissistic men, she said, "Connection." She craved the ecstasy of new love.
She didn't fault her family, yet when she described the family friends who were so much more alive, engaged, and warm toward her, I asked her to compare how she felt when they were around with how she felt without them in her family. That was disturbing.
No blame, however. No one suggested her parents weren't well intended and, in many ways, wonderful. This was a separate reality: how she had felt in her family. I could tell she feared talking about it, as if she were betraying her parents or maybe even reducing her chances of being loved by them. But it wasn't a criticism. It wasn't about them at all. It was about her, and how she experienced life in her family. Her experience, nothing else. A description.
I also suggested that, when the love affair(s) ended, she landed back in that childhood energy field: lonely, unable to reach people, living in a gray and foggy world.
I did not try to talk Laurie out of feeling that way. ("But look at all the wonderful things you have in your life," "It's just a habit," etc.) Instead, I suggested she take herself more seriously -- realize that's the way she felt as a girl.
We all decide who "we are" in our childhoods. If she looked unimportant, like a beggar (behind all the just-fine behaviors), lonesome and invisible, well, that must be who she was. Or so says childhood logic. That sense of self comes back today when her escape hatch (the new lover, the job, whatever) closes. There it is again -- there she is again.
And yes, it is correct. But it's correct only in its own time zone: her childhood, within her family. It isn't wrong. It just isn't Now.