Lying Down

I once had a patient who told me this dream. He dreamed about me.

"I was driving you somewhere, you were in the back seat. I don't know why I was driving you somewhere, but I deliberately went in the wrong direction. I didn't want to take you where you wanted to go, and I didn't want you to know that we were going in the wrong direction. I was deliberately misleading you."

Fascinating, isn't it?

I always push people to give me their interpretation first, then I'll discuss the other alternatives. He continued:

"I try to hide from you. I hope I can mislead or deceive you, not let you see the real, horrible me."

But of course we talked plenty about the real horrible person, and he's not horrible at all, simply a little disabled.

And he worked pretty hard in therapy. We had designed a treatment protocol, a difficult therapy, honestly, and he resisted it and I knew that. But he agreed with it and wanted to do it, and for the most part did do it.

I think maybe I'm perceived as much more exacting than I really am. That could be because I do call people on their stuff (if it won't hurt them, sometimes I'm totally fine with a person lying to me, as you know from reading other posts).

We talk all the time about compliance or lack there of, especially since a treatment plan is designed with the patient's input. At one time we both thought it would help.

But if a person doesn't want to work on the plan, or if the plan is too hard, then that person is tempted to hide or to lie about what he or she did outside of treatment between visits.

Some people call that lying resistance, but I call it good communication. When they 'fess up, which usually doesn't take long, we have much more to talk about. Nobody really wants to keep up a charade. It's very boring and unproductive and we talk about the process.

Not working a plan tells me more that a person is either burdened or it's too difficult or both. And that's okay, we can dial it down.

Now the dream? The cool thing about dreams, as I've said before, is that they're ALL about the dreamer. If you're the dreamer, then everyone in the dream is you. The therapist in this man's dream is him, not me, because face it, I'm at home in my bed, not with him. He looks a lot like me in the dream. He's the driver and he's TherapyDoc.

So if you dream that you're hiding from your therapy doc?

I would say that means that you're hiding from yourself. A little silly, no?

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