Tell Me Your Dreams....

One of the other blogs that I visit on occasion is written by Barry Moses of Spokane, WA. He has a couple different blogs, one of which is a dream journal.

My first reaction to this, of course, was that all my quirky privacy issues went a bit wacko. I am reluctant to tell people I know and trust about the things I dream. I certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable putting them out on the net for anyone who happened to chance upon my pages to see. I would feel way too vulnerable, way too exposed.

I have no illusions that masses of strangers, or even that many people I know, ever look at this blog. Still, the fact that they COULD read these words definitely influences what things I will post here and what things I will not. My issues regarding what is “private” and what is “public” remain pretty guarded.

So, I got to examining that a bit closer, looking at the degree to which I live in my head and the extent to which I experience and share my heart with people in my day-to-day life. There were a few lessons there.

In 2004 I attended an experiential training for personal development called Spectrum that was held in Boise, ID. (LT61) In that training, participants were encouraged to “drop the waterline” – meaning to become more authentic with others, sharing our core selves to a greater degree rather than staying in the surface superficial that our culture so often expects. There were several exercises we did in dyads and in small groups to practice giving and receiving honest feedback and taking risks with self disclosure. It was both excruciating and hugely affirming all at the same time.

Spectrum training had three different levels that were each held a month or two apart. Because of the nature of the training, some very strong bonds of friendship and loyalty were forged among the paratipants. I only made it through level two because of the distance between where I live and Boise. The third level, which I skipped, included a ropes course and some other key exercises which brought participants even closer to each other. Several of the people involved have continued to have post-spectrum gatherings and some communicate on a regular basis. Initially I was a part of that, but became less and less so as time went by.

I’ve sometimes wondered if I had done all 3 levels if I would have stayed in contact more with the people from that class. I have attributed my lack of ties to them both to the fact that I live so far away and that I bailed out after level two. But perhaps the truth is more about the degree to which I am willing or not willing to lower my waterline, allowing myself to engage in open, authentic sharing with other folks.

I think we’ve all had the experience of being around someone who dumps WAY TOO MUCH personal information, making us very uncomfortable. Most people have also had the experience of carefully trusting someone with private info only to find out later that it was not kept in confidence. I pull back from saying too much about my emotional landscape to others for both of those reasons. But that’s just scratching the surface…. Today what I am looking at more closely is NOT why I do or do not feel willing to share private things more readily. What I am turning over for closer examination right now is how I decide what is private and what is public in the first place.

I’m more than willing to spill my IDEAS. My convoluted thinking is open, fair game for all. The teacher in me is very accustomed to batting around different theories, concepts and hypothesis. But when it gets into the area of feelings and emotions, I begin to put up some walls. I put on my game face, talk about feeling in a general, philosophical, hypothetical way. But the whole idea of telling others what it is I really feel all too often seems risky and unwise to me. Besides, most times I’m fairly sure people don’t really want to know.

So now I am looking at the assumptions I have made about that and asking myself – is it accurate? Is it valid? Is it healthy? Is it creating the sort of connections with others that I desire?

BALANCE is the trick – and not something I am particularly skilled at. I do not think it is wise or healthy to go around wearing my heart on my sleeve, giving the whole world a bird’s eye view into the dark places of my psyche. I can share the “happy” stuff fairly easily as that seldom leads to any sort of problem. But when it comes to my angst, my fears, my sorrows…that is where my boundaries of privacy begin to get fairly rigid, except for one or two very specific relationships.

But I am beginning to recognize that it’s not an all-or-nothing matter of staying in stepford-wife unreality or spilling my guts to any passing stranger. It’s more about degree, and becoming more mindful about choosing when, where and with whom I might be more candid about my interior world. .

Intimacy = IN TO ME YOU SEE. It is only when we allow others to truly see us as we experience ourselves that meaningful closeness can develop. So perhaps I can work on dropping the waterline a bit more and taking off that game face.