how do my dreams link to my emotional state?

I continue to have quite unsettling dreams very often. Almost every night.
There are quite a variety of them really and I can’t tell whether they are related or what is bringing this on.
I think it might have to do with how I feel about the relationship with my partner.

We have had another “difficult” weekend. Difficult id not the right word but I don’t know how to describe it. We just had another discussion, because I am still upset/unsettled about the same things. I don’t know if this can be fixed, and that thought scares me.
I had so much hope that things were going to change, were going to be different. That I was going to really trust someone and feel warm and safe, cared for.
Things have not turned out tat way, and I am really hurt, and I do not know how to get passed it. Seems like something has changed inside. I am wondering if I still love him the same way, I am not sure.

During the weekend I realised that I am finding it hard to spend time together. Thinking about it I realised that I have been compartmentalising. I don’t want to live like that again. I know every relationship has its problems, I don’t expect things to be always perfect. But I think that nature of what doesn’t work runs so deep that I need to completely put it away. Then every so often it comes to me, and makes me wonder why am I in this relationship.
Without that trust that has been broken lots of things sort of loos their meaning.
Hugs, kisses and other signs of affection don’t really reach me.
I go from being very affectionate to being cold. I think sometimes I become affectionate because I need the affection and when I realise that I can’t really get it ( not that he will no respond, it is just that it doesn’t reach me) I turn away.

I feel hurt let down and lonely.

Just noticed that I have avoided saying what it was that I needed, and the truth is I am not very comfortable writing about it. Not sure whether this is about being worried of how anonymous this site really is.
No one has commented, and I am not sure if anyone is reading, but I still worry that maybe someone I know, or even him, will find this site. Some people I wouldn’t mind but others I would. It really feels like I should say it, put it our there, but I can’t.

Maybe that is why all this dreams, I am very unsettled in a very familiar way.
I feel that the love I get is not right for me, that is not the way I want to be loved, is not the way I want things to be.
This is the way I grew up and how most my relationships have turned out to be.
Love seemed like a very twisted thing to me. There was such a high price to pay for the good things.

Pain, and more bad dreams

Another bad night, this time triggered by pain.
I woke up in the middle of the night with acute pain, it felt like period pain. It took me about a minute to remember when I did last have period, it was last week!.
So, what is going on?
At the moment I am not registered with the doctors, it was, actually is, still in my to do list. But it is my experience when I have had similar problems before that the doctors have not paid much attention, so I am not very motivated to go.
However I am a bit worried…. Am I being a bit a hypochondriac here?.

I got up after a while of not sleeping in order to allow my partner to get some proper rest. Felt asleep again in the morning and have ore bad dreams.
Again, my father keeps cropping up. The dreams are not all that bad, however I wake up feeling as if they were. Hard to explain. Emotionally very unsettled, and revisiting a lot of things form the past, even though they were not explicitly on the dream.

I had thought that I was done with this, relieving the past, the bad dreams etc.
It had been a long time since this was a recurrent problem.
I kept having the occasional bad night, or even a little flashback, but it had become sporadic. I had stopped being scared that it would happen any time all the time.
Now it was been three days in a row. And what is more worrying is that it happened last week as well, and I believe the week before then a couple of days too.
I didn’t think much of it at first as I was not too upset in the morning, but it is escalating. I still feel pretty much in control, but I am getting worried, and I am not sure what to do about it.

Bad dreams -- old ghosts

I had a terrible night. It was one bad dream after another.
I tried staying awake, thinking of something different, distracting myself for a while before going back to sleep hoping that would make a difference to the dream theme but it didn’t work. I got up very early, exhausted, feeling as if I had not slept at all. But I couldn’t face going back to sleep, even though it was hard to keep my eyes open.

The dreams were all about my family, and my father was on some.
I hate when I have dreams in which my father is there, as if that was the situation now in the present (my parents divorced about fifteen years ago, though he lived with us for a year a couple of years after they divorced).

I think I am worried about my family, things are not going very well for them, there are economic worries, but more than anything is all the personal stuff that worries me.
I don’t think they are doing very well in that department either.
However I feel unable to help. I tried talking to them quite a few times in the past, and I do when there is a window of opportunity now, but that rarely happens.
They do not want to talk. If I ask any of them about themselves, they are fine, is the others that have trouble I should talk to them. And that is what they all say.
Then form time to time there are arguments that I get to hear about; I believe there are many I do not get to hear about. I mostly hear from my mother, and when she tells me why she is upset I understand and empathise, but then she tells me what she is done about it or plans to do and… it is hard to explain. I can see how it is not going to work; she approaches issues all at once, mixing her feeling towards the ‘family’ or even ‘everyone’ into a confrontation with one person. She brings everything up when the issue sparks from one particular incident. Also there is a tendency of extending comments and criticism far beyond what is reasonable.
I’ll give an example. In an argument with my brother which started with work related issues (they work together) she brings up personal issues, between them, and even issues about who she disagrees on his behaviour towards other members of the family (the way he talked to my aunt), and complains about his clothes, his eating and drinking habits etc. So everything gets mixed up, and obviously nothing really is taking away by the recipient of this outburst.

I am very familiar with this. She has always been like this. And she is not the only one; it is more or less the way the family operates.
I find it impossible to deal with, I mean I can deal with it, I can take it when the outburst is directed at me, and I have managed over the years to stop myself counter-attacking in the same fashion (it is hard work, believe me) but what I can not do is stir things in different more productive direction. When it is about me I can negotiate what would I do that would make things better, but when it comes to the others I can’t. If I say anything about restricting the conflict to one issue, or about the hostility it is being dealt with, I get accused of being on the other person side, or not seeing the whole picture, or … whatever, there is always something (they are very articulate people).

So what does all this have to do with my dreams? Lots I think.
I believe I feel guilty that I have set myself apart from my family.
It was not just because they have not supported me about the issues with my father, which was very very painful, but also because I couldn’t find a way to be myself among them. I find the family dynamics asphyxiating. Problems don’t ever get resolved, just left to rest until next time. People don’t usually say what they really have a problem with anyway, it is all hidden in a discourse aim to make the other feel bad, and set oneself as righteous.

I needed to solve my issues, At some point I was close to ending my life. I needed to move on, to process, to heal, to learn to understand myself and not be controlled by my emotions, which seemed erratic and overpowering.

I relate to people in a very different way now. I don’t think I am perfect far from it; there are still many issues I do not handle well at all (as it is clear form the precious post I guess). But I am better. I feel better, and I believe I am better to others. I listen more, I reflect before I answer, I don’t just react.

When I go back home, sometimes I get sucked into the old habits again. It happens less nowadays than it used to though. I do not loose my temper anymore, but I do feel really on edge, and uneasy most of the time.
I am convinced that to leave close to family again would be to be unhappy. I can’t change them, all I can do is change myself. But the way they are, they react and even the way the view things gets to me, hurts me. I guess it shows me why things happened the way they did, about me, about my father, about no one noticing, about no one supporting me. First they didn’t believe, then they just ignored it. When I pushed things once, the reaction in summary was: that was long ago, you have to move on, don’t get stuck in the past.

My dreams where all about my family. About me being back home, living with them, trying to work things out for them. Trying to live in that constant battle. Living with my father, as it was back then.

I feel responsible for them, and therefore I feel guilty about being away.
But deep down I know I can’t help them, and I can’t live with them.
I have to have my life, and they have theirs. That is the way things should be anyway right?

Back to square one

Looking for a job, again. Without really knowing what I want to do.
It seems to me this is where I was when I finished university, many years ago.
Then I went back to university, and after some time working got myself into another course at university. Though this was mainly a practical course, and most of the time was spent on a placement, working.
So, I guess I count at least, three major “stops” when I have tried to decide what I wanted to do and yet I seem to not know.
During the last year, and particularly during the last few weeks I have done a lot of “soul searching” trying to figure out what really makes me “tick”.
One thing that I am not setting as a priority is being happy. It might sound a bit of a strange thing to say, do I mean that I was seeking to be unhappy before? No of course not. But in a way I was not really focussed on achieving happiness.
For starters I do not think I had much of an idea of what that really meant.
I was surviving, and I think happiness was to me like colours might be for a person born blind. It is something that you imagine, you hear people talk about, but you really don’t know what it is, how it is like, and you have no framework to help you develop the concept.
I think before I was motivated by the desire of eliminating the effect of my past.
I wanted to have the life I imagine I would have had without the abuse.
So, I chose a partner (well, over time more than one) that had certain qualities I liked but not someone who was not understanding of my issues, and my needs.
I worked really hard on the relationship and tried really hard to be somewhere I was not, to be someone I was not. I tried to be and feel like someone with a different past would have (or how I thought they would).
On a professional level I did the same. When I finished high school, it was decided I would go to university. This had been decided long ago and not really by me but by my parents.
In any case I was not unhappy with it. When it came to decide what I was going to study I consider studying psychology. However, this was not a profession that my family would value. Furthermore they seem to be very dismissive of the field, and there was a theory that only people who have a problem they do not wish to tell anyone studies or trains in that field.
Now, that really hit a chord on me because it was very true in my case that I had a problem I did not want to discuss. At the time I didn’t even really know what my problem was, I was utterly confused and thought there was something wrong with me. It is also true that I had an interest in human behaviour and development, but I dismissed the idea and studied science, physics. Something I was good at and that they would value. And probably, I thought was what I would have liked to do had I not have any trouble while growing up.
So, I was determined to have a “normal” life.
Over the years I have though of training for counselling several times.
I have always decided against, or put it off.
Now I find myself thinking about it again, and again finding reasons to not do it on the basis of practical reasons, and a feeling that it is now too late, and that I have already trained enough over my life.
I can’t figure out what would make me happy, I feel blocked in so many ways.