I had a dream of bring pursed by a large crocodile in the dawn light hours of a waking morning dream today. At first we were swimming along an enclosed canal like water way and the crocodiles were passing us by but my sister was with me and when she got scared the crocodile picked up on it and started pursuing me. It was nearly on me when I woke my heart beating strongly sitting on the side of the bed almost paralysed with focused attention on my body symptoms and breath feeling unable to move in case I got the combination of rising up wrong and my spine collapsed. Today has been a big struggle to get going after a very active day yesterday of therapy.
Elaine Aron mentions in her book on the undervalued self that the persecutor / protector archetypal often appears in dreams as we endeavour to heal. We need to not turn away from the nightmares as it’s getting the courage to stand up to the inner persecutor that is the only thing that brings us freedom. And for those of us who sought safety by avoidance of life and relationships is also important not to let the protector or what trauma therapist Donald Kalshed calls the self care system keep us sealed off from life. Feeling under threat or unsafe when young leads to hyper vigilance being on high trigger alert poised to see anything as a threat. By all means we need to understand emotional invalidation (inner and outer) but when it gets projected out of fear onto false targets that becomes a real problem.
It is interesting to me that in the dream the crocodile only started to pursue me AFTER my sister noticed it and told me. On the weekend I was breaking out, going with family and friends to a show, being encouraged perhaps to do some performance myself by my cousin which is something I loved to do as a youngster but got ridiculed for. Come to think of it Mum and Dad didn’t encourage outside activities and home was run with military precision, it was hard to relax in an older family all geared around work. It strikes me as interesting energetically that that is when my sister called me. The last time she did this I had got myself out on a Saturday to an AA meeting and Saturday is usually a tough day for me as I had my accident around 9 am on a Saturday and that was what nearly killed me in 1979 and derailed me and arrested me along with my older sister’s aneurysm, breakdown and then Dad coming down hard and not at all supportively on me as I struggled in the aftermath..
At the moment I am reading a novel set in Sydney in a group share home and curiously the lead character has lost her father.. Reading it after I came home from therapy with Kat yesterday I could not settle it was taking me back into those dark and deep painful addictive years.. In the book they are drinking and drugging a lot.
Writing this now I am out in the car again but I realize the trauma zone captured me again this morning I could not eat until 10 am and had to gobble down tissue salts to assuage my body symptoms. That dream I had held a lot of buried deep emotional charge stored as somatic energy.
I am hoping writing this will help me to externalise some of that, give it a container of sorts. I so long to come alive.
Then I think of other children having gone through so much loss at an earlier age and how much fear can come to possess them, they are expected to feel safe in the schools system or world that acknowledges zilch of their inner psychic reality. Like my friends grandson who got hit by a car and later was nearly diagnosed as ‘autistic’. WTF!!!!
My therapist mentioned something very interesting to me in therapy yesterday it was about a guy called Russell Meares who writes on the great behaviorist purge of the 1960s where the psychological community tried to rationalize feelings and negate the power of both the unconscious and collective unconscious. She reminded me that cognitive behavioral therapy or purely mental approaches do not get at the root of these deeper archetypal structures and embedded feelings and fears and emotions that plague us from within. It reduces us in so so so so many detrimental ways making our understanding of others shallow and lacking in nuance. I was fascinated to hear of this after having the friend of my sister’s try to rationalize away deep stuff on Sunday and now see why I got an attack after speaking to her as she shut my reality down completely.. Please do not tell me your daughter is ‘paranoid’ to have social anxiety, why did she come to feel so scared.. I know we have to be realistic but psychic suffering is psychic suffering to have it reduced just makes the entire issue confusing and lacking in any kind of meaning.
Emerging From The Dark Night 