D
Defences, Dependence, Dissociation, Dreams
Defences
Defences get a really bad press. “Oh my God he’s so defensive”, we say of our friends. Well…yeah maybe he is. And he may have a really good reason.
A psychological defence is like a shield: it protects us from incoming danger. The difference is that we don’t always realise we’re doing it and we often don’t know what caused us to start doing it in the first place.
A defence can be as obvious as someone getting angry with their therapist for asking something (“My parents were fantastic; I don’t want to talk about them”) or as subtle as not holding eye contact when talking about something which might reveal emotions. Whatever the defence, therapy can be useful in two ways.
First, if spotted, we can wonder whether that defence you just deployed is really necessary now or if, in fact, it was vital when you were 12 or with your critical uncle or your competitive colleague, but not necessary in other contexts. And we can practice lowering our shield: saying or doing something without the defence and seeing what it brings up.
The aim is for you to be able to use your shield when you need it, rather than your shield appearing to use you.
Dependence
For some, the idea of dependence is the ultimate safety: Daria can trust in her parents or her husband to always look after her. But for Desmond, dependence means powerlessness; he’ll always feel like a child dependent on a dominant parent.
The same mix of feelings can arise in therapy: a client seeks (often unconsciously) to depend on their therapist, for it to feel like the ultimate relationship of trust. For others, that is the nightmare scenario: “If I depend on my therapist,” Denise thinks to herself, “how will I ever leave?”
Therapy is partly about helping someone towards independence; giving them the confidence to have their own needs and make their own choices. To get there, though, often needs some level of dependence first.
As with parents, one often needs a period of dependence through which to develop the tools of independence.
Dissociation
To dissociate is to disconnect from the emotions held within an experience.
Someone talks about a trauma which they experienced and yet without any apparent feeling about it, almost as if it had happened to somebody else. This is a common experience. Sometimes someone might literally yawn while expressing something heavy, as if their body is too tired to connect with it. These responses are as relevant as someone becoming overwhelmed, enraged or emotional. “No response” is itself a response.
Dissociation can be even more bizarre. Someone is asked about something that happened in their childhood and suddenly they can’t remember the question, much less the answer. As if an over-ride button has been pressed, marked “Move Away Now”.
If we can understand what makes something hard to connect with we can perhaps understand what that event or emotion means for you. And, even more valuably, we can wonder what else has been ‘turned off’ when that Danger button was pressed.
Dreams
Daniela dreams one night of a huge lion walking through the grounds of her primary school. What might this mean? It all depends what the feelings mean for her.
Freud called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious”. Many books have been written about them, and some people assign them a near-mystic power. In fact, dreams are a place in which we are able to process feelings or thoughts which would be too challenging while awake. Our minds find images or stories which best allow us to safely experience a challenging combination of feelings.
So back to Daniela. Let’s say she associates a lion with danger and her primary school with safety. In that case then perhaps the dream is allowing her to experience the sense of a lurking danger within a normally safe environment: a stranger to the family home, perhaps; a new boss taking over at work; a new teacher at school. Or maybe a lion, for Daniela, connotes strength and primary school suggests entrapment, in which case the dream is allowing her to feel that one way or another she can overpower the strictures of her school environment. After all, everything in the dream is a part of her: it’s her dream. The lion will be some part of her.
In therapy, dreams can be very useful in offering us access (maybe even a preview) of feelings which are being stirred beneath the surface but not yet accessible to us. They are always worth noting and often worth mentioning.
Next Week: E
Endings, Erotic Transference, Ethics, External Locus of Control