IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT

In Bill Moyer's book, Healing And The Mind, he is interviewing Dr. Dean Ornish, the President and Director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute at the School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Ornish makes this statement: "People have power over you only to the degree that you think you need something from them." The statement jumped off the page at me and seemed to hold the answer to a personal issue I was struggling with.

I found myself attracted to a man I met through friends. We became involved for a brief period of time, but the relationship was a rocky one from the beginning, so we stopped seeing each other finally. The problem was that I found myself thinking about this man almost constantly and even considered the possibility that I was somehow "obsessed" with him. I tried all sorts of psychological "tricks" to prevent thoughts of him from entering my mind and upsetting my day. Nothing worked.

At night I would dream about him and it was through my dreams that I found the answer to why I couldn't stop dwelling on what was obviously a lost cause. The soul keeps knocking until we open the door, it seems. I keep a dream journal and believe that dreams are the shadows of our reality. In several of my dreams this man kept appearing as a part of my family. He would be kissing my mother or sleeping in the same bed with her or my sister. In one dream he was going on a vacation with my older brother and his wife--all situations that would be ludicrous in real life. He was definitely not family oriented and had no desire to even meet my family. In fact, the one time I introduced him to close friends that were my second family he pulled away saying it felt "too familial."

My parents had divorced when I was a very young child and I had very few good memories of my father who was an alcoholic and had never been there for his children. I had been reading a book on "Father Loss" and had been trying to understand how not having a father to teach me about life had affected my personal growth and development. I was well aware of the general tendency many women have to look for their fathers in relationships with the men in their lives. It was one of those areas in which you think you know and understand something so you aren't aware that what you know is only on an intellectual level. The real "knowing" was yet to come for me.

The gap closed when I was able to make the connection between my dreams of this man and my not having had a father in childhood. I "needed" something from this man and therefore he had power over me. On an unconscious level I wanted him to fill me up and make everything "right," something he could not possibly do for me. The reality of our relationship was that we actually had very little in common, but for some reason he was the one who came into my life when I was ready, at last, to learn the lesson that prior relationships had not taught me. Neediness is not a good foundation to build on. Up until then I had not been aware of how "needy" I was. How often I had confused feelings of neediness with love.

I don't think we can ever truly make up for or fill the voids left in us by major losses in our childhood. That is why it is so important that children receive the love and nurturing they need in their formative years. I was in double jeopardy because not only did I not have a father in my life, but because he wasn't there, my mother had to work to support her children, so she wasn't emotionally available either.

Sometimes I have dreams that I can't always see meaning in, at least not when I first have them, but I still write them down in my journal upon waking because the significance just may come to me later on. Some of my best learning comes to me "in the still of the night."

Written by: Darlene Eberhardt, November 1, 1994