I recently disclosed childhood sexual abuse to my therapist, with whom I've been working for just over a year. I've spent much of the last year battling ambivalence, resistance, anger, and life in general. My therapist is very Jungian and developing a mindfulness practice has been a large part of our work, as has working on DBT distress tolerance skills. A couple weeks ago I got frustrated and in my reactive-attachmenty way, I tried to fire her because I got sick of hearing mindfulness and dbt as the keys to working on my shit. She responded by assuring me that I am free to fire her at any time, but that she won't quit on me ever. And that was kind of the turning point in our therapeutic relationship. 

This last session, she asked me if I'd had any dreams that stood out. I don't feel ready to share about the memory dreams that I have, so I brought up a couple dreams I'd had over the weekend. The first one, which I just brushed off, involved me adopting a tiny bear cub in footie pajamas. I told her about it and kind of laughed it off before delving into this dream that I had about being back in college and living in my dorm room, except I was my current age (34). I had made the decision to take the semester off to go into an inpatient psych program to deal with my shit. We talked about this being a metaphor for me needing privacy and space to understand this trauma and that in order to do so I need to find the places where I feel safest. She immediately wanted to go back to my baby bear dream. We've been working under the "wounded healer" archetype for a while as in my professional career I am a social worker and that seems to be th eone that presents itself most with regard to my trauma. She read me a passage from the Jungian Book of Symbols and so much of what the bear represents is relevant to where I'm at right now. 

I desperately want to write more as there is so much to this theme, but I'm exhausted and soon my words will stop making sense. I intend on this journal being as "bear" centered as possible, so with this I suppose I am going into hibernation for the evening ;-)