Psychology in China – Fairy Tales For Therapy
A Fairy Story for the Chinese Female Single Patient:
Introduction
Often in therapy a story can help the client to understand their own emotions and feelings about their own situation. At first they just hear the story as a narrative but soon as with most good stories the client puts themselves into the action and associates with the plot line, as they try to make sense of how they can assimilate the underlying psychological message to their own lives.
In China many young girls under 27 years old are obsessed with finding Mr. Right, the boy who is from the good family, with a good education, with a good job with good prospects and has a good character. I use the word “good” here many times because it is easily understood by the girls themselves to mean a boy (young man) that can offer them a future that contains security for her, her family and material wealth. Love is always low on the list of requirements prior to marriage in China but woefully regretted later when actually betrothed.
After the age 27 in China girls go into panic mode, Mr. Right has not appeared and the range of available bachelors has narrowed considerably particularly as a myth about baby health in a woman’s 30’s is wide-spread and believed to be true. At this stage many girls despair and find themselves under considerable family pressure (and peers) to get married at any cost. Many rush into loveless marriages to men they hardly know but are willing to “take them on” so to speak.
So why did many of these older girls struggle to find a Mr. Right? Partly the problem was expectations and partly the belief that their purity (virginity) would be attractive to a suitor and that by remaining a good girl they have a better chance of a high alpha male prospect. A second aspect is education, as girls become more educated and so see any man below their own achievements as excluded from their ideal.
The Fairy Tale
The aim of therapy here is to enable girls to be more realistic about what boys actually have to offer. In the story we relate Mr. Right to a Prince Charming and to the girl as the perfect Princess. We see all other men as “frogs” those who are just the everyday normal young men who are starting out in life with average jobs and average ambitions. All stories are, “once upon a time” and end, “they lived happily ever-after” if only real life was so simple!
A Tale about a Princess:
Once upon a time there was a Princess who was looking for a Prince to marry. In the land Princes were rare and hard to find. So many frogs came to call for the Princess to spend time with and consider but none could match her ideal of her Prince (Mr. Right). Although some frogs had some of the attributes of Princes, good looks, money, education, high family connections etcetera none could bring all the gifts of her perfect Prince. After a while many frogs stopped trying to woo the Princess and in fact avoided her as unattainable and not worth wasting time on.
Meanwhile at her castle her parents (the King and Queen) reminded her that only good girls find Princes and that bad girls will fall prey to frogs and bad men. So the Princess held her purity in high esteem and often told frogs how perfect she was.
A long time has passed and now the Princess is over the age of marriage and finds that many Princess’s she knows about are married to other Princess’s and she is still alone. Her parents now constantly berate her for her poor judgment in not accepting earlier offers of marriage. They talk about her not being wanted soon as she reaches thirty and that she should start to consider many of the frogs she had once rejected. Some of those frogs have now changed into Princes and have good posts, material wealth and spoiled wives. How had she not seen these frogs had potential at the time? Her married friends worry about her, they have babies (just one) she will soon only be able to birth a poor sickly child as she ages. The Princess reflects on the wasted years of searching for the Prince that never existed to her standards, that was perhaps a frog in disguise, a frog that became a Prince perhaps.
However not all is well in the Kingdom. Many other Princesses married what they thought was a Prince who offered the good job, with the good prospects, with the good family and appeared to be the good boy for many a Princess. As these young men grew many did not reach their early ambitions, settled for an everyday life, accumulated some possessions and saved some income for the future but never enough for a castle. The girl’s Prince was in fact just a frog. Had always been a frog if she had just realised. Deep down many Princesses knew they married a simple frog but hoped over time they could change them to become a Prince and give them the dream they had been told was theirs by right of passage into marriage and motherhood.
Alas in our story we learn a simple truth, a frog is just a frog and with the best will in the world will probably remain a frog forever and ever until the day they die. So our lonely Princess has passed the magically age and around her are the frogs who are left. The mostly unwanted, discarded (divorced), despicable and unworthy. What is she to do – what happened to that dream of a handsome Prince to whisk her away to security, comfort and happiness? Now she felt regret, how could she had been so foolish to believe that she was so special and above those around her for so many years.
Fairy stories should have happy endings – after all they are meant to give us hope and a positive feeling. However this is real life – not every story has a happy ending and so through change we can only hope to adjust to a new reality that we misjudged our future prospects and around us live many many frogs – content with their lives, maybe not the best, but not alone and forgotten.
Discussion:
In the above tale of course our princess is the girl who is waiting so long for Mr. Right but rejected so many suitors as not ideal. Many of the other Princesses decided to marry the frog in hope that through a kiss and encouragement they could become a Prince but most if not all just wanted to be happy frogs and not become something they were not. So when the girls chose to wait for the cultural ideal they of course missed the thought that some are late developers. Some girls realised that Mr. Right (the Prince) was in fact a myth and decided instead to marry Mr. Good-Enough, someone not perfect but acceptable. When these girls lowered their unrealistic expectations of young men they actually found that a good enough young man (frog) could be the right one for them.
The above story and analysis is a fair reflection of Chinese society as far as young girls from about 22 to 27 years old pursue their likely marriage partner and the post 27 dilemma of being alone and unwanted. It is this cultural outlook that leads to many girls losing out on the chance to find suitable partners and fooling themselves that a Prince actually exists and will rescue them from their dull lives in the castle with baba and mama. What does the girl do when that time has passed, still pure, still at home, still inexperienced in the ways of men, still stubbornly believing that even at this late date a Prince will appear and save the day?
Therapy
In therapy this tale is often told to young women (27+) who complain of no relationships, that there must be something wrong with them. That they see no future now with no marriage and a child. They come to therapy hoping to learn about why they are alone, unhappy, rejected now by men as too old to be wanted. Depression is the usual presenting issue with anxiety brought on by an unsure future. By telling them the fairy story of the lonely Princess we hope to get them to realize that their own unrealistic expectations led to their current position and that cognitive faulty thinking about young men and societies pressures to a material goal was perhaps misplaced and that where love, passion and natural curiosity took no part in their youthful outlook towards what men want and do not want led them to reject many perhaps good enough young men earlier in their 20’s. It is not the therapist place to tell the women directly this but allow her to explore the tale from her own perspective and make her own conclusions. Some patients whole heartedly accept the comparisons other reject the idea (mainly as they still cling to the hope of a Prince) and open up other areas of dialogue that can by the provocation of the tale help them to explore their historical behaviour more objectively than perhaps they had done previously before coming to therapy.
Conclusion:
Although therapy can take many forms the use of mythology, stories, tales, metaphors can all help a client to see more clearly their own story and relate to the characters in the fairy tale and make some sense out of the confusion of depression and anxiety. Of course other tales can also make for good therapy bases, such as the Princess in the Tower, whose long hair dangles down for all the frogs to see. This is the woman who wants rescuing from her dull life thinking that a Prince will save her and give her the life she thinks she deserves, there is the Princess whose finger is pricked and falls into a deep sleep. Here she is the woman once bitten twice shy, that rejects all suitors in case she is hurt again. The lowly girl who lives in a dysfunction family with half sisters who hate her and a mother determined to treat her as a servant. She runs away, lives with several men and hopes that the Prince will come and find her but when she does meet one she is rejected again by his mother as not good enough. (Every Chinese girl’s fear of the mother in law). She perhaps is not so Snow White or a Cinderella, as she leads others to believe?
I hope that Chinese girls will read this article and feel free to comment about its cultural implications and insight. Perhaps there is more to learn here and for some girls they will help themselves by realising that the Prince is just a frog after all and that for a real happy ending then perhaps Mr. Good-Enough is just around the next corner?
End……
Dr. Stephen Myler is from Leicester in England, an industrial town in the Midlands of the United Kingdom. He holds a B.Sc (Honours) in Psychology from the UK’s Open University the largest in the UK; he also has an M.Sc and Ph.D in Psychology from Knightsbridge University in Denmark. In addition to this Stephen holds many diplomas and awards in a variety of academic areas including journalism, finance, teaching and advanced therapy for mental health. Stephen has as a Professor of Psychology many years teaching experience in colleges and universities in England and China to post 16 young adults, instructing in psychology, sociology, English, marketing and business. He has been fortunate to travel extensively from Australia to Africa to the United Sates, South America, Borneo, most of Europe and Russia. Stephen’s favourite hobby is the study of primates and likes to play badminton. He believes that students who enjoy classes with humour and enthusiasm from the teacher always come back eager to learn more. Currently Dr. Myler is head of clinical psychology at St. Michael Hospital, Shanghai.