in respect of its use as a therapy tool. Some recent reading of Adler ties in quite well with this and a dream I had last night that I've just discussed with Tess and rushed here to put into pixels.
I was woken this morning by my alarm after the first fitful night's sleep in two or three weeks. The lower half of my body was under then covers and soaking with sweat. I was in the middle of a dream where my immediate family were in a churchyard. My dad had built some kind of ancient catapult thing out of dodgy-looking rusty steel beams. Oddly, this is the second time I've dreamed that he's had this contraption - I can't be sure but it definitely feels like I've dreamed about it very recently and in the same context of it being inherently unsafe.
Sophie was over near him, as a six or seven year old, while he was adding tension to the launching mechanism. I was some distance away from a short wall that separated my brothers and I from dad, Sophie and the catapult, and my mum was this side of the wall. I was shouting to my mum that I didn't want Sophie near the catapult as I thought it was unsafe and I didn't want her to get hurt, and dad was continuing to wind the mechanism up. Mum indicated she'd be fine and I got frustrated, starting to move towards the wall to rescue Sophie. I shouted more and started stabbing my finger at the air, I was that frustrated. It was at this point my alarm went off and the dream has stayed quite fresh in my mind since then.
I'll happily admit I don't really believe in dream analysis in the traditional sense, when someone listens to your dream and tells you what they think it means from their lofty viewpoint on a pedestal. Dream analysis, particularly in the form of books, may offer comfort to some in the same way that astrology offers a reassurance of order and understanding in the chaos of our lives.
Adler suggests we assign meanings to everything we experience through a reasonably narrow "meaning of life" we develop during our first five years. Our experiences during these early years help us form an opinion of how the world works and our place in it, and it drives the way we deal with most things on a daily basis. I'm unsure as to the form of my "meaning of life" but I know I'm working my way towards finding out. The significance of the above is that I recognised part of the process of assigning meaning while explaining this dream to Tess.
The dream could have passed me by as just another odd experience but, because of my current frame of mind, I've assigned a meaning to it. The clunky machine my dad is winding up represents his potential bad mood. Sophie represents me as a young boy. I was trying to protect her from my dad's reckless explosions, and my mum's lack of action represents my feelings on her failing to protect us as kids.
It jumps out that my frustration with my parents, with my father for being consistently misanthropic and my mother for constantly putting up with it despite being unhappy, stems from all the crap I experienced during my formative years. In fact, almost my entire world view is built on those five years and how my parents interacted with the world and the people around them.
I'm looking forward to CBT to understand how that's manifested itself in my behaviour. I'm looking forward even more to learning more Adlerian methods to understand myself and my world view as a whole.
I've come back to this post later in the day to answer a question that's sat on my mind since I realised the dream hadn't ended when I was woken: How would I have ended the dream if I had control? I would like to have relieved my frustration by calling out to Sophie - something I don't appear to have done in the dream. If that had failed I'd have scaled the wall and gone to get her myself, regardless of the danger posed by the increasing tension in the machine. I'd have picked her up, held her close and taken her behind the wall, admonishing my mother as I put some distance between us and my dad.
Here I am attaching meaning again, but I'm finding this exercise quite useful: In realising that, in the dream, I resented my mother for not protecting my daughter from the danger my dad had put her in, I'm recognising the resentment I feel for her now. She spent my youth displaying a lack of courage to do the same for me. She let me and my brothers experience our father's anger and its effects on her and the family, she never stuck to her guns and stayed away from him, even when they finally split up a few years ago.
I didn't realise I'd put it so far to the back of my mind until I talked it through with Tess this morning, but mum called me in a state on Sunday. She sounded stressed.
I asked how she was. "Not great, I've walked out again."
She continued, "This has been going on for a few weeks,"
"This has been going on thirty-five years," I responded.
"I've got a place at a refuge if I need one."
"Go there then," I said.
She said "[A mutual friend] is coming out to get me, she's often said I can stay with her in an emergency."
"OK, as long as you're safe."
"Are you at home?" she asked.
"No, I'm in Aylesbury having a day out with Mark and Leo."
"Oh, I'll leave you to it, don't let it ruin your day."
"Thank you, call me if you get stuck."
And I didn't let it ruin my day. I spoke to Mark about it briefly and when Tess mentioned it this morning that was the first I'd thought about it since Sunday night when I got back from seeing Villagers in Oxford. Clever Tess, noticing the link between my dream and what I'd told her then, even though I didn't realise it myself until a few minutes ago.
It's quite the coincidence that this happened less than a week after writing a blog post about mum leaving dad during my youth. It's clear to me now that the phone call on Sunday triggered this dream last night, and I'm pleased it's given me the opportunity to focus on things in this way, as it's helped me understand a few things. Primarily, I think, is the admission that I resent my mother for keeping all of us in contact with this angry person - I've spent much of my life thinking, maybe hoping, that mum was blameless in all of this, but it takes two people to maintain an unhealthy relationship, I guess. I know her outward motivations have always been for us, for the kids, for the stability, the money, the roof over our heads, and my brain is going "I'd have given all that up for a normal childhood!"
The truth is that no childhood is "normal" - most people suffer varying degrees of hardship, displacement, instability or loss during their childhood and I don't like to single myself out or compare my trials to those worse off than me. But screw it - there is an old saying that I think applies here and I adapted it for my own use many years ago. In using it, I refer to the importance I place in recognising, understanding and processing my emotions, and that if I want to consider myself hard-done-by, I bloody well will:
Look after number one, so you can best look after others
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