[Baizyl]

I have abandonment dreams a lot. Any of my nightmares always maximize every horrible emotion I feel. I would not be able to take it in real life, period.

Just panic and total agony. Everyone I care about is leaving for better things in life during these dreams, even if they're no longer putting up with me. One was that I was ripped apart about how I'm an awful person and that everyone is better off without me still being alive.

These dreams are so strong that it impacts me emotionally for hours afterwards.

[MusicMike]

Was there any real-life abandonment by caretakers, particularly early in your life?

How do you feel about life in general aside from the nightmares?

[Baizyl]

I honestly think it's because I'm a control freak, but it's out of fear of not knowing what to do if things change. Abuse does that...

I feel uncertain about my life at worst. Not knowing where I'm headed. My nightmares can be both emotionally and physically painful. I've felt really terrible physical pains in nightmares...

[MusicMike]

If we stick with this particular dream of being abandoned, there is no message here about you being a control freak, but the dream does seem to speak to a fear of utter, catastrophic abandonment.

I have something like that in my own life that I'm learning to deal with. My mother is an anxious and irritable person, and it seems that early in my life she went through periods of being emotionally unresponsive to me. That felt like abandonment. If this happened very early in life it could feel like total and complete abandonment with no hope for recovery.

But my mother was also loving sometimes. This thing that people do as a defense mechanism is separate the loving experience and the abandonment experience. There's a place in the psyche that knows nothing but love, and a place that knows nothing but abandonment. Because it knows nothing but abandonment, it can feel total.

Are you consciously aware of episodes of being abandoned? The nightmare might be speaking of infant states because it is so intense. I've experienced physical pain in nightmares too and I believe that's a part of early infancy... an infant doesn't separate physical and emotional pain... it's just this giant ball of intolerable pain.

[Thunder Bow]

Are you in Therapy?

[Baizyl]

I was never abandoned, but I cut others out of my life from raw fear and paranoia that they'd hurt me, or that I was bad for them. Since childhood, actually... I had to grow up fast and learn to get by with whatever I had. I didn't have much support to speak of, both because I blocked them and that the support I did have often ended up as backstabbing.

And yes, I've been in therapy for 8 years overall.

[MusicMike]

I don't want to make an assumption about your life. Everything I say is for you to test against your feelings. But here's what it seems to me. Your conscious orientation is that you've cut off friends before for fear they would hurt you or that you were bad for them. But that sounds like a defense mechanism rather than the original wound underneath it. In your dream it is the other people who are abandoning you. So I think the original trauma was being abandoned.

This doesn't have to mean a literal abandonment. Infants can feel abandoned when the mother is not emotionally available. Infant states are super intense, and your dream seems a lot like states I'm familiar with myself from my own life, and my own belief that my mother was emotionally unavailable in my infancy.

Also, the abandonment wound doesn't mean your caretakers were all bad. People have this way of compartmentalizing their experience, so all the good experiences go into one area of the psyche, and all the bad experiences go into another area. It seems that your dreams are coming out of the place in your psyche that feels nothing but abandonment. Hence it feels like utterly total abandonment, even this very harsh judgment that you are not simply bad but actively harmful to other people, even though your history may not contain a literally total abandonment event.

But I just realized you said you've been in therapy. What does your T think about your life history and the origin of the current nightmares?

[Baizyl]

I haven't talked about it yet. I've been in therapy for 8 years and in denial about my awful childhood. Until recently, it's been a complicated self mind-game of keeping myself ignorant. I haven't seen her since I've forced myself to acknowledge this stuff.

[MusicMike]

How hard would it be to bring this up in therapy now?

[CosmicRose]

I've had abandonment dreams as well, they suck, its a scary feeling while its happening. Usually these dreams almost always directly relate to whats happening in your life, whether its issues with friends, issues with family members, romantic partners, work related issues, or the feeling as though you are missing out on something in life.

[Baizyl]

I've had this for my whole life, as long as I can remember. Being close to people caused me to drive a wedge between myself and them. I would have panic attacks.