LOSS AND PERFECTIONISM

    

   The other night I had a most powerful and revealing dream about a man who had irretrievably lost something or someone extremely precious. Possessed by an acute sense of utter desolation the man let out a blood curdling cry of abject despair which reverberated everywhere around him. A powerful sense of absolute hopelessness at ever retrieving that which was lost pervaded his soul. This was a feeling which could not be lived with. The devastation was suicidal.

      The intensity of the dream woke me in a state of anxiety gasping for breath and, for a short period, still experiencing that deep awareness of loss. I got out of bed making my way to an open window for more air, the feelings unearthed by the dream still very present and pressing. Such was the gravity of these emotions that I felt I could understand more how tragedy for some people could lead to suicide. In those few moments before the feelings subsided, for me, too, the heart wrenching pain felt to be too much.

     I returned to my bed afraid of what I had just experienced; afraid that such feelings could be a part of me; that somewhere out of conscious recognition such feelings held sway; that, perhaps, one day they may emerge in fuller force and have to be engaged with.

      That powerful and destructive emotions reside in the unconscious mind of those damaged by all kinds of childhood trauma and that such emotions can and do influence our conscious behaviour in subtle ways is a commonly accepted theory in psychology. My experience of these things leads me to believe that such ideas are credible. For a long time I have suspected that hidden motivations instruct my thoughts and feelings and to a large extent the process of healing from the mal effects of CF has been about becoming increasingly aware of these 'disruptors' in order to detach oneself from their habitual effect. Over the years I have unexpectedly tapped into these deeper feelings on a number of occasions but three stand out as particular occasions. The first was to experience a sense of profound loneliness – some years ago now (and referred to in the main introduction of this blog); the second was to find myself trembling with rage during a counselling session and the third was the revelation afforded by the above dream.

      Were such powerfully negative feelings like these, and others, to manifest themselves completely then, in all probability, the advice offered by psychologists and counsellors that they would be too destructive to handle is no doubt correct. Consequently, we engage with some containment strategy as these feelings are formed which leads to them becoming buried deep within ourselves – but the pain they create radiates subtly from beyond the threshold of conscious awareness with the capacity to generate self-defeating patterns of behaviour and phobias. 
 

      As I lay in bed waiting for the experience of the dream to subside I made a clear connection between the dream and my own issues with the negative influences of buried emotions. Those of you who have read the main introduction to this blog will know that from very early on in my adult life I have struggled with problems of perfectionism in relationships. Though I have learned how to dis-engage from the voices in my head and so to take back some control - enough to be able to get married and to continue to have a loving and stable married and family life for many years now, the problem has never gone away completely. One reason for this may well be that it has proved so tricky not just to understand but to intuitively sense the primary cause of this effect, but now, allowing for the insight afforded by the dream as to how intense that feeling may be and knowing that loss does play a big part in my childhood and adolescent experiences (ref: section entitled 'Loss') I believe it to be quite probable that my particular experience of 'loss' and its consequent development into an irrational fear during my formative years has created the perfectionism issue to serve to protect me from ever getting close enough in any intimate relationship to ever be exposed to the possibility of such emotional pain as that revealed in the dream. 

       This conclusion feels very appropriate to me, particularly when one considers the advice of therapists that in dreams each part of the dream is representative of some aspect of the dreamer. Armed with this new insight I am now better equipped to tackle the perfectionism problem. Through the dream the unconscious fear has been brought into conscious - and emotional - awareness and so can be better rationalised and thereby its effects subdued until they are no longer of any consequence.

     I am aware of other issues giving rise, or more likely contributing, to my problems with perfectionism but these have always felt to be secondary to some other more central cause which has, until now by virtue of the often transient nature of these things, always been more a suspicion than any clear insight. Interestingly, only a day or two before the dream I had pondered whether 'loss' may have a deeper relevance than I was aware of to my persistent difficulties with perfectionism.

      Freud referred to dreams as being 'the Golden Highway to the unconscious mind'. The clarity afforded by my powerful dream and particularly with how I continued to feel the emotion of profound loss for a few minutes after waking, certainly feels to have provided for a greater sense of self awareness.