When Psyche Speaks, Listen

I love the Internet.  A guy I have never met called me and began sharing his dreams and life with me.  He had read my blog, understands, and likes my view point.  He also has no one with whom to share his life’s experiences.  Well, that’s not exactly correct.  He’s married and has two young children, so he’s got them to share himself with.  But his inner life is too strange, too weird and threatening for his wife.  She’s struggling to feed the family after his near fatal accidents.  He’s trying to reconfigure his life now that being a professional athlete is out of the question.  Brain injuries are interesting phenomena.  Many professional football players cannot withstand the effects of concussions and commit suicide.  I learned this when I saw

Tom Shadyac

Tom Shadyac’s documentary film I AM.  His bicycle accident in 2007 resulted in a brain concussion, disorientation, voices, distortions of reality and the desire to commit suicide.  Fortunately he decided to look for meaning in midst of meaninglessness.

I had a client with a similar brain injury several years ago.  She taught me to re-evaluate my assumptions and respond in the moment to where she was at, what she could and could not do.  I adapted my treatment plan to reflect who she said she was.  I had to accompany her on walks, ride the bus, facilitate enrollment in college.  This was very frustrating for a woman athlete who was an excellent University student before her accident.  The brain injury brought up memories of sexual molestation by her grandfather, which threatened her family.  They wanted to support her, but decided the incest “memory” was a psychotic feature of her brain injury.  Her doctor agreed and prescribed drugs accordingly.  I believed her (and needless to say, was very careful never to suggest anything but friendship in our relationship, I am her grandfather’s age).  And before her there was the drunken football star who crashed his car into the river on Christmas eve night after drinking lots of alcohol.  His bump on the head put him in a coma for four days and brought some repressed memories to the surface, ones that resulted in his being shunned by his friends.

His story started normally.  First there was the sexual relationship with his best boyfriend at 13.  They were on the basketball team and their coach had a part-time job at the Boys Club gym.  His parents were fighting, starting to separate before their divorce.  They had no time for their son, so he turned to the basketball coach in the evening at the Boys Club.  He and his coach were soon best friends and the sexual activity shifted from his age mate to the 26 year-old coach.  Soon the boy was dealing marijuana for the coach, they were eating psilocybin mushrooms, and taking LSD on their trips to the beach together.  After two years of this secret affair the boy broke with his coach and told no one.  The school did send him to a counselor with whom he talked about his drug use, dealing, and parents’ divorce.  But never did he reveal his gay experiment.  He covered it with fucking all the girls he could, which was easy since he was the star quarterback on his high school team.  When the accident happened he was a freshman in college.

Coming out of the coma, which he said was a non-stop replay of every homosexual experience and psychedelic “trip” of his life, he told his parents.  They supported him in making the whole story public.  His friends were disgusted and shunned him.  When he told me his story, I could see the regression happening before my eyes.  Physically he was 21 years old, buff, handsome, warm and friendly.  Intellectually he was unable to remember things like common facts.  This ended his plan to teach history in high school.  He was frustrated, hurt, and angry, sometimes to the point of rage.  His short term memory was poor.  He had to write himself notes to remember one day to the next what he had to do.  He didn’t have any problem pushing the button on his cell phone when he needed to talk.  Emotionally he ranged in age from 8 years to 12 or so, some days more like 15, rarely more than that.  It seemed he was re-patterning himself.

And I was the only person at the college he trusted with his story.  There were times when we were walking that he would reach over and hold my hand.  It felt very innocent, like an eight year old boy holding his father or uncle’s hand.  He never became seductive when he was that emotional age and it felt good to provide a stable, rational adult presence for him.  When he shifted into the 14 year-old personality, things became confusing.  It wasn’t clear what his intentions were, as there was a seductive overtone always present, one which I knew I had to resist if we were to continue being friends.  And there was his strange attitude toward women, the love/hate of the Don Juan type.  So with that background, let me come back around to the young father whose story I began to tell you.

His dreams are very interesting, with common threads, almost the same weave as the quarterback’s.  There are usually two women figures, one seductive, the other rejecting.  The dreamer is attracted to the hot woman and wants to make love to her, but somehow the other woman prevents this.  And there is the gay man in the dreams, the “boy toy”, the black athlete, the punk kid, all sexually interacting with the dreamer.  For a dream interpreter the recurrence of symbols, settings, and character types is very telling about the dreamer’s unconscious.  The black athlete in bed with the dreamer is the SHADOW, most likely symbolic of the dreamer’s feeling function which focuses on relationship.  The dreamer rejects the advances of the image, who is surprised.  The punk kid wants to fight the dreamer because he feels the dreamer is “hitting on him in the bathroom” as the dreamer removes his clothes to take a shower.  Here the SHADOW is a younger version of the dreamer, who reflects the same rejection of the gay man energy which the dreamer did with the black man.  The “boy toy” is taking care of the house, much like the dreamer is doing in real life.  All of these images are crying for acknowledgment and integration in the personality of the dreamer.

Before that can happen he has to consider befriending these shadowy images.  Then he will be surprised to discover they are actually hidden assets, secret helpers who will lend a hand when he needs them most.  His dark feeling function evaluates and gives values to his thinking function.  Without knowing how one feels about a situation, all ideas are equal.  Can you image his wife’s frustration?  I can, I was just like him at his age. The ambiguity about the women images suggests the dreamer needs to come into relationship with his inner feminine.  How does he go from being “hot” to “cold” in relationship to his wife, to her inner masculine?  This is very paradoxical stuff.  There are at least six aspects of personality in every lovers bed.  The conscious, the shadow, and the contrasexual opposite for each partner.  Of course that’s the simplified version.  Add the archetypes and it gets really sticky.  Perhaps the dreamer will find a way to integrate all this information.

In any case I will be there for him to talk to me when he needs it.  I learned how this re-patterning works with the football star and the woman athlete.  As long as there is an enlightened witness, as Alice Miller characterized this role, who can acknowledge the hurt and anger of the “victim” and ride out the process with him/her, growth will happen.  We even get to acknowledge how we become the abuser once we have embraced our feelings.  Where did the basketball coach learn how to relate sexually like that?  Wasn’t he once the “victim” who was introduced to sexual intimacy by an older man?  That’s usually how it works, and here I have to credit Alice Miller again, we act out what has been done to us.  The body never lies.