Rage Dreams

A curious thing has been occurring lately. I have been having dreams where I absolutely lay into my mother. Screaming and pointing in her face, telling her harsh terrible things…all around reacting in a way that my awake conscious self would NEVER. And often for minor transgressions in the dream.

I have long suspected a good portion of my unconscious rage and resentment is directed towards my mom. I’ve also been reading Dr. Schubiner’s Unlearn Your Pain and practiced the ISTDP process outlined in his book (verbal expression of emotions in the order of hurt, anger, guilt, and then grief) towards my mom a couple of days ago. It was surprisingly powerful and ended with my saying over and over again “you are not a good mom”. I felt anger in a way I hadn’t experienced in a long time.

I do not think this is the only source of unconscious rage but I was curious…have any others that have healed or are in the process had dreams like this? Do you felt like it indicated you were becoming more aware of your emotions or something else?

I have had dreams like this before but not towards my mother, mainly towards my sister who is a very messed up person that I think most of my rage towards is quite conscious…

 

I don't have any particular expertise about dreams, but I think that dreams you are able to remember are a safe way for what's in the unconscious to become conscious. Our unconscious does the dreaming, but now that you remember the dream, you are conscious of your rage against your mother. I would continue to work with this new knowledge through journaling, thereby increasing your conscious awareness of it.

 

I haven’t had rage dreams per se, but I have had dreams where I wake up with all my symptoms blazing, and then I try and remember what I was dreaming about, because it’s probably a clue to things. It sounds like Schubiner’s process is working for you. It’s unlocking the closed doors.

 

Thanks both, I'm hoping it is a sign I am on the right track. It has definitely made it harder to ignore how I feel towards my mom, which has resulted in needing to find ways to process those emotions.

 

This is pretty much what I do on paper when I "write shit down." Sometimes I add drawings of doing bad things to her.
My logical mind knows that she was so young herself (married at 20, 3 kids by age 26) and so dysfunctional and hurt by her own childhood that I understand that she did the best that she could. At some point I had the epiphany that our parents are not the super heroes that we expect them to be they are just regular people like the rest of us.
I know my mother loved me more than anything in the world.....and yet....my little self that is still tucked inside me is hurt by things she said, things she did, etc.
I forgive her but I still need to let all of me feel those feelings of rage. My writing nearly always turns to feelings about my mother.
I guess Freud wasn't that far off........

 

I think you are on the right track. It is fortuitous that dreaming could be your pathway to uncovering repressed emotions.

The second edition of Dr. Schubiner’s Unlearn Your Pain introduced me to ISTDP. That prompted me to read various books about it written by ISTDP therapists. Late in his life, Dr. Sarno endorsed a newly published book on ISTDP written by ISTDP psychiatrist Dr. Allan Abbass.

My understanding of ISTDP is amateurish at best, but I want to comment--for whatever it is or is not worth--regarding two things you wrote above: (1) “verbal expression of emotions in the order of hurt, anger, guilt, and then grief” and (2) “needing to find ways to process those emotions” regarding your mother.

I don’t have the current edition of Unlearn Your Pain, but my second edition includes a section headed “Working with Anger, Guilt, Grief, and Love.” Which of these emotions is missing from item (1) in the preceding paragraph?

I am not suggesting you don’t love your mother. I am sure you do, and I would venture to guess that this is why you have learned to repress anger at her, have guilt about getting angry at her, and have grief about the state of your relationship with her when she angers you. In response to criticism that ISTDP is only about anger, Abbass has responded: “In reality the cause of these problems is complex feelings including sadness about broken attachments, rage, guilt about rage. Love and interrupted attachments are the heart of these problems as opposed to just anger.” (I added the bolding.) According to ISTDP therapist Nat Kuhn’s book Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy: A Reference, if the full set of ISTDP complex feelings including love is not experienced, “the results can include . . . symptom exacerbation, and potentially serious acting out.”

 

Just want to pipe up here and acknowledge how incredibly hard it is to process mother-loss and pain. I’ve been at it for years, and it is insidious for creeping into every aspect of your life. My mother was also young, and a super screwed up physically and verbally abusive alcoholic. A very unhappy person. I think it was Sarno who said rage is particularly strong when something in your present circumstances reminds you of a deeper wound from the past. In the end, it always goes back to my mother.

 

I don't understand it. What does "love and interrupted attachments" mean?
Feeling the loss of love? Someone withholding love? Someone walking away from loving you?

 

I did some ISDTP and it’s certainly not “just anger” but the complexity of anger and other emotions -often a heady mix of what is often construed as positive and negative emotions both happening at once and how that is interpreted in the physical body.

 

I really appreciate the insight you provide here. You're right that I was overlooking that last component. The first three emotions - anger, guilt, and grief - are much more accessible to me at the moment. I was able to feel all of those fully when doing the exercise, but facing the love and "interrupted attachment" (which is a golden insight) is something I need to take more time to feel and process. I feel I have much more work to do when it comes to my mother, and the ISTDP exercise felt very impactful so I plan to continue it.

 

I agree it is very insidious... it is only very recently that I've even been able to recognize the anger and other conflicting emotions I have towards my mother. When I was a kid, and in young adulthood, it was safe to say I was very oblivious. I would've been hard-pressed to tell anyone the ways in which my mother's emotional immaturity, narcissistic traits, and tendency to foster extremely dysfunctional relationships negatively impacted my development, my life, and my relationship with her. Though now it is painfully clear and hard to ignore. It's amazing how deeply we can suppress these things.

 

I remember reading a take on TMS/MBS healing describing it as an end to internal conflict. I think many people are so quick to repress anger because of those many conflicting emotions. I've always found it is easier to for me to show anger at something/someone that is inconsequential. In fact, I'm rather quick to anger in certain regards - getting upset with people on the road, getting easily annoyed at work colleagues, or showing my anger at people in my life for smaller transgressions.

I've come to believe that the times I don't feel that anger (but should) is when those other emotions create a conflict...acknowledging that my mother cannot be the parent I needed/need her to be, for example, also creates profound sadness, and guilt over any role I feel I play in stifling our relationship at this phase in our lives. It's truly amazing how much lies beneath the surface...

That's why ISDTP was intriguing to me, I appreciated the way it walked you through the range of emotions we often feel about the relationships that deeply impact us.

 

I think it means, “I love you so much, Mommy, but I also hate you. And now, I’m only 5 years old and I know deep down—I’m on my own.” The only choice for survival is to shut down all feelings and say you don’t need anything from her. And that trait, as you go forward in life, is not conducive to living a good life, or even to living life at all.

 

Oh my gosh, yes! All of these feelings for me are now residing in my feet! Symbolic? I think so.

 

I feel like the inner conflict between positive and negative emotions is where the tension comes from. It’s what creates the TMS. Example: my sister reminds me of my mother. If she so much as texts me, I go into full blown symptom overload. The reason is, I don’t want to talk to her. But another part of me feels like I should, because she’s my sister. I don’t want her to feel sad or unloved if I avoid her. But her narcissistic self is incapable of understanding why she bugs me or of changing to make it possible for me to endure her. The answer I’m learning on my TMS journey is to finally put myself first. If it’s painful, it’s ok for me to protect myself. I don’t have to endure anyone anymore who reminds me of my mother or of any other kind of abuse. I can finally be free.

 

Yeah, and it’s the stuff we have to look at to heal. But look at us go! (I’m thankful for this discussion. Somehow it is cathartic and a bit daring to verbalize these things online—to publish them from the rooftops. But now I’m going to move past that and overcome all of this!)

 

Yep! You also have to learn to disengage from all the story and history and just feel what all this does to the body. Our minds will try to continually feed into this story - it is another level of self protection from actually feeling these emotions. It can take some people some time and mind training, it can simply be part of the process to recognize it’s all happening and then realize it’s just our reaction to this story. That we can change our response by simply allowing it to happen physically, without thought and by accepting that there are no good or bad emotions - they are all just chemicals.

 

Ooooh! I LOVE this!!! Bookmarking it!

 

Ok. Interesting. Thanks.