Idealization: The Rose-Colored Glasses We Can’t Take Off with Dr. Loren Weiner

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

I'm Cynthia Marks and I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation, established by my late husband, Doctor Bernard Bail. Welcome to And Now Love. Hello, Loren. It's nice to have you here again. Thank you for having me. We're going to talk about idealization. Yes. It's a big topic. I think I say that every time we start we have so many big topics. Try to do big topic. Yeah. So they all come together. What is this ideal ization. Right. Well, people are probably familiar with the word and can imagine what it means. And then it also has a specific meaning in psychoanalytic theory.

It's as you would think though. It means you see something is much more perfect than it is. You idealize it. So you look at it and see, exaggerate the good features, minimize the negative features. And this is something that all humans do. So it's part of our normal development. And most of the time you is looked at in the way it gives us problems. Because as you can imagine, if you are exaggerating the positive features of something, minimizing the negative features, you're going to have a skewed view of what something really is. And that's the piece we want to get.

How is my view of anything I'm looking at skewed by what I have had to do to manage my feelings about this event person thing. And so in our day of day, let's say we have to rent a car because we're going on a driving trip and we get there and they only have three cars available, but the one you wanted is the fourth one that isn't there. And you can kind of figure out how to rationalize and turn this car that you really want until a better day. That would be an example of probably a more conscious though. What it does is it pulls for the way we are primed to idealize.

So yes, even in that daily example, simple example, we're going say, oh, well, I didn't get that. But this one is better because it's got four wheel drive and it's got, you know, whatever the color set I really love and, and that, that then starts to become perhaps more consequential because now it is involved with the people in my life, how I relate to those people and decisions I might make about what I'm going to do. And you know, big, big life decisions. And then, of course, I imagine you're going to go this way and that. We certainly do that with parents.

We turn them into something that we need them to be so that we can survive. Right. And that's the piece that really sits at the base of idealization. All theorists see that this happens. We idealize our parents. So that's a sort of innate part of what we do. We have to do this because if you are a small baby, a fetus, a in an infant, and you start to see that mom and dad are not so perfect, they are simply human, you're not going to feel safe. So what theorists have looked at is all of the ways in which we idealize. We do not let in any of the negative things, or we we only let in a small amount.

We have to keep seeing mom first, mom, because that's where we start. But dad and then the whole family, we see mom as perfect. She has to be perfect. If mom isn't perfect, I'm in danger. If mom is immature, I'm in danger. If mom can't do the job 100%, I'm in danger and I am powerless. Right. So, so a kind of a real life example. If mom is always angry at dad, if mom is so invested in that, how can she find time for me? And how do I know that she's not going to be angry with me? So I'm going to turn that around and make it something different.

The basic answer is yes, we are going to just not allow that information in. We don't tolerate when we're very young. We do not tolerate the ambivalence of saying, well, mom is just angry with dad, but under that she is fully capable of taking care of me, and that's already much more advanced. This is purely a feeling thing, which is I can't know that mom is angry. Mom has to be all loving and wonderful and that's that. If mom is angry at dad, as you said, okay, well, now her attention is not fully focused on the infant, but also eventually. What if she turns that anger on the infant?

So you're going to deny that? And what if somehow I caused that anger? Yes. Now this gets tricky because what Bail added, so if we look at idealization and say, okay, everybody sees that in a normal development, there's going to be in the normal line of development. There is a certain amount of idealization necessary. We need this so that an infant is not so terrified that it can't tolerate a human mother, flaws and all. And then also it later on adds to what we can do to motivate us, right? If we see something as an ideal perfect, we're going to strive to get there.

Okay. That's what's expected. It becomes a defense mechanism, though, in the beginning when we cannot let in any of the truth about who mom really is. And then later, dad, as I said, but your caregivers but who mom really is, Bail adds a layer which is the mother gives the infant an imprint. We've talked about imprints a lot, but I'll just short in a short way. Explain. The mother projects all of her unwanted, unprocessed, uncut, conscious, unknown to her material into the infant. The infant takes this because if mom is holding it, she's not okay.

So the infant has to take it because this is all about survival. But once that infant has taken it in, the infant is problematic in that the infant feels I caused this. So now you've got a situation where the mother is seen as perfect. The infant is the troublemaker, or cause the problem, hurt the mother, and now has to hold all of this and as we talked about with masochism, sees the self as not good, not deserving of all good things. And that plays into idealism, because now we've got a mother that's seen as perfect. And can only be seen as perfect if we are the opposite, if.

We are not perfect. So we have to hold all of that. So you get splitting, you get a way in which the infant cannot tolerate seeing shades in the mother. The mother is, you know, we we then split things and it's either all good or all bad. Mother gets to stay all good. She has to. She has to. Because if she isn't, we simply are not safe and we're not going to make it. This gets laid down early. We are then primed to do this. We've got a system set up and the system goes, okay, she's all good. That's it. Mom is amazing. Next comes oh, dad, dad's amazing too, because I'm still a little baby and I need to feel completely safe.

And if I start to realize that these two people may not fully have everything under control, I am now very unsafe and I won't be able to develop. And once you've been able to sort of apply that system to your mother, it then becomes probably easier to apply it to your father and then your aunts and uncles or cousins. That's right. Now it is late. Right? So this is laid down very, very early. And then we apply it to everything. And that's the reason I want to talk about it, because we apply it to everything. So as you grow up in your family, hopefully your parents do become more human.

The shine wears off in certain places. We need this to happen. The shine wears off and maybe other siblings come and maybe people are stressed. And as you said, maybe mom's angry with dad and maybe dad's angry with mom on a day and someone's overwhelmed. And these two siblings keep picking on me. And right, slowly the shine comes off of everything. But we just keep moving. The idealization. So what tends to happen is eventually kids, you know, have somebody else that they're close to. They go to school. There's a teacher that idealization gets put onto the teacher.

I love my teacher. It's an easy place because you don't down their teacher. Maybe then you have a favorite sports star. Love this person. This is the most amazing of that team is my team. There's an idealization. Are we doing that? Why are we taking that particular sports star and turning them into this ideal thing? Because we are primed to turn everybody in the world into our mothers. And if we aren't doing that, there's something a little disturbing that it's not quite settling. And so everybody needs to be idealized. Yeah, I don't know that there's even a spot where it becomes unsettling because I think it is so layered in.

There is no daylight, you know, there's no space there. It just is. So on some level, everybody is our mother, and we're primed to do that from the start. And so there it is. It just runs through everything. Now, the opposite end of idealization is devaluation. So if you have to split things at some point, other things can get very devalued as well. Black and white thinking something's really good, something's got to be awful. But I would say the the main piece that we're going to talk about today is this place where you have to make something really good.

You cannot see the truth of it. Do we need both? So the devaluing and. It's a natural consequence of it, something is really the best right than that. Other sports team. Chances are is not going to be that other musician. That's not your favorite. Nope, nope. They're not good. And let me tell you why. And then that boosts your your favorite. Ranked. Sports star. So we do this all over the place and hopefully as we mature we have enough flexibility emotionally to let ambivalent feelings in. So what we're looking for, right, is the ability to go, well, this is you know, I really love this music.

This isn't the perfect person. Maybe there's somebody else who's better at this, but oh listen. Right. So right. There's a more ambivalence and that's more balanced. So we're looking for that more flexible is always better. So would that be what would happen had we not been given a mother's imprint that led us to idealization? If we didn't have that imprint, there'd be more balance. We're hoping, and I don't know yet, because, you know, I think people are still getting imprints. Yeah. So maybe we have to come back and however long and and see, you know.

But but at the moment this is what happens. So you get an imprint and even if you didn't get an imprint, let's just say there's a world in which that happens. You still have to rely on these people, this mother. And then whoever is around with her to take care of you. So I have a feeling it would be pretty hard to not come in and have to see those caretakers as more perfect than not, because you're powerless and you are completely dependent. So you have to imagine that state. If I start very quickly going, oh, well, you know, you're kind of you're not that responsible.

You run late all the time. You don't get everything done. You know, I don't like the way you cook dinner. What am I to do as a very dependent, small human being who can do nothing for myself? That is catastrophic. So the mind doesn't let that in. Catastrophic in that you. You'd be terrified. Because you're, you know, you're not going to be well taken care of. You may not survive. You may die, you may die, you may. Die, and you you don't have love. Will. You won't have love. You may have love would be a luxury, right? What you won't have is food, shelter, be left out.

An animal might eat you right. It's really very life or death. And that's sitting at the root of this, because that's sitting at the root of us all the time. We are out in, in the wilderness and we need tending to. We don't get, you know, we're not born and drop in within, you know, 20 minutes. We're ready to run across the Serengeti. We don't do it right. We've got many, many, many years where if you leave us alone, we die. You know, mom comes home and she's busy. It's a long day and she forgets to make dinner. You're unconscious. Is saying, I really don't need to eat.

I'm. I'll be okay until tomorrow. Mom was busy. Mom has other things on her mind. Mom's amazing. Mom's my best friend, I love her. What dinner she didn't make? I see you just to completely dismiss it. There are shades, but that would be more the idea that some of these things. Until you can tolerate it going. Oh, yeah, well, all right, mom dropped the ball on dinner tonight. But, you know, she's really warm and cuddly, and I love her, so it's okay. That's later. Right? This is very early. And it doesn't do ambivalence. It doesn't weigh both sides.

It just needs to be really black. It just goes right to it. It goes right. You have to process. There's not a big lot of space in this. That's right. Now later on we want that where you can begin to weigh things. That's much more flexibility and maturity and goal. That's the goal to get to that. But you have to know that somewhere inside lives this very first state, which is idealization. And the the reason we want to get is as you analyze people's dreams, you will see it. And even if they can tell you, yeah, well, mom had problems consciously.

They can tell you this. Mom had problems. She wasn't great at this. Some people even come in and go like that. Can't stand that woman. I don't talk to her anymore. Guess what you may still see in the dreams an enormous amount of idealization, that there is still a primitive piece of that person who is operating under the idea that this is the movie star, rock star, best author. Whatever you happen to love, best chef in the entire world now that is important because you're getting below the conscious level. You're seeing that there is still this enormous attachment.

And if I am still in part living in that state, then there is this whole world in which I cannot judge everything properly because I have got a defense going against the truth. When you're young, this defense mechanism called idealization lets you hold on to a perfect mother because you need to. As you grow up, you want to let as much of that go as you can, and we will still find it. Believe it or not, even in very successful people, that there is still, deep down, this idealization. It's going to color the way you see things and we put it on everything.

So we don't just put it on, as you said, the next person we're going to date you here people, they meet someone and immediately what is it. Right. Oh my gosh, this is the one. This is amazing. This is you know, I got this new job. This is it. I am set. Now some of that may be true. And there are real feelings and some of that is still sitting on this very old idealization. I cannot let in the negative because I'll die. So I thought we could look at some dreams or pieces of dreams that patients bring in. Now, a lot of these examples, the interpret nation may or may not focus on this piece, but certainly as the person listening to the dream, you're going to hear it and you want to know it's there and you may touch on it.

Sometimes it is the main focus to say, okay, what what you're not able to do is take off your rose colored glasses. And the idea is that the dreams change over the course of time, where the patient is recognizing that that mother, that parent isn't whom they've ideal ize them to be. Yes. And you're hopefully doing that consciously. You hear the person, maybe you had a patient who will come in and say, oh no, my childhood was great. I love my mother. And and it's not that that isn't true, but there isn't a lot of room to sort of say I love my mother, warts and all.

Right. I see that my mother was a real person, and she had her great side and her not so great side. Okay. More balanced. Yes. So as you are moving, you will see a shift in the dreams and hopefully in what the person is saying. But you also really want to see it in the dreams because we're very good at intellectualizing and saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand my mom was not perfect. Whatever we want to say about her, she struggled with this. She wasn't always nice. Sometimes she was unavailable, whatever somebody's complaints might be, but they may still dream about it in a way that will say she was the queen of England.

She was amazing. She walked on water, wore a halo. All of these ways in which you can see we pull from the external world, right? The dreams will show the imagery of all of the things our idealization has created. Royalty. These are next to God, right? These people deserve to be the rulers. Well, that's a complete idealization. But it originates with mom. Then dad and family. I think I lived most of my life doing this, idealizing my parents. And as I grew up, I didn't just put them at the top of the heap. I let them have some faults, but I rationalized them away like, that's okay.

You know, maybe, maybe I don't understand that thing, or I didn't like that. But they still deserve all of this glory that I give them. And there's nothing wrong with the way I was raised. Everything was great. It was perfect. It took a long time for me to actually let them be people. That's what we're looking for. That's right. That's a more mature stance. It has more flexibility and what it lets you do, as if you can start to see them really with more depth as real human beings. Then you can see everything. If you have to hold that, then that's always sitting there dictating how much truth you're allowed to see in any person or situation.

Big shift, big shift. Even in romantic scenarios. For me, I would meet someone and and go through the same process, that same sort of rationalization that I was applying to my parents. It's like, not quite, but this is what I need. This is what I deserve. This is their perfect. Even though, you know, I kind of maneuvered my way into thinking they were perfect. Right. And you'll minimize the downside. Yeah, right. And focus on the positive. And as you're saying it, you're describing here we use a variety of defenses. Normally if we're using one and you know, we're using many meaning if we're trying to hold on to this early place where mom was all had to be all good, we use a lot of different what we call defense mechanisms.

We use a lot of different ways of splitting things off, seeing it only as perfect, denying something exists, and if we carry too much of that with us, we end up, as you're describing, in places where over and over we might do the same thing because we haven't let ourselves see the full truth. Wouldn't it be the same feeling? So when you're relying on your mother, that's how you're going to survive, and you have to make her perfect so that you can survive? You probably take that whole thing and apply it to someone whom you're thinking about investing in a relationship with, to the point where you're thinking, if I let this go, if I if I say no to this, am I going to survive?

You might right. It may feel that life or death consciously, we may have to even go into dreams. Aims to see is that something right? How closely tied, how early a feeling is this? Does this take you all the way back to potentially fetal life or, or your infancy where you're saying, oh, I feel like this is the person who has to take care of me? And if I let this relationship go, that would be fundamentally giving up my mother, which would be death. So yes, it goes that deep and you can trace it all the way back. Most of the time. You need a dream to do that.

When we get into the dream work very quickly, we can see that this idea that we've cut the umbilical cord from our mothers is sort of just an idea that we really are attached to them, even if they've passed on, even if they weren't around because the unconscious completely red, that person and knows all of it. And so it continues to be an anchor, whether or not the person is around. Exactly. It was just looking for the right word anchor. It's interesting how so much of what we think is our truth is not, and how defended we are when it comes to that.

No, no no, my, you know, everything's great. It's great. My mom is great. I mean, I speak from personal experience and how much you're invested in holding on to that. It's so hard to let go of. And for me, the only way I got there, the only way I got there, was by looking at my dreams. And to finally have the courage to just think about it as something other than what I kept telling myself for decades was the truth. To just think about it and realize that my world didn't come crashing down because I opened the door a little bit, and then I could open the door a little bit more and a little bit more.

And that's the idea. Your mind is a beautiful tool to bring you, little by little, what your ready to know about what it was really like, who really raised me. And part of that is that the people who have been idealized also don't want to give up that spot, and that shows in some of the dreams I'm going to talk about. Once we have that spot, you can imagine Mom and Dad aren't too quick to say, oh yeah, please stop idealizing me. Right. Feels pretty good, right? It's really nice to know this child really thinks, you know, the the sun rises and sets with you.

Oh, it feels warm and lovely. And you want to let that child hopefully move away from that enough so that that child's entire life isn't colored by having to maintain that idea. But I can see from a parent's point of view how you don't want to falter. You don't want to say, oh, honey, I made a mistake. Here's what I did, and I am really sorry because that takes a little chunk out of your pedestal. And are you raising your child in a better way by doing that? Or do you need to be this perfect thing? Because that's how you think they'll survive.

And that's how you were raised? Yeah, right. How much idealization were you required to do? Right, right. It's it's much more in vogue now for parents to be able to say to their children, oh, I made a mistake here. You know, I apologize or I hurt your feelings. I can see that I apologize, but up until very recently, you didn't do that. It was just because I said so. There's no questioning. Right? So we have lots of ways in which it was just idealize me. Take whatever I say in as the truth and the rule you live by, and that's that. And because you said so and I questioned you, and that caused you to say that I'm a bad person for inquiring.

Yes. So we very quickly repeat that very early situation, which is, oh, mom's perfect. I took an imprint. I am imperfect both as an individual and then of course, as a group. And how much do we idealize our leaders, our presidents, our kings and queens or anybody who's an authority figure is then a place we can put this very early dynamic. Bail added another piece that I think is interesting, which is this original idealization, probably started with our connection to spirit. So spirit would be the sort of all loving, original mother, great mother, great father, and so our separation in part from spirit has led this to transfer to our human mothers, but that originally this was really about our connection to the divine and the all positive love.

Now we've got it shifted, and we've got all kinds of people who are happy to step in and sort of say, oh, but I'm God, I'm the Great Mother, the great Father. I will take care of you, I will save you. I will do everything. But their human. But they're human. And operating from the same system. Operating from an imprint and having idealization themselves. That's right. And so if we look around, we can see. Look, there's no way that politicians who let the kind of inequality happen that we have all over the world are really not operating from this position where somebody is perfect and somebody is in perfect and it all gets reenacted.

Yes. It's it's as if we, the collective, are at a stage where an individual might be where you've started to be able to address some of this through the course of looking at your dreams. And you're you're seeing that what you've based your life on is not accurate. And you're willing to take some steps to see the truth of the matter. Yes, that may be the team you've been rooting for. You picked isn't perfect, and you can let some of those ideas in. And then that lets you make a better choice for yourself. Let's you have some critical thinking. I wanted to ask you about this split, or this backing away from the connection with the divine or with spirit.

Can you describe that? What occurs to make that happen? Or why doesn't it exist fully anymore? Did it exist fully? I probably did at some point. And then we seem to be in a space in a time where that isn't happening. I think there is a movement to get people back. It seems from watching people's dreams that there is a big shift in a pull towards a reconnection to the divine, to a deep part of ourselves that knows that our unconscious is the connection, and that if we can go there, what we have access to is pure love. If the group can shift towards love, and in this reservoir of pure love, where we don't have to fight and I don't have to idealize you and then devalue you, well, what if everybody could just have love?

And what if somebody didn't always have to be in the down position? Much better. Then we could spend our time and effort doing all kinds of things, like not having wars and having something nice. We could all make mistakes. We could all change our minds. We could all see the truth, have questioned. That's right. We could become more evolved because we wouldn't treat ourselves in such harsh ways. We would be connected and getting fed. Love. You know, I so many times patients throughout treatment, this isn't just at the beginning, but they will show you that they were not fed, they did not have.

And it's always about love. And so if you can add that you don't just need to get all of this love from mom, but you have this big reservoir of the divine from which to pull, everybody can be fed, and you're not having to just rely on somebody who also wasn't fed to try to feed you. Doesn't that take a huge weight off your shoulders? It really does. That would relieve us all. It's it continues to amaze me how when you think about the outside world, anything that's happening not inside of you, how much you can relate it back to what's going on inside of you.

You know the, the turmoil in the world, the distrust, the idealization, all of it is all happening inside. And that's, you know, so much to clear up. Right. And that's the reason this isn't a purely selfish endeavor, because we can only create what is inside of us. So if you can work on cleaning up whatever happened to you and how you felt about it and get to really know deeply right face the truth about everything. Look at all the dirty laundry. Yes, you are helping yourself, but you're also bringing to the world new possibilities and to your group, be it your family or your country.

New possibilities. Because now something can be created from a more healthy, more mature, flexible place. Maybe it doesn't always have to be good team, bad team. Maybe we can all come together. And maybe you give a little, take a little. You know, you come to meet in the middle somehow. Yes. Now Bail goes a step further and says, in fact, everything happening externally to you is a reenactment of what happened in the womb, goes back even further and just says, look, all of this was at work. This all got laid down very, very early, maybe slightly after birth, but certainly, but mostly in the womb.

It was already set up. These templates were already laid down. And so everything outside is actually a reenactment of what happened inside him. And he knew this to be true by looking at. The dream, looking at dreams. Quite the moment when you realize your dreams are not just something that is meaningless, that or silly. That happens every night, that you, some of us don't even remember our dreams, but to go from them being just meaningless or fanciful into becoming like a treasure trove of information that you can use to heal yourself, to find love.

That's right. It's really something. And patients will come and say, well, what do I do? Well, listen to your dreams. And I know sometimes that's less than satisfying because it isn't a concrete well, read this book, do these exercises, and then, you know your self-esteem will get better, but your dreams actually are a self-help book specifically written for you. Say step one. No. This step to understand this. Step three let your mind expand by feeling these things you know. See where you didn't understand something properly because there was no space to do that.

I love that you called it that. That's all it is. A self-help book, completely all up, just about you. Just about you. And it's right there, right? I read it every night. Exactly while speaking of dreams. Okay, I'll talk about a few. So the first one I think will be pretty transparent to people. But this is a type of dream. You see, often I'm coming out of a really fancy hotel and waiting in the valet line and all of a sudden this big limo pulls up and the doors open and I get a look inside. It's these two famous musicians and I am invited into the car.

I, of course, get in the car and it pulls away. That's it. Short dream. And that was the whole dream here. Some of these I pulled apart. This is just the whole dream. And as I spoke with the person, what became clear is that this was a complete idealization of the parents. They're rockstars. They live this amazing life. They have a limo. When you look in, you know, everybody can imagine. You open the door. My God, what am I seeing into this life? I never have access to? And I'm allowed in. And I'm allowed in, right? So it just shows, you know?

And this dream could have been they were royalty. It was the king and queen. It was the president. It was right. All of the the ways we idealize people. And this will be a dream. And so what you get to do here is sort of pull it apart, go through it. Well, who the musicians. And you want to find out all of it. But, you know, I can tell you because I did all that work that what it came down to was, oh, these are your parents, and this is how you have had to see them because you needed to and they needed you to. So that's a pretty transparent dream.

But people can look for those sorts of things in their own dreams. You may get an idea. And that the importance we somehow, or maybe it's just me place on these people that we put in this huge light. Our movie stars, our royalty. You think about being in their presence and you think, I, I don't even think I have anything to I what would I say, what would I do? My hands are going to get all clammy and I think to some degree that easily transfers over to our parents. If I step out of line, I'm going to have these terrible feeling. So I'm just going to do what little I can to just be in their presence and not upset anything.

Yes. And it is just being in their presence this, you know, and sort of seeing them is amazing. Whether you get to am I going to mess it up? Can I say something, can I not? Most of the time this arises from such an early age. Didn't say anything anyway, right? Right. That's another step back, right? Right. Requires thinking again. Right. And and so this is just this emotional feeling which is, oh, these people and the musicians are an easy place to put this idealization because chances are you don't know these people. You know nothing about them.

You know what you read. You know, we know the stories. Maybe you get a little gossip sometimes, you know, a little bit of dirt, but generally you just get to hear how talented, what a rich life, private jets and everything. So it feeds that idealization because you never have to confront the truth the way you couldn't confront the truth when you were so little and depended on this person. And I think that's important to keep in mind as we talk about these things, because I tend to do it myself. We're in our dreams. We may be using current day events, current day people, but really what we're doing is talking to ourselves about our first moments.

A lot of the time, especially when you start looking at your dreams and seeing things. Yeah, I mean, some people start at the top and some people start at the bottom, meaning some people. The dream may be about what's happening today or some important issue. Most of the time, if you dig down a little bit, meaning you investigate a symbol, it very quickly yields opens up to very early life because that's the foundation. And if you're going to fix something way up here, you better go to the basement. So the mind's not going to waste a lot of time.

It's going to put it in there. Now are we going to find it right away? How defended. How protected will that information be? Are you going to be allowed to associate to it in a way that lets us dip down? Maybe. Or that may take a while, because as you can see, we put up a lot of defenses against seeing the truth about our earliest times. So one of the things we do to not see the truth, we have to do a fair amount of gymnastics so we can deny things. And a lot of what people will dream about is this denial, which is a separate defense mechanism.

But we use so freely and is such a part of idealization that one of the types of dreams we see in that vein is something like, I lost my cell phone, my cell phone went dead. I'm trying to call, and I can't dial a number or my computer that completely disconnected. Now I know it's a big thing on the internet. People will say, oh, you don't dream about cell phones ended up, that's not true. People dream about cell phones all the time in their computers. I do. Yes, well, and a lot of people do, actually, this is a very common dream. And what we see in it is that you are to be disconnected from yourself so that you cannot feel all of these feelings.

You couldn't tolerate early on. So if I am disconnected or cannot make a call, or can't find my cell phone or my computer, what I can't have is access to my true feelings about a situation. And that originates way back at the beginning when you had to be perfect. And I was the problem and you were idealized, and that's that. Because if you can connect to that computer, you're going to be able to access right stuff. That's right. You will get the information. So obviously, if a person is dreaming about these types of things, what you want to see over time is that first time you can't find your cell phone, then the next time you find it, you couldn't dial, and then the next time you dial and you break out of whatever room you were locked in, we're going to see a progression of the mind saying, I can tolerate more of the ambivalence now.

I can tolerate facing these feelings that will lead me to not idealize the way I did. But I'm growing. I can do that. And again, this doesn't mean, you know, there's a lot of people walking around who have done their developmental line the way we expect it is successful. They have met their stages and milestones and believe it or not, still in the dream you will see that there is idealization all over the place and you'll see it in the life as well. But and these are sometimes really smart people, it has nothing to do with intellect. It's that we are primed to do this.

Here's another dream that tells us about how this idealization can get held in place. The patient is smoking marijuana and the authorities are there and in full support of it, celebrating its legalization. That is a snippet from a dream. We have to talk about it with the patient and see what does this mean? Why does this come up? But what often comes out of dreams like this is again, be disconnected. Be so stoned that what you can't do is know what you feel. And what you also can't do is see the truth about the authorities. See here the authorities are celebrating it's legalization.

They want to not be taken off. The idealization thrown. Now this is unconscious in the parents too. So it's not just going one way, right is saying I need to idealize you. And the parents are saying, and we need to be idealized. On the same page. Ask us to be responsible for any of these human frailties we have. I want to stay king or queen. You stay subject. All is right with the world. So the patient is busy mentally smoking marijuana to keep in the subject position. I'll stay the serf. You can be the landowner, but that means I have to mess with my mind.

That means I somehow cannot stay in a sober state to see the truth. Well, if you have to go through your life stoned in this way, meaning disconnected from yourself, you clearly that is going to impact your life all over the place. But it holds the idealization in place. And that you legalized it. You you put your stamp of. Approval sanctioned to. See this is okay. This is the way to go. That's right. Your parents say good job, but it's completely backward. And I know this is part of a bigger dream, but when your patient understood what you were telling them, did this, then sort of open up the doors for more understanding of this.

Yes. And that's the idea is the more you interpret this and this, you're not going to see this once. If this is going on, you are going to see this in many, many ways over long periods of time. And sometimes you get at it and you analyze some of it, and then it shifts and it changes and the person grows, and then it rears its head again and you know, it's like, oh, well, now I'm going to know more. Okay, well, maybe I'm supposed to be stoned again. And then you work through it. It must be hard for all of us to. I mean, we just can't completely step away from what we've known easily.

So we I would imagine you're like, wait a minute, wait. I got to go back to that safe space. I know it's not the truth, but it's what I know. And it's safe. Yes. And it. And it pulls you back. That's already some thinking involved in it again. These things are so early for us. It's like there's no thinking. I'm back with mom because it got scary. And if I'm scared and I think something's unsafe and I might die, I'm going right back to her. And if I go back to her, then she's perfect. She knows everything. I'll just. Whatever she needs, right? And she may need you to be stoned so that you don't say.

Mom, you know, you were really immature. You weren't the nicest mom all the time. And even if it isn't really nice, mother, it doesn't matter. She's still got unconscious things that got projected into this infant, and that infant has to contend with them and still fully depend on her and take all of the blame. So we still get this, you know, even even in successful lives, you still have this operating. It's really amazing. It just seems so simple. We never want our mothers to be imperfect. That's it. And it's so not reality. And but yet we take that idea and apply it everywhere.

That's right. We take this really early idea made up between a mom and a fetus, and then a mom and an infant. And that's the rule for ever. And that's the whole point of all of this work, is that that is the rule, not just for idealization. It's the rule for everything. It starts that early and it gets laid down in such a strong way because it is life or death. Animals in the jungle learn very quickly what plants to eat and what animal to mess with or not. Right? It's life or death. Same idea. Similarly, we have another dream a little more complicated.

In this dream, the patient says, I see Samantha sitting with a few other people. She says hi and was very friendly. She tells me that she likes my hair and she has some things to tell me and to talk to me about. I'm feeling really excited about this. This is again a small piece, but this is a scene in a dream which sounds very simple. Now, as you unpack it, what becomes clear is the patient says, oh, no relationship to Samantha. But Samantha is now it's actually Sam, and Sam is the father of this patient, so not overly disguised. It was pretty easy to get there.

But what the patient is really saying is, oh my gosh, all I wanted was this person's attention. In the dream, it was like the cool person at school is suddenly talking to you and it, oh my God, this is amazing, right? And you just think, I don't know how I got so lucky, but yeah, I want to be in the cool club. Okay. And then as the dream goes on with the patient says as Samantha starts talking to her and says, oh, you know, I really loved your hair so much before I loved your old hairstyle. And the patient is sort of sitting there thinking, oh, you know, okay, well, what about my hairstyle now?

Not so much. But this person is saying, remember, you know, go back. I loved that old hairstyle. Now the person is a little defeated because I thought Samantha was, you know, just wanted to be friends forever now. But what? What it really turns out the patient is talking about is saying before you realized all of these truths about your father and maybe your mother, too, that's when your father liked you better. You've changed. You now have some knowledge. You've changed your hairstyle, meaning the head. You've changed this. And now what we start to see is that that father, who was idealized, is not happy about losing the throne.

And so the whole dream is written to simply say, my father. We could say parents, but here it's really the father is not happy that I am now so much more connected to the truth and just simply saying, my father's a human being, not royalty, but that unconsciously to the father is not a good thing. And the father lets this patient know by saying, I liked your old hairstyle. I liked the way your mind was before you started understanding all of this. Now, the problem for this patient is that the life before treatment was a disaster. Patient couldn't hold a job, personal relationships were chaotic, very unhappy.

But you can see that while the parents are ecstatic in the change, consciously, unconsciously, when you go to the dream, the pressure is I liked your old hairstyle better. So what's the message to the patient? Don't change. Leave it all the way it was. We like the system. So now the parents are very supportive of the treatment. They don't know that unconsciously they'd like to keep the idealization. So that's why all of this is so important. Even in lives that are going well, or in patients that are working hard and finding the truth. There is so much opposition to us changing this piece that was fundamental.

We do not like to do it. It just it's too scary and it might mean death. So we hold on to it. So I would just say to everybody, you have to look and see, where do you idealize things? Where do you not question, where do you not let in the full picture? You may or may not know that, but then go to your dreams and see. See if you have places where you get in the limo with the rock stars. That at least might give you a hint of what's going on. And then for all of us, we would say, look, let's shift this. Stop doing that out in the world. It's not helping us stop idealize being people.

Nobody is going to fix everything for you. And I think these dreams, thank you very much. Show us, like you just said, some simple avenues that we can go down ourselves in our dreams where we see similar representations and we can begin to feel what that feels like. We can think about it and, and maybe make some shifts. And where are we applying that in our own families, our upbringings? And where are we applying that in the world? And does it really fit right? Are we able to tolerate the truth? Where do we make excuses? Where do we deny? Sometimes we're aware of that, sometimes we're not, but we're all doing it in some way so we can all look well.

Thank you so. Much. Thank you. Really amazing. I have a lot of food for thought myself and lots of questions, but that's it for us for time today. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you. Thank you so much. Please follow, rate and share the podcast and pass this episode along to someone who might need it. Might that be all that this is? And Now Love, listen to your dreams. Live from your heart. And.