{"id":133,"date":"2015-01-09T02:07:29","date_gmt":"2015-01-09T02:07:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/?p=133"},"modified":"2015-01-09T02:07:29","modified_gmt":"2015-01-09T02:07:29","slug":"dreams-again-start-where-youre-at","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/dreams-again-start-where-youre-at\/","title":{"rendered":"Dreams – again, start where you’re at."},"content":{"rendered":"

In recent postings, I have been describing the importance and benefits of patients beginning sessions \u2013 when they can \u2013 by gently and honestly asking themselves where they\u2019re at.\u00a0 As we saw, some of the most productive sessions start this way.\u00a0 By contrast, when patients try to talk about something “important” but their heart is not in it, it’s usually pointless and the session goes flat.\u00a0 You shouldn’t talk about your mother just because you’re seeing and analytically oriented psychotherapist, unless that’s really where your heart is at the moment.\u00a0 (Obviously there are cases when a person is resisting<\/a>\u00a0the important material, and then has to be coaxed\/reminded to get back to talking serious \u2013 that\u2019s a different situation and a topic for a whole other entry.)<\/p>\n

The same thing is true when talking about dreams, as I’ve often noticed.\u00a0 Laymen in particular are prone to asking me “what does it mean when you dream x, y, or z?\u201d\u00a0 Those of you who saw “Analyze This” may recall the maddening response the therapist gave his gangster-patient who asked the same thing.\u00a0 He said “I don’t know; what does it mean to you?”<\/p>\n

Annoying, perhaps, but correct.\u00a0 It doesn’t matter what the dream means to the analyst.\u00a0 The dream, or any element in it, might mean any one of 100 different things.\u00a0 What matters is which of those hundred things is being symbolized in the dream for that dreamer \u2013 the only person who really knows that, ultimately, is the patient.\u00a0 The therapist can guide. \u00a0The therapist may know which way to point the patient in considering what the dream or some element in it means. \u00a0But only the patient knows when we’ve hit the right answer. \u00a0The therapists job is \u2013 as my old mentor put it \u2013 to help clean off the glasses; I can tell you when you are resisting, distracting, avoiding, or simply lost, and I can point you in the direction of possible ways out.\u00a0 It is only you who can tell us if we have found the right one.<\/p>\n

Erwin is a good example of this.\u00a0 He came to me with problems in his marriage, work, and relationships with his children.\u00a0 He was frequently quite\u00a0frustrated, felt powerless\u00a0and\u00a0spent much of his time enraged and unable to focus because of that feeling.\u00a0 He came from an abusive childhood, had a father who was depressed and at one point suicidal, and who often made the boy feel very guilty for being such a burden (he wasn’t); Erwin recalls his father sadly talking about how much work it was to raise him, how he gave up so much to put him and his siblings through school.\u00a0 Erwin also recalls his mother telling him that she hated him.\u00a0 When his siblings were born\u00a0–\u00a0and he does not really remember this although it is clear from his recounting of the family history\u00a0–\u00a0he was replaced.\u00a0 He had been the oldest, gotten all the attention, and suddenly these stressed and rather feckless parents turned all their focus on the new twin babies.<\/p>\n

Psychology and psychoanalysis \u2013 as well as history and literature \u2013 teach us\u00a0that what we don’t remember\u00a0we are doomed to enact.\u00a0 This unremembered sense of envy, the resultant scrambling to recover his honored place in the family and the attention and even minimal affection of his parents dogged Erwin the rest of his life and in our early sessions.\u00a0 He wasted the first several months with me trying to control every aspect of our interaction, on the surface very polite but in fact quite demanding; in the midst of all that, of course, there was no room for us to actually engage and get anywhere; he had to establish his territory and all the ground rules before he could dare open up.\u00a0 Eventually I was able to help him see his behavior and the feelings underneath, and our work could begin.<\/p>\n

One day he came in with a nightmare: \u00a0His wife had set him up to take the fall for a crime so that she could be with another man, and she told him so in the dream.\u00a0 My immediate thought was that the betrayal was what was so painful \u2013 not her leaving him.\u00a0 That’s what the textbooks might tell us is the more powerful issue, the greater blow, and it may be what my own issues lead me to believe.<\/p>\n

I have learned, however, never to assume.\u00a0 I asked Erwin, as I ask all patients who bring in dreams, what was the most vivid element in the dream, the most vivid image, sound, moment, or feeling.\u00a0 His answer was explicitly “that I’d been replaced; not that she set me up\u201d.\u00a0 Now that you know the history, I’m sure you can see the parallel between this and Erwin\u2019s real life experience when he was a child.\u00a0 Unless you’ve sat with this man and heard his stories at length, experienced his controlling behavior first-hand, and observed the pain he is in when he feels left out, you would not know what a perfect encapsulation of his life this dream and his particular response to it are.\u00a0 And we might have missed it had I leaped\u00a0to focus on the sense of horrific betrayal \u2013 nightmarish, I\u2019d call it \u2013 that his wife not only left him for another man but had Erwin sent to prison, ruining his life and career as well as breaking his heart.<\/p>\n

So again I remind all of us \u2013 patients and therapists \u2013 to shut off your brain, assumptions, and preconceptions as you proceed through a session.\u00a0 Much better by far is to allow yourself to open up to the data:\u00a0 Never mind what you think you know, what you think is “important” to discuss in therapy, never mind what you think the dream is about because you read a book, never mind what you are sure you feel because it is logical, reasonable, palatable \u2013 the latter is an especially strong draw for people and thus a frequent block to noticing what really is happening to you.<\/p>\n

When Erwin and I did this during the session the result was\u00a0a very useful discussion of his pattern of chasing acceptance and – most importantly – how he does not usually realize he is doing it; he reflected on\u00a0how such behavior in fact drives others away (including potential clients and business contacts), and how painful it is for him to experience or perceive even the smallest sense of exclusion.\u00a0 Most important, all that discussion left him calmer, more hopeful, sadder, yet much more able to focus and move forward with the day and his life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In recent postings, I have been describing the importance and benefits of patients beginning sessions \u2013 when they can \u2013 by gently and honestly asking themselves where they\u2019re at.\u00a0 As we saw, some of the most productive sessions start this … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions\/134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}