Issue 99, November 2006
Where oysters fear to tread
©Jane Teresa Anderson, November 2006
Yesterday I was sitting on a magical beach eating oysters and prawns, and I remembered a dream I had long ago. In the dream I cracked open the limb of a live crustacean, a huge, long-legged prawn, and was immediately horrified at what I had done. The flesh inside was ripped. My anguish was intense. Had I caused this terrible damage? But then, before my eyes, the torn flesh began to reform within the open shell, each fragment edging along, amoeba-like, forming firstly into fine filaments then thicker strands until the full, original flesh was finally restored. I knew that it was now healthier than it had ever been before, and I knew this wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t cracked open that limb.
What would you make of this dream?
This dream memory, partly prompted by cracking open the cooked prawns on the beach, was triggered by a comment a client had made during the week. “I don’t want to go opening up old wounds,” she had said, “I just want to know how to stop this dream”.
What are your feelings about exploring past hurts? Many people are frightened to think back, or, more accurately, to feel back to the past. “After all, what’s past is past, and how can the past do anything to help you in the future?” they usually say.
Let’s turn to that other tasty morsel, the oyster, for some insight. As it happens, only a few days ago I was looking at natural pearls in a jeweller’s window, admiring the different hues and uneven shapes, transfixed by the thought that something so translucently exquisite was never designed by nature to be seen. What is a pearl, after all, but a slimy substance an oyster exudes to surround a bit of grit that slipped, unbidden, inside its shell? The slime converts the scratchy, uncomfortable grit into a smooth ball, something the oyster can live quite comfortably with for the rest of its life. It’s only when the oyster is prised open that the pearl is revealed and seen in all it’s opalescent glory. Oh, the pearls of wisdom we stand to gain when we’re ready to dig deep and release those old gritty discomforts from their hiding places.
Dreams help us to extract the pearls that might not otherwise see the light of day, but to do this you have to be prepared to admit to the grit and then release it from your mind and body completely. In other words, don’t turn it over, admire it, and then put it back inside, and don’t show-n-tell it to everyone you meet, which is really a form of hanging on to the past hurt instead of healing it and letting it go.
When you keep the past alive, telling a painful story for the hundredth time, for example, it retains its power over you. With each re-telling of the story you strengthen it and become more entrenched as the victim. Where’s the healing in that? Where’s the wisdom? Where are the pearly rewards to pave your future?
So no, past hurts are not for revisiting again and again. They’re for healing. And much as you might like to take the oyster’s approach, and cover over the hurt so you can’t feel it any more, that’s not healing either. That’s denial. Cover up. Where there’s no learning from an experience, there’s no healing.
Here’s the common scenario: Something hurts you, emotionally. You try not to express it, or you express it but it doesn’t go too well for you so you backtrack on that idea. Instead you hold the hurt inside. But it still hurts badly. You can’t cry so you get angry, but you can’t express that anger so you add that to the hurt. Then maybe you get resentful because you have to hold this anger down, so now you have another negative emotion, resentment, to add to the bit of grit that started it all. Layer upon layer, emotion upon emotion, the grit grows grittier and grittier, though now the original hurt is buried so deep in the centre you probably couldn’t name it any more. You feel resentment, perhaps, and you feel anger, perhaps, but the events that trigger those feelings are far removed from the original, forgotten but unhealed hurt.
Further down the track you may work out some more comfortable solutions. You add denial (‘Who me? No, I carry no pain’) to the growing bundle of emotions clinging onto that grit. The pearl grows deep in the dark, but you’re none the wiser. You may feel comfortably numb, like an oyster, but is numb really what you want to be?
When you’re numb to pain and hurt you lose touch with how to deal with similar hurtful situations. When you’re numb to painful emotions, you’re often numb to uplifting emotions too. You protect yourself from feeling anything deeply. You live on the surface. But underneath, the grit’s still there, part of your being, affecting the way you express yourself in the world even though you’re not consciously aware of its power.
There’s only so far you can go with an analogy. Somewhere the story of the oyster, the pearl, the long-limbed prawn and its healing flesh breaks down, but it all serves to help deliver a message. And that’s the way dreams often work. Dreams use bits of analogies, bits of metaphors, take an oyster here, a pearl necklace there, add a prawn shell, oh and perhaps an angry bolt of thunder and a silver lining to a cloud and swirl it all up together and blow it away by the light of dawn. What’s left after the dream is an impression to contemplate.
What’s your impression of my long-ago prawn dream? For me it symbolised the anguish around cracking open old hurts, especially those protected by hard armour-like shells, and the way miraculous healing always follows, if you’re courageous enough to go there and let it happen.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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