The Importance and Sometimes Impossibility of Flexibility

Hello all,

Last article, we explored a little about mainstream “culture” around trauma and healing and becoming – mainly because I came across an article and a study in conversation with the now famous book called “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk. The study in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience is called, “The Body Does Not Keep the Score”, which was referenced in an article called “Does the Body Keep the Score?” in Psychology Today.

When I started the last article, I felt I needed to bring in a greater context to the study and the article because I do feel mainstream healing culture often does not. 

Ok, so for this article, let’s look at what was discussed in the article – and how it may pertain to how our dreams work with us around trauma and possibility.

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First, I do want to say that we, as a species often look for answers – often simplified answers – to complex and complicated situations. In trauma, and many studies around the human psyche, this often looks like people looking for definitive, simplified solutions and theories. 

For example, in dreaming, Freud looked at the nightmares of some of his patients and first determined that they may be based in trauma. Then, when the culture of his time rejected this [because the idea threatened the culture of the time], he switched his ideas and came up with theories like the Oedipus Complex and Penis Envy. As well as a child development theory based on psychosexuality – which basically states that children develop around pleasure seeking impulses based on genital and other areas of the body. 

All this to explain why women and men were having nightmares around sexuality. An explanation that kept the focus on the individual and not the culture and could be received without too directly threatening the culture around how culture perpetuates individual trauma. 

Okay, I oversimplify, but there is a truth to this. If we can make human experience universal in some way, and in some way that is comfortable to the norms of the day, then we can explain everything. 

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What I have learned and am continuing to learn from dreams, dreamers and working with dreams, is that the one human universal thing I can say exists is this – that we all have our own experiences and processes. 

Or, no one theory or ideal or process fits everyone. No one-size/experience-fits-all. 

Theories and processes can be useful as possibilities, yes!! But not as prophesy or absolute truths.