Mental Health/psychology Thread

Thank you, Punk. I agree. I'll keep pushing for it from time to time.

 

I think I'm agreeing with both @Punk-101 and @John3:16 . Did you know that the reason MDMA became popular was because a therapist/psychoanalyst tested it on his patients to help him talk to them?

 

Cool. I never knew that. Are you familiar with the drug ayahuasca? Google it if not. Crazy stuff, but I think I'm on board with it.

 

Yes I am. I thought that ayahuasca was a brew of a few things naturally found made by some South American tribes, used ritually for spirituality. What I know is that it is essentially DMT, a compound synthesized in nature as well as in the human brain. If the conversation is going this direction, I am more than down... But then we've gotta talk about DMT and consciousness and the release of it while we dream and what our dreams mean and what sleep is. But that's all psychological stuff I think, it surely is mental stuff... So I'm down!

Anybody got any theories on dreams?

 

the super computer known as our brain takes in millions of pieces of sensory, cognitive, and emotional information every day. I think dreams are the brain's way of trying to make sense of all of that info; what to store, what to trash, and how to associate this with that.

 

I'd agree with that. But then, why do we have specific dreams that seem to be about unimportant aspects of our life? What does a specific dream mean? Based on what happens in a dream, why do we dream this specific thing and not something else?

 

I'm not sure. In my experience, the unconscious works in metaphors. I specialize in play therapy, and most of the child's play has metaphorical significance with astounding reliability on a case-to-case basis. I hypothesize that psychosis (hallucinations and delusions) is really metaphors. My wife works with severely mentally ill adults suffering from extreme psychosis and she'll sometimes share their hallucinations and delusions with me and I'll cross reference them with play therapy metaphors and be able to predict the adult schizophrenic's childhood traumas based solely on the metaphorical content of their psychosis. Anyway, I think all dreams have some sort of metaphorical meaning. Certain dreams may seem unimportant if you don't understand the metaphors.

 

Okay. I guess I'm just having trouble understanding the metaphorical significance of dreams, because... How can an imaginary life event that you put yourself through (a dream) be a metaphor for an actual life event? If that's even what you're implying.

 

i'm far from a metaphorical expert. I'm just trying to extrapolate my knowledge of play therapy metaphors to dreams. I could be totally wrong. In play therapy, the child's unconscious creates metaphors to protect the psyche from the pain of traumatic experiences. Bringing the unconscious to consciousness can be very psychologically dangerous to a child that doesn't have the intellectual or emotional strengths to handle it.

For example, many children initiate a role play with me where they serve me pretend food and when I eat it, they laugh and tell me it was poison. I respond as if I was betrayed and in pain from the poison. They soothe me and tell me this next food is safe..only to repeat the poisoning again and again. Food in play is a metaphor for nurturing. How they use food in play indicates how they have been nurtured by their caregiver. Every child that does the poison role play has had a parent that was extremely unpredictable and untrustworthy in their nurturing; loving one moment, neglectful or scary or painful the next..ie usually alcoholic or drug addicted parent. An extremely common schizophrenic delusion is food refusal because they are paranoid that family members are poisoning it. Every single adult schizophrenic that has this specific delusion happens to have had the specific parent i just described. That's just one example of hundreds.

So, that's how the unconscious mind creates metaphors to cope with trauma. But, obviously, most dreams have nothing to do with trauma, so why metaphors there? i don't have any strong theories on this, but maybe it just has something to do with sensory overload. Trauma metaphors are because the pain/fear was too much, and maybe dream metaphors are because the magnitude of info throughout the day was too much. "Too much" in whatever context causes the unconscious to create metaphors. Our brains are wired to find meaning and patterns, automatically striving to find order in disorder by forming models. That's how many optical illusions work. There is so so so much meaninglessness info taken in by our brains every day, that maybe dreams are a chance to try to make order out of all of it by plugging new info into previously existing models of the world. Dream metaphors are like our unconscious showing us; "check this out. I tried to make some meaning out of all this meaningless stuff."

IDK, it's a rad discussion.

 

^^

I've had poison, too hot, and pee or poop.

Are you saying you initiate that the food was too hot, or that they tell you the food was too hot?

 

Gotcha. I wouldn't tell them I don't drink coffee because they're not serving "you" coffee, they're serving it to the character you're playing who is someone in their life that drinks coffee... probably mom or dad. It's not about you, but who you represent.

Really eating the the play doh is about their character giving you nasty food ( nasty nurturing). I'd whisper out of character; "im gonna pretend to eat it and it'll taste nasty, right?" Then role play that. I'll bet they go for that.

 

Congrats, bud! That's quite an accomplishment. Yes, my LCSW exam felt like that. I was so scared.

 

Haha, me too. I had some added pressure. I had been working unlicensed for almost 4 years and the contract my agency has with DMH only lets employees work under a supervisor's license for 4 years. So, I had to study and pass both exams on the first try in like 4 months or something crazy. If I fail, I am unemployed. I had a 2 year old and 2 month old to support. As I was about to click the submit button on the testing computer, I pictured my two little girls and whispered a little something like "this is for you two" to myself. The computer scores the test instantly...Pass. My allergies started to kick in.

 

Good luck! What is your next career gonna be, btw?