Quote:
Originally Posted by LonesomeTonight
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Me: "So I had this dream last night but am unsure if I should share it. Well, we just won't spend much time on it." T: "OK." Me: "I'll just share the relevant parts. I was in Los Angeles for some reason. At first, I was staying with my parents, and we all had to sleep in one bed, and I had very little space." T asked how it made me feel, and I said kind of trapped.
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Talked about working to forgive myself and thinking I deserve good things. Me: "Do I maybe need to start small, like, forgive myself for something little?" T: "Actually, I think you need to go bigger." Me: "Bigger?" T: "I think this all goes back to your inability to be the daughter your mother wanted."
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I think the juxtaposition of these two things is very interesting, and very important. In the dream, being with your parents, even being brought into their "intimacy" (I realize you're not saying anything inappropriate happened here, dream or otherwise), was constricting. Maybe paying attention to that feeling is really important. Is it possible that not being the "right daughter" is the root of this feeling? I think this happens pretty often in families, where parents want to "box in" children, tell them who they are, how they have to be. Sometimes marriage does this, too (I, at least, identify with the constricting nature of marriage and trying to live up to who my spouse wanted me to be). Sometimes, just like animals caught in a trap where they chew their own leg off to escape, people do pretty extreme things to get away from the perception of being trapped in something they don't want to be in, or perhaps more deeply, trapped inside someone else's idea of who they are supposed to be.
We all need our freedom from something, even if it's something we box ourselves into. A mortgage that's too big, a relationship that doesn't quite work for us, our own ideas of who we're supposed to be and what we're supposed to do. The exodus or escape from whatever's holding you back in your life seems to be central to this dream and maybe the therapeutic theme connected to it.