Intergenerational Trauma: Unraveling Our Deepest Self - A Somatic Psychology Perspective

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. Our guest today is Kate Beauchene. Kate is a psychotherapist in Los Angeles and has been in practice for ten years. Dr. Bail's theories have influenced the way she treats patients and dream interpretation has helped Kate in her own therapy. Hi, Kate. Hi. Thank you for being here today. My pleasure. We're so lucky there are so few of you, unfortunately, that know of Dr. Bail's work. And we really want this to get out there because it is ever so helpful to all of us as individuals.

And then we can take that out into the world and help each other. So how did you come to know about Dr. Bail's work? So most of my friends are therapists, and when I had moved back to Los Angeles from Colorado, was looking for a therapist. And it took a while and I was referred to somebody who was trained by Dr. Bail, and that person is themselves a therapist. So they knew enough to kind of talk about the maternal imprint and and thought this will be a good fit for you, which it has been. good. So you're still in therapy with that person? I am, yes.

And she uses the dream as a way to help you deal with your issues, your trauma. How does that work? And my imprint and your imprint. So I bring dreams to my therapy weekly. And this is assuming the dreams keep coming, which I'm fortunate that they typically do. And we go through them. I lay out my dream. Then I share my association. So whatever thoughts come up off of the dream, some of them make sense. A lot of times they don't. And then the therapist is really sort of perceiving all of this kind of stitching together the bits and pieces and really listening for what is unconscious so that they can interpret that back to me.

So in that process, you're sharing with her what you dreamed she's saying back to you what some of these things in your dream may mean. And she's starting maybe with some questions like what does the color red mean to you? Or how did you find yourself on that diving board on that day? Or are those symbols that red, that diving board things that she already has tagged as meaning a certain thing? We always want to keep it fairly individual, but within that, I'd say there are some things that are are pretty universal water, you know, bodies of water.

Usually, you know, this person's talking about the unconscious. They're talking about the emotional body. That's the big one that comes to mind. So there are some things that you typically get a hit on. Yeah, this usually means this or is some kind of commentary on what's happening and in this person's emotional world. And I love that you say that about the water because you're not the first person throughout these podcasts has said that about water. But how did we come to think that water meant that it must have something to do with what people describe their feeling when they have this dream about water?

Perhaps. There's not some book where it says water. This. I mean, there may be, but. Well, I mean, my my mind goes in a lot of directions with it. I have my own pretty significant relationship with water. But there's the primordial waters. There's the fact that we're in water in the womb, essentially, that we are made up of water. So I think in so many ways can't help our water. Important or mean something. Yeah. Yeah. The language of the dream is pretty much individual. Every person has their own language and the interpretation gets to that unique language.

Yes. And within my understanding of Dr. Bail's work and what I have found effective as I do that work, we want to stay really close to the dream. We want to make sure to stay really close to the person and their dream and their associations, because that's the way to get to an interpretation that's going to be most impactful for them. So what do you what do you mean by that? Stay close to the dream. Like not drift off and think about somebody else's thought process. Just somebody else's. And I'd say probably mine is is going to be this somebody else in.

You know, now I'm thinking as I'm in a therapist chair, but I might have a meaning attached to a certain symbol that comes up in a dream. And that's fine. I can sort of like register that and hold it, but I don't want to go with that necessarily if I'm not hearing it in the person's associations for their own dream. That's got to be tough because you would I would think you would just kind of glom on to that because it feels comfortable to you. It's it's what, you know, that thing to mean and to kind of let go of that and hold it at bay is a task.

It is a fundamental part of the the role of a therapist. So I'd say it may have been tougher at the outset, but at this point, it's kind of second nature. It's like everything just becomes a theory rather than a I, I feel this so strongly. It must be true. Now, I do get some kind of internal signals when I am on the right path or when something resonates. So that's helpful. Like what? Goosebumps is the most kind of noticeable one that's sort of all over body Goosebumps or, like, a little kind of chill. Typically happens when I've, like, really gotten to the right interpretation.

That said, the thing that is clear resonates with the person. This is a little off track, but the Goosebumps thing, since I've had my experience with Dr. Bail and learned so much more about love and caring for each other, there are moments now where someone is telling me something that they're going through, something about their life, something either super fabulous and happy or terribly sad. And I just feel this wash of goosebumps come over my body. And that never happened before. And I feel like part of the process of understanding Dr. Bail's methodology and coming to terms with your true self in involves listening to what your body is saying to you.

And when I feel those goose bumps, I, I note it so that you say you feel goosebumps too. Is is validating mine. Cause I was like, Wow. Now that's just that's nothing, but it's something. Yeah. And also in your work, you, it's I think somatic therapy is what it's called. Could you describe that a little bit? Yeah. So my original background in this sort of the psychotherapy landscape shape is in somatic psych. Soma is the word, the Greek word for body. So it's basically body based therapy. It's kind of a broad umbrella that encompasses different modalities, different sort of theoretical orientations.

Dance movement therapy would be under that umbrella. EMDR, which you might have heard about because it's pretty popular these days. Could you describe that to us? Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing, I believe, is what the MDR stands for, and it's a trauma therapy that involves kind of reprocessing memories, using the visual fields. Wow. So somebody kind of figured out that I think it has something to do with bilateral stimulation. To be fair, I'm not trained in EMDR, so this is kind of my loose understanding of it. This person figured out that something about kind of switching back and forth visually was helpful as she was trying to work through some traumatic memories.

So and how do you use this type of therapy in your therapy? So these days, if you are kind of a fly on the wall in my sessions, they often look pretty. Talk therapy ask. But I am always like kind of keeping track of people on a body level. So noticing where the breath is, where the breath isn't what's happening pastorally, what's happening with the directionality of the weight. So like, is the person able to really, like, settle into their chair and kind of give their weight over to the chair or the earth or the whatever? Or are they a little bit upright and kind of suspended And.

And what would that mean to you if someone's sort of settled in comfortably versus someone who's is trying to keep themselves suspended? What do you see? A lot of that stuff is is like pretty, pretty intuitive and goes along with the the psychoanalytic principle of it all means something, right, like that, that every symptom is symbolic. So rigid posture may be a hint that there's some rigidity in the personality or the thought process that being able to give oneself over to the chair or the earth or whatever would suggest a level of safety and ability to sort of yields potentially a receptivity.

And then when that goes too far, it's wearing collapse, right? Then it's not, this chair is supporting me. It's I'm part of the chair. Yeah. And that kind of suspended. I can't let my weight rest anywhere. It speaks to kind of a level of, like, hypervigilance and difficulty settling, feeling safe and secure. So then how do you speak to your patient about that? Is that a you don't just say to them you're pretty rigid there? No, it just helps you converse with them. It helps you understand kind of a path to take. Like you might take this path if they've totally settled in and you're going to take this path if they're really upright and suspended.

Yeah, a lot of it. I'm not going to take up with them, but it's it's part of my ongoing assessment and I'm sort of noticing, okay, does that is that sort of flexible does that seem to do things seem to loosen or get more relaxed when I say a particular thing or does the opposite happen? And what's what's going on over time? Does what I'm seeing in the body sort of map onto what I'm hearing in terms of their thinking, their emotions, their behavior? Usually, yes, but not always. It would be hard to imagine that someone would be upright and sort of suspended, but yet feel the opposite.

Yeah. Most people then they come to you knowing that you treat in this fashion. I would say the somatic piece of my work is a draw. Yeah, it's out there and, you know, whatever my bios that are available are. Yeah. And do you use some of Dr. Bails work in your practice, then? Yeah. And is that typically starting from a place of dream interpretation, or are you accessing the maternal imprint in another way? So when dreams are available, it's great and very helpful in terms of working the maternal imprint. It's not the only way. And so because I have a few, I'd say more than a few patients who don't really dream or don't recall their dreams or aren't so interested in working that way explicitly, then it becomes more about understanding who parents or early caregivers were.

Grandparents kind of going going up the chain in terms of the lineage and understanding the history of this person's family, and then kind of connecting that to what they are very frequently replicating in their own life in some way. Are people receptive to seeing, discovering this information about their lineage, about their parents? I ask that question because so many times I've seen people say, you know, don't go there, don't talk about my parents. Everything was perfect. And it takes a long time to be able to get past that without feeling like you're hurting your parents or dissing them in some way.

Yeah. Is that tough for your patients? Was that tough for you in your therapy? That was not so tough for me. But I tend more toward devaluation than idealization, so it wouldn't have been my struggle. It is certainly tough for people and definitely folks that I see struggle with this feeling of betrayal or shame that arises when they're talking about the things that parents did not so well. Yes. And how it impacted them. And I think, too, we all grow up with what we grow up with. And whether it's terrible or great, in a way, it's great. It's all you know.

So you don't know that there's another way. You don't know that there's a gentle, loving way. If you don't have it, you think what you have is what you have. And some people do know that there's another way because they get exposed. You know, they're out a friend's house or they're like, this family seems to do it differently. And my family and it feels better over at this house. Yes, you're correct in that we need to make that way that it is in our family of origin the way that it is. Yeah, right. We really orient around that because it would be so psychologically unsafe not to.

Right. And that's how we can survive. We make it all okay. And in doing so, if it is actually not okay and we have to make it okay, a lot of times how that gets achieved is people make themselves bad. Yes, right. Well, this has to be all okay. So I must be bad. There must be something wrong with me. Right. Which is what Dr. Bail was pointing to in that even in utero, we're taking on the distress of our mother in order to help our mother survive. Because we're not going to go anywhere without her being intact. And obviously, this isn't really happening, but it's some process we have to go through to make the whole system work, which really isn't working but keeps us going.

And I see that the only way that you can make it work is to take all of the badness and trash and make it your own. Yeah. And then that's what our mother did. And her mother and our fathers. And again, today, I really want to see how we can get to the place of understanding that there's a way to have compassion for those people that brought us up, that gave us life, you know, And we don't have to bash them for giving us the life we have. How do we learn through this process to treat those people with compassion and then also not try to mold them or make them become something they're not?

Let them be who they are. Yeah. That the wish to mold parents and spouses and all kinds of people is profound. I guess we all start from a place where even though unconsciously we've made ourselves bad and we're carrying all this trash when we come into therapy, I think we're often trying to figure out how we can deal with other people or fix other people so that they can make our lives okay. Yes, that is that is what a lot of people are starting out trying to do. Right. How can I just get to the right thing to say or the right thing to do to make them be different?

Yeah, we want to get people away from that and to how can I just tolerate, deal with have compassion for. Who they are and do we do this? Look for that sort of answer because we can't really afford to think of ourselves as being any more bad than we already are. If I already feel bad and I'm coming in and I need to take care of something, and if I could, if you could just tell me how I talked to this person so that they stop doing what they're doing, I don't come to you and say, What am I doing here? Because it's so uncomfortable for me to say that it's me, but yet I've grown up taking all the bad and and trying to keep it from my parents.

Well, I think that you're you're on the right track here in that the two things are related because the the being the bad one and being the problem when really there's some stuff going on out here that is problematic, it it sort of gives you back some agency. If I'm the problem, then presumably I could do something to change that, which isn't really true most of the time. Right? The problem is kind of baked into the family system. Yeah. And we can find ways of working with it. And certainly the system could get some help. But we ourselves usually can't just make a systemic change for a family or a group.

So I think it follows that same idea that, like, I have the agency and there's something I can just do that's going to exact change over here in this individual and get them to treat me like I want to be treated or whatever we're trying to accomplish. So that's the notion that I think we as therapists or certainly me as a therapist, I'm trying to disabuse people of, well, we don't have so much power over what anyone else does. And what do you see happens when people come to terms with that? They get less angry and they get more to the compassion part.

And I'd say that is really well accomplished through Dr. Bail's work. Right. Because when we can talk about what's gone wrong in our family or upbringing or just been painful, then we can start to metabolize it. And when we can do that effectively, and a big part of that is putting these things into context, right? This is why my mother is this way. My parents are this way. My upbringing was this way. Then the softening, that sort of understanding and compassion is really a byproduct. And I feel the same way about forgiveness. And this is sort of my own idea about it.

I know there's a lot out there about just forgiveness as kind of a starting point and a thing that you just do and maybe come back to over and over again. So people will often say like, I just need to forgive my mom or I just need to. Right. But it's like even in the way that they say it, you can feel how far away they are from being able to do that. And what I've observed is that when you put the context, when you really understand that softening comes in and then the forgiveness is just there. Right. It's just sort of a natural outcome. I've thought about that.

I wonder how we got to this place where it's almost just a set of words, this forgiveness. I feel like that's disruptive, that we're getting away with something by not really feeling the feelings behind the forgiveness. I mean, if you can get there like that and it's authentic, great. But most of the time it's not. It seems like it's a way to just put that on a shelf and, you know, let it stew over there still. But it's a little in the background, but maybe not really. You know, it's not that you've done away with it. You've just pushed it aside.

Yeah, I think depending. But that's another place. The somatic piece comes in because it's like we feel the resonance of somebody saying something that is in alignment with their internal feeling about the thing. And so, you know, if it's I forgive her, it's like, kind of on a cellular bodily level, at an unconscious level, that doesn't strike me as true. Yeah. And can you help people see that? Yeah. Does that present itself through dreams or through this somatic therapy or even just through talk therapy, I guess. Any which way you can get to it eventually.

It's a little bit of that. All roads lead to the same place kind of idea. Yes. If someone's listening and feeling and in tune with the conversation. Yeah. And and I'd say most fundamentally, what we're trying to help people with, or at least in the way that I'm working as a therapist and being worked with as a patient. We're just trying to get people back to the feeling. Because it gets disavowed. Covered over. Translated into a different feeling. So many things happen. But when you can get back to the feeling and re-experience it and do it in a container that is safe and hold you well, that's kind of everything.

It is. I'm not sure that all therapists provide such a thing, and I wish that they did. You know, there's a lot of therapy that requires some amount of medication and that has its place, I'm sure. But I'm worried that this practice isn't seeing the way you would like it to be seen or the way Dr. Baily would like it to be seen. I feel like this idea of knowing our feelings is so alien and that we're so busy as a society that we just want to soothe everything, tamp it down, whatever it takes, so that we can all continue through our day, and that sharing our feelings and bringing them up on an individual basis or across a society is just too much trouble.

Yeah, I think that that is how it goes. And there have been a lot of generations of parenting where the feelings really were not put on an altar, so to speak. Yes. Right. So a lot of the messaging that kids got was kind of get in your place, right? Pipe down. Quiet down. I'll give you something to cry about. This really sort of punitive, disciplinarian, frustrated attitude about people having feelings. We feel the most unabashedly when we're kids. We're just like kids are just little balls of emotion and it's not particularly refined and you don't really know exactly what to do with it.

So it's just gets expressed and it's a hard thing to know what to do with that when you didn't come from a family that knew what to do with it and didn't do much with it other than to tell you stop. Yeah, my sense is and sort of what I hear being talked about increasingly is that that itself is shifting that that this sort of current generation or two of parents, there's movement toward actually really attending to feelings. That's great. Yeah, I do see that in some young parents listening to them speak to their children. And I think about how that little kid is being told that his feelings are valid even though they don't suit the parent at the time.

You know, the parent may just want to jump through the window, but instead, they're they're giving this kid a space to feel. Yeah. And I think that's just refreshing and new. And I hope it sticks. I hope it sticks to and I think to your point, it's not quite happening broadly enough yet, but there does seem to be movement toward that and an understanding that it's valuable. Of course, this idea of Dr. Bail in his work and moving it forward and keeping it going and he didn't want it to die when he died, is really why we're here. And for me, you're one of these fabulous people that can help bring this further into our knowledge, into our society.

How else can we how can we grow this? How can I mean, not all of us can afford a therapist and not all of us understand therapy, But yet I think almost all of us want more than what we have. That was a giant 12 questions wrapped up in one. How do we grow? This is a good question. Right. And there's. There's sort of the way that it's happening that that I know of and I'm a part of, which is you get with a therapist who's trained in Dr. Belzer. And, you know, if you have one who was trained by Dr. Bail, Lucky, lucky. And there's a lot of learning that happens in your own treatment.

So that's part of it. If you could have supervision, that's a great thing too, because there are so few people that are in this niche of psychoanalytic theory. It's a little hard, but as you say, you know, there's there's a few people my peers, that are doing the work and then certainly the older generation that was trained by Bail himself. Yes. And for us laypeople, what is supervision? Supervision is a process that therapists engage in, ideally, basically consultation with a sort of seasoned therapist or analyst, and you bring them the cases that you're working on.

So you talk about your own patients and struggles that you're having or what's happening in this or that case and get another kind of mind to think with about what's going on with the person I see. And do all therapists do that? All therapists do that as they're training. It's it's kind of built into the like, education and licensure process. And then at a certain point, you're licensed and you're out in the world doing your work. And at that point, it's it's sort of voluntary. I guess seems highly beneficial. I wish that all of us had supervision in our own world.

It would be nice if we could all just have our own little supervised, right? Yeah. Yeah. So since all of us aren't able to be in therapy, do you think that there's just some awareness of this of Dr. Bails theories that will create a curiosity that might lead us to find other resources or figure out how to help ourselves if we can't get to therapy? Is there something about this that we can do as individuals to make ourselves feel whole, to find our true being? I think that just understanding, even in a pretty basic way, the kind of fundamentals of the theory, my mom or the person who whose womb I grew in that gave birth to me handed something down while I was in there.

They imprinted upon me something of their unconscious. That alone is is a pretty powerful thing for people to be able to think about as it relates to what has happened in their life, what their hopes and dreams are, what choices they've made. I'd say maybe more than anything, who they've partnered up with or challenges and in partnering up with people. Certainly there's there's impact there if it can be done in therapy. I'd say that's sort of the ideal because it is so hard to listen to your own unconscious, right? What is unconscious is out of reach, out of consciousness.

And the dreams are a very helpful way of getting at that. But that is greatly supported by having good interpretation. And good interpretation takes training and practice and experience. Yes. So, yes, if it can be happening through therapy, wonderful. I think the podcast is a very good idea and hopefully that will will spread the word. There's a couple of movies about Dr. Bail and his work, I know. And hundreds of essays that he's written. Yeah. Dream analysis. It's all very helpful. Yeah. And his books. Yes. So I think for for me, in terms of training institutes that I've been at talking about this or friends of mine who are either also therapists or just helping professionals, the word is is getting out, but it's it's a slow oozing, maybe good.

In other conversations, we talked about the possibility of people writing down their dreams for quite a period of time and reading over them and looking for symbols that resonate or something that occurs again and again and starting to think about how those things make you feel as an individual, whether or not they're worth addressing. Is that helpful? I think getting acquainted with one's dream life is never not helpful. Yeah. And I can say from my own experience that I do tend to have themes or symbols that will show up over periods of time.

There's lots of lots of facets for a while, or that I'm in hotels and every dream for several months. Yeah, I think those things are definitely worth looking at and thinking about. And let's say you have this. These dreams about hotels. Are you pointedly reviewing those dreams in order for those hotel dreams to go away? I don't know that we're necessarily looking to resolve anything per se, but it would be notable. That they do go away, right? That at some point I'm not in hotels anymore. Now I'm not. I'm in this home or that home. Yeah. There's something that you're talking about with your therapist that leads you to know that you don't have to be in those hotels, that you're.

Whatever those hotels represent. You've kind of handled or talked through, and now you have a home. And that maybe not literally, but. Right. Like, and I don't really recall exactly what the interpretation was at the time. But if as I'm thinking back to kind of when that was, I think there was something around not feeling so settled. Right. So once once I could get out of the hotel back into houses that I actually was for the most part acquainted with, I was like, okay. See, that's fascinating. Right. And then which houses are they? Is it the one I lived in when I was four or eight or.

Yeah. And what do those 22, how do they make you feel. When I first looked at my dreams, I had all sorts of dreams about animals, wild animals, some of them living in my front yard. Sometimes I'm living in their front yard, them popping up wherever. and it wasn't really fun. They. They weren't there to be nice to me, and. But they all went away. I haven't had a dream like that in a long time, and that was through my analysis. I don't know that I'm allowed to call it analysis because I was his wife, but of course we couldn't help but talk with each other.

And this dreams, of course, was like his love, his favorite topic. So it was pretty magical that I ended up in his world and anyway, I drifted off. But yes, I can say that when I resolved what those animals were doing and what they meant, they, they went away. And in that case, it felt really good because I didn't like going to sleep at night wondering if I was going to be bitten. Yeah, that sounds a little menacing now. Well, I love the drift, because, as you know, I didn't get an opportunity to actually meet Dr. Bail in person. Sorry. Yeah, me, too.

I've been sort of hungry for more knowledge of him on a personal level, and I'd say, yeah, you're probably not allowed to call it urinalysis, but we could say your your informal analysis slash. Yes, yes. Yeah. You're turning it around, are you? Well, when I first met him, I was completely uninformed. I know. I knew nothing of him. His world. I came to him from my profession as an interior designer, and he hired me. And whether that moment meant something or not, I'm not sure. But the moment I met him, he meant something to me. I couldn't figure it out.

And he was significantly older than me by 37 years. And so I had no thought of any whatsoever. But I did find him very dapper and very intriguing. I couldn't figure out what a 92 year old man would want with an interior designer in your life. It's terrible to say I don't feel this way anymore. It's like his life is almost over. What does he want? You know, a new La-Z-Boy to sit in. But it was so much more than that. He was so full of life, so loving his life and just terrific. And I spent so much time with him before I even knew what he was up to.

How how big a person he was. He used to take me to lunch before our meetings, and I didn't even know what to talk about with him. And and one day after I knew that he talked about dreams with his patients and so forth, I thought I had this crazy dream last night, and I shared it with him and I just thought it was cute. Something to talk about. And it was so much more than that. It was his moment to say all these things that I thought about this woman. She's feeling back and I didn't even know it. It was all unconscious and I can look back now and see that he was absolutely right and he didn't share any of that with me.

I wasn't his patient, but over time it just couldn't help but come to light anyway. There's so much more to tell. But I we just fell deeply in love with each other. And this connection that we had seemed bigger than our tangible existences, as if we couldn't help but be together. And I'm going on and on. But for me, it was so tough because of the age difference, and I felt all this pressure about judgment and what would people say, what would people think? What does it mean for me? What does it mean for him? How can we We can't. But what happens if I deny this?

What if I walk away from it? I'm so in love with this person, deeply in love. And what is the point of walking away because of judgment? So that's a bigger loss to not let myself feel this love or let him have the love. And that was the biggest leap I ever took, was to just say, I'm doing it. And we had a short time together, but it was just delicious. Yeah. How long did you get? I think we got about eight years, but part of that was very minimal because I was very stand back is so afraid. So afraid. And all he could do was give me time. There was no forcing it.

And what torture for him, I think to. Well, from what I know of him, he's a man who knew timing. Yes. Somebody might have tried to force that, but yeah. Yeah, he I think knows that people come to what they come to on their own terms. You know, you can, you can sort of maybe help them along if you know how to help them along. Like he does in his therapy. But nobody's getting to where they need to be until they're comfortable with it. And really, there was just a moment where I said I just have to do this. I just have to do this, and we'll see what happens.

And it was only the best thing ever. and then this other gift, not just to have this man that I fell deeply in love with, but to have then all this new knowledge about my unconscious, myself, the great experience, talking about your dreams. I mean, that is not only good for you, it's healthy, but it's so fun. You know, it's obviously a lot of it's traumatic and difficult and we find out troubling things or have to dig through stuff that's uncomfortable. But yet there's something marvelous, marvelously challenging about it that creates a joy. There's so much potential relief in it.

And it's also like back to what you were saying earlier about that there's not enough love, there's not enough patients, there's not enough people doing feelings with one another to have somebody listen to your dream and take interest in your dream and help you wrestle with how do we sort of decode the code and figure out what it means and get to the feelings part of it? It's like it's so juicy. It is. And it can be a little tedious. I mean, not always, but it's, you know, it's there's some specificity to that. That process of uncovering. And in the way that you were talking about, the dream that you shared with Dr. Bail at lunch, it really helps to have another mind to think with right to like have somebody to receive it.

And even if he didn't do it right, then to be able to say, so here's what I here's what's unconscious and yes, here's what your handing me that you don't even know that you're handing me. Yeah. And so it's such a rich relational, all connected thing to do with somebody. It is it's just so juicy. There's there's so much good stuff in there. And when I look back on that dream, I just think, my gosh, how could I not see that? I couldn't at all? And it was just so clear to him and that he contained himself and didn't bring it up and just let me go through the paces was pretty amazing.

I mean, he's truly a master of this work. Yeah. There I was, naively cheering, but to my great benefit sometimes. That's been the lovely part about beginner's mind. Yeah. If you had a sense of whatever I tell him from my dream realm is going to convey some secret meaning that I'm not trying to offer up. Right. I'm not going to share that. Right. And I would imagine that a lot of us position ourselves when we're sharing a dream. Maybe I won't share that part because I don't want them to know that messy part of me. But it's still got to come up somehow.

Ideally, it gets to be shared, but I think people definitely do edit a little bit, right? that's a little too dark or that's a little too graphic or yeah. I shouldn't be thinking those things. Or just even. It's embarrassing to to say this is what I'm dreaming about. Yeah Yeah, yeah. I guess we're seeing same thing there. I guess. Yeah. So you and I were talking the other day and you mentioned this idea of illness dreams, and that's pretty interesting. So describe a little bit what's going on there. Yeah. So I'm in the dissertation phase of my PhD, and my research topic is illness dreams, which are essentially dreams that convey to the dreamer that they have an illness that they didn't know that they had or offer up some kind of information about an illness, but that one already knows one has something about the prognosis or outcome.

Sometimes, even like these dreams will help folks that are trying to make treatment decisions that kind of clarify something in terms of if you go this way versus that way. And is are those messages that are being received in the dreams clear or do they need some great degree of interpretation. Sometimes they are really obvious. And actually when we when we first spoke about this, you had a recent example. So I wonder if you want to share your your example of when it's really obvious. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the actor who shared this on a podcast I was listening to, but he had an earache, which wasn't anything to think about.

And then he had a dream that night. And in the dream there was something like a golf ball that was very close to his ear. Inside his head, he ended up going to the doctor, I guess, to get some medication for the ear infection, and they discovered a and so he survived and it ended up not being cancer, but it did need to be removed and it was pretty serious. But he got this message in a dream. And from what you described, I got the sense that he he took it sort of seriously. He said, I better go. You're right. He didn't dismiss it. That's a great example of the obvious ones.

And then there are some that really do require some some decoding. And of course, for the most part, you have to actually then get sick to to be able to retroactively understand, this was an illness dream. So that the sort of skeptics point to that typically like, well, now you're just sort of revising how you understand this dream to fit with what I see. I see. But this is a really well documented phenomenon that goes back thousands of years. So we're talking Asclepius hypocrisies. Galen Early, early medicine was taking up dreams and working with dreams as a form of treatment to help people with their illnesses.

So the records of how many dreams there are that are communicating something about what's happening in the body are abundant. So why did that go by the wayside or fall out of fashion? Not many of us know of such a thing. The short answer is Christianity, and it's probably a lot more complicated than that. But basically Christianity came in in in more forceful ways and there had been a lot of healing temples and priests of these temples that were they kind of straddled the world of like spirituality and medicine. And so one would let's say I had an ailment I might go to this healing temple at Epidaurus, for example, and I would dream there in there kind of like dream room, let's say, and then the dream would be shared with one of the priests and they would kind of extract the message or the cure or whatever I needed to understand about it.

And kind of similar to what I've already said, sometimes that was more or less coded. Yeah. Then Christianity came in and illness was it's sort of more moved into the realm of being understood as like in more of like a possession kind of way. And Asclepius was a very popular figure, was a threat to Christianity. He was so popular. So they, they sort of co-opted him into their dogma. And as part of that, dreams became kind of forbidden. So people weren't weren't free to talk about their dreams. And in the decoding of the dreams, it was very possible that it would come to be understood that you were possessed by evil spirits or something, that you really didn't want to be perceived as sure.

So it went really kind of underground. So this sort of look at how that works, even the dream, the idea of the dream has this negativity that's been imprinted on us. Yeah, over time. So, I mean, most of us today think dreams are nothing or nonsense or something terrible. You don't want to look at. Yeah. Today most of us. Is there any place like that today where you can go and be in some sort of dream spa where you can go to sleep and dream and have someone talk to you about it? It's a great question. I don't think any of the temples are still kind of going.

They also mostly got co-opted by the religious movements. There are people who are doing that work, sort of dream incubation or dream healing, and usually in like a group collective sort of thing. I know one one person, Dr. Ed or Edward Tek, who's published a few books, he's spends a lot of time in Greece and takes people on tours and kind of visits the old temples and does dream work there. So it's certainly still happening. I think it's like Doctor Bail's work a little. Well, Nietzsche, right? Yeah, right. We're trying to initiate. Yeah. If one were to have a dream about an illness, but it's not so clear.

Like the one that I shared with you, you'd really almost have to be in therapy to get the right interpretation. I don't know that that's something that we could do. So well on our. On our own. It certainly helps. I don't know if the person from your podcast happened to be in therapy. It does sound like and I've heard other examples of this where sometimes the message is just being communicated in such a clear way. Yeah. That it like hits the person over the head, so to speak. Like, that you feel it and it kind of gives you, gives you a sense of urgency.

I should check this out. But if you have a certain amount of respect for the process of dreaming, if not, you could just say, Well, that's ridiculous. Yeah, I would say it probably generally helps you out if if that fits into the way you already think about things. But I think dreams are powerful enough that sometimes they can just intrude on a person if they are trying to deliver a really urgent or insistent message. So that's not outside the realm. But you're right that like knowing what to do with it or how to work with that, it gets tricky if if you're not somewhat versed already.

Yeah. And what do you say to the person who says, I never dream? I say, that's okay. But. But do we all dream? There's so much research on dreams and a lot of that goes against the rest of it. So I'd say you can find answers to that. That'll be yes and no. My sense is that there are some exceptions to rule. There are some people that don't. And the way that I understand that, I mostly think about like actual physiological or biological structures that have been severed, like brain trauma kind of reasons for not dreaming. And I think also when people get very and close to death or so far into some kind of psychic disturbance, sometimes the dreams will go away that as well.

But for the most part, I do think that we all dream have the capacity to dream and often are dreaming, even if that doesn't necessarily get remembered. Yes, I think so too. And Dr. Bail would agree with that. And the times where he and I spoke and I said, I don't have a dream. I don't have a dream day after day. And he says, Well, you do. You're just not remembering. And that is significant that you're not remembering. So there's something that you aren't prepared to feel or discuss yet. And when the dream comes back, you'll be ready. So in your therapy, how have you seen a change in yourself from before your dream interpretation, your work with your therapist?

What has changed in your life or in your ability to feel or love? So I've I've had a very long term interest in dreams. I was like very into them when I was in primary school. I would buy the dream dictionaries, interpret my friend's dreams and such, and that's always been something that I've kept track of to a degree. But I didn't have necessarily a specific theory that I was working with then. And so I'd say that's the most maybe profound change through my current therapy, which is I guess been about four years at this point, that the maternal imprint theory is so specific and for me so resonant that it's yeah, it's just helped to make a lot of sense of what has occurred in my life, the types of people that I have, you know, as I mentioned, kind of partnered up with the specific kinds of losses that I've encountered.

And when I came into my therapy was encounter a lot of this same very specific type of loss, mostly people dying of cancer, which relates back to my own imprint. So I'd say prior to being able to think about it and this way I would get into that like, it's fate, It's that sort of almost magical thinking that people, I think, have a tendency to do because there's some sense making that happens there. There's some comforting aspect. But what where I would go with it is like I'm supposed to go more in this direction. I'm surrounded by that are sick with and dying of cancer all the time, one after the other.

Maybe I'm meant to work with this population also. Maybe so. It was like, it's all around me and I'm supposed to do more of that. And it was very helpful to be able to shift to It's all around me because it's sort of always been all around me and because that is a big piece of my imprint. And it's not that I need to lean into that. I need greater relief from that, right? I need to not be living out my imprint such that everybody I care about is going to get cancer and die. And how did you did you do specific things to step away from that or did it just occur by your knowing that this is what you been doing?

It's a both and but I would say the insight is extremely helpful. So just as you said about the dream, once Dr. Bail interpreted it, you kind of felt like, how could I not have seen it? Yeah. So that shifts a lot for us just in terms of what our predilections are. And I'd say the knowing, the making conscious of unconscious aspects and the understanding that comes from it, it does in itself create some change. But then there is a secondary layer of like, well, I won't sign up for that job, or that doesn't have to be my niche population, or yeah, I can start to just have permission to say like, I've had enough of that.

You can give yourself some other choices. Yeah, just because this is your comfort zone doesn't mean I guess you learn that it's you can still be safe and warm outside of that that you're used to. Yeah, well, I think comfort zone is so frequently actually our discomfort zone, but it is comfortable and that is really familiar. Yes. So it's like, yeah, it was my comfort zone in that I really knew it. And so even. That was uncomfortable. Right? But I was like this is I'm suffering through this. I hate this. I don't I don't want this to be surrounding me to the extent that it is so.

But we're so afraid of undoing what we know, even if it's uncomfortable. Yeah. And I think we make sense of it and that like, well, the universe keeps sending it my way, so this must be what I'm supposed to do. And so that's where the maternal imprint. Theory. Has been very helpful to me, but I think also to patients where it helps you get out of that kind of thinking of like this is just happening to me. It's like it's more of a co-creation. Yeah, right. Where of course. You're in IT. Objects and people in the world have their own agency. But we're in relationship to those things and we do very interestingly seem to replicate.

So closely early life dynamics things from our parents lives. So once you can sort of stand in that perspective, it unlocks a lot of things. It does. I think if we can look back and see some of that, see how much we are behaving in accordance with the way we behaved as children, or look at how our parents or our mothers were behaving and see this track. It's eye opening. Yeah. And in a way, just even that little bit lets you know somehow I don't have to be that. I've just been that. But I don't have to be that. Yeah, I have other options. Exactly.

And even to kind of further that idea, I've been that but also that's not me, right? This is just. The stuff of me living out the imprints. Yeah. And to find the real true you is. Well, that's the goal here. Yeah, but it's pretty life changing. And you just take a deep breath and think, my gosh, I can live the rest of my life being me. It's pretty liberating. It is. Yeah. And there's a lot more satisfaction in a life that is you being you. And we're better for the world and the people we love. Yeah. When we're that now, I think our time is up today.

But I've so enjoyed this and I'd really love you to come back and talk some more. I would love. That. Another conversation, please. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you all for joining us for our podcast. And now, love, we hope you enjoyed our time together with Kate. Please like share and follow us. See you next time. Bye.