Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 726: Working with Dreams & Nightmares with Leslie Ellis

Transcript

Episode 726: Working with Dreams & Nightmares with Leslie Ellis · The Trauma Therapist

0:10
Or welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gaming Person.
0:14
My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible cells, to be human,
0:19
to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big believer in
0:23
who we are is more important than what we know, and this requires cultivating
0:27
authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can learn more
0:33
about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot com.
0:37
That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started. Five four,
0:44
three, two and one. Our folks, welcome back to the podcast.
0:49
Very excited to have back Doctor Leslie Ellis. Leslie, welcome back, Thank
0:54
you. I'm really happy to be back. Awesome, awesome So. Doctor
0:58
Leslie Ellis is a leading expert the use of semantic approaches in psychotherapy, in
1:02
particular for working with dreams, nightmares, and the effects trauma. She's the
1:07
author of A Clinicians Guide to Dream Therapy published by Religion twenty nineteen and offers
1:12
many training opportunities and embodied experiential dreamwork based on her book. She's a PhD
1:19
in Clinical psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology with a specialization and semantic
1:23
approaches. Her dissertation on using Focusing oriented Therapy to treat PTSD for Refugees with
1:30
recurrent nine bears won the Ernest Hartman Award from the International Association for the Study
1:37
of Dreams. I mean, that's pretty cool. We'll talk about that.
1:42
But welcome back, thank you, thank you so much. So before we
1:46
could dive in here, share with the listeners again, who if they didn't
1:51
hear you initially on episode four to forty six. Where you're from originally and
1:53
where you are currently? I'm originally well, I was born in Moose joss,
1:59
A, Scotch but I'm an Air Force brat, so I had no
2:01
fixed address basically growing up and right now, I divide my time between Salt
2:07
Spring Island, where we just moved, and in the winter I spent quite
2:12
a bit of time in Palm Dessert. And w were we talking about here?
2:16
Is that Canada Spring. Salt Spring is in Canada. It's the southernmost
2:22
Gulf Island, so in San Juan Islands. Okay, okay, and just
2:25
quickly, so your your your dissertation. That's pretty cool, the one to
2:31
award. How how does that happen? Well? The International Association for the
2:38
Study of Dreams LIGHTS to promote dream research and student research, and so they
2:43
have a every year at their conference they invite people to share their their dissertations.
2:50
In mine was the winner of the year. I sent it in and
2:54
I think it was partly just, you know, because it was so for
3:00
me anyway, it was it was a really I don't know, I wouldn't
3:04
say universally positive. I was about to say really positive. But it had
3:07
everything in it because being doing a PhD is really an exercise and perseverance,
3:12
and it had its you know, sort of smooth parts and very difficult parts.
3:15
But what I got from it has actually propelled my research, in my
3:20
thinking and my teaching ever since, because the I just applied this focusing oriented
3:28
bodied approach to working with dreams to people refugees that had very severe PTSD and
3:37
frequent nightmares. And it was a small study, but it just it was
3:42
just very promising. It really showed how effective this kind of treatment can be
3:46
some people. I completely stopped having nightmares after decades. And the feedback I
3:53
got from the participants was that they just felt empowered and they didn't really have
3:58
a sense of control over their dreams before that, and so it really encouraged
4:01
me to just keep going with developing the treatment and learning more about how I
4:06
could help, and staying on top of the research and teaching and teaching clinicians,
4:11
and it's really evolved. It's become really my main focus right now.
4:16
I would say, how did you get excuse me, how did you get
4:21
involved or interested in, uh, dreams and nightmares? Usually we hear dreams,
4:29
we don't hear night so much about nightmares. But how did how did
4:31
that start for you? I've always been interested in dreams, you know,
4:35
It's like I've just I'm a big day dreamer. I really just like that
4:42
sort of realm that's like between waking and sleeping and the fantasy world. I
4:47
just I just kind of enjoy that that um, that space, that that
4:51
mental space. I think that's really generative. And so, and then when
4:56
I did my Masters in counseling, when I wanted to become a therapy I
5:00
chose specific a graduate institute and it's one of the few places really where you
5:05
study dreamwork as part of your training. And I know, I know now
5:10
that most clinical programs don't include dreamwork as part of the training, and so
5:15
it was it was a pretty big part of my learning to become a therapist
5:20
was working with dreams, and then I always use them in my practice,
5:25
and so yeah, I just kind of started right from the beginning of my
5:30
training with working with dreams, and I couldn't imagine not doing it. I
5:33
didn't realize I think at the time that it wasn't a mainstream, mainstream tool
5:40
anymore. That a lot of programs have phased out dreamwork, and I'm trying
5:45
to change that. I'm trying to bring me any more training for people because
5:47
I feel like it's such a window into what matters to people. But then
5:53
nightmares specifically, it's not because I have a lot of nightmares. I really
5:57
don't, although my most profound dream have been nightmares. It's that when I
6:01
was looking for a dissertation topic, I wanted to do something related to dreams,
6:08
but I wanted it to be something that clinical, and really the only
6:13
dream related subject that's got a clinical diagnosis is PTSD or nightmare disorders. So
6:19
I wanted to basically see if I could incorporate something clinical into and combine my
6:27
interest in dreams and work towards you know, maybe developing a different kind of
6:32
treatment. So give us the the the kind of the overall view of dreams
6:45
clinically, um, because correct me from all they're like there are a couple
6:49
of camps, right, I mean like, well dreams are why study them?
6:56
They're the kind of like the trash bin of you know, our psyche
7:00
the sense and then right the other there's another perspective. I don't know if
7:04
it's it's just the only other one is that it is a rich, fertile
7:10
round. Help us understand that is a big question. Well I could.
7:17
I always like to point out that dream work and dream you know, dream
7:21
therapy was how the whole enterprise of therapy started with Freud and Young, and
7:26
that dreamwork was at the beginning central to the practice of psychotherapy. And what
7:34
I think has happened over well, it's been a hundred years, I guess
7:41
is that there's been just a shift toward more evidence based, cognitive, measurable,
7:46
time limited approaches to therapy. And dreamwork is not that it's really unique
7:53
the path that people would take. It's perceived as really complicated and esoteric and
8:00
so um, there are more than two camps. There's not just the oh,
8:03
I think dreams are great to to to use as a tool, or
8:07
they're not. But you could, you could, you know, you could,
8:11
I guess look at it that way if you want to draw it along
8:15
a simple line. But um, even some people who work with cognitive approaches
8:20
will use dreams as a way to understand people's beliefs about about the world and
8:28
how they're reflected in dreams. I it's hard to generalize. This is a
8:33
tough question, but I would say the people that truly value dreams really are
8:39
in some way interested in depth, interested in the information that's implicit or that
8:46
we repress, and that the part of um there, you know that the
8:50
therapist can do that would be most helpful is to support the person in understanding
8:56
and unearthing those things that live under the fists and so the subterranean realm and
9:03
and feeling like that's really important, versus someone who might say, you know,
9:09
I just want to know what you think and what you believe, and
9:11
we can work at a cognitive level and we'll get we'll get the job done.
9:15
So I think that might be the two comps, is how I might
9:18
describe them. I think I may have shared this with you before. But
9:24
there was a point when I was seeing a therapist who was young and inspired,
9:31
and we did a lot of dream work and it was intense. I
9:37
mean, I found myself. I'm sure this is not surprising to you,
9:39
but you know, the more I tried to remember my dreams, the more
9:45
I remembered my dreams. And I was writing down my dreams, and they
9:48
were so um what abstract, and you know, they weren't very literal.
10:01
I don't know where I'm going this, but I kind of want to get
10:05
to a point where you can share with us an experience of working with someone
10:09
and and what you learned, what was able to be called from their dreams.
10:16
How How does how does looking at our dreams help us? M?
10:20
Well, um, there's there's a way that they show us what's most important
10:28
to us. I think, Um, there's a lot of theories about why
10:33
we dream, and some of the things that I feel like are um seem
10:37
really true is that when we're sleeping, we're processing emotion, That dreams are
10:43
very implicated in our emotional life and trying to kind of work through emotion and
10:50
and temper it and that um, so dreams of reflect what's really gotten a
10:58
big response from us. And the reason that they're abstract, as you say,
11:03
or obscure I don't seem to make sense, is that when we're dreaming,
11:09
our prefinal cortex, our rational thinking function is very damp down, and
11:13
our ability to express things in clear language and a logical order, and our
11:20
time, our sense of time, all that stuff is sleeping, and so
11:24
including our ability to remember things really well and our ability to you know,
11:28
executive functioning doesn't exist very much in dreams. But what is still very awake
11:35
in our brains is our our olympic system, our emotional center, our visual
11:39
our visual cortex. We can picture emotions basically, so we get the dreams
11:45
are not trying to be obscure. They're just expressing themselves in what's the language
11:50
that's available to them. So, and this is an idea from a very
11:54
famous dream research tuning Ernest Hartman Well, the person whose name the award was.
12:00
It was in his named after and he said that dreams are picture metaphors
12:03
for the most prevalent emotion that we're sensing. And so if you if you
12:07
see them as that, they a lot of them really make sense immediately there
12:13
they're pictures of what we feel. And so in terms of therapy, if
12:18
you're wanting to get an image for something that's really important and really up for
12:24
you, the dreams supply that. And they often supply images of things that
12:30
we maybe don't want to think about or don't want to talk about. They
12:33
they picture things that we repress. So they're very important material for the therapy
12:41
process. And I can give you an example because I often share this one
12:46
because my daughter is willing to share it, and I don't like sharing clients
12:52
stories too much, but this one, she says, you know, you
12:56
can use this as an example. So she dreamt of a of it's this
13:03
horrific image of hacking a woman to pieces. And she called me because this
13:09
was really disturbing to her, and she knows I know a few things about
13:11
nightmares, and so, um, what you do with an image like that
13:16
is not take it literally. I always tell people not to take your especially
13:20
graphic dreams like that literally, because dreams are just trying to get your attention,
13:24
and sometimes that's the way they get your attention is to make it very
13:28
gory, and especially if it's important. So but I did ask her something
13:33
about a question about what it you know, does it mean something to be
13:39
divided up in pieces? Does it mean something to you to be broken or
13:43
you know, divided? And she immediately had a m a deep response to
13:50
that. Yes, you know, living in she was going to school in
13:52
Montreal, and she was confined to her apartment for a month and couldn't get
13:56
outside, and she felt like a big part of her we were from the
14:01
West coast, and she felt like she couldn't, like a big part of
14:03
herself was left back there and she felt profoundly divided and she felt really uncomfortable.
14:07
And the dream was a way of saying, this is important to pay
14:11
attention to. And she made some life changes that really helped. And so
14:16
that's a good exam So what's what I think is importing there. One of
14:20
the things is that your question was to her, right, what does it
14:24
feel like to be divided up? It wasn't, Well, how does it
14:28
feel like hacking up somebody? Right? So our dreams I don't want to
14:35
use the word always, but oftentimes what's going on for us? Right?
14:39
So she was she was hacking up somebody? Was she wasn't hacking up herself?
14:43
Yeah, Well, this is an idea from Geshtal that every aspect of
14:48
the dream, everything in the dream, is an aspect of ourselves, and
14:52
that that I don't know if that's entirely true. I do think that dreaming
14:56
can be about something larger than ourselves. But I would say that the characters
15:01
in the dream, like, we're not just the dream ego, that our
15:05
avatar and the dream. That's not the only aspect of us or that represents
15:11
us in the dream. I think we tend to overidentify with the dream ego,
15:16
and I think the dream ego really represents our persona or just an aspect
15:20
of ourself that we show to the world, and it's often an uncomfortable figure
15:24
in our dreams or an incompetent figure. But there are other characters in the
15:28
dream I think that do represent different ways of looking at the situation or different
15:31
aspects of our consciousness, and that really it's it's mostly very expanding and enlarging
15:41
to imagine into the other other characters and the other pieces of the dream.
15:46
I think they have a lot more novelty and a lot more to offer in
15:50
ways that are enlightening new. You know, when you talked about earlier on
15:58
and as we were talking to walked about uh kind of the how how dream
16:04
work was viewed and how often sometimes it's it's perceived as obscure. But you
16:11
know, as we're talking here, part of me is thinking, will a
16:15
lot of this is in correct? Me if I'm wrong again? But is
16:19
interpretation right? And that's so talk to us about how does one learn how
16:26
to interpret? Are there many ways to interpret dreams and so forth? Yes,
16:32
um, there are, Although I did this another study I like to
16:36
I like to do research, I guess, but on what you know,
16:40
what are the most common modern dreamwork methods? And really the whole field has
16:44
gotten away from interpretation in the dream worker as expert, and I'll tell you
16:49
what your dream means to more of an experiential and collaborative approach. So what
16:56
um, what I do and what I think most of the dream dream therapists
17:02
that I that I speak to do is really invite the dreamer to go back
17:07
into and experience the dream, experience it from different perspectives, feel into how
17:14
it might be, inviting them to look at a different perspective. It usually
17:19
enlarges your perspective or kind of gives you a view from left field, or
17:23
from something that you wouldn't have considered. But then the dreamer is the one
17:29
who offers the and I would even say interpretation so much as the dreamer would
17:33
then take the dream and live it forward, or ask a question like,
17:40
what's the dream asking of me? What is this dream trying to show me?
17:44
How is this dream you know, attempting to enlarge my perspective here?
17:48
And and if you if you enter a dream experientially, which is pretty easy
17:55
to do because there's such as such an all encompassing experience. When you have
18:00
them, I feel so real. So what I find is that when you
18:04
invite the dreamer to try on different places besides the dream ego, they will
18:11
they'll get their own sense of what the dream is about. And as the
18:15
outsider, I don't really feel like we're qualified, honestly to tell someone what
18:21
their dream image means. I think that particular way of working with dreams is
18:25
quite outdated, Like the dream dictionary and a dog means this, or a
18:29
horseman life, It's like it's not really there's no universal meaning in dreams because
18:34
everybody everyone has a different you know, say, someone could love dogs and
18:40
someone could be terrified of them. So my dog and your dog in a
18:42
dream are going to be very different. But a person's emotional experience or what
18:48
the feeling tone is in the dream and how that might be familiar is a
18:52
really generative way to get at what the dream is saying or trying to do.
18:57
It's interesting as talking. I can't help but think about and I almost
19:06
feel what my experience was like working with that therapist and doing that. It
19:12
was so freaking intense. And I remember she told me, you know,
19:18
this is going to get intense, and it did. It got So why
19:25
is it so intense? Well, maybe you're intense. Maybe that's true,
19:32
but I think, I mean, you know, dreams and of themselves,
19:36
they're so when you go in there, they're so intense. Well, I
19:40
think it's because they use emotion as their base material and so um, there
19:45
is an intensity to that, and they really go to they cut to the
19:48
chase, they go to the most. Um. I think they really are
19:55
trying to metabolize the things that have had the most impact on us, like
20:00
my initial dreams that I worked with and I did therapy with the Youngian as
20:04
well, and my dreams after we started in on the process were about like,
20:08
I was born very premature and nearly died. When I was born,
20:14
I had to spend a couple months in the hospital. And then I also
20:17
nearly died when I was seventeen in river and I had a dream that combined
20:22
my early birth experience with this near drowning. So the two experiences of my
20:27
life where I was I nearly died and put them together into one. So
20:32
speak of intensity, and yeah, the dreams. I mean that experience I
20:37
kind of, you know, put it away somewhere and thought, oh,
20:41
I'm good, but you know what, obviously it's got a big impact something
20:45
like that. And so my dreams felt like, oh, this is a
20:48
I've got an opportunity to metabolize this a little bit, and I'm going to
20:52
bring this up to the surface and I'm going to give you an image and
20:56
and it did feel like one of the most profound speriences of my life,
21:00
but at the time I didn't know what to do with it. So it
21:03
was very helpful to process the emotions later. And I mean, I think
21:10
that's what dreams do, is they bring up unmetabolized feelings, and by their
21:15
nature they're often intense. I just want to remind everyone that I'm speaking with
21:18
doctor Leslie Ellis. So do you how do you work? Do you work
21:23
exclusively with dreams? Who comes to you? Yeah? So I mainly now
21:30
do nightmare consultations, so I work with people who have intense nightmares or but
21:37
more often I'm actually teaching therapists how to work with dreams, and they consult
21:42
with me on their clients because I to parachute in is you know, there
21:48
isn't the relationship developed, and I'm you know, not doing so much one
21:52
on one therapy anymore, but mostly teaching how to work with dreams and nightmares
21:57
and in a a particular way that is quite simple actually to learn. I'm
22:04
really trying to encourage therapists, even if they don't work with dreams per se,
22:10
to to work with nightmares if people have them, because they're quite treatable
22:15
and they're they're quite a they can be quite a clinical problem. They're very
22:18
highly linked to suicide risk, and they disrupt sleeps, so they create a
22:23
lot of problems for people. So mainly that's what I'm doing now, is
22:27
teaching therapists how to work with dreams and also have a specialty in teaching nightmar
22:33
treatment. So therapists are going to be listening to this and they're going to
22:40
be like, oh my god, this sounds awesome, Doctor ellis sounds amazing.
22:45
But I don't know the first thing about dreams. Blah blah blah.
22:48
What would you say to them? I always say something to the effect if
22:55
you're a therapist, you already have the tools that you need to with dreams,
23:00
because you mainly need to be curious and empathic and calm in the face
23:07
of whatever comes your way. And the other thing is that dreams, I
23:12
really believe they're attempting to metabolize the emotion. They're meant to be helpful.
23:18
They're not trying to be difficult. And there are some specific things about nightmares,
23:25
Like one thing that's useful to know is that nightmares are a classic symptom
23:30
of PTSD, and they will show you by the nature of the dream kind
23:37
of they're diagnostic. They can show you how far them trauma has been metabolized,
23:41
because the closer a dream is to the actual event, the less it's
23:45
been metabolized, and the more the dream starts to become symbolic and more of
23:51
a picture metaphor weaving in current time and current events. The more sort of
23:56
actually dream like it is, the more you can say that they've gotten a
23:59
certain level of integration of their trauma, and you can you can kind of
24:03
track their dream content and see how well they're doing, and to treat them,
24:10
you're essentially letting them dream the dream onwards. It's not very complicated,
24:15
So I guess I want to say, if there's a perception that dreamwork has
24:18
to be really complicated and esoteric, it doesn't. It can be very simple,
24:23
and it can go obviously very deep and get into all kinds of terrain,
24:29
but it doesn't have to be that way. It can still be something
24:32
like a part of what you do that isn't so complicated. What's coming up
24:37
for me is the more and more popular use of like psocybin and psychedelics UM,
24:47
and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the relationship the commonalities, if
24:52
any there exists between working with those. Yeah, I think there is some
25:00
crossover in that in that UM, you know, you get into in the
25:06
psilocybin journeys into an altered state where there's definitely more that can come up from
25:15
the unconscious if you want, I don't like that word. It sounds like
25:18
you're knocked out or asleep, but from the implicit from from the you know,
25:22
under underworld, and so you're dealing with m kind of bigger forces.
25:27
And there is a way that I think that they touch on the same material.
25:32
And in the dreaming state, you're also your ego is kind of relativized
25:37
and you're like not in control. So like a lot of a lot of
25:41
wild things can happen in dreams as well. UM. And then there's some
25:45
differences in that, you know, with with psychedelics, that's it's a it's
25:49
a deliberate kind of journey into that um, that other realm, and it's
25:55
it's it's not something your body would naturally do, So it's it's a little
26:00
bit more of a intensified and UM. You know, I feel like it
26:06
has to be it has to be you know, used carefully, and I've
26:08
heard incredible stories about how it can help. But dreaming is just a it's
26:15
more of a natural, um, a natural trip of the same variety in
26:21
a way, not and not doesn't have the same intensity usually, and it's
26:25
more about what your own body will um will offer you. Usually dreaming is
26:30
paced at in a way that you can metabolize it, though not always depending
26:37
on you know, somebody's um encountered things that jog their memory or or or
26:44
upset their nervous system. The dreams can get intense, whether you like it
26:48
or not. But there is definitely some crossover. I feel like, um,
26:52
they have um, you know, a certain amount of terrain in common,
26:56
and yeah, they can open up open up realms that you wouldn't necessarily
27:00
look at otherwise. What do you say when people say I don't dream,
27:07
I'm sorry, I don't have dreams. Well, everybody dreams roughly two hours
27:14
and ninety minutes to two hours every night. This is it's just that they
27:18
don't remember their dreams, and so that is fairly common, I would say,
27:26
especially as as we get older, dream dream recall is it kind of
27:32
dissipates a little bit. But like you discovered, when you started to pay
27:36
attention to your dreams and use them in therapy and really engage with them,
27:41
you had more dreams and more intense dreams and remember them better. Right,
27:45
So I think there's there's a number of ways to catch your dreams if you
27:51
want to remember them. But everybody dreams and it is possible to recall them
27:55
if you if you really want to, if you pay attention to them.
27:57
Awesome or Leslie. Um, So, what's the best way for people to
28:03
get in contact with you? Well, hold on, hold on home before
28:07
you do that. Um. The book is called The Clinicians Guide to Dream
28:10
Therapy Implementing Simple and Effective Dream Work. We'll have that linked up here at
28:14
the show notes page at the Traumatapist podcast dot com. Now, just quickly
28:18
before we kind of close out here. Obviously it's four clinicians, Okay,
28:23
hence the title. But yeah, although it's it's not like it's not really
28:29
the language is accessible. Anybody could read it, Honestly. It's it's it's
28:33
aimed at clinicians, but it's friendly. Okay, awesome, awesome, and
28:36
that people can get that anywhere books are sold. Okay. Um, all
28:40
right, we're what's the best way for people to get in contact with you
28:42
and learn about what you're doing? Probably my website would be this simplest It's
28:48
got everything that I'm doing and some actually some material for people who are non
28:53
clinicians, but a lot of stuff for clinicians, and all the podcasts I've
28:59
done. I think the original one that we did together is still up there,
29:02
and hum lots of free resources, blog posts. It's really yeah,
29:07
it's it's it's the place. It's doctor Leslie Ellis dot com. You can,
29:10
okay, throw it on the link, but it's definitely it's the place
29:12
to start. And there's a there's a way to reach me through the website
29:15
as well. Okay. And finally, so you offer courses for a clinicians
29:21
of these in person online both what they're online at the moment, I'm thinking
29:26
now maybe I could start offering some in person. But it's been you know,
29:30
as we've all been through COVID, everything moved online and it's a pretty
29:34
accessible way to to reach a lot of different places and people. So right
29:40
now, yeah, it's all online, but hopefully we'll get to see some
29:42
warm bodies in our room at some point and then it's a little while.
29:47
Awesome, awesome, Well, I appreciate it, Leslie. Great talking to
29:49
you. I'm so glad I you came back on here. I just let's
29:56
love talking to you. Um, thank you so much. Yeah, thank
29:59
you too. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you. It's always
30:02
a pleasure all right, take care okay,