Hi Mary899,

The worst thing someone who needs help can do is to offer somebody help (according to the latter). She could be recovering from a “Who do you think you are” syndrome herself. Not saying you needed help, but maybe, just maybe, she thought you were a loner with few friends yourself. So you two are in college, and you, another nice loner girl, offers to be her friend. She picks up the vibe that YOU feel sorry for HER! She hates that. She can’t live it down. Then her people, her “real” people, the cool kids, recognize who she is at last. She is free!!

Fast forward to when a new frienemy spreads ugly rumors about you. Your friend couldn’t just dump you without an excuse in the past. Here’s her chance! She leaps at it. Thus the dreams.

The answer? Time, time, and more time. I would write her a note that says you never said those things, and that one day she may see the girl’s true nature for herself. One day she may look back on your college days fondly. She may discover this other girl’s true colors (she’ll be expecting something to happen because of your note). These things happen.

Best,

Inky

She’s standing somewhere and I approach to talk to her, telling her that I don’t want to leave college not being on speaking terms with her. She gives me this contemptuous, disdainful look (as she sometimes did after our growing apart) and says it is common knowledge what a lying hypocrite I am.

In dream interpretation the people we dream about can represent attributes of the dreamer. (the image of your ex is projected into the dream via your unconscious so is almost always about the dreamer. Dreams communicate via images that mean something to the dream and can point to areas in the dreamer’s life that the unconscious wishes to make conscious. Making the issue conscious will end the dream)

The question to ask yourself is what associations (words) come to mind that your ex might symbolize. Love lost, Contempt, hypocrisy’s…. How might those associations relate to leaving college: Associations to the word/symbol College, what you learned, your expectation of how life should work… what you imagined you would be, do

If this were my dream I would wonder if there wasn’t some tension between what I was taught and how life is presenting itself.
Do I trust the idea of Love? Are there any areas in my life were my actions don’t match my values? Am I trying to force life to conform to how I was taught it should be, want it to be? Could this dissidence be impacting relationships and or my expectations of love?

Hi Mary

Of course our relationship to our idea and experience of love has many layers.. family , friendship,  romantic, self… Universial

The commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves, at first glance seems straight forward, yet what does it mean to love ourselves and how does that relate to how we love others. When you look at what it means to love how fortunate we are that the command was not to like our neighbor as ourselves. We can love someone we do not like, even those that who hurt us (even if that means the relationship end… and if we understand love) so much more difficult to like someone we do not love.

I feel that is what we work for in the practice, I feel that is how we love ourselves even when we don’t  always like ourselves.  In such a state of being we are “nice” because that is who we are, our authentic selves, and being authentic enough.

Just finished a book called -Touching the World A Blind Woman Two Wheels 25000 Miles – about a motorcycle road trip around the world. Everywhere they went they were told to be careful, the people in such a such nation were bad and yet they found that everywhere they went people were people just like them.

Taped to the bikes windshield was a note: What you see  depends on what you look for.  By  the end of their travels they added the word mostly, the were not blind to the reality of the road, yet at a personal level it proved true over and over. When they needed help, help was their, when they needed kindness, kindness was their. Crossing the world it was a authentic smile, a wave and good hummer more then anything helped them navigate their way through.

My experience has been the same, the car goes where the eyes go.

* didn’t reflect under Topics

Dear Mary:

You asked: “What do you do, how do you arrange your thoughts when (somebody) has hurt you?”

My answer: if somebody was clearly aggressive toward me (loudly, with words, or silently via the silent treatment), then I have no contact with that person.

The most powerful person in my life who was aggressive toward me was my mother. I was very hurt, very much alone, separated, inside a bubble of deep despair, day after day, year after year. I was angry at her, hated her. I was also angry at myself, guilty, for feeling angry at her.

I tried to love her, just like you wrote: “instead of putting my focus on how much I ‘dislike’ a certain person who has hurt me, I need to try to ‘love’ them… we should try to love those who hurt us”- I wasted all of my teenage years, all of my twenties in that belief, in those efforts, then all of my thirties, and I proceeded to waste all of my forties as well, living a miserable, dysfunctional life, very much in that bubble of despair.

This is how long it has been for me (“for God knows how long”, you wrote).

Finally, following my first good experience in psychotherapy, at fifty, I decided (it was not a decision that was supported by my therapist, but my own), to end all contact with my mother. I decided to take my side, no longer her side, to take the side of the innocent one (me as a child), not the side of the guilty one (she as my mother).

It was only then, when I settled this issue of my mother-myself, that I was able to start healing, to gradually get out of that bubble of despair, to see me as I am, to see other people as they are, to actually experience life outside that bubble.

anita