Healing the Past, Shaping the Future: Exploring the Mother's Imprint with Dr. Loren

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

Hi, I'm Cynthia Marks. I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation established by my late husband, Dr. Bernard Bail. I am very happy to be introducing you to Dr. Lauren Weiner today. Dr. Weiner is a psychologist with a thriving practice here in Los Angeles. Dr. Weiner had the precious opportunity to learn from Dr. Bail over the course of many years, and her work with her patients is based on the theories put forth by him. We are so lucky to be spending time with her today. So hello. Thank you so much for having me. It's just an honor to be able to talk about the work.

And Dr. Bail. It's so exciting. We're just thrilled to be here with you. We'll start with the basics. How did you get here? How long have you been doing this work? What got you interested in this work? I think, truthfully, it was sort of like going into the family business a little bit. I tried to do some other things. I felt called in different directions, but I think deep down, I knew I would come back to this work. And I say family business because my father is a psychiatrist and he knew Dr. Bail and worked with Dr. Bail, and dreams were a constant part of family discussions from when, as far back as I can remember, dreams and the way the mind worked and the unconscious.

That was a big one. The unconscious, right? That there were. Meaning? What do you mean? There's all these things that we don't really realize are going on, but they're dictating what we do. Dreams? You mean every night when I have a dream, it has a meaning. I think it just seeped into my pores. That's basically how I ended up there. I feel that it was I almost want to say. I don't know. Did I have a choice? I'm not sure. I think it was a bit of a calling. I think so too. And all of these things that you're bringing up, the unconscious dream. We're going to be talking about in many, many podcasts.

Great. So how long have you been practicing? Let's see. I've been practicing for about 20 years. Is your work based on the theories put forth by Dr. Bail? My work is completely based on the theories. Put forth by Dr. Bail. Hopefully, my work is is also part of me. I think that's what he really wanted, in fact, was that he knew that his ideas would be taken by each person. And and the goal is that you really want it to inform your work, but that you come through and each person will bring something just a little different to the work, which is as it should be.

Is it almost as if you wear this work? It becomes part of who you are in your in your practice is just so natural for you to go down this path. It did resonate with me and I think, yes, it it is something where thinking this way becomes natural that that part isn't work. And that's because it really just made sense to me that when I got the idea, that doesn't mean it's easier when you start 20 years ago, which was probably before I was licensed completely. But this work was already what I was trying to do. I liked it. One thing to understand yourself, you can get an analysis in this way.

And so you know the territory and it seems easy. wait, I know this. And you know, this seems understanding a dream should be pretty easy. And then you go listen to somebody else. So to do this work and your patient is there in there telling you like, my goodness, this isn't quite so easy, because then you have to chart the territory there. That didn't matter hard. Fine, I'll take it. I'm just going to work at this until the material speaks to you in this way. And you you just have a love for doing what you're doing. And it must be fascinating to watch where your patients go with this work and and see how they transform them.

And I'm sure they do transform. It is I, I don't know what else I would do in the whole world that would feel this exciting to me. I mean, hard. It's hard, you know, And you're in the pain with people every day and you have this beautiful North star of the dream that guides you, just being able to hear what the minds of all of these people who are willing to share this dream material with me, just to get to listen to that every day and try to figure it out and try to see what that person's unconscious wants the person to know to grow and change.

There just isn't anything this exciting to me. Well, I think what you're doing has to be about the most important thing on earth. I know you love what you're doing, but it's so valuable to all of us through the course of your understanding of Dr. Bailes methodology, you changed. What are some of the ways that you see your patients changing? Or if you can speak to how you changed, if there's something poignant that something we could all experience? Good question. I think everybody changes, hopefully in the way that person needs to change. For myself, there was a maturation, deepening of compassion, an ability, I think, to see things in a bigger way.

One of the things I think for me that was really important was patience and letting things develop. I probably had a tendency to be a little headstrong, and I want it now and let's, you know, go, go and get it. Just learning to be able to sit back and let things develop that isn't the thing that every single person needs, right? So hopefully what this does is actually because each person brings the dream material needed to grow, hopefully the idea is tailor made. Yeah. So you as the therapist can then see where that growth needs to happen. Right?

And hopefully the patient does too. Right. Because, you know, it wasn't that I came in saying I'm so impatient, but that impatience was causing me pain. It became clear later. Okay. wait a minute. And. And there were reasons for the impatience, and there was a pain that I was trying to heal. Are we. Sometimes impatient? Because that's such a good way of not having to get to something because you're you're you're busy. You're moving on to the next thing. The next thing. In a way, if you can imagine it, then we humans will use it to not feel. To divert from something.

To distract. Interesting how we got so good at that. Incredibly good at it. Yeah. So thank you for that little bit of background. So we touched on dreams and that Dr. Beale has this theory and let's talk about those things so that in our future podcasts, we can kind of take a deep dive. So there's this Dr. Baile, this fabulous Dr. Baile and he has his theory called The Mother's Imprint, which is basically the base of what you're working from right? Can you describe that to us? Yes. The mother's imprint was his idea that for each of us, the mother who herself has lived a life and had her own pain when that fetus is living inside of her, the mother without realizing it, projects into that fetus all of the unwanted unknown to her, but upsetting contents of her mind to all of the upsetting emotions.

You know, every way in which life didn't go as you wanted it to go. But you don't realize it that that is actually transmitted to the fetus. That is so hard to grasp. It is because we consciously most people are walking around, you know, you want all good things during a pregnancy going into this baby or people aren't thinking about it at all. Likely that nobody's imagining that. my goodness. You mean all of my hurt goes there? And this is what he found that it does, and that the baby will take it because the baby's main goal is survival. So if you think about it and you have a mother who's upset, suddenly your goal is survival.

This is a sort of fetal event within the baby. The fetus will then say, okay, I will take all of your hurt because if you don't have it, you can be happy, go lucky and you will stay alive. And I will stay alive. So the two of us will go along. But now I've got this ball of trouble. Can you give us an example or two of what an imprint might be? Imprints are actually really simple. If you think about the mothers lived the life, Some are happier lives, some are less. But normally what a person will come away with is a feeling that certain things are possible or not possible.

So and imprint could be something as simple as I don't deserve love. I've come away with a feeling in my life that I don't deserve love. Totally unconscious to the person. Sometimes people have an inkling of it, but the full extent people don't usually know that they're walking around living according to a message like that. So simple, but so unfortunately, life altering. Completely life altering. Those are the sorts of messages that Dr. Baile felt it was so imperative to know are there. And then, in a way, through this work, tracked down, get to them, make them conscious.

Right. So he's a psychoanalyst. All of psychoanalysis is basically concerned with taking what is unkind. Yes. Or unknown to the person and making it conscious. That's where we can get in there. And and where you have a chance to change things, you have to know it's there to fight it. Where psychoanalysis didn't go, where he went is to this piece, the mother's imprint. So what are some of the simple ways that we could talk about this being different from other types of therapy? I know Freud doesn't go into the fetus. Is that the biggest difference between Dr. Bailes work and that of others is that he goes farther back in our development to get to the very, very bottom of the right deal.

Hurdle at the middle. He he does go back I think other people do get into what we call this very early life. The biggest piece that he brings is saying, but the mother imprints the fetus. The mother imprints the child. That's huge. And then he takes the dream and puts it center stage. Freud did, but he says, what it's going to show you is everything about your life. It's not just going to show you specific things. It will give you the entire picture of your emotional life, all of the emotional truths you have to know in order to grow the mind and free yourself.

Because in his view, the imprint is really like a prison. You're going to have to obey what this very early unknown, unspoken message you basically got and then kept from your mother so that the two of you would survive and life would keep going. And that is unique to each individual. That is unique to each individual. It was Freud working, say, more from an agenda like looking for patients to get to a particular place that he already had in mind. That's a good question. I think he when he started looking at the dreams, he was seeing certain things in his patients.

So, yes, he his goal was to relieve those symptoms. His goal was to use the dreams to see that the unconscious was involved in all of this. Then, for all of us, I think our goal is to help relieve our patients of certain complexes using the talk therapy. He's just going to add these very specific elements. The dream is really a gift that is here that we get every single night when we go to sleep. It is the way that our deepest self communicates to us what we need to understand. Then you have to just set yourself to the task of starting to look at it.

If you know it has a message in it, then it just becomes, all right, how do I now break the code of what's trying to be communicated? So if you have a dream and it's overwhelming on some level and you just want to put that aside because it's overwhelming, if you just take a deep breath and look at it bit by bit rather than just a giant scary thing, maybe you can start to make inroads. I think that's one way. There's a lot of different ways to approach a dream because sometimes we want to get into the weeds on it. We're going to get into all the little pieces.

And also, sometimes you have to just pull back and and sort of say, okay, what's the overall feeling of this dream? Often dreams that are overwhelming, surprisingly, they seem scary. I don't want to touch this. Sometimes that's a little bit misleading because it's telling you something really good, but you're not supposed to. Perhaps you have something good so it becomes scary. So if we take the earlier example, I'm not supposed to have love, but there is some way in which love is entering your life that may scare the system because what am I going to do?

Break the. Rule? I see. So you'll have a dream that points you in the direction of not taking that love that you've been presented in reality. Right. The dream is the most valuable way to get to the mother's imprint. And the mother's imprint is really the thing that we need to undo so that we can live our best life. That was Dr. Bailes idea. His discovery was there is this imprint. We all have it. He listened to the dreams of his patients for over 60 years. So you can imagine he sits in his office. People come in. Patient after patient all day, every day.

And they talk about their dreams and so what became very clear to him was that there were all of these messages that the people had no idea about the dream puts the spotlight on that again, as with all of the dreams. It depends what's on the mind of the person in any given moment. So it isn't that every single dream is going to reveal your imprint. You may have a dream that day, but you're you know, you're more concerned with whether you're going to get fired at work. Chances are your dreams will be in that arena. That's what the mind is occupied with.

But if you listen to somebody's dreams over time, you will start to see this trend and then you can begin to put together, here's this message again. Here's this idea. It's popping up again. And so the dream becomes the most important vehicle for putting the focus on the main ideas. That doesn't mean you won't hear it even just as people are talking, because the unconscious is always at work. I mean, we get this direct hit through our dreams, but it's flowing through us an active all the time. Dr. Baile came to know this by releasing everything that he had been using in his practice previously.

But I know that he was very, very frustrated and he didn't feel like he was making headway on a personal level. And if he was feeling that kind of discomfort or angst just internally, what is everybody else feeling? And I mean, here's this man who's been in this for decades and decades. And I know that you said that he listened to the dreams of patients. Did he just start with a clean slate? Did he just say, I don't know where this is going? Let me just hear what everybody has to say. I think eventually that's where he ended up. I think he was trained in Freud.

That's what they read and that's what they had at the time. And then other theorists came in. Klein And I think he was just looking. So I'm not satisfied that what I know is helping my patients enough. And I think he got really frustrated and he tried different things and I think still felt this isn't quite it. He said, Do I even keep doing this? After a lot of searching. I think he just said, All right, I'm just going to do my best to throw out what I know. I, you know, as possible as that is. And just listen. Listen to my patients. What are they saying?

What are their dreams saying? Luckily, he had a love of the dream. He didn't abandon that for him. That was sort of a place. Okay, let me listen to the dreams and new. And here. What are they saying? What are people trying to tell me about their lives and how they are relating to themselves and others? And I think he felt eventually that's what he came to, that the idea came. And did you ever have an opportunity to talk with him about that moment? It was more than a moment. But when he finally saw. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I get this. That must have just been a transformation for him.

And that's a building, you know, over his head. Right. But at one point it settles in and it's a thing. You hit critical mass. Yeah. Then he gets to go and do now, right? What feels like his work. Right. And what you get to do. Now and what he left for all of us. So this mother's imprint, then it goes back generations. There may be something that your mother's mother's mother experienced that gets passed on and that may show up in the most recent fetus, right? Yes. Part of the dilemma is, yes, in theory. And I say that because we'd have to sort of see it in a dream to know how far back does this go?

I say that because it's going to be unconscious to all of us. Most people are going, I feel like this hearkens back a few hundred years. So we have to trust that it is in there because this seems to be how we hand these experiences down. Good things are handed down too. It isn't all just bad news, but it's the troubling things that redirect our lives. Yes. And the troubling things that we do take care of. That's right. The things that bring us joy probably don't need that much attention. We'll let that flow naturally. Right. That's already flowing.

Yeah. This is as though the flow or the spirit, the flow of your life is, in a way, been diverted. And again, that depends on your philosophy. Some people would say. But that's also your challenge in this life, as it should be. You've got challenges and the goal is how do you release what blocks you? But back to your question. I have to make the assumption that this didn't just start in the last 50 years or so. So, yes, I believe this goes back quite a long way. And you could point to something like feminism and the ill treatment of women. Some of us are just born into this world as women thinking that we are second class citizens.

If that a lot of us don't even consider or otherwise. Is that perhaps something that's been passed on through generations? Dr. Bell really felt that treatment of women was sort of center to what he talked about and that, yes, this mistreatment of women over time, because women have never had an equal seat at the table. That is part of the experience of every woman and every woman who gives birth to. A boy or a girl. To a boy or a girl. So we all carry it. One of his points was, if you really want to start to change the world, treat women better, give them a seat at the table and let all of the generations to come, male and female.

Let all of the babies have a mother who feels she has agency in her own life and a say and is not a second class citizen because carrying that around, even in a way, in the best of circumstances. That's still in there. And so you are giving birth that Well, I'm a second class citizen. That male baby this born is still carrying a feeling of being a second class citizen. And then we humans are walking around with that unconsciously and continuing to promote that unconsciously, Right. So unconsciously, whatever messages. But we'll take this example.

I'm not worthy. I'm a second class citizen. I don't get everything I want, need, should have, and in the healthy way. And that is in your unconscious, it's in your being. Then every baby that follows will have a piece of that. So if we really want to change things, start treating women better. I mean, right there, boy, even in a way, if we never get to see most people's dreams, you change something like that, you change the course of history. That's unbelievably important and seems so simple yet and I think we're making headway. But I think we have a long way to go.

This message of treating women better as young women today get ready to think about having their own children as pregnant people. They can consciously think about their fetus differently than they might have had. They not thought about what you and I are talking about now, both in terms of being a second class citizen as a woman or whatever else it might be. I mean, I'm just I guess I'm wondering if someone is thinking about this work, but isn't yet really fully understanding it as a mother to be. Can they still make a giant difference in the life of their child by just consciously thinking of some of these things?

Yes, that's the beauty of it. Sorry, that was super long winded. That that's the beauty of it, which is we can start to make a lot of difference just by knowing, okay, this process is happening. This baby is attuned to everything I'm feeling. I may not even know all of the unconscious things in my mind. All of the the upset I'm carrying. I may have some inkling. I probably don't know all of it, but that's okay. Right now what I can do is know that this baby is paying attention to everything so I can start to make sure I am telling the baby every day and focused on loving the baby.

Focused on telling the baby that the baby just can relieve itself of carrying my pain and focus on growing and being a happy baby. And the people around me, hopefully and myself, can kind of all work to make sure I am having a well-supported, happy pregnancy to do whatever it takes to try to really be supportive of the person carrying the baby. Because the better that person does, the better the baby does, and not just in nutrients and and the physical being really psychologically, you give that baby a much better start. If you have a happy mother.

You're giving that baby an opportunity to live a life as their own person rather than a person carrying the weight of those around. Them. Much more. So are you still going to have an imprint? Yes. Might you lighten the load? Yes. And this is something if somebody hears this and they're thinking about getting pregnant, I would say, okay, great. You can start preparing and thinking about this and trying to set intention around, thinking about these ideas and being loving and being loving with yourself. Also, a lot of us have not nice things we say to ourselves all the time or, you know, ways in which we communicate with the people around us.

And I say, okay, well, you're planning on having a baby. It would be if you're able, let's all get together and really try to be thoughtful that this baby is going to come into the family and feel everything. So we may not be able on our own to get at the unconscious pieces, but we certainly can try to work on the conscious part. Let's not yell and scream and call each other names and let's sit down and really, okay, what's bothering you? Let's just have a talk. So there are a lot of things we can do, a. Lot we can do. Without having to go to the depth of finding out who are true self is, let's say.

But a lot of things we can practice that can lead to a better life for this baby. I mean, can we even say to this little fetus, Look, I am so sorry, I've got some baggage and I'm going to do my best to keep it a light load for you. And I love you. Let's go. Yes. That puts the mother's mind in a certain state that she's thinking about that that this is now another soul that is having a communication and that the intention is to lighten the load. Right. That that's already a different way of thinking about the process. Yes. You're in the process instead of kind of standing outside just letting things happen.

What ultimately is the best thing that can happen if. You. Work on your mother's imprint? What would we hope to achieve? What becomes different about a person? Whatever they want, meaning each person is different. And so what are your goals for your life? What do you feel hasn't happened that you want? Are most of us even aware of that? Are we just kind of on cruise control? It's much easier to just let life happen than it is to address life. Well, I have a little bit of a bias, which is I get to work with people who have said something doesn't feel right.

And that may be one of the biggest pieces, is that some way it doesn't feel right. And I want to try to change it. Yeah, I want to have a look at this. I want to have a look. I want to figure this out because I think it does require that peace. A person has to feel, okay, I yes, I want to be part of changing this so the people that come see me have said, yeah, something doesn't feel right in in whatever way, you know, whether somebody is very anxious or really depressed or feels frustrated or stuck or angry, something just isn't going as the person wanted it to go.

And so you call somebody like me and probably have no idea that eventually what it's going to take from my point of view is let's see what you're dreaming. And I know some people come and it's about, but I don't dream. Everybody dreams. So the question is, are you able to remember it, Hold on to it. And even people are always surprised. A little tiny piece, a sliver. I had one scene. And they were probably saying, this is going to be nothing to you, but I'll share it. That happens all the time. And they're meaningful, you know, not every time, but very often it's important.

So, you know, I always feel that the mind doesn't waste time on extras, doesn't need to. It gets to business. Now, how much it's disguised, often messages and dreams are incredibly disguised, but that has to do with how ready, willing, in a way we are to get the message. And a lot of messages are simply, as you referenced earlier, a little scary for us. What does it mean? What am I going to. Am I going to have to change something in my life? Often what it really is is I'm so scared I'm going to find out something awful that I didn't know about, forgot, didn't think about.

I think that that people are very afraid of that. I'm going to be surprised by terrible news That doesn't happen all that often, truthfully, that somebody had no inkling about something at all and suddenly out pumps them, you know, pops a monster from the closet. Yes. Most of the time it's something that I always kind of felt that. So I think people don't have to be as worried about that as as they tend to be. So whatever or you want to change in your life, you have the potential to change If you can connect to your highest self, your deepest self, and let it guide you to where you're supposed to be.

And that's the idea. And so the more somebody gets to do that and look at that, the better the chance that where you end up is more your true self, not you as holder of the unconscious trouble from the lineage. Dr. Bell spoke about that often in that once you got to your true self you've got rid of all of this trash, that that was the place where you found your self, love, your self-worth, that you really, honestly could feel what love is by taking away all of this other stuff. Is that right? Yes, That's what he felt was necessary to get the full experience, sort of of being you and of of loving that and that being okay in his understanding of the way we work psychologically, we have a connection.

He was a spiritual man. We have a connection to the divine. It comes through our unconscious, he believes. So when we have what he did call trash, all of these things that come from both our lineage and our day to day lives grow up in a household where people aren't happy or there's different traumas that happen to us all different upsets. You go on with your life and have relationships and and heartbreak and all sorts of things that maybe don't go the way you imagine. We collect trash. We're filled with it. The problem is that makes this channel from there to us filled with trash.

So each dream he felt took a piece of trash, like pick up the trash off the beach. One piece of plastic at a time. That was his idea. Each dream pulls a piece of trash off of you, out of you, and that opens up this channel to the divine. And that's what we want because that's pure love. So the more pure love we can get, the better. The other thing, cleaning all of this does are getting rid of the trash, is that it lets you love each other more. It lets you feel love and love and that is one of the other problems we all face is that as you get battered by life and the unconscious pieces we don't always receive love even when it's there and we don't always know how to give it without all of this trash interfering and that changes our relationships.

Well, I think a lot of us are looking for love. Well, in all the wrong places. You see this fabulous person, then you think, my gosh, I'm so interested. I could see myself being a partner with that person. But I'm stepping back. I'm not good enough. I, I don't really deserve that. That's not the you you that saying I don't deserve that. That's the imprint that's saying that it feels like that little spark, that connection that you felt that you all of a sudden, you know, made a correction on like, no, no, you're not you don't deserve that Is that's that's not right.

That's the imprint sending you back to your cozy little cocoon. So the imprint does that all the time and it does it in a variety of ways. If you've gotten the message we took this simple one, I don't deserve love. Yeah. And you may have a few active all at once. I don't deserve love. I'm not to be successful. I'm not to be happy. I'm not to have a lot of friends. These types of messages, then yes, if you get close to it. I got a spark with this person. Wait a minute. With that person then come imprint and it's friend, the internal saboteur. And that is what.

The internal saboteur is almost what it sounds like. People would commonly call that self-sabotage. I'm going to go out for that job that I really, really want. But then, you know what? But I mess up my resume without realizing it because a part of me just doesn't feel I'm supposed to have it for sleep on the day of the interview. Those are the little things that the internal saboteur is really the protector of the imprint. Technically, in the way Dr. Bell saw this put together, we get this imprint from our mothers basically, we don't know that that didn't come from God at this point.

Right. We live inside of a, you know, this human who gives us life in our minds. So this is valuable. We don't see this as a detriment to us. We hold it. It was very painful when we got it. We almost like a clam with a pearl. We keep putting things around it to protect it, to keep this kernel of an imprint hidden from us. And the internal saboteur stands. Guard says, Listen, don't mess with this, okay? Let's just keep it over here. I know you're not going to have the love you want and I know you don't get the job, but you live. So I'm doing my job.

I'm going to protect you from getting too close to this. I almost want to say nuclear bomb. Of an imprint. So don't go near it. You don't need it. You're living. You might be limping, but you're living. Yeah. That other stuff is way off limits. So this is the reason. This is so difficult to get it. This is the reason you probably want your dreams to help you get there. Because a lot of this is just sort of protected territory. All of that is happening. The internal saboteur comes along and is trying. It was developed originally to save you, but just as a fetus thinking it's saving a mother by holding all of this is fantasy.

Really. The internal saboteur is kind of doing the same thing because now you're protecting me from something that if I could get it, it would actually really save me. I've lived. I'm okay now. Job complete. So we kind of want to make friends with the internal saboteur and say, it's okay, stand down. You don't have to work so hard to keep me from touching any of this. Now I actually need to touch it. I need to know it's there. It won't kill me. I think that's a whole other big topic. But to get to that place with this internal saboteur where you can say, I see what you're doing, I don't need that anymore.

Takes a lot of guts. It takes a lot of work. I mean, the dreams, of course, But I feel like so many of us not only don't recognize that there's anything going on, but don't even want to think about needing some introspect. How do we get to the people who need help but don't want the help or don't ask for the help? How do we create a curiosity? I mean, you do what you do, which is fabulous, and you have all these people that come to you because they have so fabulously recognized that they want your help. But most of us don't even know how to say we want help.

Maybe we have an inkling like there's got to be more. This just doesn't feel right or how do we get to them? Hopefully somebody listening would say, okay, this makes sense to me and this is really a problem across mental health, which is there's a lot of people we know are suffering. I don't know that one can convince somebody to want help if one doesn't called to that. I want to figure out how to create a curiosity, at least, which is enough to you know, there's this little window in your opening and you're like, Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't close that window.

I want to see what's over there. I think we'd have to see if somebody's listening. Does this spark interest in you? I don't. I think a person has to have a choice to decide whether there's some curiosity there. You know, we know now that and I think this is, again, across mental health that there are all kinds of ways people can get some type of help. Hopefully the message we're trying to give to people is there is hope. Your mind actually contains the answers. Believe it or not, this isn't something that comes from out there. Yes, people come to my office and the hope is that and I think especially in the beginning, you know, people just hope, well, you'll just tell me, tell me what's wrong and you'll fix it.

And that isn't really how it works, actually. You're going to tell me what's wrong. You're going to show me what's wrong. So you have patients that come to you saying, okay, I'm here, you're going to fix me all the time. But then it ends up being very collaborative and you find deeply involved. Then it becomes sort of more of a partnership. I suppose that's the goal. And I don't expect people to come and say, you know, unless they happen to know what I do. And they've talked to somebody who has been in a treatment this way, then they come usually much more, okay, I know I'm going to get to work and here I go.

I think most people come expecting that there is work, but then to get to describe to somebody and help show somebody through the dreams or just through talking, because not everybody brings the dream immediately we just start to talk. But people start to see that as they tell their story, Certain themes start to emerge. I think every clinician who does this kind of work sees that you're listening to see what are the stories, what are the big themes that make up this person, the life, the relationships, how do they tend to go? What's it like? And so people begin to see that, okay, I participate in this.

I get to say maybe I've never had a say in much of anything or felt I did, but I get a say here. And then the dreams bring even more information and we start building. I think it's important for people to know this isn't a three session, even a ten session endeavor. It could be meaning you could come for a few sessions and it you'd get a flavor of things. But if you really want to get in there and work on getting each piece of trash out of the way, you work at this for a while, I think actually, and this may freak a lot of people out, but sometimes it takes a year of working this way before people really feel they get the full set of, now I see why we're doing it this way.

As I said earlier, I understand not always wanting to be patient. You know, something hurts. Fix it now. Broke my ankle, put a cast on it. Let's go. And I suppose a lot of people come to you because there's something at that moment that's made them feel desperate. Absolutely. Yes. Most people do not call because, hey, life is great. But maybe I could fix this little thing. I don't know. It's no, it's. You know what? I don't feel good. Yeah, I will say again. It depends on the person. Some people. wait. I hear you work with dreams. I don't have a crisis at the moment, but, boy.

That's. Intriguing. This is really intriguing, right? This is a different way. Yeah. This gets at something. I haven't. I haven't had this before. Let me see what this is about. So there's a lot of therapy where it's talk back and forth and you talk things through to a place where I guess you feel like some resolution. And this therapy is different in that the dream is taking you to a place that doesn't have anything to do with the talk. On the surface. We're going into the unconscious to find some of these answers, to address these feelings. I'm going to give you a yes and no on that.

And the reason is it is truly the whole person. So we do a lot of talking. Right. I want to hear I want to hear all your conscious thoughts. And I also want to see what is your unconscious say about this. Does it confirm that what's happening on the conscious level is in alignment with what your unconscious feels or is saying about an issue? Or do we have denial or do we have you out of alignment somehow with what your deeper self wants to be happening? Somebody might come in and say, Well, I'm upset about this one thing with my partner, and then the dream was, okay, wait, but you're upset about these ten things? and look how interesting.

And it's not just your partner, though. There are some issues there, but you're really upset because your mother treated you this way and your father treated you that way. And your brother or sister held this place in the family and you didn't. And that's always upset you. So it's going to paint a bigger picture. So the tip of the iceberg was something that maybe felt very acceptable to the person to talk about. But the dream may show us that this is a much longer historical experience, but you might not have been able to complain about or talk about how it made you feel because it was just expected.

That's what it was. And now you've moved on and you don't live at home anymore anyway. So what does it matter? Right? What could it still mean? That's right. Now, hopefully most talk therapy would get to that anyway, meaning you would get to the family component or the the history. Right. Or the origin of a problem. The dream may get us there more quickly and it's probably going to show us the depth of it. We're not just going to touch and say, okay, well, now I know that was my mom. It's going to detail the ways in which it was which you want, because if we don't get what Dr. Bill would call the whole emotional truth of what your life has felt like we have to get that so that you aren't repeating it everywhere.

And that is something that you can do through the dream. Yes, that you can do through the dream in a way that you just don't get without a dream. You just don't get it. And I say that knowing that because I will have sessions with people and they may or may not have dreamt that day, fine, But you will hear certain things and boy, it's exciting. The next day when the dream comes and it goes, my gosh. Well, no wonder you had a fight last night. You were in an infantile state and you were back in your babyhood and in your baby hood. You felt nobody would listen.

Nobody cared what you had to say. You were to be completely dependent and couldn't do anything on your own. And then we can look back at the argument you might have had with your partner who you felt wasn't doing something the right way or didn't listen to you. Many things may come to light, but most importantly, we see the state of mind you're in, right? We get at the emotional truth of where you're living. Well, you're not even an adult. You might be completely in your infancy. And so whether the partner did something wrong or didn't treat you the right way, we now actually assess because sometimes what it'll turn out is, no, your partner just thought you were an adult and didn't realize there was a baby sitting in front of him or her that really needed to be attended to in a different way.

And so what you get to find is, my God, I was maybe you mean I wasn't my adult self and this wasn't actually so awful. And your partner, though, has no idea that you need to be treated like a baby, that this is an issue that is. Nothing to do with the partner. Right. Now. Do you need to be treated like a baby? Really, what you probably have to do is work on yourself to grow up. Yeah, right. But you get to see that and you go, well, now I know what I'm fighting. So you create the table as a whole grown up, right? That you can then work to get yourself to be a grown up.

Then you can decide whether this is the right partner or not, and then you have a say. And which you didn't. Have. And that's going to be what what you might be wrestling with, right? That could be another example of an impact. I'm not the how to say, right, I'm to stay a baby, but then if I'm a baby, I have to constantly find people who will take care of me, who don't mind dragging a baby around that may or may not feel good. And so if you get to a place where you're past that, where you realize that's not you, that partner that you chose, that servicing that part of you may no longer be the part that interests.

You, that happen, or your partner may say, you're growing. I want to grow too. Maybe we both get to grow and we get to do this together. And I'll start to recognize these and know you might have a tendency to regress. We'd call it regress, and I might have a tendency to infantilize you and be the parent all the time. And then we get to look at it like, wait, you're doing that again. It's okay. You don't have to. I'm going to pick up the slack on my end and you relax yours. You don't have to be the parent here. And then we might actually get a love relationship between two adults and not what often happens, which is we have a parent child relationship, and then everybody's fussing all the time because it doesn't feel right.

Something's always off. Well, yeah, it is. It's not really two adults. So in terms of relationships, that's really the goal across relationships of getting to a place where we are seeing each other for who we really are, or I am giving you who I really am so you can have a relationship with me rather than my mother or my imprint. Is this the way that we are as a bigger society going to be able to improve. That would help. You brought up a couple of things we didn't even touch on. I'm going to touch on them though, which is you may be a baby, but you may also be your mother in a relationship or your father.

And that's something you might hear a hint of if we were just talking. But the dream will certainly show you may not really be yourself. How much did you take on of the people around you for survival at the root of it? Dr. Bell Really felt we had to survive like all the other creatures in the jungle. We have to survive. What did that require of us? So it may be in my household, I have to be just like my mother, because that's that's what gets me love. That's what I'm rewarded for. And that's how you survive. That's how I survive. I might have to be just like my father.

That's how I survive. That's what I'm rewarded for. And so we're always looking at who are you in any given moment? And a dream is incredibly good at showing that now it's going to be disguised. It might take us a while, we might see it and not know what it is in a dream. And now the next dream. Okay, well, now we can go back to the one before it. So it's really a mystery. You know, you're solving little mysteries every time you have a dream. But hopefully what you're getting eventually is the big puzzle. And the big puzzle says, I made up of all these parts.

Let keep what I want. And if I'm my mother and that really doesn't serve me because I didn't like my mother's life all that much. good. We can find those pieces that trash and pull that out. We lesson that for you. That's the goal, is the more we get out all of the things that aren't serving you be that your infantile ways of being you being one of your parents or not, or being a sibling or not, all of the things that have covered you over when we get those off of you, yeah, you come as a whole different person able to make much better choices about your life.

And in this process, we're not mother bashing or parent bashing. So many people, I think, look back and say, Well, I love my parents, I love my family. I would never want to think about anything that would make it seem less than that. But finding out our truth does not mean that we don't care about our family or that we don't respect our family. I mean, maybe in some cases our family doesn't deserve respect. But generally I think that takes away a safety zone for a lot of us. If I go here, that means I'm going to have to say I don't like what I've been given and I don't like my parents and they did a bad job.

That's a huge piece for so many people. They feel so terribly worried that they're going to offend, hurt, destroy a relationship. And that's just talking to me. Their parents aren't listening. Their aunts and uncles and siblings that nobody's listening at the door, just being able to say it worries them, right? How could I say my mother worked so hard to raise me? How could I say I didn't like something? And I understand that. And I would simply say, we're just trying to look at the emotional truth. If there was something you didn't like, you don't do anybody a favor by not being able to acknowledge it.

That doesn't actually protect your mom. What would probably, in the end make a better relation ship. A more honest one is if you tell me I'm not saying you have to go home and tell her all your complaint, but tell me what didn't feel right. Let's get everything in the right spot so that you can be your best self. Pull out those upsetting things. And then what tends to happen is you don't get upset with her about something that has nothing to do with the real reason you're upset. The feelings don't go away. In other words, they just pop out sideways.

So I can't I can't tell you that I didn't like how my mom did something, but, I get so frustrated or upset by her when she wants to just make me come over on this holiday and doesn't ask whether I want to or, you know, we'll find it somewhere. So I suppose what I'm saying in a roundabout way is the feelings are there, whether we acknowledge them or talk about them or not. And you don't have to worry that that will hurt somebody. In fact, it makes it better because you release the upset. Then you can go have a truly more loving relationship if that's what you want.

So it's really part of disintegrating the imprint or getting rid of some of the trash again. Yes, that the whole goal is the more of what is not yours. That is painful trash. That is junk you have collected, you let go of. The better your life gets, the better your relationships. And I know people were, well, will I divorce my husband? Only if you want to. And you may discover you want to. And that's not my decision. I don't have an agenda for anybody. My agenda is to follow your unconscious message from your self. So you are going to tell me what you need via your dreams to get to a place where you are satisfied in your life.

It's not me saying, here's what I imagine a good life for this person would be, so I'm going to get him or her there. Sure. By telling you, do this, do that. My goal is overall to really say, well, wait a minute, what do you want to be? You tell me. Show me in your dreams. Show me in your dreams. I think that's what I'd like to talk about with you next. Okay. So the next time you come back, let's dive into that. Now that we have a better understanding of the mother's imprint, it's a giant thing to grasp, and I think we're going to have to maneuver in and out of that.

But I look forward to seeing you again next time. And dreams all right with you. Sounds great. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you. Thank you all for joining us. And tune in next time and let us know what you.