ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the process of working through a difficult mother–daughter relationship as well as the developmental stress caused by entry and exit of family members from a family system through birth and death, marriage and divorce. In her first therapy session, Jessica, age forty-one, told the author, she was depressed and experiencing social anxiety. Being emotionally upset around her parent's marriages and divorces dominated her early life. Jessica told author, she has always had a tense, conflicted relationship with her mother, and she is not really close to any family. She was not allowed to feel angry; if she did, her mother yelled at her or slapped her. So, Jessica learned she was expected to suppress her anger. Through dreamwork, Jessica came to recognize that the tensions of family relationships and her feelings of aloneness in childhood had intensified her commitment to authentic, forthright communication in relationships, and that this was a defining feature of her life's meaning.
