Posted by antigua3 on June 3, 2009, at 7:55:33
In reply to Re: Integration**possible trigger, posted by Dinah on June 2, 2009, at 21:46:28
Thank you so very much all of you for responding when I feel so awful. I was devastated last night and didn't know where to turn. I cried more last night than I've cried in years. While my T and pdoc would say this is good, it isn't.
I hope you don't mind if I reply in a single post. It just makes explaining easier.
I woke up so early this morning, not able to sleep, and I was touched by the replies.
Before I explain more about the dream, and another one, too, I woke up this morning with an insight that fits.
My stated goal with my pdoc is to work through and "resolve" my Oedipus complex, to learn to have a healthy relationship with a male authority figure. As many of you have been kind enough to read over the three or so years I have been with him, it has been a tough battle. I was very resistant, vicious, etc., toward him until I learned to trust him. (Actually, the trust came about when I came to understand how devastating negative transference can be to a therapeutic relationship--and yes, it was always a misunderstanding on my part about him saying we have no relationship. We cleared this up when he admitted this and was concerned that I didn't believe this to be true for several years. This was a turning point in our therapy and another long story I won't bore you with.) What matters is that I trust him now and I know he will not abandon me. Do I feel safe with him? Not always, but when I don't we really work on it.
In any case, my basic issue is that in the abusive situation with my father, the Oedipus complex was "realized," if that makes sense. It does to me, now, so we are working on going through the Oedipus complex in a safe environment. That's what he says, but I still have lots of issues over this because, for one, while I do have transference with him, at this point I can't imagine opening that love your father part with him because I don't have these feelings for my pdoc, or I'm too afraid to go there. He's a person, I've accepted, and while he may be a stand-in for my father I would be too horrified to feel the way I did about my father when I was a young girl.
We've been doing some very intense, albeit painful, work at a steady pace. Sometimes I feel like I never have time to come up for a breath of air before we go right into the next tough issue. (there's that water imagery again). Maybe we are going too fast, and he does bring this up, but it's like I can't stop, and the feelings, flashbacks and painful feelings just keep showing up and we try to deal with them. I haven't had a light session in months and months. I even started seeing him weekly because the pain between sessions was too great, but I've had to stop that because of the cost.
Sorry, I'm rambling. The insight: If he is the father figure, he told me last night that the daughter needs to die. Maybe he didn't put it that way, but that's what I heard. And isn't that the very fear I had as a child? That I would die?
In all the time I've been with my pdoc, I've never had a single dream about him. I've had three (two on the same night) in the last two weeks. In fact, I don't really dream anymore like I used to. I wake up feeling horrible many times, but I can never remember the dreams. But the terrible feelings are always there.
In the first dream, two weeks ago, there are a set of really disgusting triplets--hideous, deformed creatures--locked up in a room. I'm giving a tour of my "institute" to a group of investors and I know that a decision needs to be made about what to do with these horrible creatures. Two are connected by the head, Siamese twins (my mother & father? and my T & pdoc by extension) and the third is a small girl. In the dream, I am certain that these creatures need to die--either to be killed or let die naturally. All of sudden my pdoc is there. He is there to "treat" the triplets. He is keeping them alive whereas I want them dead. His interpretation was that maybe he was keeping them alive so that they could come out of the room. So, here he is saving the third triplet, me, really, and after he said this, I realized that yes, she wanted out of that room and away from the other two.
He thought my identifying the Siamese twins was an "interesting interpretation," which meant he didn't quite buy it, but he couldn't figure it out either.
The second set of dreams were last week, on the same night. In the morning, this is what I remembered.
In the first dream, me and a younger part (not the youngest, though) are walking up from the forest, and through my beautifully green, manicured yard up to the back of my gorgeous home. There are three marble steps (there's that three again!) leading up to a long patio toward the back door. The whole back of the house is glass, top to bottom, and since it's night, the light is flowing out onto the backyard. (I used to dream of houses all the time; I know they are me, or parts of me.)
Two trees have fallen down from the forest. I'm confident that me and my younger self have chopped them down and I'm feeling really good about it.
My T is standing on the top of the marble steps. He is concerned that the trees have come down and that the tips of the larger one have landed on the steps (too close to the house is my impression). But I don't care. I feel strong and powerful, and know that this was the right thing to do, to chop down the trees. That's the full dream. My pdoc is concerned is really his only part.
In the second dream, which came on the heels of the first, the grown-up me and my smallest one are in the dark, stormy ocean water. Waves are hitting against us so hard because the water is so choppy. My pdoc is on the deck of a ship, even in some type of Navy uniform. I don't know if he had tried to save us (I have some feeling that he did but I could be really wrong about this), but he is standing there at attention in front of his Superior Officer, who tells him, "They all can't be saved." At that point, I realize I'm going to drown, and that the little girl has already drowned. I just know I'm going to die, too. (I have an abuse incident from my childhood where I thought I was going to drown, BTW).
That's the dream. My pdoc really had no interpretation of the first one, except that I obviously was feeling powerful. He said it was a message TO him, that I felt more powerful than perhaps he realized, and when I questioned this as I don't think it's true, he admitted he was making an interpretation of an interpretation. He lost me there.
In the second one, he wanted to know who his superior officer was. I thought it was the limitations he puts on therapy that prevent him from helping me enough--his boundaries, rules, orientation, etc., and that by having someone else tell him "we can't save them all," he was let off the hook--he had no responsibility for the fate of that girl and woman in the water. He didn't agree; he wanted to know who that person was, but we didn't keep on this. Instead, that's when the talk about the little girl dying came up, and the discussion of integration. He saw it as a positive thing, but I kept saying "I know I'm going to die too," and he kept saying, "But you didn't."
It wasn't acrimonius at all. But how can he be "saving" the triplet and then allow that same little girl to die?
And yes, integration should be about bringing all those joyful things inside of the adult me, but it feels like a death of all those things. And a father letting his daughter die.
I can't adequately describe how hopeless this all makes me feel. That my soul, the little girl, has been torn from me. She's not there anymore. I don't feel her at all.
So maybe we're going way too fast. I don't know. I feel like I've been stripped down to my bare essence without anything to replace it. This is not the person I expected to emerge like the Phoenix as someone suggested. Maybe it will take time, but there's something wrong about all of this.
Sorry to be so very long, but thanks for reading.
antigua
poster:antigua3
thread:899140
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20090515/msgs/899177.html