IJSP Number 2, 2020

61 would often get into conflicts, expressing various discontents, or accusations of supposedly inconsiderate behaviours towards herself, only to later reconsider, reintegrate the group while dramatising the situation and presenting herself as the victim (two examples of such situations: in the theatre club, the teacher’s decision to change her initial role, coincidentally the lead one, for a different more appropriate role, or generally speaking whenever disciplinary measures had to be taken due to school rules infringement). L. A. comes to counselling manifesting the wish to share a rape experience she had undergone approximately one year before (that also happened to be her first sexual experience). At the time, the client wanted to reveal the whole experience to a psychologist in order to unburden herself of the traumatising rape memories. During the whole sessions, L. A. relates her experience while seeming dissociated from the traumatic event, and at the same time focused on catching the therapist’s reaction signals – how impressed I was. During the first session I mainly listened to the client, barely managing to interact conversationally. During the following session, that finally took place after a certain number of postponed and rescheduled appointments, an interview was applied to get a clearer picture of her past and life context and a couple of relevant elements emerged: - L. A. comes from a shattered family (parents divorced when she was about 5 years old on account of frequent conflicts described by the mother, aggressed by the alcohol drinking father) - growing up at the countryside, L. A. and her older sisters were left with their father, since their mother left the country to work abroad after the divorce (and then got remarried and had another child); the contact between mother – daughter and the extend family is unstable and often conflictual. - the client relates an episode from her early childhood that marked her, when the mother locked-her up one evening in the nearby cemetery as a punishment for failing to learn a poem for the school fair. - the client remembers the mother frequently telling her “I shouldn’t have had you”. - more recently, six months before, L. A. had been abroad at her mother’s, in order to look for a job, which she managed to find; according to her, the salary was also used to provide for both the mother and her new husband; L. A. decided to come back as conflicts with her mother kept escalating, one of the reasons being the mother would accuse her of flirting with her step-father (L. A. denies the truth of this accusation, is extremely irritated by her mother’s opinion, that she accuses once more of being an “unnatural mother” that always ends up by pushing her aside and abandoning her). - L. A. claims she spent “maybe half of life” in and out of hospitals, having been a sick child.