Judy’s parents couldn't take care of her, and immediately after birth placed her in a very loving foster family. She bounced around in foster families and homes until she turned 18. To manage this tumultuous upbringing, she developed the coping pattern of being cute and striving towards perfection, in order to avoid being rejected again. She managed her circumstances as best she could and has grown up into a successful adult, but now she's getting older and feels driven by these patterns formed in her childhood, hounded with a persistent sense of not living her life. I offered that trying to be perfect and pleasing to others could have been her way of preventing herself from being abandoned again. She had never thought of this: She was aware of her perfectionism, but not of the motivation behind it.

Judy was invited to find three places in space for the moment she was separated from her parents: one for herself, one for her mother, and one for her father. When she took the place of herself as a baby just born, she was overwhelmed by pain and grief. She then stood on the place of her mother and became her mother. The mother was also overwhelmed by grief and guilt: she did the Logosynthesis sentences as her mother to retrieve her own energy from her daughter and to give her daughter's energy back. The tension diminished, but the grief was not fully resolved. Then she said the sentences for the wish that her daughter could have stayed with her. Now, as the mother, she relaxed, and took her own place again. The pain of the newborn was now greatly diminished.

She repeated this same procedure from the position of her father, and after that she said, back on the place of herself as a baby: "This is my destiny, I can't change it, and it's o.k." Back in her seat as an adult woman, she couldn't internally feel the perfectionist attitude that had been her strategy to cope with the current challenges in her life. She said "I'm doing the best I can. That's good enough, for me and for other people." The abandonment of the first order dissociation was covered up by the drive to be cute and perfect. This second order dissociation had led to a feeling of alienation: a nice, perfect robot. Addressing the original separation trauma made the coping perfectionism not needed.