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Dream – The Manipulator-Seducer Syndrome

Issues: manipulating others … seducing others … lacking integrity … dealing with manipulators … prey and predator … living with integrity … honesty grounds you … sleep pattern … cancer challenge … cancer care-takers …

I have enlisted my partner in helping with my sleep pattern. This is not the dream yet, but because of medication and maybe the cancer, I suddenly fall asleep at times like at the computer or on the toilet. I also get up quickly. The other night to bed at 12 midnight, and with the sleeping pill. But up an hour later and back at the computer because I could not go back to sleep. I follow the energy in this thing, assuming that there is an independent process at work in me and my body, either for healing or destruction, or sometimes both.

This night sleepy at 10 PM and up at 4 AM.

Now to the dream.

I dreamed that I was with my training group, similar to the last dynamic one in Romania where I volunteered to teach the student psychologists and regular psychologists there for three years in dreamwork psychology, coming into the country a number of times, and relying on the local psychologists there to organize themselves into an ongoing, regular training group.

My first Friday night presentation of dreamwork at a famous old hotel where treaties had been signed in the past had 43 in attendance for the three hours. Out of that we had 23 of those commit to a few weekend dreamwork training the next day where I led process dreamwork. Out of that we had about 12-14 commit to an ongoing year’s training, of which we ended up with about seven students lasting.

In the dream one of the brilliant women of the year-long committed group is truth telling. She is pointing out to the group and me the subtle ways I manipulated people in the group to get commitment. She is truth telling, something that people rarely have the courage for.

Integrity

Of course myself coming out of the California growth movement I know how manipulative growth leaders are and can be. It is a matter of integrity, which is sorely lacking is most people.

I chose the path of integrity because I realized that I must myself be a growth leader of integrity. There are just too many problems raised by being a false and manipulative person. I wanted to be as grounded as possible so that I myself handled well the psyches of the people who chose to work with me.

The reason clinical dreamwork is so difficult and hard to do is that dreams don’t give a damn about being socially careful.

Dreams reveal all, even when dreamers tell them and don’t know mostly what they are saying. But I as an intelligent and experienced expert can read the core personality and ego disposition of most dreamers through their personal dream telling.

However, I also get manipulated, and so certain students are able to manipulate me at my blind spots. So be it. This is a risk you take in dealing with the unconscious.

For myself personally, I have chosen to live as honestly as possible, not as a religious value, which it is not, but as an existential value.

An existential value is a value you choose for in life that gives you back reality.

Each of us is a biological being, an animal who shits and farts and fucks because we are a bio-machine. We eat food for growth and energy. But we are also, with our magnificent brains a cultural artifact. Yes, everyone goes to the toilet every day, and we all know this. Yes, most of us try and have sexual intercourse regularly with somebody because this evokes a feeling of vital energy and closeness with another human being.

The truth is more that out of the womb we are isolated human beings. Our mothers with probably breast feed us and wipe our asses of the shit that must come out, and otherwise keep us healthy and warm. But this does not mean we are close to our mothers and fathers in that they understand and nurture who we are as individuals.

To exist as persons and not just shitting animals we must fight for our right to exist as persons. We must assert our energy, our will power, our talents, our ability to understand how the culture and the groups work within which we live. We must gain money to live on. We must gain position in society’s roles so as to have secure jobs to keep earning money that maybe lets us have an apartment or house of our own, money to do things with others, like going to that nice restaurant, money for a computer and a car, money to marry and have children with the right person, if that becomes a person life choice, though raising a family can be a cope-out often to taking full responsibility for oneself and becoming a culture bearer, someone who contributes to humanity and cultural evolution.

As a teacher then, because I have the talent for it, I have faced these factors and others. Now I wake in the middle of the night to write down this dream and its context.

It reminds me of this strong outer experience of training students in Romania.

I dream of the same brilliant woman, beautiful, feeling, and very, very smart! Yes, it would have been a real plus if she had stayed in our advanced training the three years or so, but she did not.

During the first week long dreamwork intensive at a Romanian inexpensive resort hotel it turned out that her Portuguese psychologist boyfriend had come along unannounced without asking permission of me as the chief trainer. Of course I would have said No if given the choice.

For the brilliant, young woman was there supposedly to learn dreamwork and work with her own dreams and psyche. This could not be done much if you have some man fucking you every day and night while trying to do your own process for which you need focus on yourself and not on anyone else for the week.

Consciousness Encounter

Finding this out at the lunch table a few days in, with other students around I confronted the young man on what he was doing. ‘You have not chosen to be part of the training,’ I said. ‘Your woman friend has. This is not vacation time for her. This is training time for her own dreamwork process as a professional psychologist herself. Why are you interfering? So we engaged in a polite conversation on the issue.

The brilliant and beautiful student listened, as well as the others. It was between me, the older psychologist and the young, dynamic psychologist. I did not call him a seducer, but apparently he was. He did not withdraw from spending the week with my student in her free time. She never had the chance to work on herself. Soon after she went to live with him in Portugal. Romanians were poor at the time and of course wanted a better life. Maybe he would take responsibility for his sexual adventuring and help give her a better life? Apparently he did not. She was back in Romania after a few months, but never rejoined our training though she had been contacted by our organizer.

In life there is always only one opportunity to choose at the major transition points given us.

That’s destiny. What we choose is what we become. If she chose to be his sexual object for awhile then she also pays the consequences of his and her actions. She had not learned yet, if ever, the principle that you do not put your sexual relational life first over developing your full self and abilities to be productive, creative and a true self-functioning individual in this life.

Back to my dream just now.

In the dream we are in training group again and this ex student is confronting me on some manipulations I seem to be doing. It’s how I say the words. It’s how I get to a person’s real attitudes and bring them out and contrast these attitudes with other attitudes that are more purposeful, realistic and growthful.

She is calling me on my game.

For growth-work, I found out at the beginning involves a high level of manipulation. Clients and students do try and manipulate you all the time mostly if this is what they have done growing up in childhood. Okay, she is brilliant. She points out things in the dream, as if to test my ability. Do I acknowledge her insights and issues? Or do I do as a lot of growth teachers do, deny and cover over, get angry, fire such a student, and otherwise be denying and defensive?

My approach is that I always encourage the truth as someone sees things, even if it hurts, but that we process through the issues together. I teach and demonstrate honesty because true honesty is what builds the reality function and the reality function active in you is what grounds you in the real world of experience.

Someone no longer wants to relate to you intimately or in a training group?

Why get angry, upset, put them down, revenge them?

All these things have happened to me, and I have had fantasies to do the same back, but chose not to act on revenge and other fantasies but to accept the disappointments and loss of ego pride and learn from the experiences, as well as survive them.

Thus in the dream when the student is pointing out ‘the truth’ partly because she is brilliant and can do so, how do I react back? Defensively, no. I a living myself by example not to react defensively in life but to accept reality and deal with it as best one can.

That’s the dream and its elaboration into the issues.

My truth-telling student gives her insights but does not understand the contexts yet within which truth operates. But it is a growth step for her to say her insights and not worry about being defended against. Now she is stronger. Now maybe she can learn also to make conscious insights about herself and change her own personality for the better? If so then as a teacher I have got the issue about honesty and integrity across.

The other area pointed out by the dream is manipulation-seduction. Her psychologist boyfriend for a time was a seducer as I knew him during the training week. He took his sex and relating from her, even after I pointed out that it was best for her to be with herself in her own process. Of course he said he would be careful with that, but it had to be a public lie. At their young age they would be fucking each other and hanging out together instead of with the other students and their processes. And he did not himself join the training and go through his own dreamwork process with me and the group. This is a telling point that he lacked integrity in respecting another person.

A seducer takes you sexually and binds you to his or her needs despite with might be best for you.

Probably my public challenge sowed the seeds of consciousness for these two, and that enabled them to break up, even after she had moved to Portugal.

It is far better not to live with a seducer all your life and lose your core being and destiny to him or her. But this is not easy. I myself have lived for years sometimes with a manipulator-seducer. The psychologist is himself seduced, but at last I learned by lesson from it.

Now, why do I dream this long dream with its issues? I no longer teach people, having gone past that life stage.

I have others still trying to relate to me, seduce me to their neurosis, plus people with integrity who are honest who want my best energy to build the dreamwork approach into their lives and future as I am going the way of life’s ending. So I must be aware. Two of the seducers, and it does not have to be sexual, are still sending their type of stressful energy a bit my way. For dealing with a seducer is stressful because it is an attack on ones essential being and expression in the world.

• There are plenty of people in life, that if you let them, want to destroy you and divert you from who you really are and can be. Watch out for these, because part of a seduction is often acting like being your best friend and supporter. Be realistic here.

I have always given the benefit of the doubt to seducers that at least a part of themselves wants to be compassionate and conscious in their dealings with other human beings, including myself. But this attitude of the ‘good therapist’ has cost me dearly at times.

Current Cancer Seducers

With my current cancer diagnosis I have had to observe and deal with the doctors and alternative practitioners to figure out which ones are the seducers and how they do their manipulations of me.

Having been told that from the x-rays and scans my symptoms of phlegm and coughing are due to a tumor on my lung then makes me extremely vulnerable, and that vulnerability can be manipulated, and I can be seduced into taking treatments not in my own best interests.

This blog contains enough of a record of what I have been through so far regarding the manipulations of so-called support people, medical and alternative.

Why, when I am made weak do I have to fight hard with limited energy not to be seduced by unconscious support people out to earn a good living off of the weakened me and other cancer diagnosed people?

I wrote another piece last night of a Times reported writing about people who are shorting dying from their afflictions. He obviously gets paid for his well-written article, but my God, he is a seducer, who keeps trying to get his dying people to give him interviews to write up their stories so that he gets paid as a reporter, and maybe even gets publisher interest to write a book about it.

Final point: The world is full of vulnerable prey to the powerful predators, and always will be.

Which will you be? Prey or predator? Or can you be protective of yourself and not become a predator as a way of protecting yourself from becoming prey to the manipulators of the world?

I have nothing more to say at the moment.

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