The Feeling You Keep Trying to Get Rid Of

Artwork by Laura Smith-Riva

We often think of healing as a process of getting rid of what hurts. We want to feel less afraid, less anxious, less angry, less ashamed, less grief-stricken. When a difficult feeling arises, our instinct is often to fix it, understand it, manage it, or somehow move beyond it. Even in therapeutic and healing practices, there can be an unconscious assumption that the work is successful when the difficult feeling goes away and we feel relieved.

Relief can certainly be an important and much needed quality in our journey. But relief is not always the same thing as transformation. What if some of the feelings we most want to be free from are actually carrying something essential for us?

This is one of the mysteries that dreams continually bring us back to. A dream may leave us frightened, moved, confused, fascinated, or deeply unsettled. We may wake from a dream or nightmare carrying a feeling that seems disproportionate to anything happening in our waking life. Clients often preface a session with, “I don’t know why I am having this dream! It has nothing to do with anything going on in my life.” There might be a stranger in the dream who evokes an unexpected longing. Perhaps an animal frightens us. Maybe we find ourselves filled with rage. Or grieving something we didn't know we had lost. Maybe (definitely!) we encounter a part of ourselves we would rather not recognize.

If you’ve brushed up against Natural Dreamwork in any context, then you know that rather than immediately asking, What does this dream mean?, we become curious about the experience itself. What did I feel? Where did I feel it? What image carried that feeling? What happens if I stay close to it? The feelings evoked by dreams are not simply reactions to the dream. They are part of the material the dream is bringing us. I believe they are the raw material of transformation.

One of the aspects of alchemy that I most relate to in my work with dreams is its fascination with opposites, the coming together of things that seem incompatible. Hot and cold, wet and dry, spirit and matter, Sol and Luna. The alchemical coniunctio, or conjunction, brings unlike substances into relationship. They may resist one another, attract one another, even transform one another. Transformation does not happen simply by throwing something undesirable away and keeping what is desirable. The alchemical process requires substances to be brought together, contained, heated, combined, and allowed to interact within a vessel strong enough to endure the heat and the reactions. What emerges is not simply one side winning over the other, but something new.

This gives us a powerful image for psychological transformation. We, too, contain opposites. We can love someone and be angry with them. We can long for intimacy and simultaneously fear being close. We can want to change and desperately want things to remain the same. We can feel courageous in one moment and terrified in the next. We can be deeply grateful for our lives and still carry grief. Often our tendency is to choose one side. We tell ourselves which feeling is acceptable and which one needs to go. But dreams don't seem particularly interested in our preferences. Dreams don’t seem to care what our agenda is. Dreams bring us the whole thing.

So all of the parts of ourselves that we’ve unconsciously excised are really in exile. But exile is not the same as disappearance. The feeling remains. It may live in the body. It may show up in our relationships. And very often, it finds its way into our dreams.

An exiled feeling often shows up as what we relate to as a nightmare. It might arrive as a frightened child, an angry stranger, a wounded animal, a monster, or a dark landscape. It may appear as a person we don't recognize but somehow feel intimately connected to.

The dream doesn't necessarily tell us, This is your exiled anger or This is your abandoned grief. Instead, it gives us an experience through images, actions, and feelings. It allows us to encounter something we may not know how to encounter consciously.

If our only goal is to remove an uncomfortable feeling, we may inadvertently send the message that the feeling itself is the problem. Fear becomes something to overcome. Anger becomes something to regulate. Grief becomes something to move through. Shame becomes something to heal. But what if these feelings contain information, energy, or even a part of ourselves that has not yet been welcomed into relationship?

When we simply suppress, override, or eliminate an emotion, the underlying material may remain untouched. The psyche may find another way to bring it forward. Sometimes it returns in another dream. Sometimes through the body, as unease or illness. Sometimes through a relationship. Sometimes through a familiar pattern that keeps repeating. The feeling may continue knocking because we have not opened the door and allowed ourselves to meet it.

This is where I see dyadic work as an inherently alchemical practice. In dyadic work, we don't necessarily try to determine which part of ourselves is right. Instead, we create a relationship between two experiences.

I generally work with clusters of dreams. Within these clusters are many moments. In a session we work with the dream images, allowing spaciousness to feel into all that the chosen dreams have to offer. I may ask questions or make suggestions. The client may share stories, memories, or perceptions that expand the dream field. I give my clients dream practice moments to return to between sessions.

Ultimately, the alchemy begins within our session time together, but it is often the work the client does between sessions that allows something to continue unfolding.

Here is an example of a dream practice moment from a recent client session, shared with her permission:

Feel the threshold moment just before deciding to dive in the water. Feel the decision moment, the commitment and the exhilaration in your body when you go for it. What would it be like to bring that threshold to the moment with the man on the train? You put your leg up...can you bring the threshold to the encounter that is longing to happen?

Spend time with the baby Ocelot. Receive the Ocelot, knowing that it is a mysterious, beautiful and wild part of you that may have been exiled and longs to return.

These moments are not an interpretation of her dream. They are an invitation to allow the feeling moments of the dream to expand through the holding of tension. The client longs to make a connection with the man on the train, but she doesn't feel safe putting herself out there—to really let him know, make eye contact, engage. Rather than choosing one experience and eliminating the other, we can allow them both to exist. There is fear, isolation, hesitation, longing, desire, and a certain innocent yet wild fierceness in her work. All of these are brought into the vessel that is her inner work. Something begins to happen in the space between them.

This is the alchemical possibility. It isn't simply fear. It isn't simply longing. It is something that could not have existed without the meeting of the two. I believe this is one of the deeper mysteries of psychological transformation: the answer is not always on either side of the opposition. Something new can emerge from the relationship between them. It could be that a person carrying fear discovers that courage isn't the absence of fear at all. It is the capacity to remain in relationship with it.

The alchemists' dream of transforming lead into gold can become a beautiful metaphor for our own inner lives. The gold is not a life without fear. It is not the elimination of anger, grief, shame, desire, or sorrow. What we have spent years trying to get rid of may not be asking to disappear. It may be asking to come home.

Maybe transformation isn't about becoming someone who no longer feels difficult things. Maybe it is about becoming someone who can stay in relationship with whatever is alive within them.

This is what our dreams offer us each night…not a problem to solve, or an uncomfortable feeling to make disappear, but an invitation to open the vessel. To bring the raw material together. To stay with what is there. And to allow, with curiosity and patience, for something we could not have imagined to emerge.

Originally published on Laura’s blog In Search of Puella