psychotherapy

Behind our closed eyes.

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“I am no longer being woken up by zombies coming to get me, in an apocalyptic world. My sleep is better.”

‘What do you see now?’

“Some unsettling incongruous domestic situations but nothing terrible. Nothing that kicks me out of my sleep.”

This indicated to me that my client’s level of threat-perception was lessening. I don’t know much about dream interpretation, so I do not attempt to go deep into that, but I know that they can release energy and reveal messages from the subconscious, inside the safety of sleep. They can erase unnecessary emotional files stored in the primitive brain and prioritize what is relevant and important.

A friend dreamt of working with elephants in a forest repeatedly. This seemed completely random to her. She sold solar panels for a living and had been planning on taking a sabbatical, which commenced 3 months into these recurrent dreams. She booked a one-way ticket to Thailand and the day after she arrived, she found out that a new orphanage for elephants had opened that very day in her neighbourhood. What are the chances? Of course, she volunteered there for months and loved it.

As per Ayurveda, there are seven types of dreams:

  1. those based on what was seen
  2. heard
  3. reflected upon
  4. desired
  5. imagined
  6. those foretelling something and
  7. those caused by illnesses or possibly predict specific illnesses

They intrigue me as they are communications from a deeper self that has access to everything that we cannot consciously know. Psychologists have dwelt upon them for centuries. The basic idea behind Jungian dream theory is that dreams reveal more than they conceal. Jung did not believe that dreams need to be interpreted for them to perform their function. They operate as safety valves for the psyche. They are worthy of attention as they are an important source of information about vanished people, places and experiences in our lives.

Freud called them, via regia, the royal road to the unconscious, but a strong force within us strains to conceal our dream messages from us in ingenious ways such as obscure symbols and the ethereal nature of dreams by which most of them, we forget. It’s a good idea to write them down while we still remember them. Another good reason to get a new notebook 😉

As I venture into the world of Hypnotherapy, I find a deeper learning, connection and understanding of the inner worlds of others and myself.

Resource: Benefits of keeping a dream journal

Day 781

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She is a Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University. She is an international authority on Manic-depressive illness. She writes about her own struggles with the illness since her adolescence. She recounts the slow and painful mastering of her illness through knowledge, courage, medication, self-discipline and the power of love. Her work has helped save countless lives. An excerpt:

“At this point in my existence, I cannot imagine leading a normal life without both taking lithium and having had benefit of psychotherapy. Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from running my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible.

But ineffably, psychotherapy heals. It makes some sense of the confusion, reigns in the terrifying thoughts and feelings, returns some control and hope and possibility of learning from it all. Pills cannot, do not, ease one back into reality; they only bring one back headlong, careening and faster than can be endured at times. Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused and despairing beyond belief. But always, it is where I have believed-or have learned to believe-that I might someday be able to contend with all of this.

No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one’s own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy.”

  • from ‘An Unquiet Mind’ by Kay Redfield Jamison.

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