When the Unconscious and Conscious Become One

I had a Primal in my sleep last night.  I will tell you about it because it lays bare what is going on in the unconscious.  And I will try to answer the question, “Why in your sleep?”

Is was about my mother, whom I rarely have feelings about because she was emotionally absent and never really “there.”

There is an old saying that if you raise your kids right they leave you as children and come back as your friend.

But what if you were not reared (the correct word) right?  They stay your children forever looking for the fulfillment the parents should have given you.

Once you have all a good part of your need and can begin to see them as people, a lot changes. Your need no longer clouds your perception of them and that leads me to my Primal.  In my sleep I was crying deeply and saying, “I’m so sorry. So, so sorry.”  I was not nice because my mother was pre-psychotic, I treated her later on as “crazy Annie.”  I could never see her limits, yet within those limits she and my father, two lost souls from Russia, did the best they could.  They never heard about, nor knew anything about love.  They never even knew that parents were supposed to talk to children.  Their parent left for America for years to find work, leaving them on their own.  They abandoned me for years in other places because they were left, and that is the way life is.

For me, everything was a mystery.  I never knew their history except what I learned from my aunt.  I knew nothing about their lives, their finances… nothing.  They never knew about touching, softness or caress.  It was a daily struggle to make a living.  We were working class and my sympathies have always been working class.

So in my primal I began to feel how unfair they were to me but also how unfair I had been to them.  I wanted and desperately needed, what they could never give.  So long as my need was strong I could not see beyond the need. No one is smarter or stronger than their need and no one can see beyond it.

Why in my sleep? I think it is because at this late date my unconscious and consciousness are merging.  They are become almost one.  So what should happen on the top level happens during the lower level.  Why?  Because having felt for years the gates are now pliable and allow feelings to rise almost at will.  They rise when I and my brain are ready for feelings.
How do I know? I don’t, except that my body temp remains very low which is usually a sign of far less work the body is doing to maintain its equilibrium and the work it constantly does in the service of constant repression.  That is a great effort.  It used to be higher.  I no longer have nightmares nor do I think my unconscious drives me because that unconscious is now mostly conscious.  I control it, not the case at all when I was younger.  Back then, compulsions and obsessions abounded.  I will  spare you the details but I was run by the unconscious as so many of us are who have not felt.  And that unconscious , more than any bad diet, will shorten your lifespan as it gnaws away at the heart, liver, kidneys and other organ systems.  Of course proper diet is critical, but not as critical as the force of the unconscious.  That maims and kills.  That sends too many prematurely to the great beyond.

What happens in sleep?  Some of the childhood pains reside there, and like all Primal Pains they need liberation. Not everyone has to have merging levels of consciousness but it is critical to reduce the pressure that lower levels exert all of the time.  When they drag the system down into depression or speed it up due to anxiety, they need to know that there is a way to dredge up and eliminate those forces forever.  After all, those forces are only you and your feelings.  Nothing else.  So how bad could it be?  It is now part of my life; not part of a psychotherapy but a state called living.  We laugh and we cry; that is also known as sanity.  It is not that we are so emotional.    We have eliminated all that extraneous force so that emotions are commensurate with reality.  Not a monster driving entity.
When we are not emotional it is a problem; because we means repression and suppression and the emotions are hardly being contained as they whiz around the brain creating havoc.  If are made to laugh we are also made to cry. It is natural, biologic, not an aberration.  And because we often suppress this biologic tendency we suffer.  We have denied our biology.  We cannot do that and be healthy.

We often believe that we can think our way to health and sanity.  Nope.  We think our way to denial, to neurosis, to a false consciousness but not to health.  For health and healing we need feeling; that is what makes us human; feeling human beings.