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I am in some kind of narrow, wooden, upended box-like enclosure.   I am sitting opposite my mother.  I can make out her eyes in the darkness because they are glittering with raw terror.

It dawns on me we must be in some kind of concentration camp.  She is cowering and barely breathing, trying not to make a sound.  Signaling me not to.  It is hard to look at the naked horror in her eyes and at the same time hard not to lock into such a desperate gaze. 

I do finally manage to inhale and look about.  I realize this compartment is not some kind of prison.  It doesn’t even have a door.  It has a red velvet curtain hanging from a rod to cover its opening.  It looks more like some kind of a changing room that you’d find at the beach.

I pull the curtain aside and gasp at a breathtaking, seashore sunset before me.  The sky is on fire as the waves roll reliably and easily onto the shore.  My chest expands with relief and pleasure. The beach is quiet and isolated.  Its horizon seems to stretch on forever.

I turn to my mother with joy and tell her we are safe.  We are at the beach.  We are not captives.

She shakes her head insistently, even more agitated.  She grips my wrists and pulls at me, willing me to understand our danger.

My mouth falls open.  She still sees a concentration camp and doom.  I realize I can’t make her see nature’s spacious beauty and such delicious freedom inches away.  We can and must leave this claustrophobic wooden coffin, isolated from a vast and glorious world.

She won’t hear of it.  That would mean danger she is convinced.  She is trembling with anger and anxiety.

I recognize I can step out there into that beautiful and adventure-laden world but if I do, I must choose separation from my mother.  I will be leaving her to her horrible, imagined hell.

It hurts to inhale.

I reach out and touch the curtain.

I wake up.

Do you have a sense of whether or not you were going to go through the curtain?

AloneAtLast, a good question but as you know dreams can be just as tormenting as life.  But they sometimes carry a remarkable gift of clarity that our awakened selves have not the courage or freedom to embrace.  

I have spent my life and am still spending it trying to clear that metaphorical curtain completely and leave completely that coffin-like structure.  Physically I did leave not quickly nor smoothly but I still carry an unhealthy degree of survivor's guilt.  My own qualifier to this site has passed on.

Our so profoundly disordered uBPD parents demand us to "keep them company in their isolation" as one of the many wise authors I have read declared.

When we are mandated to "keep someone company in their isolation" what is in it for us?  They want the comfort of a symbiotic/codependent affinity we provide to them.  They want us to believe that our self-sacrifice is an act of love to them and ignore that it is an act of anti-love to ourselves and in fact a profound act of anti-love from them.

They are necrophilic and want us to contract -- to be like their own private bonsai tree object/mascot.  To be pruned and kept small and forever limited.  A healthy and nurturing parent would be biophilic, encouraging us to expand and explore the world and our own selves.

They want us to see the world EXACTLY as in their dark and terrified or numbed out vision and they want us to live an arrested development, small and controllable. In fact, they declare treason if we dare have our own relationship with the world separate from them. Sometimes they loosen the leash, as we pretend there is no leash and try to engage with others and ourselves.  But any joy and sense of independence, and self- and other- discovery is temporary. All the time we are at the end of our stretched leash we are still not grounded in self-possession. we know the leash will be tightened momentarily and often punishingly for our presumption to LIVE. The cruelest reality is that we convince ourselves that some day we will be released by them from the leash.  We are the only ones who can release ourselves from that leash.

We have witnessed their suffering for so very long.  They encouraged us to believe we had the capacity to free them from their unhappiness and frustration and sense of helplessness.  We can not.

We can not!  And their willingness to ask us to sacrifice so much for them reflects their own inability to genuinely love us and recognize that we belong to ourselves and not to them.  They want us to stop being who we are -- and what a colossally outrageous demand to make of a human being, an insistence on us being a slave.  To be a hologram of their inflexible wills to distract them from their pain and their own sense of helplessness.

They want to tit-suck from us and control us at the same time. As Scott Peck points out, that is colossally unjust and evil to put someone in that double-bind position.  No one should get to play controlling parent and demanding lost to narcissism child at the same time to the same person ALL THE TIME.

They do. They did.

Hi bethanny

Thanks for sharing this dream. It reminds me of something Christine Ann Lawson says:

":)on't internalize the Hermit's fears or become limited by them."

Your dream really shows how someone with BPD can perceive the world totally different from how it really is and also how that person can impose that distorted world-view onto others. When trying to understand or process our BPD parents' behavior, I think it helps to be aware of this type of distorted perception. Also to help us individuate and be open to the possibility that what we always believed was reality, might in fact be a distorted version of reality we were raised in by our BPD parent(s).

Kwamina,

You wrote:


It is hard not to when you are privy to so many years of their belief system that had such impact and control on one's behavior.

It also shows me how the times I found joy and support in life that was outside the orbit of my mother was not celebrated and appreciated by my mother but triggered her sense of abandonment and rejection by me and I was guilted for that.  

I look back and see that my mother had such black and white thinking and had no respect in or confidence in conflict resolution.  If I had an altercation with a friend my mother would rush in to worsen the separation and encourage me not to forgive the person who obviously didn't appreciate me enough, as much as she did, and I had wasted my time investing in the friendship from the get go.  In the short term she flattered my ego and comforted my hurt, but in the long run I lost a friend, or the friendship had been weakened.  Every relationship has its bumps and setting boundaries is called for not termination in so many cases.

best, bethanny