Romanov – Thank you for that feedback. It is helpful to me and other readers in the Forum.
My mother wasn’t a schizophrenic, but she was terribly anxious that I would die because I was born lifeless. This led her to push ideas into me that resulted in years of sexual misery because she feared I would still die even at thirteen.
Such things cause an habitual emotional response, and habits can be changed – see
https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/habits/ and
Ugliness and beauty are skin deep. Some people who are skin deep ugly are often wonderful, living and wise people inside. They had to be to deal with the rubbish thrown at them. These people when you get to meet them are very attractive, despite their looks.
The trick is not to forgive your mother, that is hard, but in recognising the damage it still does to the way you live your life.
Many people do not realise that they have an inner mother equally as powerful as an external mother. You have taken in millions of bits of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with your mother, and they are a major influence in your early life, and in a few cases the child never becomes independent from its mother at any age because they never outgrow the damage done. This is true even if your mother was never there for you – you still have all the memories of her not being there for you filed under ‘Mother’. The memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. Such an inner mother can appear in dreams because you are still deeply influenced by what you hold within you. The inner mother can also signify what has been received via genes passed on or ancestral influences. A man gives an example:
"It was difficult to find this forgiveness because I felt that what my mother had done was unforgivable. Of course none of this was neatly rational. The feelings were burning beyond reason, and could not be rationalised away. But I could not ignore the fact that this was not, in the end, about my mother, but about myself. My continued anger was ruining my life. So for my own sake I had to sincerely forgive my mother. This was not a fast change, and it was not easy. But it did release me from the crippling effects of the anger. And some effects of non-forgiveness in these situations are quite subtle. One might, for instance, avoid success in one's life so that those close to you could never feel the pleasure or relaxation of seeing me succeed. Also, the misery would spread out into the lives of those around me -- to my wife for instance. Ripples upon ripples, and the world has enough waves of vengeance and bitterness riding through it already.
After realising this I had a dream. In the dream I stood facing myself. The second me stood above on something, and was condemning me for not being as good a father as I might have been. Meanwhile I stood below begging forgiveness for all the wrong things I had done, and feeling terribly guilty and an awful failure. But gradually the funny side of the situation struck me, and I called out to the second me, ‘Come down from there, you fool. You’re only me condemning myself and making me a failure.’ When I woke from the dream I could see how true the dream was, and what a destructive habit I had. If I projected the feeling of being a second-rate father, my children would feel it and believe they were second-rate children." See
https://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/#Opening I sent my peace and love to you - Tony