healing the unconscious Archives

Unlocking the Power of Dreams in Therapy

“This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.”
— Carl Jung (General Aspects of Dream Psychology (Collected Works, Vol. 8, para. 505))

Beyond Behavior: Why Dreams Matter More Than Compliance

The field of clinical mental health counseling overly privileges observable behavior as the golden standard, largely because it can be assessed through our five senses. Yet we ignore how subjective even behavior is: What I view as “appropriate,” another may find unacceptable. We can offer a general spectrum for functional behavior, but at the end of the day, behavioral analysis often turns into something few are brave enough to call by its real name: manipulation.

We manipulate children, adolescents, and adults to adhere to behaviors that we deem acceptable. By “we,” I mean clinicians en masse, armed with interventions that make people more palatable to the world, but not nearly more whole. This is especially visible in the rise of ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) services for individuals with autism. ABA does not aim to deeply understand; it chisels away at the individual’s uniqueness so they might fit into a narrow mold crafted by society. It may help some who are overwhelmed by severe symptoms, but for many others on the spectrum, we could and should be asking better questions.

Now, what gets missed when we only look at the surface? Well, everything. A person’s dreams, defenses, distortions, complexes, archetypes…none of it is visible in behavioral checklists. And yet, those are the things that contain the essence of who we are. Dream analysis is one such approach that actually honors this depth, and it is the primary focus of this essay.

The Symbolic Language of the Soul

What are dreams? This question echoes endlessly through the halls of academia. Some settle on the view that dreams are meaningless…mere flickers of random neurons. But others, including myself, argue that dreams are not only meaningful, they are essential.

Dreams are the language of the unconscious soul. They do not speak in bullet points or diagnoses. They speak in images, metaphors, distortions, and riddles; they speak in symbols: a language that most modern clinicians have tragically, long forgotten (and have little interest in learning) how to read.

Contrary to common belief, dreams do not simply reflect external events. The psyche is far more clever and complex for that kind of spoon-fed narrative. It weaves what we have witnessed into tapestries of meaning that reveal the truth of our inner lives. A monster in a dream is not just a scary image, it may just be the shadow self: the rejected and disowned part of our psyche we’ve exiled to protect our conscious ego. Dreams force us to confront what we have avoided. They demand our attention….or else, we forget under the guise of “I don’t dream.” Unless we heed to the call, the call becomes muted.

To reclaim symbol interpretation (as a clinician, and as a human) requires that we first do the work ourselves. If we dare claim to help others, we must help ourselves first. Dream journaling and analysis are perhaps the most powerful tools we have for integration. It is how we make the unconscious conscious. It is how we reclaim what we have buried. Moreover, it acts as a fundamental benchmark in examining our own and our clients’ progress along their path to individuation.

Personal Dream Example: The Devil Behind the Clock

Here is a personal anecdote to my time utilizing dream analysis: When I was four years old, I had a recurring dream.

I was at my aunt’s house: a place that, in waking life, felt safe and loving. In the dream, however, something was wrong. I was sitting on the couch in the living room while my mom and aunt talked in the dining room. A large grandfather clock stood nearby. And behind it… was the Devil.

The depiction was exactly as I had seen him in a Christian movie growing up: red skin, horns, sinister. I cried, pointed, and ran to my mother. She didn’t even turn around. She waved me off with intense irritation. My aunt barely looked up. I was desperate, in agony, as this evil figure crept toward me. But I was dismissed and being overtaken.

Jungian Interpretation:

This dream, like many from early life, was not random. The devil behind the clock was not simply “evil” in the religious sense, it symbolized the forbidden, the repressed, and the terrifying unknown. In the context of a rigid, hyper-religious upbringing, he embodied not only projected fears around the body and sexuality, but also the unspeakable trauma that was taking root in my psyche.

The two women – figures who were sources of comfort and safety in waking life – were not villains in the dream. Rather, they represented a feminine energy that was emotionally unavailable, disconnected, and fragmented. Their dismissal in the dream was symbolic of a larger absence: the absence of grounded, attuned feminine containment. They did not betray me in waking life, but their dream counterparts portrayed what my psyche felt in that moment of crisis: alone, unseen, and forced to face the shadow without an emotional mirror.

This was the beginning of my inner rejection of the feminine. Not out of hatred, but as a survival mechanism. My mother (herself animus-possessed) modeled a way of being where logic, control, and emotional suppression were used to navigate life. Her feelings were powerful but unspoken, guiding her from beneath the surface. And so, I followed suit.

The dream encoded the psychic conditions that formed the early architecture of my inner world:

The growing dominance of my internal masculine (animus) as a protector and suppressor
The repression of my intuitive, feeling-based feminine qualities
The emergence of a mother complex shaped not just by relational dynamics, but by the archetypal distortion of what the feminine had come to represent for me: danger, denial, disconnection

This dream revealed the symbolic moment when the feminine was unconsciously exiled within me, and not out of blame, but out of necessity. It marked the beginning of fragmentation… and, much later in life, the very clue that would lead me back toward integration.

Reality Is Subjective: The Limits of Perception

There is such a thing as objective reality, however, no human can experience it. Everything we perceive is filtered through layers of lived experience, cultural imprinting, trauma, emotional valence, ego defenses, and complex structures buried deep within our unconscious. This is why even people raised in the same household often have drastically different interpretations of their past. We each wear unique perceptual lenses and no two alike. What we call “normal” or “abnormal” becomes a judgment passed through a very narrow filter. And so, if we hope to help others, we must first admit that we cannot see clearly. We must own our subjectivity. Only then can we begin to understand the symbolic logic of another’s psyche.

Dreams as the Roadmap to the Client’s Inner Cosmos

If each person carries a private myth; in other words, one’s unconscious is a rich, symbolic architecture and it is no longer helpful to impose a generic model of healing upon the individuals we work with. Instead, we must become curious. We must become guides of dreams. As a clinician, I do not “decode” a client’s psyche like a puzzle. I ask questions. I help hold the lantern while they descend into their inner world. The dream leads the way.

Clinical Dream Example: The Assault Nightmare

A male client once came to me terrified of his dreams. Night after night, he relived scenes of sexual assault, but in these dreams, he was not the victim. He was the perpetrator.

This detail tormented him. In waking life, he had been assaulted as an adolescent. The trauma left him paralyzed with shame, plagued by a profound inferiority complex and a deeply wounded mother complex. Sleep offered no refuge. Instead, it cast him in the role of the very force that had once violated him.

Understandably, he feared what these dreams said about him. But as our work deepened, and we dared to interpret the dream symbolically rather than literally, something far more human, and far more tragic, emerged.

Jungian Interpretation (Male Psyche, Symbolic Violence, and Trauma Integration):

The dreams were not about desire or cruelty. They were a dramatization of an internal psychic war. His unconscious had cast him in the role of the perpetrator; not to shame him, but to illuminate the depth of his fragmentation. What had been done to him was so shattering, so annihilating, that the only way his psyche could begin to metabolize it was to invert the trauma: putting him in imagined control of the very violence that once rendered him powerless.

In Jungian terms, these dreams symbolized the domination of this client’s psyche’s internal masculine function (rigid, disconnected, and tryrannical) over the anima, the inner feminine principle that governs intuition, emotion, and relational depth, because there was an incongruence between the dualities within him. After his assault, his psyche could not afford softness, so, it adapted. The anima was not safe to express, so she was buried. And in his dreams, she reemerged not as a figure of beauty or connection, but as the one being symbolically violated. This was not a literal drama. It was a psychic mirror reflecting how thoroughly his own inner feminine had been suppressed in order to survive.

These dreams were not signs of pathology. They were signs of readiness. The unconscious had begun to reveal, through dark imagery, the deeper truth: that what had been lost could now be reclaimed. The symbolic violence pointed not to moral failing, but to the soul’s attempt at re-integration.

What appears as horror in the dream world is often, in truth, the first flicker of psychic rebirth.

A Reaffirmed Commitment to the Depths

I have been working with dreams for many years through a Jungian lens, and over time, my appreciation for their psychological necessity has only deepened. Dreams are not just curiosities or byproducts of sleep. Over the decades, I have come to learn that they are essential dispatches from the unconscious. And interpreting them is not a technique to be memorized, but a far more sacred practice, one that requires presence, humility, and depth.

Dream analysis, especially when working with another person’s dream, demands a level of emotional insight and attunement that many clinicians are simply not trained to wield. One must not only understand symbols intellectually but feel into them empathically and tune into the psyche of another without overlaying it with one’s own projections. There is a great deal of intuition involved, as well as a kind of inner spaciousness: a willingness to listen to what is unsaid, to notice what appears behind the veil of the image…to look far beyond the mere surface.

This is not easy for everyone…far from it in fact. Those with a Sensing-dominant personality type, for example, are often more attuned to what can be observed through the five senses. Their cognition is rooted in concrete reality. And while this has tremendous value, it can make dreamwork more difficult because the dream speaks from beyond the veil. It emerges from the invisible layers of the unconscious and from the mythic architecture we carry within. It requires us to see in the dark, and to trust that what we cannot touch may still be real.

Closing Thoughts: Why Dream Analysis Should Not Be Optional

We are not blank slates. We are stories: myths, images, and memories tangled in archetypes that stretch back to the beginning of time. To understand someone (and I mean truly understand them) we must move beyond behavior, beyond diagnoses, and beyond surface language. We must comprehend the narrative folding that resides within. Thus, we must go inward.

In closing, dreams are not an accessory to therapy. They are the deepest expression of the Self calling out to be known. They are how the unconscious speaks when the ego is silent. And they offer what behavior never can: truth – truth that is symbolic, personal, and transformative.

What are your dreams asking you to witness?

“Every symbol in your dream has a special, individual connotation that belongs to you alone, just as the dream is ultimately yours alone. Even when a symbol has a collective or universal meaning, it still has a personal coloration for you and can be fully explained only from within you.”
― Robert A. Johnson (Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth)

EMDR: Modern Rituals in Trauma Healing

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain… One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
— Carl Jung (CW 13, ¶335)

This post will be a little different from my usual writing. It leans more academic in tone because I want to reflect on one of the most widely respected tools in trauma therapy: EMDR.

For those unfamiliar, EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It has gained endorsements from the American Psychological Association (APA), the Department of Veterans Affairs, and even the World Health Organization. Its place in the clinical world is well established, and its benefits are experienced by many.

What follows is not a dismissal of EMDR’s value but a reframing of how it may actually work. While EMDR is best known for its use of bilateral stimulation (BLS), I propose that the deeper source of its healing power is something more timeless: the direct confrontation with trauma.

To be clear, I fully acknowledge the growing body of research supporting EMDR’s efficacy (Lee & Cuijpers, 2013; Shapiro, 2018). My aim is not to strip away its credibility but to look at it through a symbolic lens. As a clinician-in-training steeped in trauma-informed care and depth psychology, I wonder whether the field has misattributed its effectiveness. Are we focusing so much on the method that we overlook the ritual act at its core?

The Hypothesis: Exposure, Not Eye Movements, Is the Active Ingredient

Let us first dive into the research: EMDR leads to significant symptom reduction in trauma survivors. However, when the role of bilateral stimulation is isolated, the findings become a bit murky. Davidson and Parker (2001) conducted a meta-analysis and found that eye movements did not significantly enhance outcomes beyond exposure alone. van den Hout et al., (2011) observed that while BLS may slightly reduce vividness and emotionality, it appears non-essential to successful treatment.

This brings us to a question that many researchers have asked, but few clinicians or educators seem willing to face directly. Is it wholly the eye movements or the repeated, structured confrontation with trauma that promotes healing?

Here is what has not been explored deeply: the symbolic and psychological function of BLS. What if BLS serves more as an emotional buffer, something that helps to regulate discomfort rather than reveal truth? What if the real healing lies not in tracking a therapist’s fingers, but in walking through the fire of memory without turning back out of fear?

Talk Therapy’s Avoidance Problem

In many graduate counseling programs, students are taught to be trauma-informed by emphasizing non-intrusiveness. Do not push. Do not retraumatize. Do not make the client uncomfortable. While well-intentioned, this approach can backfire. In our effort to “do no harm,” we may do nothing meaningful and cause harm in and of itself. We sit quietly, hoping the client will go deep on their own, while silently colluding in their avoidance.

This avoidance can, moreover, mirror the client’s trauma and merely perpetuate a trauma loop. A sense of being abandoned, unseen, or emotionally unheld in their darkest moments. The therapist’s inability to bear witness to pain perpetuates the very repression that trauma thrives in. If we cannot make space for and hold the heat of a client’s story, how can they ever trust themselves to come to face it with courage?

EMDR as Modern Ritual

Looking through a Jungian lens, EMDR is less about BLS and more about a ritualized descent into the unconscious. It mirrors ancient rites of passage found across cultures. These are journeys into darkness, chaos, or death to retrieve something vital: a lost part of the Self. In this way, EMDR becomes a modern ritual that guides clients into the symbolic underworld to reclaim what was fragmented.

Now this is where the controversy deepens… What if BLS is not a catalyst, but a distraction? A rhythmic soothing agent, not unlike a lullaby or a pacifier, that makes the journey more bearable but less potent. Yes, the bilateral tones and eye movements can regulate the nervous system. But perhaps they also cushion the intensity of the experience. And maybe, just maybe, that is where a fundamental problem lies.

Hypnotherapy: Another Descent-Based Modality

Take hypnotherapy. Dismissed by many for its pseudoscientific reputation, hypnosis also facilitates an altered state of consciousness. It invites a trance, a softening of ego boundaries. Like EMDR, it opens the door to unconscious material. When paired with cognitive-behavioral therapy, hypnosis has been shown to enhance trauma treatment outcomes (Kirsch et al., 1995; Valentine et al., 2019).

From a depth perspective, hypnotherapy is not about control or suggestion. It is about a symbolic descent into the abyss. It is Dante, led by the image of his Beatrice, the guiding archetype of the inner feminine, through the underworld toward integration. It is Persephone, reclaiming her agency. These are not techniques. They are myths made real. What unites EMDR, PE, and hypnotherapy is quite obviously, not their form, but their demand for emotional honesty.

What Actually Heals

When clients wholly come to face their trauma, not just remember it, but feel it fully, symbolically, and viscerally, that is when the inner alchemical transformation begins. These methods succeed not because they are gentle, but because they ask something of the client that many modalities do not: to return to the wound with open eyes.

The client becomes the mythic hero. The one who chooses descent. And the therapist, if they are willing, becomes the witness, the anchor, and the soul guide.

What Needs to Change

If talk therapy wants to remain relevant in trauma work, it must stop pathologizing emotional intensity. Too often, strong emotions are seen as something to avoid or regulate rather than engage with. But it is precisely within these intense emotional states of grief, rage, and fear, that the deepest healing potential lives. Avoiding them keeps both therapist and client circling the wound rather than entering it.

Therapists must be trained not only to avoid harm, but to tolerate discomfort: their own and their clients’. The ability to stay present during emotional upheaval is not optional in trauma work. It is essential. A therapist cannot guide someone through the storm if they are only willing to stand on the shore.

What heals is not comfort, but honest confrontation. True safety is not the absence of emotional risk. It is the presence of someone who can stay steady when everything else feels like it’s falling apart. That is what clients need. That is what trauma work requires.

Revisiting “Do No Harm”

It is important to pause and address what may already be rising in the minds of many readers. The ACA Code of Ethics states that clinicians must avoid harm. Non-maleficence—do no harm—is one of the foundational principles of our profession. It is often cited to justify cautious, client-led, non-intrusive approaches, especially when working with trauma.

But we must ask the harder question: what does “harm” actually mean when it comes to trauma?

Are we being wholly benevolent when we avoid stirring the inner wounds of our clients? Or are we, under the guise of caution, participating in something more insidious? When a therapist avoids a client’s trauma, when they softly reassure, “You don’t have to go there,” while that trauma silently erodes the client from within, is that not a form of harm? Is that not abandonment by another name?

In our effort to be kind, we may become complicit. Complicit in avoidance. Complicit in shame. Complicit in preserving the very suffering we claim to treat.

Let us also be honest about something else: there are far more bad therapists in the world than there are good ones. This not cynicism, it is reality. And the tragedy continues in that nearly everyone believes they are one of the good ones. But sincere trauma work does not come from being “good”. It comes from being whole.

Only those who are themselves on the path to wholeness (not perfection and not performance) can embody what trauma-informed care actually requires. This is not just a clinical posture. It is a way of being. One must be able to sit in the fire with another human being without retreating. That is what heals. Not credentials, not compliance, and certainly not the illusion of safety.

Thus, if we, as clinicians, shy away from that confrontation, we teach our clients to do the same…and nothing changes. The trauma goes on repeating. But when we consciously aim to walk with them, into the depths, through the fire, with eyes unaverted, something ancient stirs. Not just recovery, but resurrection.

“Fear, like love, can become a call into consciousness; one meets the unconscious, the unknown, the numinous and uncontrollable by keeping in touch with fear, which elevates the blind instinctual panic of the sheep into the knowing, cunning, fearful awe of the shepherd.”
— James Hillman, (Pan and the Nightmare, p. 65.)

References… for your viewing pleasure.

Davidson, P. R., & Parker, K. C. H. (2001). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR): A meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 69(2), 305–316. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-006x.69.2.305

Kirsch, I., Montgomery, G., & Sapirstein, G. (1995). Hypnosis as an adjunct to cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy: A meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 63(2), 214–220. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-006x.63.2.214

Lee, C. W., & Cuijpers, P. (2013). A meta-analysis of the contribution of eye movements in EMDR therapy: Psychological Bulletin, 139(2), 241–268. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2012.11.001

Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Valentine, K. E., Milling, L. S., Clark, L. J., & Moriarty, C. L. (2019). The efficacy of hypnosis as a treatment for anxiety: A meta-analysis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 67(3), 336–363. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2019.1613863

van den Hout, M. A., Engelhard, I. M., Beetsma, D., Slofstra, C., Hornsveld, H., & Houtveen, J. (2011). EMDR and mindfulness: Eye movements and attentional breathing tax working memory and reduce vividness and emotionality of aversive ideation. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 42(4), 423–431. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2011.03.004