Bringing the power of dreams to 12 step recovery work.
I began working with my dreams about 4 years into my recovery. In the years since, I have seen a powerful parallel between the intention of the dreams and the 12 steps of recovery as laid out by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob. It isn't surprising that the great pioneer of the dreams, Dr. Carl Jung, was also a pioneer to Alcoholics Anonymous all those years ago.
In January of 1961, Bill Wilson wrote a letter of "great appreciation...long overdue", letting Dr. Jung know of the great influence he'd had over Rowland H. in the early 1930's. Under Jung's care, the seminal moment came when Mr. H, after having been told by Jung that he was a hopeless case, asked "Are there no exceptions?" To which Jung outlined the possibility of spiritual awakening as the only hope for him. Thus the journey towards spiritual awakening became the foundation upon which the 12 steps of AA were built (see link to letters at the bottom of this article).
Dreamwork is psychospiritual work. As such, dreams support many of the steps to recovery. Dreams will bring us repeatedly to the felt experience of acceptance of our powerlessness, showing us the subtler nuances of how our lives are unmanageable. Our Higher Power will come over and over in the guise of various Archetypes to provoke us, to teach us, and to guide us towards wholeness. We look to our dreams to more fully reveal our habitual patterns, the character defects which block us from our Higher Power, so that we may learn and understand that they are not our only choice. The dreams will support our 11th step work by providing us with the felt experience of our deep connection to Higher Power. They open us to our own gnosis, the Promises, and a wisdom that is unique to each of us for carrying the message of our recovery and the hope for others.
By working with the dreams in a dyadic way, exploring the tension between our character defects and the Promises, which are particular to each of us, we further open our channel to spirit. Do you have particularly irksome character defects that you just seem unwilling or unable to let go of? Sometimes what we think is the defect is not actually the thing. The manifestation of our problem sits on top of a larger issue, one that is perhaps in a blind spot. The dreams are like a lantern shining God's light into our darkest corners.
Sometimes it is unresolved trauma from our family of origin. It is often felt as a lack of faith or an inability to turn it over. Archetypes of all kinds come in the dreams to support us in our journey to wholeness. We cannot fully turn it over if we are reacting to old trauma that we carry in our bodies and hearts and minds. The dreams will take us down and through and will not give us more than we can handle. If it comes in the dream, it is something we are meant to look at.
The 12 steps provide us with a guide to daily living...the dreams can offer us the Divine wisdom and guidance to support our desire to achieve spiritual awakening and carry the message of hope to others.
I bring my own personal experience in recovery through the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous to my work with dreamers in recovery. We share a common language and understanding which supports our work together. Dreamwork isn't meant to replace your recovery program. It is meant to augment it with the rich tapestry that is uniquely you... Please contact me if you'd like to find out more, or if you or your group would like to host a free presentation.
Excerpted and adapted from my blog In Search of Puella:
"He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the soul. If he does not find the soul, the horror of emptiness will overcome him, and fear will drive him with a whip lashing time and again in a desperate endeavor and a blind desire for the hollow things of the world." Carl Jung, p 129 The Red Book, A Reader's Edition
Who on the journey has not felt this? In the moment where we finally agree that our pursuit has been for naught..that we are powerless, we encounter the place in us that does not know who we really are. And we are terrified. I experienced this myself at a certain point in my life. It came in the form of hitting rock bottom. I was bereft, lost, and truly terrified. I feared dying the hopeless death of the lost soul I had become, enslaved to a cycle of alcoholism and in an increasingly desperate nihilism. My pain and hopelessness became the great motivator that I had sought in books and churches and people. I could finally admit that I was powerless over alcohol and that my life had become unmanageble by me.
It doesn't matter how we come to desire our soul, only that we do. When we come to terms with our own powerlessness, our own inability to manifest through the force of our will the faith that we so desperately want, we may become willing to turn from our false desires and turn inward towards our soul. This is terrifying, because we cannot know it until we find it inside ourselves, in this body, in this life. When we objectify it, we make it something outside ourselves to be sought after. But when we truly open our self to the mystery, our full potential in our recovery is possible.
In a recent dream, I am a wanderer, walking, trudging along through an ancient valley. I am carrying a blanket and have food in the pockets of my heavy coat. In the distance I can see a shimmering city, like some crystal palace, perhaps my own personal mythos of the land of OZ, my own Narnia. There are many mountains and boulders and high cliffs leading up to that distant shimmering land of Narnia. Behind me, where I have trudged, there are the remnants of an old, contemporary civilization. It is as if the future has come and gone and I am still walking to yet another distant future. A young girl comes up beside me. I say to her, “Nobody told me that I would have to walk like this.” She responds matter-of-factly, “nobody knew, nobody knew”.
This girl is my soul, my own personal Salome – the girl who came to Jung on his journey through the dreams. This girl is not trudging, she is on a journey. Her parents, the Archetypal Mother & Father are behind us. She is curious, open. Nobody knew, except she knows that nobody knew and I do not. I live in fear of the unknown. I am in the impoverishment of believing that I am going somewhere, that I am surviving something. Don't we all believe that it is about our survival? My mind wants to get the lay of the land to understand the journey as if it could be something outside of myself, something that I could conquer or something that I must survive. But my soul knows the truth, which is that we must walk in the not-knowing. Perhaps the true Gnosis is in the not-knowing.
Carl cried out to his soul, “I am weary, my soul, my wandering has lasted too long, my search for myself outside myself. Now I have gone through events and find you behind all of them.” (p 131)
What is so exciting about the dreams, is that they come from my own psyche and they carry the energy of the divine as represented in my own personal mythos which is like a story, unfolding. It is a story that is at once a tragedy and also a comedy, but it is never boring. And the truth is, it is not about my survival, but about the death of everything I think I know. When we work the 12 steps in recovery we find that what we thought we knew about ourselves may not actually be true. Through working the steps we begin to see Spirit's hand in all that has transpired and we begin to feel the workings of Higher Power in our lives.
Jung queried his soul, “Who are you, child? My dreams have represented you as a child and as a maiden. I am ignorant of your mysteries.” (p 131). and says of her, “You took away where I thought to take hold, and you gave me where I did not expect anything and time and again you brought about fate from new and unexpected quarters. Where I sowed, you robbed me of the harvest, and where I did not sow, you give me fruit a hundredfold. And time and again I lost the path and found it again where I would never have foreseen it. You upheld my belief, when I was alone and near despair. At every decisive moment you let me believe in myself.” (p 132)
This incredible passage speaks truly to the Promises and to the journey towards faith. Nobody knows your journey. Only you can experience the truth of what Carl is saying for yourself when you embark on your own journey. The girl tells me, “Nobody knew, nobody knew”. This is the truth she brings in this moment. It is my prayer, a place to enter into the solitude of my personal contemplation of my own powerlessness and my own acceptance. And, as I journey forward, a place to feel into the possibility of walking in the not-knowing, trudging the Road of Happy Destiny.
Phoenix Rising, Form of Girl
by Laura Smith
Links to my blog series, Archetypal Dreamwork and the 12 Step: The Recovery Chronicles
Go to next page to read Bill W.'s letter to Dr. Jung and Jung's response.
Bill Wilson's letter:
My dear Dr. Jung:
This letter of great appreciation has been very long overdue.
May I first introduce myself as Bill W., a co-founder of the Society of Alcoholics Anonymous. Though you have surely heard of us, I doubt if you are aware that a certain conversation you once had with one of your patients, a Mr. Rowland H., back in the early 1930's, did play a critical role in the founding of our Fellowship.
Though Rowland H. has long since passed away, the recollections of his remarkable experience while under treatment by you has definitely become part of AA history. Our remembrance of Rowland H.'s statements about his experience with you is as follows:
Having exhausted other means of recovery from his alcoholism, it was about 1931 that he became your patient. I believe he remained under your care for perhaps a year. His admiration for you was boundless, and he left you with a feeling of much confidence.
To his great consternation, he soon relapsed into intoxication. Certain that you were his "court of last resort," he again returned to your care. Then followed the conversation between you that was to become the first link in the chain of events that led to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.
My recollection of his account of that conversation is this: First of all, you frankly told him of his hopelessness, so far as any further medical or psychiatric treatment might be concerned. This candid and humble statement of yours was beyond doubt the first foundation stone upon which our Society has since been built.
Coming from you, one he so trusted and admired, the impact upon him was immense. When he then asked you if there was any other hope, you told him that there might be, provided he could become the subject of a spiritual or religious experience - in short, a genuine conversion. You pointed out how such an experience, if brought about, might remotivate him when nothing else could. But you did caution, though, that while such experiences had sometimes brought recovery to alcoholics, they were, nevertheless, comparatively rare. You recommended that he place himself in a religious atmosphere and hope for the best. This I believe was the substance of your advice.
Shortly thereafter, Mr. H. joined the Oxford Groups, an evangelical movement then at the height of its success in Europe, and one with which you are doubtless familiar. You will remember their large emphasis upon the principles of self-survey, confession, restitution, and the giving of oneself in service to others. They strongly stressed meditation and prayer. In these surroundings, Rowland H. did find a conversion experience that released him for the time being from his compulsion to drink.
Returning to New York, he became very active with the "O.G." here, then led by an Episcopal clergyman, Dr. Samuel Shoemaker. Dr. Shoemaker had been one of the founders of that movement, and his was a powerful personality that carried immense sincerity and conviction.
At this time (1932-34) the Oxford Groups had already sobered a number of alcoholics, and Rowland, feeling that he could especially identify with these sufferers, addressed himself to the help of still others. One of these chanced to be an old schoolmate of mine, Edwin T. ("Ebby"). He had been threatened with commitment to an institution, but Mr. H. and another ex-alcoholic "O.G." member procured his parole and helped to bring about his sobriety.
Meanwhile, I had run the course of alcoholism and was threatened with commitment myself. Fortunately I had fallen under the care of a physician - a Dr. William D. Silkworth - who was wonderfully capable of understanding alcoholics. But just as you had given up on Rowland, so had he given me up. It was his theory that alcoholism had two components - an obsession that compelled the sufferer to drink against his will and interest, and some sort of metabolism difficulty which he then called an allergy. The alcoholic's compulsion guaranteed that the alcoholic's drinking would go on, and the allergy made sure that the sufferer would finally deteriorate, go insane, or die. Though I had been one of the few he had thought it possible to help, he was finally obliged to tell me of my hopelessness; I, too, would have to be locked up. To me, this was a shattering blow. Just as Rowland had been made ready for his conversion experience by you, so had my wonderful friend, Dr. Silkworth, prepared me.
Hearing of my plight, my friend Edwin T. came to see me at my home where I was drinking. By then, it was November 1934. I had long marked my friend Edwin for a hopeless case. Yet there he was in a very evident state of "release" which could by no means accounted for by his mere association for a very short time with the Oxford Groups. Yet this obvious state of release, as distinguished from the usual depression, was tremendously convincing. Because he was a kindred sufferer, he could unquestionably communicate with me at great depth. I knew at once I must find an experience like his, or die.
Again I returned to Dr. Silkworth's care where I could be once more sobered and so gain a clearer view of my friend's experience of release, and of Rowland H.'s approach to him.
Clear once more of alcohol, I found myself terribly depressed. This seemed to be caused by my inability to gain the slightest faith. Edwin T. again visited me and repeated the simple Oxford Groups' formulas. Soon after he left me I became even more depressed. In utter despair I cried out, "If there be a God, will He show Himself." There immediately came to me an illumination of enormous impact and dimension, something which I have since tried to describe in the book "Alcoholics Anonymous" and in "AA Comes of Age", basic texts which I am sending you.
My release from the alcohol obsession was immediate. At once I knew I was a free man. Shortly following my experience, my friend Edwin came to the hospital, bringing me a copy of William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience". This book gave me the realization that most conversion experiences, whatever their variety, do have a common denominator of ego collapse at depth. The individual faces an impossible dilemma. In my case the dilemma had been created by my compulsive drinking and the deep feeling of hopelessness had been vastly deepened by my doctor. It was deepened still more by my alcoholic friend when he acquainted me with your verdict of hopelessness respecting Rowland H.
In the wake of my spiritual experience there came a vision of a society of alcoholics, each identifying with and transmitting his experience to the next - chain style. If each sufferer were to carry the news of the scientific hopelessness of alcoholism to each new prospect, he might be able to lay every newcomer wide open to a transforming spiritual experience. This concept proved to be the foundation of such success as Alcoholics Anonymous has since achieved. This has made conversion experiences - nearly every variety reported by James - available on an almost wholesale basis. Our sustained recoveries over the last quarter century number about 300,000. In America and through the world there are today 8,000 AA groups.
So to you, to Dr. Shoemaker of the Oxford Groups, to William James, and to my own physician, Dr. Silkworth, we of AA owe this tremendous benefaction. As you will now clearly see, this astonishing chain of events actually started long ago in your consulting room, and it was directly founded upon your own humility and deep perception.
Very many thoughtful AAs are students of your writings. Because of your conviction that man is something more than intellect, emotion, and two dollars worth of chemicals, you have especially endeared yourself to us.
How our Society grew, developed its Traditions for unity, and structured its functioning will be seen in the texts and pamphlet material that I am sending you.
You will also be interested to learn that in addition to the "spiritual experience," many AAs report a great variety of psychic phenomena, the cumulative weight of which is very considerable. Other members have - following their recovery in AA - been much helped by your practitioners. A few have been intrigued by the "I Ching" and your remarkable introduction to that work.
Please be certain that your place in the affection, and in the history of the Fellowship, is like no other.
Gratefully yours,
William G. W.
Co-founder Alcoholics Anonymous
Carl's response:
