A dream:
I am getting ready for a party. My parents are throwing me a 40th birthday celebration. I drink a lot of alcohol. Lots of friends are there but somehow I dont feel connected to them. All of a sudden, my parents have decided the whole party is going on a trip to Madrid to see a museum. I find this odd, but we embark. We pause in the middle of seemingly nowhere - like a town from an old Western movie. There is a club and one of my homosexual friends are taking his partner there. I decide to follow but have to argue with the doorman for ages about my sexual identity. Then I decide to rest and find a comfortable room and fall asleep. I wake, worried that the train has already left. I exit the room to find a very wide, very long zebra crossing. I stand and wait for the lights to change.
Recently on my course we started to take a deep dive into trauma therapy, intricately connected as it is with dissociation. Our main topic was the very relevant and very applicable work by Peter Levine and Diane Poole Heller. Yet my internal response was somehow resisting, not feeling the connection perhaps with what my work had been encompassing thus far as therapist. Now if you happen to be a skilled people-knower yourself you may also know how new learning can trigger the Ego - oh the dreaded change! And I admit there is probably a lot of truth in that for my system. Yet I find that we also circumvented a lot of the way this work can trigger us as therapists - our own fears, traumas and yes, dissociative parts - and fear of them. I felt a sense of having to be on the lookout for and keep having to try and pull my client back into a ressourceful place at the least sign of dissociation/overwhelm. And for me, this created a weird sense of danger around going into that place.
Since having a little time to digest I have learnt that it quite common for therapists to fear dissociation in our clients. So I turned to Google (obviously) and found Jung. And to my soul's delight - really that landed in a very bodily felt way - Jung talks about dissociation as, yes, a trauma response but also as athreshold. A liminal space between the conscious and the unconscious. A place ripe with danger, yes, but also with promise and hope of redemption or self-development. Jung saw archetypal work and creativity as a way to deepen the relationship and to integrate this liminal space into more of a conscious way.
I guess for me having that as a frame of mind, not only does it give me a spark of curiosity and impels me to want to get to know my own dissociative parts (and there are at least a few) but it restores my sense of trust in the client's ability to know what is their limit. To let their system lead. And not to be guided by fear. And to invite into a space where that ultimately protective system can become seen and through that, transform the way these parts function on behalf of the client.
Warmly, Signe
The edge of something
A threshold
The silence before the words are spoken
A submitting to being profoundly lost
Neither home nor at the place I
Expected
The place where my autistic son collapses called
waiting
Where I always felt he was struggling but maybe
laying down at the crossroads is what makes perfect
Sense
The fertile soil before the seed breaks through
The place between birth and death we call
Life
The question asked: am I good enough, are you the one for me, is this my right path
Not merely following the seemingly truth of it blindly
Most of all it calls for the allowing, the welcoming in, of all those uncomfortable feelings
Maybe dressed as
Stress
Burnout
Anxiety
Restlessness
Doubt
Or
Possibilities
But not knowing which door to open
And then allowing yourself to feel that
