- ment of the kind and degree of personality distortion she is
subject to.
As one might guess, this patient was not easy to treat. She had developed a powerful tendency to handle her fears by denying their existence. When she was finally able to see through this self-deceiving trait, however, she came to grips with her problem. She was able to see that she had been in a ten-year competition with her husband instead of a marriage. When she realized this she was able to control her competitive actions, and the immediate rewards she received in the form of renewed affection and companionship from her grateful husband motivated her to find out more and more about herself. At length this intelligent but dreadfully insecure person became, through understanding and insight, a real woman able to give and take in every aspect of the love relationship.
Frigidity causes a personality distortion. I wish to impress this on you deeply. It means that the person has a misunderstanding of reality, denies it, blames others for her own miseries and failures.
One woman who had been cured of a severe frigidity problem phrased it this way: "I was looking at life and people through a distorting glass. No wonder I made such poor decisions." She was right, too. Her problem had first driven her to promiscuity, then to marriage with an alcoholic. I was very glad, when she first came for treatment, that she had not yet had any children. With her deeply seated, sexually based personality problem she might have ruined them. I am even gladder that, remarried to a fine man, she has two children now.
In a later section we shall examine in great detail these personality problems that accompany frigidity. There are, however, more immediate symptoms which I should like to go into here.
