Gaining Closure through dreamwork
YOUR DREAMS ARE TRYING TO HEAL YOU
Closure is something we all seek at different points in life, whether it be from a relationship breakup, family conflicts, career loss, personal regrets or unfair treatment. Any unresolved situation can leave us feeling lost, stuck or unable to move forward.
What is dreamwork?
There are different approaches to dreamwork, I offer Embodied Experiential Dreamwork (EED) developed by Dr. Leslie Ellis, a therapeutic method that explores dreams as lived somatic experiences and not just symbols to be interpreted. In this way, dreams can become tools for emotional processing, by accessing implicit memory and trauma imprints of unresolved wounds. Guiding us to uncover hidden feelings and patterns which lead to healing through memory reconsolidation and emotional and somatic processing.
How does this help with closure?
Closure can feel impossible when we are stuck in rumination or blame, unaware how to shift emotional pain. Dreams act as a valuable bridge between our conscious awareness (explicit memory) and subconscious programming (implicit memory). By working with your dreams, we can often trace recurring patterns, hidden insights and identify unresolved emotional wounds by pinpointing the origin of your core trauma imprint. This gives us the opportunity to integrate the new and old experiences, ultimately leading to closure.
Case Study Example: Friendship breakup / Mother wound
The following is a condensed example of a dream sequence over the period of several months, to give an idea of the dreamwork process and how dreams can be used therapeutically for emotional healing.Dream 1: A vivid and terrifying nightmare where the dreamer was being strangled by a mother figure who wasn’t actually her mother in a location where the dreamer and her friend first met.
Real Life Connection: The dreamer viewed the friend as part of her family, a safe, trusted person. The mother in the dream represented this safety but in reality, the friend did not reciprocate these feelings and would often ‘cut off’ or invalidate the dreamers voice and perspective.
Dream 2: Many recurring dreams over several months where the friend would appear in the dream but always have her back turned away from the dreamer and would never speak.
Real Life Connection: The friendship had abruptly ended with no closure or chance of resolution. The dreams represent this silent disconnect and lack of communication. The recurring nature of the dreams mirrored the rumination of the dreamer who could not yet find closure and was mentally looping in an attempt to heal.
Dream 3: The friend was with the dreamer walking around a city, she was talking and being friendly but when the dreamer said she was going home, the friend got agitated and said no, I want to go to a restaurant. The dreamer started planning where to eat, the friend did not help, expecting the dreamer to organise everything, but no restaurant was acceptable to the friend. Eventually, the friend started leading the dreamer to another part of the city, it started to feel unsettling, the friend’s energy was changing into something darker, the dreamer started to notice but still trusted her so kept going. They arrived at an apartment door with the number 13, just before she opened the door, the dreamer suddenly realised she was being deceived and that something bad would happen if she went through the door.
Real Life Connection: The dream was mirroring some of the unbalanced dynamics in the friendship but ultimately highlighting to the dreamer the importance of prioritising how relationships feel and trusting when things ‘feel off’, instead of blindly following along. The number 13 on the door was significantly related to the dreamers mother.
Dream 4: The dreamer was in a very old house from another time, it was a vivid and highly symbolic dream with tar covered frogs and dragons which she washed in a sparkling fountain to reveal their beautiful colours. The friend was not central to this dream but was watching from afar, just like the previous recurring dreams, the friend had her back turned and was silent.
Real Life Connection: The old house represents the dreamers ancestral heritage, the frogs and dragons were legacy wounds of being chronically misunderstood ‘tarred with the same brush’. When the frogs were washed in the fountain their ‘true colours’ were revealed, they were finally seen for being themselves for the first time and free of misjudgement.
The trauma origin
Through embodied dreamwork, the dreamer was guided to re-enter the previous dream whilst awake and try to blend with the friend to see if there was any additional information. Upon doing so the dreamer revealed her 13-year-old self stepping out of the friend’s body.
The dreamer had abandonment trauma from her mother at age 13, once this was explored further it was apparent that the friendship abruptly ending had triggered almost identical feelings from the original abandonment event. In both cases the core trigger was having her voice erased from a process that would affect her life significantly. Once identified, the two experiences could be integrated separately, reducing the emotional charge and finally gaining closure.
Steps to use dreamwork for closure:
Record your dreams: Keep a dream journal and note recurring or important themes, emotions, characters or symbols.
Embodiment: Observe how your body reacts when recalling the dream, tension, heaviness, hope, excitement etc.
Explore emotions: Allow yourself to fully feel the emotions without judgement.
Find familiar patterns: Identify if any of the dream elements connect to the past, whether it be familiar people, patterns, situations, places, feelings or behaviours.
Interested in exploring your own dreams?
Dreams can be a powerful guide and a lifelong personal tool, offering trauma-informed healing and insight. Do you have any of your own dreams you want to explore? Online dream therapy sessions are available below.
*Available to Australian and International clients except for USA (due to insurance restrictions)