TRANSCRIPT
[Music] Basically, everybody I’ve ever seen is totally traumatized in their childhood from not having gotten their needs met. The reason they’re able to deny it is because they have no empathy for what their child’s needs were, because they’ve split it off. It’s too dangerous to really empathize with your little child’s needs because that betrays your parents. And from a little child’s perspective, betraying your parents is like death. It means you’re going to get totally rejected. You can’t betray your parents as a child; it’s completely impossible. That’s why even in the extreme cases, abused children side with their [Music] traumatizer.
Now, most people grow up and break away from their parents, get some distance from their parents, and then are able to see their parents in a more honestly critical light, in a more legitimately realistic light. They’re able to see more of the reality of their parents’ flaws and their parents’ strengths. Though I should be really careful saying that because I know so many people as adults who have little or no ability to see their parents’ flaws. Or they think they see their parents’ flaws, and they think they see their parents’ flaws in a realistic light. But at best, they see maybe 5% of their parents’ flaws because it’s still far too painful to see the full reality of how limited their parents were. Because to see how limited their parents were is to really acknowledge how traumatized they were, how traumatized they are, and how totally vulnerable they remain on the inside.
[Music] When we get into our dreams, we get into who we really are, into our wounds, into our traumas, into our rage, into our frustrations with our parents and our life and our childhood, and all the limitations that life has presented us with. But what makes dreams odd is that they’re totally symbolic. So that’s what makes it easy for so many people to say dreams don’t mean anything. They’re just like little random workings of my mind. They’re just something that I ignore. Yeah, I had a bad day today, or I had some weird dreams tonight, or you know, I had some indigestion during the night. I had really bad gas, and that gave me bad dreams. Or I had a headache, and that gave me bad dreams. And it’s like, you know, if only life were so easy. If only dreams really meant so little.
Other people discount their dreams by saying, “Oh, my dreams are magical in terms of telling the future. They tell weird things about what’s going to happen in the world.” And that’s an easy mystical, quote, spiritual way to discount the deep emotional reality of your [Music] dreams. Analyzing dreams is not always easy. It’s a lot of work, and sometimes there’s a lot of guesswork and speculation. But that can totally fuel the self-therapeutic process because just the act of questioning, of saying, “What does this dream mean?” of trying desperately to figure it out, even when there may not be a lot of clues, that in and of itself is valuable. Because it starts the ball rolling of looking inward, of picking yourself apart in a healthy way, and trying to figure out what’s going on.
Often, if we go really deep inside ourselves and self-reflect and ask ourselves, “What does this dream mean?” and let our mind quiet down, often we find the answer bubbles up. So even though my dream work is imperfect and confusing sometimes, and I don’t feel I exactly get what the dreams mean. And by the way, dreams can mean so many different things at once. One dream can mean 10 different things that maybe I get two of those things or three of those things. But over time, what I found is that I’ve gotten much better at figuring out what my dreams mean, and often I get them pretty quickly or get much more of them.
Now, of course, I’m still improving on the dream analysis process, and it’s like a muscle. It’s like something that the more you exercise that muscle, the stronger it gets. And no wonder then that people who have very little experience looking within feel very alienated when it comes to analyzing their dreams. They really can’t make much sense of it. But again, like all things, if you try and you practice at it, you get better.
Analyzing my dreams helped bring me back into my center, into who I really am, what’s really going on in my unconscious. And it gives me a wonderful sense of connectedness and a sense of deep real comfort and satisfaction. And that what’s going on in my head is not crazy, that it really is legitimate, that I really was wounded, and that I really am struggling to work things out. Because what are dreams after all? They’re a desperate attempt for our unconscious to try to work out our problems—problems that seem too overwhelming to us because we live in a world that’s so against healing. And so our dreams are trying to do the work for us. And we do ourselves a great service if we try to actually help our unconscious, and we use our conscious mind to try to connect with that unconscious, and we work in tandem with it.
I’ve already talked about it a little bit because journaling and dream analysis are both forms of self-reflection. But in the broader sense, it’s just any way of looking within, of asking ourselves, “Who are we really? What are we doing with our lives? What’s going on in here and in here?” And what I found with self-reflection is when I try, when I simply just try to self-reflect, I actually get answers. And often, I believe this with other people too because I’ve observed it, that if we have the courage to just ask ourselves the questions, often the answers come pretty quickly. Because I think desperately our unconscious wants to give us the answer. Our unconscious desperately wants us to heal and wants us to become the full, true, manifested person that we were all meant to be.
[Music] What is the goal of self-therapy? If the goal of psychotherapy is to become free enough to learn how to do self-therapy, I believe the goal of self-therapy, again, is to fully manifest our truth, to dissolve our unconscious. Because I believe a fully healthy person would no longer have an unconscious; they wouldn’t need one. What is the point of the unconscious? The point of the unconscious is to help us keep all our painful material out of sight so we can actually function day-to-day. If the unconscious came up too quickly, it would overwhelm us. It could drive us crazy. It could make us have anxiety that would be totally, totally overwhelming. So we need to respect it, to be gentle with ourselves.
That’s why some people flip out when they try certain hallucinogenic drugs, even marijuana. It takes their unconscious and it brings it up into their consciousness far too quickly, and it’s very, very disrespectful to the self. And it’s not a gentle process. And that’s the vital thing for self-therapy: to be gentle about it, to be self-loving. Because the whole problem with the traumatizing process of having a neglectful childhood, which is the standard, that’s the norm, is that neglectful process that we’ve all gone through was so disrespectful to our inner beings.