Tag Archives: archetypes

Strange Dreams

February 9, 2013 By in Depth psychology, Dream work, Ecotherapy, psychoanalytic theory, Shadow Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

You know those nights, when you’re sleeping, and it’s totally dark, and absolutely silent, and you don’t dream, and there’s only blackness, and this is the reason, it’s because on those nights you’ve gone away. On those nights, you’re in someone else’s dream, you’re busy in someone else’s dream.

Some things are just pictures, they’re scenes before your eyes.
Don’t look now, I’m right behind you.

~ Laurie Anderson, Someone Else’s Dream, lyrics

The first time it happened was early in my career, too early for me to know or understand the phenomenon well – and certainly too early to trust it.

I was working in milieu therapy, a day treatment unit, where several hundred “severely and persistently” mentally ill adults came each day to receive their medication and case management, group therapy, art therapy and rehabilitation.

I dreamed that I was wearing a police officer’s uniform, and one of my clients was begging me to spank him, while he masturbated.

I was startled by the dream, it felt different in tone and quality from my “usual dreams” whatever that meant.

I explored it in my own therapy extensively – looking at the countertransferential sadistic and aggressive impulses that emerge when working with clients who have difficulty containing their own aggression. I considered the power and class differentials between me and my stigmatized, disempowered clients, and tried to examine my privilege and the authority, authoritarian, and social control functions that I was expected to serve on the treatment unit. I explored my personal, familial and historical associations to the specific client, to police officers, to spanking, and to domination and submission.

I explored my own sexual fantasy life – but, the sexualized aspects of the dream somehow felt off: a dream could have shed light on power/authority issues without sexualizing it.

But, the sexual nature of the dream just didn’t feel like my kind of kink.

The next week, the dreamed of client came in for an awake, daytime session and confessed that he had been embarrassed to tell me that he had been having masturbatory fantasies about me for sometime. He imagined me, dressed up as a police woman spanking him.

I felt enormous relief. The strange bits of the dream weren’t mine. The dream was about my role on the unit, and also about the ways I had been subtly, unconsciously pulled by this specific client to “police” and monitor his compliance and program attendance in ways that were stimulating to him, perhaps over-stimulating to him, and which made perfect sense with the clients history of sexual and physical abuse.

That was when I began to understand, many years, before I began to study Jung, that my own dreams about clients were not merely about my individual psyche.

I told my therapist excitedly about my new realization and he responded:

“Be careful.”

Be careful of what, I wondered? It seemed to me that I was in greater “danger” or getting pulled more deeply into some destructive authoritarian enactment, scolding or punishing, or chastising a client who could feel too stimulated by it if I hadn’t had the dream.

The dream had clearly protected me, and the client. Surfaced a dynamic, an unconscious currency, an exchange that was already present, but unspoken, unacknowledged.

The dream itself wasn’t the danger.

“If a dream shows me what sort of mistake I am making, it gives me an opportunity to correct my attitude, which is always an advantage”
~ C. G. Jung, Dreams

I left a long message on my therapist’s answering machine after that session, certainly too long, trying to shake off the undermining caution, and the traditional psychoanalytic models of dream theory that we had both been indoctrinated into

The various psychoanalytic branches which grow off of Freud’s ego psychological tree view dreams as subjective and individualized experiences, as a portal to unconscious conflicts which are about the clients personal history – and the conflicts from the past which have been transferred onto the therapist or other loved ones. And an analyst’s dreams could only reveal something about the analyst’s individual, private psyche, and transferences. If an analyst were to dream about a client, it would speak to their countertransference, the aspects of their own historical conflicts, or perhaps a dangerous over-identification, activated and constellated in the treatment.

I don’t know about your dreams. But mine are sort of hackneyed. Same thing, night after night. Just…repetitive. And the color is really bad – And the themes are just – infantile. And you always get what you want – And that’s just not the way life is…
~ Laurie Anderson Talk Normal, lyrics

There was another, more minor dispute about dreams a year or so later. Another one of “those” dreams – this time a strange dream I had about my therapist:

I was in his home, sitting on the treatment couch. His wife, as I imagined her, was nearby. A daughter, a son, and five month old baby boy. I sat and played with the baby boy while others went about their business around me, not interacting with me. The dream itself had little emotion attached to it, I was neither happy, nor distressed, perhaps a little bored, but enjoying the baby enough. Yet, in the dream, and afterward, I wondered why I was there, and worried that I was intruding on the scene.

Again, of course, I explored the dream extensively: as a transferential wish to have siblings, to be a part of his family, to be parented by him. To be trusted and invaluable member of his inner circle. I considered whether or not this tiny baby was an extension of my self, perhaps my inner child, that I wanted to be responsible for, as I was seated, held by the sofa now in the middle of his living room.

Four months later, he informed me that he would be taking a leave for a few weeks. Shorter notice than his usual vacation at an odd time.

“Are you about to have a baby? Is this a parental leave?” I asked.

Yes, he admitted, a boy.

I expressed my happiness and congratulations. But, I had a question:

“Do you remember that dream I had a while back? About you having a new baby boy?”

Yes, he said.

“Was your wife, by any chance, 5 months pregnant at the time?”

Yes.

“Did you think about that then? Did my dream seem strange or uncanny to you? Because I remember saying that it felt like a weird dream for me to have – and I worked very hard to try to understand how it might have been about me! But, now I see, it was also about you – or about us both!

Yes. He had thought of that.

“Well it would be very helpful to me if the next time that happens that you just let me know so we can sort it out. Maybe in a previous session I was sensing that you were internally preparing for the birth of your son, I’ve known you through other parental leaves, and I – or maybe both of us – felt that I was intruding on that scene. And you sort of left me trying to take responsibility for the whole unconscious scenario by myself.”

Fair enough, he promised.

“Enlightening an interpretation on the subjective level…may be entirely worthless when a vitally important relationship is the content and cause of the conflict. Here the dream content must be related to the real object. ~ C.G. Jung, Dreams

Many many years later, following a weekend which involved a very emotional and excruciatingly painful crisis involving my family of origin, a client of mine reported this excerpted dream (with permission) which she had herself after the previous Thursday session:

“You were motioning me to wait – but this guy started to upset you.  I thought you’d tell him to stop going through your papers (they were certificates, I think, of your degrees or licenses or something). Instead, your emotions quickly escalated and you started yelling / pleading with him to stop – and you screamed ‘what are you doing! you’re ruining my life’ He was completely in control of upsetting you.

You sat down across from me, legs curled in and started crying out of control.  I couldn’t help but to cry as well – seeing you in so much pain. You were destroyed.  I think I tried to hug you but you were a broken, small, mangled version of yourself.

There was a pause in the dream. I’m telling you about the dream that I just had (above)- and how upsetting it was for me because it was so strange but midway through, it’s abundantly clear that you’re not listening.  You’re going through your papers.

I stopped talking mid-sentence and waited. You looked up at me and I asked you if you’re listening – if you’re with me.  but you weren’t. So I got up to leave, undramatically. but really very upset. And I said “I can’t do this.” you just watched and didn’t stop me.  I left without looking back.”

Her “strange” double dream not only anticipated my unexpressed concern with a crisis that was about to erupt, the distress I had been in – it showed me the ways in which I could re-injure the client, abandon her and damage our alliance if I chose to hide behind my professional papers, degrees and certificates.

We began by exploring her associations and history, her relationship with her wounded parent, and her personal subjective assumptions about the dream – I started slowly, as, frankly, I did not want to expose the details of a personal conflict that felt still vulnerable and I did not want to burden the client or require that she take care of a “small broken” version of myself. Neither did I want to abandon her behind a professional stance that exempted me from my responsibility for my own unconscious processes as they influenced the treatment relationship.

As we were about to move on, just as the subject was changing, I summoned my courage:

“So, listen, there may also be another component in the dream. You’ve been going through a very intense time, and I know that you have been really needing me lately, and whenever we feel we need someone, we watch them very closely. I am wondering if this dream may also be about me in someway… After our session on Thursday, I had a family emergency/crisis which flared up, and I think, I did, over the weekend feel quite small and broken and I did cry a great deal like in your dream. I wonder if you were reading the signs in me, maybe in the same way you learned to at home, to anticipate an upcoming crisis. And then, the second part of the dream expresses your fear that I could deny your astute perceptions of me, and just pretend that nothing ever happened. Kids learn to read their parents like the weather, and maybe you were reading me, and feeling my own storm coming on, and then expecting that I would just act like you hadn’t felt anything real about me.”

“Yes”, she said, breathing more deeply.
“I must have felt something coming on. I always had to do that at home, and my family would act like I was crazy.”

More deep, relieving breaths.

“Are you ok?” she asked.

“Yep.” I answered, “I take good care of myself.”

“It must be left to the analyst to decide how far he, himself, is the patient’s real problem” ~C.G. Jung, Dreams

In some therapeutic relationships, dreams become the transitional play-space where the patient and the therapists’ unconscious processes communicate and play with each other, telling us both about the aspects of the therapeutic relationship that we have consciously missed.

I’ve learned to trust my dream life, and my clients dream lives as they sense and sort through the unconscious processes that exist as a dynamic in relationship to others, to the systems we live in, to the culture and communities we embed ourselves in.

“That is to say, I take dreams as diagnostically valuable facts”
~ C.G. Jung, Dreams

I once dreamed about a client who was unable to tolerate weekly therapy and had terminated abruptly:

I walk down the streets of the city through various familiar neighborhoods and the client pops up randomly, here and there, as if they are making brief, cameo appearances -walking on the sidewalk next to me, coming out of a store, standing at the cross walk as I pass – in a movie that is about something else.

I realized upon waking that I needed to let the client come in as needed, pop up, pop-in, and not try to force them to into my story-board of weekly standing appointments.

Certainly there are many dreams that emerge entirely from our personal unconscious, our unprocessed conflicts alone, calling attention to our history of past traumas, losses and misattunements.

But in the past fifteen years of recording my own dreams, my dreams of clients, and my client’s dreams, it has become obvious to me that dreams serve many other functions as well.

Last night I had that dream again. I dreamed I had to take a test In a Dairy Queen on another planet. And then I looked around And there was this woman… She was writing it all down. And she was laughing. She was laughing her head off. And I said: Hey! Give me that pen! ~ Laurie Anderson Talk Normal, lyrics

I’ve come to think of dreaming as a natural, sensory and relational phenomenon, a means of digesting and incorporating our unconscious perceptions: dreams solve problems, anticipate transitions, highlight things we have overlooked, prepare us for dangers, help us communicate to each other, tell us what issues our psyche is working on in the background, reveal what lives and moves out of our awareness, point out imbalances in our relationships and environments, and extrapolate/project future outcomes from the current trends in the patterns we are embedded in personally, relationally, systemically, and globally.

All of nature talks to me. If I could just figure out what it was trying to tell me. Listen!
~ Laurie Anderson, Sharkey`s Day, lyrics

Many clients in the weeks before 9/11 reported dreams of the like that I have not experienced since. I had been enrolled in a Depth Psychology class studying Jung at an institute in the city, and everyone in the class was asked to keep a dream journal for ourselves, and for all our clients’ dreams. The week before the attack on the World Trade Center, we read aloud from our journals: Strangely, there were many dreams within dreams: of kamikaze jets flying down the streets of the city, of giant tornadoes coming “from the east” which destroyed tall buildings killing hundreds of people, dreams of four giant bombs dropped from the sky but the fourth one doesn’t explode. And those were just my clients. Other classmates’ journals contained surprisingly similar themes and images: lost pilots, building explosions and collapses, one classmate’s client dreamed of turning over the Tower card from the tarot deck.

We wondered together what violent shift was present in the environment that could be reflected in the community’s dreams.

Perhaps any random sample of dreams reported at any given time would contain similar imagery.

I don’t deny the statistical realities of probability or chance.

But I haven’t been privy to a similar thematic thread since.

And I would damn sure brace myself if I was.

Some say our empire is passing as all empires do. And others haven’t a clue what time it is or where it goes or even where the clock is.
And oh, the majesty of dreams, an unstoppable train, different colored woodlands. Freedom of speech and sex with strangers
~ Laurie Anderson, Another Day in America, lyrics

I’ve had dreams, for example, where one highly/overly intuitive client critiques my treatment of another client with a highly/overly developed thinking function: the dream itself offering me excellent insight and supervision into both of the clients undeveloped bits and the functions that I am called upon to strengthen in each of them.

Sometimes I share dreams that have been helpful to me in a case with the client.

Sometimes I don’t.

And another interesting “strange dream” phenomena, which I have experienced many times – A client and I dream a similar sounding dream, the day or two before session, from different vantage points: A dream of a terrible storm in a steep valley, me looking from the ridge of the hill, the client looking at the clouds coming over the high tree-line. A dream with the client swimming against the current, tiring in the water looking up at a woman in a small boat, and me, in a small canoe trying to figure out how to pull a drowing client safely on board.

The dual dream content itself is usually fairly obvious, and takes little work to interpret, but the synchronistic phenomena itself has come to represent to me a kind of alchemical consolidation of the therapeutic relationship itself.

Our unconscious lives have found themselves in the same place, in the same time, working on the same problems, from different perspectives.

I don’t claim that this is science.

Nor do I believe it to be magic.

I remain agnostic as to the ultimate causes or explanations for such synchronistic and unconscious experiences.

But, to the degree that the function of dreaming remains mysterious, and unknown, perhaps we can only approach such mysteries with faith.

And to learn how our dream lives, whatever their origin or function, can serve to deepen our connections to each other and the world around us.

There was this man…And there was this road…
And if only I could remember these dreams…
I know they’re trying to tell me…something.

Ooooeee. Strange dreams.
Strange dreams

~ Laurie Anderson, Sharkey`s Day, lyrics

copyright © 2013
All rights reserved Martha Crawford

The Wrong Road

January 13, 2013 By in Archetype, Decision making, Depth psychology, New therapists, psychotherapy, Shadow Tags: , , , ,

“So what do you think is the right thing to do?”

“So should I leave him?”

“Should I take the job?”

“So are you saying I should tell my mother this?

There is one, simple, correct therapeutic answer to all of these questions:

“What the hell do I know?
What am I? A fortune teller?”

It is true that over the past two decades I’ve had a chance to watch a lot of people make a lot of decisions and I have borne some witness to the outcomes.

There have been trends, there are some patterns that emerge. I do have a sense, an impulse about the kinds of decisions will lead to conflict and chaos, or those that may make life more stable and comfortable.

There are statistical truths. But no one can tell you where one individual’s choices will place them along the statistical spread.

And in my experience, the worst outcomes from bad decisions emerge when bad decisions become cumulative.

It is generally true, perhaps, that impulsive, drunken Las Vegas wedding-chapel marriages between strangers are generally not successful – and if you were consulting with me – and if you paused the evenings revelry long enough to place a long-distance call for an urgent phone session and I picked up the phone (this has never happened and would never happen) I would undoubtedly express my concerns. I would encourage you to slow down, sober up, and think about it tomorrow – remind you that it is a decision that doesn’t have to be made tonight, and I would try to understand what lurks behind the intense urgency.

But always with the same caveat:

What the hell do I know?
Perhaps you’ll be divorced in a month, perhaps they will take you for everything you own, or perhaps, you’ll be married happily and prosperously for 50 years.

Chances may be slim mind you, but its possible.

If your intuition is pressing you forward despite all reservations – you will likely go ahead no matter what I say and meet your fate on the road ahead.

Perhaps this is the best or the worst choice imaginable, and either way it could change your life forever. Maybe it is the very wrongness of it that makes it a necessity. Maybe you in fact need to experience the terrible and awesome intersection of fate and free-will in order to face your destiny.

Such fateful decisions and dangerous trials loom at the heart of every myth and fairy-tale:

“Hansel, since you asked: I think you need to proceed with caution if you are planning to nibble nibble on that candy housekin like a little mousekin. And, you should talk to your sister, Gretel about it as well. Of course you are starved and abandoned – but, in my experience such candy houses are generally built by cannibalistic witches who use them to fatten children up for dinner – so be prepared. You do have other, more prudent options: you can collect kindling and try to fish from the nearby brook.”

“But what the hell do I know? Perhaps by surviving this witch, and finding a way to recognize and protect yourself from the Dark, Toxic mother, the archetypal Sow Who Eats Her Own Piglets you will be able to at least hear the song bird of your own psyche leading you back home, to your loving father. You’ll have to make your own choice, and encounter your own destiny. I’ll be here to back you up whatever choice you make.”

Some of the greatest saints and heroes of myth and scripture headed down the wrong road.

And there was no stopping them:

Before he became Saint Paul, he was a political assassin known as Saul, who set off down the road to Damascus “breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord” (King James Bible Acts 9)

And as he set off down the wrong road of murderous intent, Paul met his moment of grace:

“And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven and he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? (King James Bible Acts 9)

An instructor who introduced me to Jungian thought once advised me with regard to a “problematic” case:

“You have to be careful not to take anyone’s Road to Damascus away from them”

Oedipus, on the other hand, did everything he possibly could to mitigate his fate. He tried to make the safest, most self-and-other preserving choices imaginable:

In spite of his beloved parents’ denials and their attempts to protect his royal inheritance, Oedipus struggles with a persistent nagging suspicion that he has been adopted. He decides to seek the guidance of the Oracle at Delphi to uncover the truth.

The Oracle apparently ignores his question and tells him instead that he is destined to “Mate with [his] own mother, and shed/With [his] own hands the blood of [his] own sire.”

Desperate to avoid his foretold fate, Oedipus leaves Corinth, believing that Polybus and Merope are indeed his only parents and that, once away from them, he will never harm them.

On the road to Thebes, he unknowingly meets Laius, his biological father. Unaware of each other’s identities, they quarrel over whose chariot has right-of-way. King Laius moves to strike the insolent youth with his heavy scepter, but Oedipus throws him down from the chariot and kills him, thus fulfilling the first part of the oracle’s prophecy.

And we all know what happens after that… poor man.

Oedipus made the most loving decision possible based on the data at hand – (although perhaps ignoring his own intuition that insisted he was adopted, driving his consultation with the oracle in the first place)

And he too, met his fate on the road.

I have no way of knowing if you are setting off on the road to Damascus or the road to Thebes when you find yourself at the crossroads of a potentially fateful decision.

The blatantly obvious Good decision, the choice motivated by the best intentions can lead to hell.

And the wrong road can lead to an encounter with Grace.

Both possibilities and their opposites exist.

There is no telling.

Whatever “wisdom” I may have accrued, I make no predictions.

I cannot seal your fate. I am no Oracle.

I can listen with you for the “tells” that your own intuition sends out. I can voice my own intuitions and sensations about what may lie down either path. I can help you prepare for what you may encounter. I can stay by your side, and help you respond in alignment to who it is you mean to be.

But, such choices will always be your own.

And listen to this:

Perhaps it is the very process of trying to make the “right” decision – the judgements we create against or in favor of what we perceive as a “good” or a “bad” outcome – that causes our fear and suffering.

Suppose there no merely good or bad option.

Perhaps there is only:
A decision and the consequences, -anticipated and unanticipated – that flow from it.

Light and darkness are always mixed up together. Good and bad luck too.

Darkness can never be avoided. It is present, in some form, in every choice we will ever make.

The question is how will we respond when it emerges.

As therapists, it is easy to be seduced into wanting to protect the people in our care from their own choices. To watch someone making a complicating, challenging mess-making choice can make us yearn to redirect and intervene. We wish we could “stop” it, and help them to make “better choices”

But, sometimes the hard road is the only road where we will meet ourselves.

And we must always bear in mind that everyone simply chooses the road they need to choose. Most often, we make the only choice we know how to make.

One of my kids favorite folk tales is found nestled in a popular children’s book:
Zen Shorts by John J. Muth.

The Farmers Luck is an ancient Taoist tale in which a wise farmer encounters many twists of fate. His horse runs away and the neighbors cluck: “Such bad luck!” And the farmer responds: “Maybe…”

The horse returns with a wild herd, and the neighbors cheer: “Such good luck!” and the farmer responds: “Maybe…”

His son breaks his leg and the neighbors cluck.. and the farmer responds “Maybe…”

Officials come to draft his son into the army, and the broken leg exempts him. And the neighbors cheer…

Maybe.

There is no right road. There is no wrong road.

But what the hell do I know?

Maybe, our task at the crossroads is simply to tolerate the Maybe.

copyright © 2013
All rights reserved Martha Crawford

Four Dreams and the East Wind

October 11, 2012 By in Dream work, Ecotherapy, psychotherapy, Psychotherapy and climate change, Self Care Tags: , , , ,

It is not at all farfetched to compare weather with human life, for few things in our universe are so identical. We are born mysteriously into the world, very much like clouds, and we disappear back into the world just as clouds disintegrate into the atmosphere from which they came. The sky is as changing as human passions, and as spiritual in its ways as our own emotions.
(~ Eric Sloane’s Book of Storms)

Surprising, uncanny things blow in with the east wind.

There are crystalline moments when the air is thick with sudden, disorienting clarity and just a whiff of dread.

Lightening bolt eurekas. Startling updrafts from the deep.

Moments when we just know: that change is mandatory and imminent, that it is time to leave the job, or the marriage, that today is our lucky day, that we are suddenly, incontrovertibly heading in a new direction.

I watch my clients struggle with such moments of bolt awakening – wondering if it wouldn’t just be easier to fall back asleep.

I’ve watched too many resist, fight, ignore, self-medicate, dodge, weave and try to serpentine out of the inner callings to face their fears or to shake up their sense of identity, or to consider something important they have long ignored.

The first dream:
A sociology class requires that I design an experiment. I would like to design one that tests for responses to warm and cold environments and decor in therapy offices. The professor hates my idea and will have none of it. He slams down a sheet with the words SAVE THE WHALES and GREENPEACE on them.
“Do this!” he says “Look at this!”
I begin yelling:
“This is not my idea, not my way! I am trying to make my idea work! I want to do what I want to do! Not what you tell me to do!”

When your psyche asserts itself, it can send you on journeys that you had no intention of ever undertaking.

We all resist in our own way, no one really wants to take on the increased responsibilities of becoming more aware of ourselves or the world around us.

Avoidance is ultimately a costly choice – symptoms emerge, hopelessness, cynicism, boredom, anxiety and depression take hold. The sense of purpose drains out of life.

Suffering is too often the only warning we will heed before correcting our course.

“The business man goes his way despite the weather, more so each day. Instead of adapting himself to the weather his goal is to ignore it… If you want to attract a crowd on a busy street corner, just stand there and look at the sky. So few of us look aloft at all that within a few minutes a crowed will have gathered, staring with you.” (~ Eric Sloane’s Book of Storms)

Many of us have lost the awareness of the ways the weather effects our mood, affect and conduct – and similarly, most modern-minded people are dismissive of their nighttime dreams as random electrical neurological processes, detritus from the day, meaningless nonsense, instigated by rich food eaten before bed, or worse, implanted by televisions left on while falling asleep.

Dreams are an essential element of the atmosphere we move through, and learning to listen to your dream life is like becoming weather wise.

The second dream: ;
I am at the same school in a class with kinder professor. He takes, what in my view, is a too strict, too extreme existentialist model – the past does not exist and has no further influence. There is only the present – and the course you set for the future of your community and the world by what actions you perform right now. I suggest that both reflection and action, both past influences and present choices must be taken into account, as well as deep responsibility for the consequences of our actions – predictable or not. He entertains my idea respectfully and as a result I am eager to listen more deeply.

Sailors, farmers and perhaps some pilots still know – not from the meteorological reports – but from the smell of the air, the feel of their bones and scars, the direction of the wind, the color of sky, the waves on the water – what to hope for, what to prepare for, what to brace for, what to fear.

Old sailors’ rhymes, weather folklore, almanacs relied on weather-mindedness, and an observational and intuitive awareness, a kind of dialogue with the world around us.

The Wooly Bear caterpillar, and the width of his central brown fuzzy band accurately forecasts how severe or mild the coming winters will be. Katydids and crickets react to the weather more quickly and accurately than thermometers.

But for the uninitiated, the chirp of the katydids, the ache in their knees, the subtle scent in the wind and the halo around the moon – if they are noticed at all – appear to be totally random, unconnected events creating no obvious narrative, no discernible through-line: merely nonsensical bits of data indicative of nothing.

Like the Wooly Bear’s coat, and chirping of the insects, dreams tell us about our own internal conditions, and how the internal winds of change will impact our energies, our mission and sense of purpose, our life tasks, our characters, and our fates.

The smallest adjustments in our inner atmosphere can create turbulence. Such windshifts always, absolutely always, involve facing some fear, the break down of some no-longer-necessary-defense, and are the cumulative result of a thousands of imperceptible shifts in thinking, behavior, experience, until some critical mass has been reached and the front beneath the previous way of life gives way.

Better sooner than later, I’ve learned.

When we are arrogant enough to assert our own agendas and ignore the weather and the rumblings on the horizon the scenario eventually goes unbearably stale, or worse, erupts or implodes without advanced preparation. Having something unsustainable forcibly torn out of our white-knuckled grip hurts far far more than proactively releasing it when it is still healthy to do so.

For the Navajo, it was the wind, that brought the Holy People, human and four-legged, from speechless existence in the underworlds to life on the earth’s surface and gave them language, thought and leadership.
(~ The Book Of Symbols – The Archive for research in archetypal symbolism)

Not that such updrafts actually lead to perpetual sunny skies and balmy weather.

Fat chance.

More often than not, they involve a rush of clarity and optimism, gathering momentum and confirmation, followed by a daunting challenge, an unforeseen enemy (usually ourselves but not always), a ridiculous amount of effort, flat out exhaustion, even some wretched, self-fulfilling complaining about feeling burdened and misunderstood. As the pressure climbs, maybe even a stormy, irritable tantrum or two.

The third dream:
I have a male roommate who has filled our apartment with piles of dusty books:
‘Where did you get these books?” I ask.
“I don’t know” he says, “I never opened them. It’s too late in the semester now I can’t bear to look.”

I build and install shelves for all the books to be treated respectfully, and to be integrated into the room. When all is done there remains a pile of unshelved science books about plants, animals and climate studies. I toss the books behind the couch.
The roommate admires the way I can “just toss stuff away like it was never there.”
I wake agitated.

Our unconscious moves through and works upon us as surely as the weather.

Of course, I am just idealistically and existentially inclined enough to believe that when my internal weather report changes it does change everything. Just as I assume that the even minor-seeming transformations in anyone, you included, can effect everyone’s reality, (mine included) as well as the collective realities of the planet and the interconnected universe itself.

The impressive thing about our dreaming lives, and the wind and weather for that matter, is that they will perform their cyclic and compensatory functions whether we actually pay attention or not. They go on of themselves, regardless of whether we think they are worthy our regard.

The dreams recounted here took place on vacation, over four consecutive nights. I recorded them, as part of my regular psychospiritual hygiene, quickly forgot them as I did not feel at all like “working,” at anything. I spent no time amplifying them or analyzing them, and didn’t look back at them until a week or so ago.

During the daylight hours in between, I went on long runs and bike rides, meditated in the woods, explored the seashore, and hiked in wildlife sanctuaries and wilderness areas. I got a strange hankering to learn more about bird watching. I felt filled with sorrow at explaining to my children that so much of the wildlife we had seen, from osprey to horseshoe crabs, to monarch butterflies to codfish, to humpback whales were endangered or threatened, I swelled to bursting with a sense of gratitude for the fresh air in my lungs and the sea breezes, and the view of the Milky Way at night. I opened up a conversation with my husband about our sense of urban disconnection from our food sources, the effects of climate change and consumption on the world around us, and a desire to make a commitment to improve our household’s relationship with nature, to accept and face the new and coming realities for good and ill, and deepen our families sense of wellness and interconnection at the same time. I got a notion in my head to investigate ecopsychologal writings, an area I had only vaguely heard of and know little about.

The fourth dream:
I am about to fail an earth sciences class that I never showed up for. I meet with a department head – a plump, pretty older woman with curly white hair. She is wearing purple. She is kind, but I don’t quite see her face. She understands immediately, with little explanation from me, what has happened and what I need. I am assuming that I will be scolded for letting this go so long – but, she even seems to understand that this is painful and anxiety provoking and seems to think it is natural to have waited and avoided it for a time. She is not urgent or worried. I am impressed by her authority, compassion, power and intelligence. She is the author of some amazing body of work in a field that I am not familiar with. I am very grateful to her, and surprised that she has more compassion for my circumstance and my anxiety than I have for myself. I had felt guilty and ashamed that I had ignored it for so long, and her kindness and understanding makes me feel how upsetting it has been to have this looming over me unaddressed. She says I can meet the requirement a different way, in my own way, it doesn’t have to be strictly through the science department, or the political science department, but I do have to meet the requirement. It is mandatory.

The wind changes sometimes.
And it changes us with it.
We can accept, or we can resist,
and most likely we will do both alternately and repeatedly.

But we will all have to meet the requirement, one way or another.

copyright © 2012
All rights reserved Martha Crawford

Butterfly Effect

September 22, 2012 By in Projection & Transference, Self Care, Wellness, psychotherapy, Morals & Ethics, Crisis, Shadow, Ecotherapy, Psychotherapy and climate change Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

Every late August /early September it comes, whether I like it or not.

As soon as the wind shifts, without any invitation at all.

In fact, when I resist or forget that it is arriving, it bursts in a rage, like some slighted and pissed of fairy-witch that spits curses, wreaks havoc, and grinds the whole works to a stop.

When I just remember to behave with grace when it knocks it becomes a respectful, polite, if somewhat impinging guest who is aware that their presence is inconvenient, and unavoidably disruptive, and their scheduled stay just a little too long.

When I am attuned, prepared and accepting, it brings with it quiet pleasures and relief.

As the earth under my feet cools, and draws the heat out through the bottom of my feet, my sap no longer expands, but contracts, retreating from my extremities redirecting itself down, down my trunk traveling from the tips to the roots.

There was a time when I would have had no word for it other than “depression” – perhaps it was at the time, and could be again – maybe there were even a few seasons of my life -especially when I stubbornly refused to heed the signs or adjust my behavior- when it could have met the official diagnostic criteria.

Although I no longer think of it that way, not at all.

Now, with many years of practice, and deep listening to myself and the world around me, I know it is my body’s response to the season changing. It is time to start to pull my attention inward and conserve my energies again. To shift the rhythm of my household from spontaneous, open-armed outdoor adventurousness to books, indoor art projects, and homework at the kitchen table. To warm up my diet. To carry a light sweatshirt on my morning run. To eat less raw, cold food. To give up the iced coffees of summer. To start cooking again. To put cinnamon on my oatmeal, and to wear closed shoes on my feet. To find my light cotton scarves, to make sure my kids have windbreakers handy, and for us all to come in from outdoors a little earlier each day. To get the garden, and the rest of us, ready for a colder season.

The green drains from the leaves, the downward migration begins.

Everything turns, and begins to head south when summer is over.

Even the monarch butterflies

Why should I be exempt?

Why should you?

Living in NYC it is shockingly easy to forget that we live in a larger world, that we are among the animals on the planet, that we are inextricable from the natural world.

Our clocks, and TVs, computer screens and lightbulbs, our subways and taxis and over-air-conditioned workplaces and shops, the cement and brick and glass and steel horizons and the meticulously groomed parks help us forget our instinctive selves and our place in this world.

We cannot easily wade in the rivers, climb trees, we do not rake our lawns – we must schedule long car trips out of the city to see the leaves turn. We see only a few stars faintly, and the moon is more often than not, hiding behind a building. Windows look out on other windows.

Right now there is a storm raging outside, the winds are gusting up to 50 miles per hour, but out my office window you would never know it. Nothing moves. If I look long and closely, I see a pot of dead decorative tall grass bending on the sun-deck of the condo a few buildings over, only a very thin slice of the river far off and barely visible between skyscrapers shows some white caps on the waves.

But I have seen the Monarch butterflies – every single day for the past two weeks – but certainly not today in this wind – I have seen them, in purposive, directional flight, past my office window on the top of a Wall Street skyscraper. One at a time, flying by every couple of hours, migrating like birds, to their winter roost in Mexico.

The Eastern monarch migration is endangered, and monarch numbers dwindling. Stateside, municipalities mow highway medians covered with milkweed – which feed and sustain monarch breeding – to improve highway safety. Corn farming uses pesticides – which kill caterpillars – to insure sufficient crop yield. The local resident loggers in Mexico facing overwhelming poverty, cut down trees – that millions of butterflies route to, and roost in – selling lumber to feed their families.

Neither are the butterflies safe from the measurable effects of climate change: drought, dehydration, forest fires, increasingly severe storms.

And neither are we.

The clients who come to see me have heard many such stories, if not this one, then others. The plight of the distant polar bears, the poaching of elephants, the ever growing list of extinct and endangered species. The short-term, immediate desperate human demand for food, for folk medicine, for oil, for energy for money, for stuff, for power that makes us a danger to the natural order, and corrective natural phenomenon a danger to us as well.

The battle, a false dualism, appears to set human needs against the natural world. An intricate and complex interconnectedness has created a scenario that leaves all parties, residents and butterflies, in insufficiency.

This is the dark side of the archetype of Interconnectedness:

Nothing is without its shadow.
Every action has its reaction.
Everything we do can fuck something else up.

Acts of creation are usually reserved for gods and poets.
But humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.
To plant a pine for example, one need neither be god nor poet;
one need only own a good shovel.
For one species to mourn another is a new thing under the sun.

~ Aldo Leopold

as quoted in Monarch Butterflies, The Last Migration, by Benjamin Vogt

All archetypes are bivalent, and two-faced.

Every gesture we make has the power to heal something too.

What often looks terrible can be essential and transformative.
And what looks good and clean and perfect will eventually reveal a darker under-belly.

If we were to live with awareness that we are of the earth and effected by it, and that we also have a significant effect up on the world – what would change?

Many shut down such questions down, dismissing the dilemma entirely, defensively certain that none of it matters anyway.

Some live in constant fear about coming catastrophes. Some are paralyzed with hopelessness.

Some believe, self-righteously, that they know as a point of fact, the “best choices” to make, the one right and true and obvious answer.

Others are just trying to tolerate the questions.

I ask myself what are my responsibilities and capacities as a psychotherapist in the face of it all.

Social workers emphasize the importance of understanding clients as “persons in environments” and as therapists, we are further trained to assess our client’s (and our own) capacity for healthy relatedness and ability to empathize with others. We try to discern and describe attachment styles and strengths. We take note of how well impulses are contained, if gratification can be delayed, and the development, or lack of judgement as well as short and long term reasoning. We determine the of severity of symptoms, orientation to reality, rigidity and effectiveness of defenses. All of these assessments are based, in large part, on our proximal environment of human relationships and structures, particularly co-workers, immediate friends and family.

But perhaps we are also called to asses the larger circles of interpersonal functioning beyond the immediate tribe and social environments, widening to include our interconnections to the much larger communities we dwell within: the local, regional and global community, our immediate habitat, region and ecosystem.

Insurance companies do not require us to assess the sense of relatedness and relationship to the planet itself. Our training rarely helps us figure out how much our client may or may not feel themselves to be a indivisible part of the natural world, or how divorced they may be from understanding their integral and entwined position among plants, oceans, animals, weather, bugs, bears, bats, clouds, soil, light and climate. How aware are we of the fact that our individual beings, and our supposedly self-determined fates remain absolutely inseparable from each other and the rest of the creatures, minerals and vegetables and vapors swirling around on this blue dot?

Here is what I do know: we are rarely destroyed, but usually strengthened by facing our fears and integrating our shadows, both personally and collectively.

As psychotherapists it has always been our obligation to promote our clients awareness of themselves in a larger environment, and deepen their contact with strengthening realities, even if approaching reality is uncomfortable or difficult.

As clients, we are called to face and accept what we do not want to know about ourselves.

Jesus sat under the sky on the hot desert sands to face down his shadow, Buddha sat under the Bohdi tree, with a finger touching the earth. Fairy tale heroes and heroines must commonly align themselves with animals of the forest, and draw on the support of flora and fauna to conquer the witches and demons that threaten them. The desert, the tree, and the animals guide them into deeper contact with themselves-as-part-of-the-larger-world, and therefore, more in touch with themselves, and more in touch with the world.

When we allow ourselves to wonder about what it means for us to be absolutely intertwined and interdependent upon the natural world at this point in history, we may feel angry or impotent, afraid, overwhelmed, anxious about what is to come, disoriented about how to proceed when our culture produces so many diversions, distractions and explicit minimization and misinformation.

Raised in captivity in labs, experimentally living under controlled temperatures, sheltered from the wind, the sun, the rains, adapted to prolonged artificial lighting, or exposed to electromagnetism the monarchs also become lost and disoriented. When they are released during the migratory season they scatter in random directions.

How do the wild monarchs find their over-wintering trees? They have no cognitive knowledge of how the hell to get to Mexico. They are two or three butterfly generations away from the tree where their grandmothers wintered before laying spring eggs.

Like us, they are heading somewhere they have never been before.

But somehow they do know. Or they figure it out.

They feel the cold slowing the beat of their wings. Too cool, and they are paralyzed, frozen. Too hot and they dehydrate. They fly just enough toward the sun, to the south, toward conditions that allow them to keep moving, that maximize their strengths, and ultimately to the roosts that support the survival of their species and the lives of their offspring.

Like the Fisher King who must heal his own wound before his land and grounds will be fertile again, our work will begin by accepting that we hold many illusory beliefs about ourselves as entirely autonomous and self-determining, and by addressing our own estrangement from ourselves, and the truth of our essential, undeniable interdependent nature.

Some how, monarchs are able, with much smaller brains than ours, to feel their own bodies, to read the weather and to instinctively feel where they are and where they are headed and how they should respond to the earth itself.

They will start the trip all alone, heeding the warnings of colder realities. They glide and soar and flap toward the sun, and catch thermal winds that warm and animate them, they follow a circular and indirect route. In time, those that survive and are not eaten or blown off course will gather in a flocks – or more properly a rabble of butterflies. The rabble will increases in size until they are in the hundreds of thousand in flight together. As they near their destination millions upon millions of them will soar together, they will stop traffic, and darken the skies.

But for now, I sit in my office and watch for them – one at a time, caught in updrafts, swirling through thermals, sometimes switching directions and then switching back, undaunted and too small to be afraid of what lies ahead or to dread the arduousness of the long and treacherous journey, each slowly, steadily finding their way to where they are meant to be.

copyright © 2012
All rights reserved Martha Crawford

Books that informed me in writing and for more reading:

Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly
by Sue Halpern

Monarch Butterflies: The Last Migration
by Benjamin Vogt

Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re In Without Going Crazy
by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
by Alan Watts

Demigods on Eggshells

August 8, 2012 By in Countertransference, How therapy works, Projection & Transference, psychoanalytic theory, psychotherapy Tags: , , , , , , 40 Comments

“Without in the least wishing it he (the therapist) draws upon himself an over-valuation that is almost incredible to the outsider, for to the patient, he seems like a savior or a god. This way of speaking is not altogether so laughable as it sounds…Nobody could stand up to it in the long run, precisely because it is too much of a good thing. One would have to be a demigod at least to sustain such a role without a break, for all the time one would have to be the giver….”
(C.G. Jung from The Personal and Collective Unconscious)

To be a therapist, is to spend a significant amount of time each work day being actively idealized, attempting to sustain a certain type of idealizability, and tolerating the responsibility and anxiety of the role you have been assigned: carrying the idealizing projections of others.

It is tricky and delicate business, to accept, and even enjoy the over-valuation of people who may need to see you, at least for a time, as Conscious, Wise and fully Self-actualized.

And it is essential never to actually believe a word of it.

In life, this is not so very difficult to imagine. We all know what it is to be looked up to by a young child, or through the eyes of a junior adult like a younger sibling or a new friend, a mentee, a student, or a protege.

We also know that with time, practice and age that they will end up essentially where we are. The road from there to here is not so mysterious or magical once you have walked it. Once you have developed some sufficient mastery in one area of your life, if you are healthy enough, you don’t think it gives you any magical powers or special qualities in any other area of your life, no matter how astounding it seems to others.

When my son was around five, he pulled up a stool to watch me, wide-eyed, as I made breakfast. As I whisked up some eggs in a glass bowl, turned the heat on under the pan, and poured in the scrambled goo he exclaimed:

“Mommy, you amaze me. You are amazing.”

(It was a delicious moment, one that I hang onto now that I have an eye-rolling 9 year old, who is just trying on his new shiny self-protective shell of snark-snot-and-sarcasm.)

Mommy, you amaze me.

I never for a moment believed that I had scrambled miraculous eggs. I never considered for a second that I actually had unique, magical cooking powers or that I was the most amazing cook in the world, in NYC, in my borough or even on my block.

But it was deeply pleasurable nonetheless. To see a simple act of minimal mastery through a child’s eyes: using my my mature fine and gross motor skills to crack open a perfectly packaged egg, directing its contents without spilling a drop, moving a whisk faster than the eye could see, watching the mixture whirlpool around at my command, summoning fire and flame without fear or hesitancy, prodding the spitting, sizzling eggy-glob with nothing to protect me other than a mere wooden spoon, transforming it all into comforting meal using a dangerously hot piece of metal.

Now that is something.
Maybe even the stuff of demigoddesses…

The pleasure grows from remembering when I thought it was a miracle too. From recalling my own mother’s miraculous ability to make the most delicious grilled american cheese on white bread sandwiches in the world while domesticating the threats and terrors of the wild and unpredictable electric skillet.

It is joyful to be reminded that the skills I take for granted were hard won over many over-cooked meals, burned fingers and inedible food tossed in the garbage – as I traveled from not knowing how to cook at all to competently scrambling an egg.

It was also absolutely lovely to recognize that my divine ability to scramble eggs out of thin air, made my son feel safe, and confident too – through his identification with me. If I can make eggs, tame fire, if I am able to use sharp knives safely -what can’t I do? I could certainly take down any lurking “bad guys” or monsters, with a flick of my magic whisk. He felt stronger, braver, special more capable through his secure alliance with me in all my egg-scrambling glory.

And another pleasure: knowing that very soon, all these amazing powers would be his. The pleasure comes from knowing how I developed this skill, that it can be conveyed over time and through maturity, that he would soon catch up, and probably quickly surpass me.

In fact, today I woke up, four short years later, to find him making a garlic scape (I had no idea what those were until this morning), sweet orange pepper, and cream cheese omelette for breakfast.

He amazes me. He is amazing.

Healthy idealization is ultimately, a mutually admiring experience.

In the early stages of therapy – when we are vulnerable and the healing crisis is fresh and disorienting – we often need to see therapists as intact, healthy, knowledgeable, experienced authorities. Competence, confidence, mastery are essential in making us feel safe, held, well-guided and incubated through the aftermath of the events that drove us into therapy to begin with.

Sometimes an idealized therapist serves us as a protective shell, guarding and concealing vulnerable, unformed and embryonic aspects of the Self as it consolidates.

“A successful phase-appropriate chip-off-the-old-block type merger with … the idealized father (parent/therapist) and the subsequent gradual or phase-appropriate disappointment in him might… enhance self-esteem. (Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of the Self)

Phase-appropriate disappointment.
If only it were as easy as it sounds.

Kohut spends a great deal of time discussing the importance of manageable empathic failures, tolerable mishaps, humanizing mistakes. These unavoidable errors and revelations disrupt our idealizing transferences, and remind us that the person who is holding all our eggs in a single basket, is human, flesh and blood, not a demi-god.

Idealizing transferences have a function and a cost. The gain is the sense of hope we get from feeling connected to someone bigger and more powerful than we. The shadow is that as clients we are smaller, diminished, and fearful that we will have to stay “smaller than” in order to stay connected.

For therapists, the danger is that we can become inflated, burst our shells, accept medals and approbations that we have not earned.

Other times sitting in the therapists chair can feel stiff, brittle, and anxiety provoking as we try to keep our disruptive, broken and wounded, aspects hidden from view, our humanity banished by the necessary admiring distortion.

There is often little room for failure, for error, for the therapist to be an equal partner or a fellow traveler, or even fallible in the early phases of engagement and therapeutic relationship building.

I walk on egg-shells, waiting: its just a matter of time before I stumble, show up late, misunderstand, forget a necessary detail, repeat myself, challenge a defense at the wrong moment, bump into a painful bruise. How bad will it be? The suspense is excruciating. How long until it cracks? How deep or disruptive or painful? Will I injure, trigger, re-activate an old wound too profoundly? Will it break open before we have developed the necessary language and trust to negotiate it? Will we survive it together? Will it evoke destructive rage? The timer ticks away. Will I be the one to shatter a self-protective but illusory hope? Will the client be contemptuous if I prove to be less than perfect? Will the trust we have worked so hard to earn together fall to pieces?

I squirm imperceptibly in my seat, releasing pressure with self-deprecating wise-cracks. Fear mounts – the more the client inflates me, the more steep the drop. The more that I represent the perfectly satisfying feed, the more likely I will be eaten up. Or spit out in pieces.

I try to inoculate everyone who comes in at the initial consultation:
“It is not a matter of if I disappoint you, but when and how I will. However it happens, however small the error or annoyance – you may not even notice it until you leave the session and some comment I made, or something I did or didn’t do suddenly rises up hours later and sticks in your craw – it is extremely important that we talk about it, find language around it, and make it a part of our work together.”

Probably few remember when the time comes and I do lay a big old egg. But I have at least told the truth. I have made no false promises and did not commit myself to a perfected stance I cannot sustain. The caveat gives me the space to sit in my seat, carrying the loneliness and responsibilities of the idealizing gaze, for as long as necessary, knowing that it will not last forever.

In the folklore of most of Europe, the strength or the life of supernatural beings could be destroyed only if an egg, usually hidden in some… inaccessible place, was broken.
(see Eggs: Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend)

Ultimately, it is extremely relieving when the illusion, the facade cracks at last, and it is time to descend inch by inch, climb, fall, or be squarely knocked down off the pedestal that I had to sit upon for a time.

This is true: A healthy therapist will not ever need you to stay small. They will be increasingly relieved by their incremental over-throw, happy to rescind the authority temporarily granted to them while old wounds healed. They will step down with dignity and acceptance of their own humanity and rejoice to see you claim your own authority when you are ready.

A profound moment in my treatment, more than twenty years ago: I was waiting tables and, along with the entire wait staff, had to attend some mandatory-bull-shit-motivational-team-building-brain-washing-success-cult seminar. At my next session I spoke of how enraged, disgusted and toxic I felt. I assumed I’d behaved badly in the forced forum: I’d folded my arms, stared at the floor, sat surly and glowering as I refused to let them force their simplistic cult-speak into my mouth. I was sure, that my pouty, sour behavior was an insufficient and immature way to express my opposition to this coerced programming and that my therapist would have had some much more effective way to maturely express his disagreement and set a healthy boundary that I, in my undeveloped state, couldn’t yet conceive of.

He said: “Me? Really? I probably would have gotten totally pissed off, and screamed at them stormed out and lost my job. That’s what I probably would have done.”

Fresh air.

His admission of humanity, his discomfort with my defensive, self-negating uses of idealization, disrupted at the right moment made room for me to hatch further, aknowledge my growing powers of discernment, judgement, and impulse control.

The therapists I trust find ways to enjoy the inflating gaze of their clients and what it represents, accept it as developmental and transitional, without needing it, believing it, attaching to it, or feeding off of it. And they will release it with pleasure as you are ready and your own strength mounts.

One day, strengths will equalize, and a new relationship, one that makes room for two whole people with differentiated and individualized strengths and weaknesses will emerge.

And a new kind of intimate collaboration, between participants of equal powers, can begin.

It is sweet connection to be amazed and amazing.
It is a lovely thing to be surpassed.

It is sweeter still to work together, side by side, and to make a meal, more beautiful and inspired, than either of you could have cooked alone.

copyright © 2012
All rights reserved Martha Crawford

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