Joanna Poppink, LMFT

Keeping a Dream Journal Can Speed
Eating Disorder Recovery

Dream Journal Value
Keeping a written record of your dreams is often part of eating disorder recovery work. Clients do it dutifully, resentfully, awkwardly, enthusiastically. They forget to do it. They can't do it because they can't remember their dreams. They are embarrassed to do it because the dreams are embarrassing. Or they refuse to do it because the dreams are frightening. Yet any of these experiences add value to the recovery process. 

Dreams are a living communication from your unconscious. Eating disorders and binge eating are attempts to bypass the internal unconscious and let your body carry the burden of coping with intense challenges.

Recognizing and honoring dream content gives you an opportunity to free your body of needing to carry the burden of your emotional life.

How does a dream journal work?
Keeping a dream journal lets you write down the content of your dreams. When you keep a dream journal you write your feelings, life issues, denied awareness, memories and life forces coming forward in a disguised language. Dreams use symbolism in an attempt to slip pass your personal censors to deliver needed and valuable information to your conscious mind. Your dream journal allows your conscious mind to take in what your unconscious is telling you. Your body becomes less necessary to shield you from that information. 

Understood, your dream images are powerful aids in affirming who you are, what you want and believe. They show you the challenges you face as well as your strength and power to cope with them. 

What do eating disorders have to do with dreams?
Eating disorders block this inner awareness and prevent you from knowing who you are and what your authentic goals and experiences are in life. But your dreams keep pushing against the eating disorder barrier. Binge eating, purging, and starving require a tremendous amount of energy. Your life force energy is diverted into the eating disorder. Dream information is continually blocked more effectively.

As you move more into recovery your dreams can become more intense. Eating disorder recovery weakens your internal barriers to the authentic self-knowledge within you. More of your truth is attempting to get through.

Keeping a dream journal can be enormously helpful. Because your dreams use a disguised language, you may find it helpful to work with a psychotherapist who understands both dream therapy and eating disorders. 

In reading "Interior and Exterior Landscapes" by Leslie Marmon Silko, I found this passage, like an exploding nova of brilliant articulation. Silk answers the dream question.

 "[Dreams] have the power to seize terrifying feelings and deep instincts and translate them into images — visual, aural, tactile - and into the concrete where human beings may more readily confront and channel the terrifying instincts or powerful emotions into rituals and narratives that reassure the individual while reaffirming cherished values of the group. The identity of the individual as part of the group and the greater whole is strengthened, and the terror of facing the world alone is extinguished."