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APA Psychotherapy Training Videos are intended solely for educational purposes for mental health professionals. Viewers are expected to treat confidential material found herein according to strict professional guidelines. Unauthorized viewing is prohibited.
Dr. Koch-Sheras's self-directed approach to dream work is a powerful process for enhancing the effectiveness of psychotherapy that goes beyond understanding the dream as an end in itself. Her approach brings the dreamer actively into the process of dream work and its application to current life experience, rather than approaching dream interpretation as a passive exercise that focuses on the client's needs and dependence on the therapist to meet them. The therapist teaches and guides clients to interpret their own dreams, enabling dream work in therapy to become an avenue to self-responsibility and self-healing. Clients are taught how to use dreams as a vehicle for taking responsibility for both their waking and dreaming lives, enabling emotional growth and relationship development—not only intellectual insight—to be possible. In this way, clients develop confidence in their own authority and creativity and come to see that they have the power to heal themselves. In addition, clients are shown how to use their dreams as a path toward dealing with relationships in a way that moves beyond their own self-interest to become more related and connected with others. This self-directed approach focuses on the technique of translating a dream into "dream language," emphasizing the client's own creation of the dream story and the perceptions that lead to each dream symbol, action, and feeling in the dream. Based on the theory that all aspects of a dream are parts of the self created by the dreamer, the technique is reminiscent of Carl Jung and related to the gestalt therapy of Frederick Perls and the "percept language" of John Weir. Clients are taught to start by telling the dream in ordinary language in the present tense. Then they "translate" the dream aloud in dream language. The translation involves owning each part of the dream by using the phrase "part of me" after every noun and adding the phrase "I have me…" at the beginning of every sentence, which helps to emphasize the client's accountability for all the actions and feelings in the dream, rather than blaming them on something or someone else. While sometimes a bit awkward at first, clients learn to be comfortable with dream language, like learning a foreign language. Reliving the dream in some way is an essential part of the client's taking responsibility for creating it and making effective use of it. Some of the techniques for reliving the dream include role playing or dialoguing with the various characters and aspects of the dream, changing or finishing a dream in fantasy, and giving oneself messages for actions to take from the dream. In the process, clients learn to apply this self-directed way of thinking and operating to their waking lives as well as to their dreams, further moving them towards being more self-directed and responsible for their own perceptions and behavior. |
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