Happily :

A Fictional Case Study of and Her Prince

Nina Moliver

Cinderella wasn’t living happily ever after. But she began to learn how to make that happen.

The story of Cinderella is perhaps the world’s most beloved fairytale, endlessly speaking to children everywhere. In this article I explore Cinderella as a Jungian archetype: A wonderful, innocent girl, victimized by a miserable family, makes her escape thanks to the grace of magic.

A life story behind this archetype is followed through to a possible real-life conclusion.

Cinderella Seeks Psychotherapy

Cinderella Respucci was married for almost 12 years to a wonderful man. So far she was unable to have children. She had heard that yoga can be helpful for infertility, and so she started attending my classes.

Toward the end of the third class, after some backbends, she collapsed onto the floor and started sobbing. She lay there and sobbed until the class ended; afterwards, she approached me and requested a private consultation.

Because the consultation involved both private asana work and a preliminary evaluation, I scheduled two hours for Cinderella. I prepared a room with soft candlelight and gentle flute

1 music in the background. We began with a series of hip openers to help bring oxygen to the pelvic organs and a good blood flow up and down the spine. I then led her into a few backbends to open her chest, liberate her breathing, and squeeze old, held tensions from her digestive and reproductive organs. Once again, the backbends released a well of sadness and pain.

When the sobbing subsided, I guided her in some deep breathing and a few moments of quiet, focused mindfulness. When she appeared ready, I invited her to talk to me. She then told me her story.

Cinderella, Cinderella

Cindy’s mother was a social climber who was always striving to appear wealthier than she was.

She wanted her three daughters to be a part of this charade. Her father worked long hours, adulated her mother, and never challenged her mother’s authority in the home. Cindy never really saw him very much.

All the children had household chores to do, but Cindy felt especially persecuted when it was her turn. She never noticed her sisters doing their chores, and in her childish perceptions she assumed that they were just having fun while she was singled out and scapegoated. Drizella and

Anastasia were close in age and always played together, but Cindy, who was several years younger, kept to herself and never felt included in their play. She found her own territory in the attic, where she could paint, sew, and smoke pot unbothered. Drizella and Anastasia used to mock and tease her for being different, in the heartless way that children sometimes do. Her mother stayed aloof from these sibling tensions and was probably unaware of them.

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Cindy’s mother offered music lessons to all three children, as she felt that they would be positioned well socially if they could each play an instrument. However, Cindy preferred visual and tactile arts such as sewing. She enjoyed rummaging in the closet for her mother’s old clothes and fixing them up into beautiful dresses for herself. She fantasized that her mother wore those clothes when she was young, warm, loving, and all for Cindy, her sisters magically gone. She had pretend companions who lived in the attic with her and never teased or mocked her. These pretend companions co-created her works of art and gave her the only feeling of connection that she had.

Cindy felt so distant from her parents and her sisters that she often wondered if this was her real family. The real mother of her dreams was rotund, huggable, unconcerned with social status, and totally devoted to her welfare. This real mother had no other children. She was imperfect, but her faults, such as a slipping memory, were benign. Cindy had a vague preverbal sense of somebody in her life who fit this description.

At one point when she was 16, rumors started to circulate in Cindy’s town that a particularly handsome and wealthy bachelor named Giuseppe Respucci was planning to be at the next town ball. All three sisters decided to go, and their mother was happy to let them go, provided only that their chores were done first.

On the night of the ball, everybody finished her chores on time, but Cindy was adamant about putting the finishing touches on the dress of her own creation, so she was running late. At the

3 moment before their taxi arrived, as she rushed to the door, Drizella accidentally tripped over

Cindy’s sash and tore it. Cindy screamed, “Now I can’t go to the ball! I will never get out of this house! Everybody persecutes me! I hate you all!” Furious and hysterical, she fled to the garden and sobbed her heart out. The other girls had to leave or they would be late. Her mother dismissed the matter and took a bit of whiskey to relax for the evening.

When Cindy could cry no longer, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a joint. Soon she began to relax under the stars. Dejection and despair were suddenly transformed into a radical amazement with the grandeur and unity of the cosmos. This was her first real peak experience.

While deep in a marijuana high, captivated in her gaze at the North Star, Cindy was jolted to see her Aunt Clara standing by her. Clara had passed the house on her way to a bridge game and saw

Cindy alone in the garden. To Cindy, Aunt Clara appeared as the original Madonna, suddenly descended from the heavens without sin or blemish, a who would erase all of the cruelty from her wicked stepfamily, as she had taken to calling them in her conversations with her attic companions.

Clara resembled Cindy’s image of the mother she needed. She was not vain, she was not fixated on her appearance or on staying slim, she was childless, she was more huggable than anyone in

Cindy’s immediate family, and she seemed undividedly for Cindy. She was a bit forgetful and not always a mind reader, but these benign flaws were overshadowed by the sense of acceptance that she communicated.

4 All of a sudden, it seemed, Aunt Clara was gone. Equally suddenly, she reappeared, with a new sash for Cindy’s dress. Clara volunteered her squeaky, diminutive husband, Jacques, and his rotund but equally mousy friend, Gus, to drive Cindy to the ball on their way to a poker game.

But they would be waiting for her at the foot of the stairs at midnight, and if she wanted a ride back, she had to be there on time. They could not wait longer than that, because Gus needed to be home to take his insulin.

Cindy didn’t want her family to know that she was at the ball, so she knew she had to catch that ride. But soon after she walked into the party, Giuseppe asked her to dance, and within moments she was oblivious to all time and place beyond his presence. When midnight arrived, Giuseppe had not yet thought to get her full name and number. As the clock struck, Cindy turned around and fled down the stairs of the palace, dashing into Jacques’ car wearing only one shoe. She was in too much of a trance to mention it.

The next morning, a friend of Giuseppe’s knocked on the door, wondering if the spare shoe belonged to anybody in the household, because Giuseppe was looking for the girl who had worn it. Cindy’s mother quietly urged Anastasia and Drizella to force their feet into the shoe so as to claim Giuseppe. She never mentioned to Cindy that this man was here, since she assumed that

Cindy had not gone to the ball.

At the last moment, Cindy ran downstairs from the attic and tried on the slipper. When it fit, she brought out the matching shoe and screamed, “You see! It’s mine! He’s mine, no thanks to you!”

5 She fled the house with Giuseppe’s friend. She met Giuseppe in a pub, wandered off with him, and eloped. Nobody in her family was at the wedding.

From Cindy to Cinderella

After she married, Cindy decided to call herself Cinderella. She found the name Cindy too babyish, and she disliked the name Cynthia. The name Cinderella appealed to her because it was longer, dramatic, and evoked a sense of romance. It also validated her own sense of personal persecution, because she had seen herself as being under constant pressure to do the dirtiest jobs in the house, such as cleaning the cinders from the fireplace.

Guiseppe was Cinderella’s of her dreams, and when she married him, she felt sure that now she could leave her birth family behind and live happily ever after with him. Over time, however, the unresolved issues of her past began to catch up with her. She was paralyzed at the thought of doing housework, and her home was an unattended-to mess where mice scampered about with impunity. To provide herself with an escape from her dull, chaotic surroundings, she spent time during the day smoking pot when her husband was away. She ate sweet pastries throughout the day, she was always exhausted, and she never exercised beyond the occasional walk outside for errands.

Cinderella wanted to lose weight, reclaim her youthful body, bring joy back into her marriage, and have children. I told her that she had made a perfect start by beginning a yoga practice.

Rather than set specific goals for the psychotherapy, such as weight loss or cessation of drug use,

I encouraged her to focus on being able to be present, in the moment, with awareness,

6 connection, and joyful engagement with reality. I set forward the idea of letting go of a particular agenda, instead allowing the gifts of the universe to flow to her as they were meant to unfold.

I guided Cinderella into another set of postures, twists this time, supporting her shoulder and her corresponding thigh in the pose. After a few moments she giggled briefly, and then she started to sob. Her whole life, she said, had just bubbled to the surface.

I said, “What word would you use to describe this feeling of your whole life?”

“Tragedy.”

“Tragedy,” I replied. “Stay with that tragedy. Be with that pain.”

I paused to allow her silence. Then I asked, “Where do you feel this tragedy in your body?”

“In my midback.”

“In your midback. What is happening in your midback?”

“I laugh,” she replied, “and then I cry.”

“Tell me more,” I said.

7 “I have another feeling,” she replied, “lower down. Lower in my body. A deeper tragedy.”

“What does this deeper tragedy feel like? Does it have a name?”

“Loss. Longing.”

“Loss and longing. What do you long for?” I asked.

“A baby,” she replied.

“A baby. What would this baby bring you?” I asked.

“Hope.”

“Hope. How can you bring hope into your life today, before you go to sleep tonight?”

She paused and then replied, “I can go home, clean the house, and eat a meal without any pastries.”

And so she did.

Over the next few sessions, Cinderella and I developed a direction for her healing work. She was going to eliminate white flour, white sugar, sweet pastries, soda, and dairy from her diet.

8 Everything she ate was going to be a whole food, with minimal processing. She would reduce her fat intake and make sure that all fats she ate were healthy. She would buy some cookbooks and cook meals from scratch. She would attend yoga classes three times per week and do a few hip openers and backbends every day. One day per week, her yoga class with me would be followed by a private session that would involve both asana work and conversation. During the therapy we would focus on the feelings that came up as she did her postures or told her stories.

She would locate the feeling in her body, give it a name, and express her reactions to me, and I would also express my reactions to her if that seemed significant.

We left it up to her as to when to taper off or terminate the private psychotherapy sessions, but she made a commitment to continue the practice of yoga, patiently allowing the yoga to do its work over time. I made sure that she understood that my purpose was not to create an indefinitely long therapeutic relationship or to create a dependence on me. Rather, I wanted her to develop the tools of bringing awareness, connection and aliveness into her life that would be hers alone.

Cinderella and I co-created additional goals: a half an hour per day out of doors walking, swimming or jumping on her minitrampoline. She was going to keep a journal of her feelings, which she would write down at the end of every yoga class and whenever else she felt moved to write.

Cinderella began to get control over the disarray of her house, her hair, and her clothing. She stopped smoking pot, she lost 16 pounds, she bought new plants for the house, and she began

9 cooking a delightful meal for her husband in the evenings. She became more limber in her hip openers, her backbends no longer provoked such powerful discharges of emotion, her skin began to glow, and her pimples cleared up. At my recommendation, she sought out an acupuncturist who also gave her some herbal remedies for infertility.

Over the next few months, Cinderella began sewing dresses for herself and started to create crafts for the local children’s center. She saw that it would bring great joy to her life to connect with children, so she began assisting at crafts activities for children at the local library. She joined her local church and began to make new friends there. She discovered that she loved reading the Bible, so I suggested taking a favorite psalm and rewriting it in her own words. She chose Psalm 23 and wove a beautiful story of rushing waterfalls and lush forests where she walked with God.

Cinderella’s talk therapy tapered off, but her yoga practice became stronger. When she did return for conversations, she told me that old memories were beginning to resurface for her with startling clarity. She saw that her tendency to withdraw into the attic was a vital strategy of self- protection at the time, but she began to see that withdrawal was no longer serving her. With that breakthrough, she was able to look back on those days in the attic and see vividly how jealous her mother was of her youth, her dating, her future – and her hope.

Cinderella’s lovemaking with her Prince Charming became joyful once again. She let go of her fixation on getting pregnant and learned to allow the future to take its course. She and Giuseppe adopted a little Quechua Indian girl from Peru. Her menstrual periods regularized. Eight months

10 later, she conceived, and then gave birth to a boy. She never stopped doing yoga; she took prenatal yoga during the pregnancy and a Baby and Me yoga class to learn to integrate the postures with her toddlers’ play.

Cinderella never reconciled with her mother, who died from cirrhosis of the liver before the baby was born. She did reconnect with Drizella; Anastasia moved to New Zealand, however, so she never had the same chance with her for reconciliation. Her father rejoiced in his two grandchildren, and he swore that he would never again allow anybody to stand between him and his children.

But her favorite person in the world was still Aunt Clara, the fairy godmother who waved a magic wand and sent her to the ball where she met her Prince Charming.

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