Reacuring nightmares of childhood abuse - Please help

[gelertvincent]

I'd like to preface this by saying I'm very new to this forum so please let me know if I've violated any rules with the content of this post, my only intention is to get some help but I understand that this topic is very touchy. I've been suffering terrible recurring nightmares for more than a decade and I was looking for advice on how to make them stop. I'm a 24-year-old straight male in the US, and when I was a kid, my father molested me and my younger sister. A long story short, he was eventually arrested and put in prison for five years, then released. I never saw him again or had any kind of contact with him whatsoever. The problem is I have had non-stop nightmares about him since I was 11 years old that have shown no signs of stopping. The dreams vary, but the structure usually follows one of these "plots": - My father comes back home after being released from prison because my mother thinks he's 'changed' and won't abuse me or my sister anymore, but I catch him raping my younger sister and my mother doesn't believe me or my father threatens me not to tell. - I catch my father and sister engaging in a consensual sexual relationship (this almost disturbs me more because it's so far removed from reality) and my sister gets angry at me for telling on them. - I have a consensual sexual relationship with my father. After these dreams, I wake up feeling sick and disturbed, on more than one occasion I have literally had to rush to the bathroom to vomit. The main feelings these nightmares give me are disgust and extreme fear. I've woken up with my heart racing, thinking I'm a kid again and that my father is in the bedroom with me. I've caused my girlfriend a lot of distress by waking up crying in a panic, but I haven't been able to fully tell her why. She knows I was abused, but I've given her no specific details or told her about the nightmares. I'm looking for advice on how to get these nightmares to stop. I just want to be able to sleep well at night. Any advice is welcome. Also, I have seen a therapist before, but she wasn't able to help. Thank you in advance!

[Occipitalred]

Hello Gelert Vincent. Welcome! Whereas I am not a moderator here, I think you should feel comfortable talking about your trauma and abuse. It's just a real thing that you can't pretend didn't happen and is now affecting your life, and your dreams. Obviously, you will want to talk about it here. I think just having a disclaimer about content of sexual abuse might help warn people who wish not to be confronted to these topics to not read on. I think you did do a sort of disclaimer though. Although your experience with a therapist or perhaps, therapists, has not been helpful, I hope you can consider trying again. One therapist is not representative of all therapists and it is a particularly relational profession. That is, you might just not vibe with the first person, and you just need the right therapist to connect with. You need a good therapist and one that you connect well with. It's normal that it didn't work out the first time or first few times. I understand your reluctance though because I didn't like my first therapist and I haven't gone back. Honestly, I think you'll always have those dreams unless you really deal with the contents of those dreams and I can't imagine a better place to do that than with a therapist. If you are waking up puking, it has to be worth it to find a therapist. Any kind of help I can give you, might fall into the field of things that a therapist would be far better equipped to help you with. And more likely, what we say here, is just our individual intuitions. So, first of all, the basic thing you could do is read about the basics of lucid dreaming and learn to realize that these nightmares are dreams and that you can dream about other things. About this option, you're much better off not asking people to give you a quick run down of all lucid dream basics here on this thread in one message. Do go see the full tutorials and learn how to do it. Come back to ask specific questions that you can't find answered and share your progress. But, I think you're going to have these nightmares even if you lucid dream. I might be wrong but that's what seems to be the case, I think. My advice would be to do "lucid daydreaming." That is, play the dream plot in your mind, realize you are daydreaming and still engaged in the daydream, decide what's meaningful to you, and how you want to proceed with the daydream. The goal is to create cathartic moments and create new associations. New paths for dreams to take when these recurring ideas arise For example, I've had a dream where I had a dream where I had a consensual sexual relationship with my father in the last month. It's not a recurring dream for me, but I still felt disturbed to have dreamed that. What I did to feel more at ease and to feel secure that I wouldn't have to live this dream again, is that I revisited the dream, and really felt the dream vibe. Oh wow, see, I don't know if you can follow what I'm saying on the internet. It's hard to write in a clear and concise fashion. But the point is, dream content arises from random arrangements of memories, ideas, associations, connections, etc... and so, I asked myself, was that really me having sexual relation with my father? Well, honestly no. I'm not sexually attracted to my father and that's just not a desire I have. So, in my case, I just admitted that my idea of men is greatly affected by my father. He is the first man I knew and one of the men I know best. He's for sure influenced my idea of man. So, here, I am, in a dream, having a sexual relationship with an older man, and there, my dream, makes the connection between a random unknown older man and my father, the original older man of my psyche. And all, I need to do, is recognize that this is not specifically my father but that idea in my psyche of man, and that this man I am having a sexual relationship with is a not a specific man but all men, or some men. And so, I can not judge myself or feel shame, but just observe it happen with little judgement, and just shift the man back to any man, as he always was. It's a dream. The person can shift. That said, my father did not abuse me so, obviously, your dream interpretation will be different than mine. But I did want to share to you this taboo type of dream, so you can at least know. People don't share these kind of dreams all that much. But I have seen on the internet that incest dreams happen and, well, no one likes to have them. I can share with you another type of recurring dream I had. Hopefully, my analysis of my own dream can inspire you in your own. The plot of these dreams are generally like so: monster man, not attractive arrives and threatens everyone. I choose to sexually seduce the monster and be sexual with it/him. I haven't had such a dream in a while, so I can't do much dream work with that psychological pattern anymore... Honestly, I don't get it, because it's very unlike me to be aggressively sexual/seductive, and I have no real life pattern to go after aggressive or monstrous men. That's not my type either, at all. But, really, I haven't had the chance to explore my sexuality until I was 24. I didn't know I was gay. I felt asexual before then. But when I was a kid, a few of the popular guys mildly sexually harassed me in the manner that Middle School kids do, for years. Force my hand on their crouch. Tickle me in my grain region. Tackle me/tickle me. And as they did these things, they were moving suggestively as if they were fucking me and even so, they would claim I was humping them and so all the other kids would mock me, saying I was humping the popular boys. All in all, those scenarios were always labelled sexual by the kids doing the harassments and the witnesses, and I always was made to believe it was my fault. That I was the sexual agent in the scenario. And I felt a lot of shame. Like everyone had discovered that I was some pervert. It was years until I realized that I had nothing to be ashamed of, because well, I did not do anything sexual or actively. They were tackling me and forcing my hands while I shouted no and wriggled to get free. These boys also happened to be the most attractive boys in my school grade. So, I was also attracted to them. And I always blamed my attraction to them on those events. In some ways, it took me much longer to realize I was gay because I kept blaming my feelings on sexual harassments. I did eventually read that sexual harassment and abuse by men to men is very perplexing to both straight and gay men often leading them to not know their own sexual orientation. So what I learned is that, whereas you have consensual sex with your father in a dream, that is an expression of your past abuse, and not your sexual orientation, as you know. Just like my sexual orientation is also free from my past sexual orientation. I'm not sure if I'm expressing those ideas clearly but I'm trying to be quick. So, I think that the dreams in which I act sexual with monsters is because monsters have treated me sexually. And those dreams are a reflection of that. And the way I dealt with it is, again, revisiting those dreams and being aware that I'm in a daydream and things are reflections of my psyche, recognizing that my sexuality is free from (not connected to) abuse. That they may coincide but in the end, their coincidence does not mean that I am sexually attracted to abuse. And I can watch the abuse fade away because as of now, I feel secure and I don't realistically feel threatened by such events. In your case, I don't know how much you feel safe presently. You said your dream felt so far removed from reality. Perhaps, if that's the case, you can let it go with that realization: that it is far removed from reality. When abuse arises, you can also think move your attention to easily connected events, such as: "talking about it with your sister" and "talking about it with your therapist" or just a moment that maybe you felt better even thinking about it for just a moment. I don't know, maybe you made a joke about it once, just to yourself and in that moment or such a moment, it felt OK. I don't know, but moving your mind to a connected time where you felt empowered is something I would try. Questions to ask yourself is: "Does your mother believe you and your sister?" "Do I feel safe?" "Do I feel safe for my sister?" "Do I blame myself or feel for myself and my sister that we may have caused this?" If you can answer all these answers in the direction of "Yes, my mother believes us, I feel safe for us, I know we didn't cause this," you might still continue to have nightmares about these things because well, it is terrible. My boyfriend has a pet snake at home that I have never touched (just because I don't think snakes like to be touched and I respect that) but I often have snake dreams. I guess, because my brain is alert. It knows there's a snake and I'm sensitive to that dangerous reality, and I dream about it. And I guess, in your case, you know abuse, you are sensitive to it, and you will dream about it. If my snake dreams were too intense, I would have had to do more dream work, and, well, hold the snake to learn to feel at ease with it. To know it's not scary. In case of abuse, I don't know how you can feel safe again. What it's like dealing with that. That's why a therapist might be useful, or at least, other people who have had these experiences, if together, that can empower you and make you more at ease. I'm too tired to go back and edit my response, but I just hope you can find something useful in there.

[aussiemusician]

Hey Vincent, welcome. question, have you tried to contact your father ? it is possible for you to do that ? i think you need to contact him, and discuss it with him first. and then for the both of you to have counselling.

[DarkestDarkness]

Occipitalred has already put forward some pretty concise thoughts and I feel there's not a lot to add to it; the main thing I will reiterate, is what he said about trying a therapist again because I do agree that unfortunately they are a not one-size-fits-all thing. Finding the right therapist can take a long time but it can be immensely helpful to do so. I know that cost can be a prohibitive factor in that regard but considering how deep the issue seems to be, it's one of those things where I personally feel that even a wasted expense is justified. I don't know about aussiemusician's suggestion to contact; on one hand, it is not an uncommon approach to family relationship issues even from the therapy point of view, though I think this goes somewhat beyond that and the rest of us have no idea of how your father is as a character (thoughts coming to mind, is he sociopathic?, does he suffer episodes of psychosis?, etc.), so I personally would advise against this because it could be a fruitless endeavour that can just put you back in a situation of risk to new abuse, even if it didn't become physical. As for my own thoughts on your dreams, there's an obvious issue to me here that it's a common recurring theme for you, so you might simply expect it to happen all the time by now which makes it sort of self-perpetuating in the way most nightmares do; you fear something, so you expect it all the time, so you hype yourself up about it and so on. I think an important thing you can realise from how you are now, is that you are disconnected from your father, meaning that as a character in a dream he is literally just an echo of a memory, possibly representing feeling like you can never be safe in general. This could relate to issues around trust in general, since in this case the abuser is someone in principle that should be caring and not abusive. In my opinion, when someone is supposed to care for you or help you and they betray that notion and their position, the "ordinary" structure of things falls apart. Unfortunately, and I may be wrong, I don't believe you can simply make nightmares stop by making them want to go away, even if you had lucidity as Occipitalred says. It's a very deep issue that needs to be faced in some form or another and I think that with "unwanted thoughts", forcing them to go away just makes them come back stronger, because some part of you is trying to communicate with your more aware self in a very primal and symbolic way about the issue, a way that doesn't make direct verbal or logical sense. Deconstructing a dream and analysing it step by step can help with making sense of it, because you break down complex elements into simpler symbolic parts that are easier to process. You should be the judge on how to act on this but in my personal opinion, telling your girlfriend and talking to her about it may helpful, especially since she is already aware of your past. It depends on how serious your relationship is and at what stage you're in, but it sounds like you live together and that she worries for you. A lot of therapy is just about talking and your girlfriend can still help there because you can then openly discuss it out loud, making yourself think about the issue and perhaps processing it differently from how you normally would because there's an external voice to help you. The only thing there is that she would also need to understand that she might not be able to "fix" the issue or provide solutions; it would have to be approached in a way where she is mostly listening and asking you critical questions that make you think outside of your normal pattern of thought. Hopefully something I said will be of help, I hope that you can find a resolution to your issue. Edit: An extra line of thought. I tend to notice that people fall into specific behavioural archetypes. A couple of years ago or so now, I had an unpleasant experience around someone I knew, who was probably a pathological liar and possibly an abuser of some kind, certainly headed that way... My thought here is that perhaps you have not been able to disassociate some of your father's abusive behaviour with the underlying behavioural archetype, as this is something I found difficult to do myself. Perhaps you've met people along the way up until now who remind you of him in some way. I happened to be meeting people in these last two years that matched the base behavioural pattern almost to a T to this person I mention. At first this made me feel very uncomfortable because it made some associations at a base level with that person. I ended up realising that they were incredibly different people despite having the same base personality. I helped myself by realising with the experience of knowing them a little that people are shaped not only by these archetypes and their genes, but actually a lot more than I gave credit for by their actual life experience and interactions with others. Perhaps this added bit doesn't relate at all to your issue, but I thought I'd add it on the off-chance it does.

[aussiemusician]

folks are welcome to disagree with my suggestion to find the father, but really, i think that is basically the only way to resolve this. or at least for vincent to forgive his father for what happened. however, without the father acknowledging what he did, the dreams may not end. of course, im not a counsellor, and you can dismiss my suggestion all you like.

[gelertvincent]

Occipitalred and DarkestDarkness, thank you both for such long, thought-out answers. I really appreciate the time you put into your responses and both of you have given me a lot to think about. aussiemusician, even if I did want to contact him, he's been cut off from my family for 13 years, I have no idea how to find him. But I appreciate the suggestion as well, every bit of advice is something to consider. Thanks everyone for being so kind

[aussiemusician]

does your father have any brothers, or sisters, or do you know of any of his friends that would know where he is ? the choice is yours though ..

[monsa199a]

Hello there, I believe you're a brave and divine human being. In my opinion, there are no coincidences to be here, at this very moment while read your story, while I read some enlightening advises, or perhaps while you breathe. I have been never being abused, but have had dreams (to me are kind of nightmares), where a female would transform into a male when we are having or about to have intercourse, and to me that's enough to be disturbing until I wake up and have that dream experience, very vivid through out the day. The first thing that came to my mind when you stated"...to STOP this night mares" I feel that you could find a way to navigate and transform the recurring nightmares. " Who can STOP the endlessly thoughts, chatter and business of the mind? ", I often make myself that question... And as I say letting go is one of the biggest lessons in this lifetime. So I'm just here to tell YOU with all my heart "I WISH YOU WELL" ... may the light be with you!