The leader who had destroyed everything around her -- and was finishing off herself

The presenting picture

Galina arrived in a state of deep, black depression interspersed with aggressive outbursts. She was 48, had left her position as a factory director eighteen months before, had failed several job interviews, and had recently left her husband — moving into a small apartment she had once bought for her daughter. She spent days without leaving the house, without changing clothes, without washing her hair. Each morning began with three cups of coffee. Each evening ended with a bottle of red wine. She could not say what she did during the day. She thought about death as a release.

She was a large, striking woman — sharp, energetic, commanding in voice and manner. Not an Amazon, but a leader of Amazons. And she was looking for a therapist who would not break under her force.

The pattern that emerged

From the very first sessions, Galina’s dominant mode was accusation. In the first meeting, she attacked a mutual acquaintance with disproportionate rage over a trivial social offense. In the second, she blamed three potential employers, her former boss, and the therapist herself — five accusations in fifteen minutes. She was convinced she had been blacklisted, but had only been rejected three times in eighteen months, and only for positions that matched her very high standards.

Behind the fury was a woman who categorically externalized all responsibility. She believed herself to be the victim of deliberate malice, and her enormous resentment needed an enemy at all times. She wanted the therapist to pull her out of the depression, but appeared to be doing everything to sink deeper into it.

The backstory

Galina had been spectacularly successful. Together with her husband Oleg she had built a large chain of pharmacies in the Altai region from nothing. She had money, status, respect, a beautiful house by a lake, a wide circle of friends. But she wanted more — the scale of Moscow, bigger business. When her daughter Polina was finishing school, Galina decided the entire family would relocate to the capital.

The plan went wrong almost immediately. Instead of launching her own business in Moscow, she accepted a position running a pharmaceutical factory for an owner named Kira. She worked seventeen-hour days, pouring herself into the role at an unsustainable pace. When she finally tried to set boundaries, the relationship collapsed. Galina left and found herself without a job, without her business, without her social world — living in her daughter’s cramped apartment under a low ceiling, as she put it, “like in a coffin.”

Her husband Oleg, who had lost momentum during the disorganized relocation, withdrew into computer games. The expensive house they were building outside Moscow remained unfinished. The money from selling assets back in Altai was partly frozen. The grand plan had turned into a guillotine.

The therapeutic hypothesis

Galina had unconsciously replicated her mother’s parenting — in mirror image. Where her mother gave nothing, Galina gave everything material but nothing emotional. The paradigm remained the same: no real closeness, no respect, no presence. She had sworn her daughter would never have the gray childhood she endured — and delivered an abundance of things instead of love.

Meanwhile, Galina lived out a deep cultural script: the self-sacrificing woman-warrior who takes on the functions of the men around her, who is strong and successful but has killed off her own femininity, tenderness, and capacity for joy. She craved a strong partner but resented every man who failed to match her; she could show boundless affection to her dogs but only coldness to her husband.

Her depression was not a collapse of strength — it was the price of a lifetime of silenced needs. As the therapist formulated it: “Depression is hopelessness projected into the future.” Galina had spent thirty years running a marathon, and the finish line was the bottom of a well.

The daughter

A critical thread appeared when the therapy turned to Galina’s 22-year-old daughter Polina. Galina was furious at what she saw as the girl’s irresponsibility, financial carelessness, and ingratitude. She criticized, lectured, and accused — then, overcome with guilt, quietly left money on the dresser. The cycle repeated endlessly.

Confronted with the observation that she had never actually taught Polina to manage money or responsibility — having instead showered her with material comforts as a substitute for closeness — Galina broke. “I’m a terrible mother. This is all because of me,” she said in a voice stripped of all defenses. It was the first time she had spoken without her armor.

She recalled that she had missed her daughter’s first steps, her first words. She had once forgotten Polina’s birthday while on a business trip. The thirteen-year-old had called her mother herself: “You forgot about me. But I never forget about you for a single minute. You don’t know what it’s like to always remember someone who forgot you.”

The childhood beneath

As the therapy deepened, Galina’s own childhood surfaced. Her father was a cold, joyless despot — laughter was not permitted in their home, and the one vivid memory she carried was being severely beaten with a soldier’s belt at age six for forgetting to lock the door. He was killed in a construction accident when she was sixteen. Her mother, a paramedic on an ambulance crew, was chronically absent — she never attended school events, rarely spoke to Galina, and had placed her in a five-day boarding nursery at the age of three, despite two healthy parents at home.

Galina left school after eighth grade, earned her first money at fifteen mopping pharmacy floors, and essentially raised herself. She had never cried — not as a child, not as an adult. Tears were forbidden in her family. She had buried all vulnerability under a persona of iron control and relentless achievement.

The turning point

Progress was neither smooth nor fast. After a failed first attempt to talk to her daughter — in which Galina demanded mutual forgiveness instead of offering her own — she returned to the therapist enraged, declared psychotherapy a fraud, and nearly quit. That night, she had two vivid nightmares: in the first, she attacked her therapist but found herself choking her own father; in the second, she lay in a coffin, unable to reach her husband and small daughter.

She wrote to the therapist at 6:20 the next morning: “I will work with my past. Without this, my demons will devour me.”

The breakthrough

The deepest shift came through loss. Galina’s beloved mother-in-law — the one person who had shown her unconditional warmth, and who had essentially raised Polina — died. Galina drove to the house, was present at the death, and afterward found herself sitting on the veranda floor, curled up in a corner, weeping for the first time with complete abandon — mourning not only this woman, but her own unloved childhood and her misdirected life.

“No one can stand me except my psychotherapist and the dogs,” she murmured through her tears. And then Polina appeared. She looked at her mother — this fearsome, commanding woman, now small and broken on the floor — and felt something shift. “Mom, don’t cry. Dad and I need you. Come inside — Dad made coffee and toast.”

Galina looked into her daughter’s eyes and saw, for the first time, the depth of compassion there. She asked for forgiveness — truly, fully — and Polina, kneeling beside her, forgave. In that moment, the internal spring that had held Galina in tension for a lifetime finally released. She felt her soul fill with tenderness. She smelled the coffee. She wanted to eat. She wanted to live.