Posted by Tamar on October 2, 2005, at 17:27:28
In reply to Avoiding Dream Meaning, posted by daisym on October 1, 2005, at 20:37:57
That sounds like a very frightening dream.
Are you afraid that your feelings are too much for your therapist? That if you really told him everything he would abandon you? It seems as if his death in your dream is a consequence of your gesture of affection. I know I sometimes think I’m so contaminated that if I’m untouchable; that no one would ever want to hug me, and that my feelings of affection are dangerous to other people. Do you ever feel something like that?
There certainly seems to be a theme of fear of abandonment. But in your dream you don’t even get to focus on your own abandonment because as soon as you’ve been abandoned you are verbally attacked by another client, who turns into your mother. So you have no opportunity to deal with your feelings when your therapist dies. Even before you can begin to think about why he died you’re being accused and other people assume you’re guilty. Is feeling guilty an automatic response for you?
The encounter with your mother in your dream is probably very significant. In the dream you aren’t able to deal with her; you aren’t able to tell she’s wrong, and you have to run away. And your therapist can’t help you because he’s dead and so he can’t reassure you; he can’t tell you that you aren’t too demanding.
The hug with your therapist might symbolise your attempts to accept aspects of yourself that you have separated from your conscious ideas about your identity. His subsequent death might symbolise your fears about what self acceptance might involve, or your fear that you aren’t able to accept yourself. The attack by the mother-figure might symbolise what you’re left with if you aren’t able to accept these aspects of yourself. It’s frightening because she overwhelms you and you need to escape (become symbolically an adult). But without your therapist you can only separate yourself from her by running away; you can’t outgrow her influence without him.
I think to resolve this dream you need to find a way of bringing your therapist back to life (metaphorically speaking). In fact, the mother-figure might actually be responsible for the death of the therapist but she shifts the blame onto you. Bringing him back to life might reduce her power over you.
One thing I sometimes do is to visualise how I would have liked the dream to end, rather than how it actually ended. If I’d had your dream I might imagine running down the stairs away from the mother-figure and encountering the therapist-figure (alive) at the bottom of the stairs. At this point I would hug him again and he wouldn’t die; he would hug me back and at the same time the mother-figure would disappear.
I don’t know if that would work for you… but sometimes I find that imagining a better ending provides some kind of resolution for me.
Tamar
poster:Tamar
thread:561747
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20051001/msgs/562019.html