At the end of part one, I talked about how we tend to build walls around the type of loss that goes beyond the human pale, like the death of a one-month-old infant. We do so in an attempt to not go through an experience of all-consuming loss—a loss that would feel as if we were losing everything and everyone in our lives. As a result of successes in the gym, personal trainer Jillian Michaels has gotten Agnes, the mother, to a place where she feels that she can bring up the loss of her infant son (over twenty years ago) and not necessarily go through all-consuming loss. As Agnes puts it, “I wanted to talk to Jimbo [her husband] about me grieving my son by myself.” She continues, “I was so petrified of what Jimbo’s reaction would be. I was afraid that he was either going to shutdown or lose it completely because he has never spoken to me about Jimmy [her son who died at the age of one month].”
With Jillian’s support, Agnes calls a family meeting. Agnes brings in a picture of Jimmy. Just seeing a picture of his son—tubes and wires all around him—sends Jim into a profound state of sobbing. Therapists would call this a “reliving experience.” We relive traumatic experiences from our past when we are not able to (conceptually speaking) put them into context, put them into perspective, put them into an appropriate sense of time. Jim is reacting as if he is actually seeing his son when in fact his son died over twenty years ago. What Agnes says next is rather profound, and I quote at length:
The only time I held my son without any machines on him was the day he passed away. The only time my boy opened his eyes was when he was letting go, like he was saying, “Thank you mom … I’m at peace now.” For 22 years I have felt alone. And I need my man, I need you honey, I need to grieve with you. We have a son. He doesn’t even have a tombstone, it’s like he never even existed. It tears me apart.
Jim, the father, composes himself somewhat and begins to put his son’s death into perspective. Here’s what Jim had to say:
I sat there every day for 30 days. And I watched my son breathing through a tube. The doctor would say, “Do you want to hold him?” I did want to hold him. But I thought he was fragile and I didn’t want to hurt him. Then when they took the tube out, I never had the chance.
Jillian, sensing that the moment was right, simply suggests, “What about getting Jimmy a headstone?” Memorializing a loved one who has passed is a good way to try to bring context and perspective to what otherwise might be an all-consuming loss. This was a great piece of grief therapy. I’m sure that Jillian has help with these difficult situations, but she’s the one who’s actually dealing with the family, and, in my opinion, she does a great job.
The focus now shifts back to the daughter, Michelle. What comes next is a “great” example of a self-defeating strategy. I put great in quotes because it’s great as an example of a theoretical construct, but not so great in that it depicts a pattern that can bring us emotional pain and suffering. Michelle reveals to Jillian, “After the gastric bypass, you play serious head games with yourself.” She continues, “You take a compliment, and you flip it so it’s the worst thing you have ever heard. It’s a crappy way to live.” John Bowlby and Erik Erikson both recognized that a compromised ability to accept compliments from others could indicate a pattern of insecure attachment. When we don’t trust complements from others, what we really don’t trust is the idea that the other person would wish to take us inside their minds. In order to give another person a true complement, you have to be willing to take a model or an image of that person into your own mind. If you take a compliment and turn it into “the worst thing you have ever heard” (quoting Michelle), then you confirm your inner schema or inner model which says that no one would wish to take us into their own minds. Empathy works in a similar way—it’s about minds knowing minds or minds inside other minds (often referred to as “walking in someone else’s shoes”).
At this point, Jillian asks Michelle a profound question that gets at the heart of self-defeating strategies: “Why are you going to choose failure when success is an option.” Michelle actually responds in a rather reflective, psychologically minded way: “I’m just trying to avoid the compliments because I don’t believe them.” Allow me to quote Jillian at length as she responds to Michelle because I think Jillian gets at the heart of what happens when we engage in a self-defeating strategy:
Michelle, you refuse to succeed because you are so afraid of getting attached [my emphasis] to the possibility of what your life could be—that you’ll be destroyed if it doesn’t happen. You’ve already been to the bottom … why don’t you try going to the top for once. Just try.
What Michelle says next is a “great” example of how we can know something cognitively or intellectually, but know that same something in a completely different way emotionally. Here’s Michelle’s response:
I know that I’m not an ugly, disgusting person—like I really want to think that. Like I know that my fiancé tells me everyday that I’m beautiful. And I literally would do anything to believe it. But it consumes me, it literally eats me.
And Jillian gets that you can do something technically, instrumentally—like a gastric bypass—but that doesn’t mean you are also doing something emotionally. Referring to Michelle’s gastric bypass, Jillian tells Michelle, “You have remedied a symptom of your core problem, which is not only still there, but growing.” She continues, “You have to make a choice to move forward. I can’t make that for you.” A bit further along in the show Michelle thanks Jillian by simply saying, “Thanks for calling me out.” I take this to mean that Michelle is thanking Jillian for taking the time to take her (Michelle) into her (Jillian’s) mind. And even though Michelle made every attempt to make that image of herself look “the worst ever,” Jillian stood fast and kept holding a future for Michelle that was filled with success and prosperity. It was Bruno Bettelheim, the noted child psychologist, who said in his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (and I paraphrase), “A parent’s greatest gift to his or her child is to hold a positive and hopeful image of the future.” When you are in the throes of locked mourning, you cannot hold a positive and hopeful image of the future. When you are in a state of locked mourning, your schema or model of the world centers on the possibility that you could lose everything and everyone in a single moment.
So, I hope this two-part post on the pilot episode of Losing it With Jillian helped to illustrate what can happen when a mourning process becomes locked. As Michelle, the daughter, puts it, “It consumes me, it literally eats me.” In my opinion, Jillian did a great job of being an attachment therapist. If you have any examples of attachment patterns or attachment functioning depicted in the media, please leave a comment and let us know about it.
