To be helpful, I suggested that Mimi regard herself as loveable, which she immediately rejected on the grounds that it was “a self-serving lie.”
I countered that her history of repeated failure indicates that she shouldn’t put her faith in her assumptions that pertain to intimacy.
She contended that her history of repeated failure proves that she is right to believe she is unlovable.
I maintained that her relationships ended badly because her judgment that she was unlovable set up a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which her premature judgment that her partner would abandon her evoked a fight-or-flight reaction that chased him away.
This is only one of several lines of resistance clients take when you point out the obvious to them. This is the same frustration that friends and family must feel when trying to reason with someone caught in a self-sabotaging trap.
It’s not coincidental that Mr. E. is also uncharacteristically dogmatic when it comes to his problem area. For example, he is adamant that he will be able to control his gambling and maintains that point of view despite lots of evidence to the contrary. He appears insensitive to data and reason during intense motivational states [e.g., just before or just after a relapse]. Likewise, Mimi appears gullible [ready to accept unlikely explanations on the basis of little objective data] and dogmatic [unwilling to change her view of the truth despite evidence and reason that her original interpretation of reality was wrong] during her high-risk situations. Both are so certain they know the truth that they are blind to the lessons that nature is trying to teach them. Each would be better off if they accepted Socrates’ humility [“I know nothing”] and withheld their judgment. Giving assent to one out of the many possible interpretations banishes all the others to oblivion. The one chosen evokes emotional and motivational reactions as though it were objectively true and thereby irreversibly alters the unfolding sequence of cause-and-effect.