Daring To Dream: Thoughts on following your dreams when healing from trauma
- diaryofafloppingfi
- Aug 1, 2024
- 7 min read
Much of what keeps humans motivated to heal and improve their lives is trying to reach a goal. When we are suffering, and being held back by dysfunctional people in our lives, it is daring to dream that often brings us out of the darkness.
While dreaming can also put us into a cycle because too much daydreaming can be a form of escapism, it is also a powerful tool in establishing goals and deciding what life we want to build. However, we have to be careful not to let ourselves fall into depression with too much daydreaming and not building any confidence in ourselves, and another obstacle that I find stands in my way is that I am used to denying my own needs because I was taught that they are never more important than someone else’s. Once we break free of the chains that bind us to being dependent on someone else, we are the obstacle that stands in the way of our dreams.
In this article I am going to explore my thoughts on following your dreams while healing from trauma, and share a few things that I have learned along the way.
Don’t Share Your Dreams
The first rule of having hope and following your dreams is to never tell anyone about your dreams. Sure, when we are sharing our hope for our live direction with people, we can tell them what our general direction is, but our most desired things can be quite fragile ambitions and the slightest doubt to their possibility may cause them to shatter and it is best to keep these fragile things to ourselves. We want to believe that the worst of people are in our past, and now that we’re healing, we can see the signs of people with malicious intent and keep them out of our sphere of influence, but that just isn’t true. People reveal their true selves over time, and even after you understand a person’s true nature, we are all subject to change sometimes. Not all people with negative, dream-shattering behavior know they have these evil superpowers and do it on purpose so it can be tough to judge who is ultimately a safe person to share your daydreams with.
People let themselves be ruled by jealously and will accuse those people they are jealous of as having malicious intent so they can convince themselves that the person they’re jealous of, their victim, deserve mistreatment. Sure, this isn’t true of all people, but it is true of any who cannot listen to the needs of others without interjecting reasons why their needs are more important, and they can’t congratulate people on their accomplishments without pointing out their flaws. The largest sign I have found of a jealous person is that they talk about everyone behind their back to everyone else, and they are never the perpetrator of bad relations. If possible, it’s probably best not to let jealous people into your sphere because they hate people with dreams who dare to try to outshine them. They would rather be the lord of nothing and surround themselves with people who feel like they are nothing than try to latch on to their own dream and support others who have one too.
Jealous people are just terrified that they will fail at something, be criticized, or not be good at something the first time they try it. It’s not the fear that makes them detrimental to the dreams of others, but the mentality, conscious or not, that they need to hold everyone else back, so they don’t look like they are scared, unambitious people. The most common demonstration of this is the narcissistic trait of belittling and talking down any positive thing their victims try to do (i.e losing weight, finishing a degree, taking a good job offer, learning a new skill.) but remember that a narcissistic trait a person with NPD does not make so you will run into people with this habit who do not act like the person with (probable) NPD you are accustomed to and that is why you must be on guard of your dreams with everyone.
Every Small Step in the right direction is a step forward
Once you have successfully put on your proverbial horse blinders to uncalled for negativity, and stowed your dreams safely in your heart the next daunting task is trying to figure out how to accomplish your dreams. For people who have been told our perception is always wrong, we can’t do anything on our own, and that we don’t deserve basic needs it is hard to wrap our heads around the idea that we can accomplish our dreams. It is important to remember that if you never try, you will never succeed.
Something that has helped me with taking the first step on a big goal is to break things down into really small steps. My best example to demonstrate this idea is this blog. At first, I just wanted to publish my writing online so that I could get a job in writing. While I still haven’t accomplished getting a paying job in writing, I have built up this website to have meaning. I like to joke that I’m building a castle on a pile of poop because being able to share my experience and things I’ve learned with others suffering from some of the same stuff has enabled me to build to something great out of experiences that were terrible. We don’t always know what our endeavors will become when we are first starting out, but every step that we take towards building something is another brick in place.
So maybe take out a pen and paper (or crayons and cardboard) and start brainstorming something that would bring you joy. Pretend for few minutes that nothing stands in your way, and what sort of dreams and goals do you come up with? Perhaps some of these are feasible, and some aren’t, but this is a good way to narrow things down.
A few other tips
Having a planner of some kind can be invaluable to plan out your life. It is also especially important to note that often living with a mental illness makes for less for energy available to us throughout the day. Using a planner can be a useful way to make sure that you are getting the things you need to done without over loading yourself so that you burn out and go through a long period of time not able to do anything.
I find that I need to stay very organized to feel like I can handle things. For important information like doctors and appointments I need to have a planner to keep everything all in one place. If I have to make a phone call, but I know I have to search for the number I need to call it feels like a giant task to get that phone call made. I hate make phone calls and being on the phone, and having to search for the number just gives me longer to dread the process of being on the phone. If you have tasks that are painful to complete, maybe there is a compromise you can find with yourself to get them done. Mine is to have a planning stage where I write out my tasks for the next day the day before, and if it requires a phone call then I put the number in there. I like to refer to this as taking away my excuses not to do something.
Vision boards or a form of a “don’t panic” poster can be a great assistant in staying on track. In the past I made a “don’t panic” poster with words of encouragement, minor goals, and a few major goals and I hung it in a spot where I would see when I woke up every morning. Over time things would get crossed out, and I would make a new poster with more goals and new motivational messages. If you are following my first advice and trying to keep your dreams to yourself, then hide it in something only you see every day. Or maybe use pictures so only you know what it means.
Never Say Never
Never call something a failure or impossible until you have tried and are out of options. Too many times we just give up on something we want because it sounds like something we can’t do, or we quit at the first hiccup on the road. Nothing worth it is ever easy, and if you give up on everything just because you don’t think you can then you will never get anywhere. I think that a lot of times when we talk down to ourselves this way we are mimicking the voices of people from our past who told us this, and those people were likely jealous of us in some way. Even though we may not remember exactly who it was that killed our self-confidence, we can still recognize these negative voices for what they are and tell them to shut up. You can’t always control who you are in the room with, but you can control who gets to live rent free in your head even if it does take a long time and a lot of work to kick them out.
Celebrate Your Wins
Celebrate all of your small wins even you only celebrate with a bathroom facial, a coffee from Starbucks, or a few hours of your favorite video games. Often, we were denied the ability of satisfying our own needs without being guilted or shamed so it is very important to start celebrating yourself and what you do now to help with feeling your accomplishments, not just finishing something and moving onto the next problem.
Over time celebrating our accomplishments will retrain our brain to be excited for new challenges, to feel good about ourselves, and to feel like we do deserve good things (Guthridge, 2019).
In Conclusion
The future can be scary, but it doesn’t have to look bleak. The difference between a bleak future and a happy one can often be defined by the goals that you are working towards. Many of us are coming from situation where we haven’t been fully prepared for succeding as an adult, and people in our lives have done everything they could to make sure that we never succeed. In a way, having a happy life is the ultimate revenge on our abusers, and it is the ultimate goal of healing.
Dare to dream. Dare to make plans. Dare to follow through.
Tell me what you think or what has helped you to keep your dreams alive and comment below!
References
The Diary Of A Flopping Fish and any posts or articles published on Diaryofafloppingfish.com are not reviewed by a therapist or medical or mental health professional. Resources are cited and opinion is opinion. No advice or opinions in any articles replace professional advice from a doctor, therapist, or any other kind of health professional. The author is not a licensed professional of any kind.
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