Nightmare Therapy - Effective techniques, exercises and help in nightmares

Therapy Nightmares - Examples of use and backgrounds

Nightmares are an equally important and underestimated problem of psychotherapy. But today there are well-founded approaches that do not "treat" these dreams just as a side effect of trauma or mental disorders.

contents

• Therapy Nightmares - Examples of use and backgrounds
• traumatization
• The behavioral therapies
• Confrontational therapy against nightmares
• Imagery Rehearsal Therapy
• ask questions
• When is a nightmare therapy useful?
• Compensation or corrective?
• The dream script
• Altpraum and fear
• Creativity and nightmares
• gestalt therapy
• Role playing and hot chair
• Relaxation
• sleep hygiene
• exposition
• Selbsexposition

traumatization

A special role in the therapy of traumatization had always been work on nightmares, which represent a leading symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder. Those affected are not only struggling to distinguish dream reality and external reality, their nightmares also occur frequently, and the associated sensations intensively affect the waking state.

Nightmares often occur in people who had a traumatic experience. (Image: lassedesignen / fotolia.com)

In people without this disorder, there are different theories about the nocturnal hellish journeys. There are indications that stressful situations that we do not deal with sufficiently during the day are pushing our dreams.

Another theory assumes that the nightmares continue what we deal with during the day. Promising are findings of the latest brain research. Thus, the brain works actively during the dream to solve problems. Nightmares are therefore no superfluous troublemakers, but a painful but necessary mental work on real problems and real conflicts. The horror trip even has a therapeutic function in helping us to deal with anxiety or to design solutions to existential situations.

However, this is contradicted by the fact that a nightmare is defined by the fact that the event scares us so much that we wake up to it, and that does not lead us to solve a problem in the dream. Also, permanent nightmares do not lead to a better way of dealing with everyday life - on the contrary. Those affected are afraid to fall asleep, they do not regenerate during sleep and suffer from tiredness during the day.

The behavioral therapies

Behavioral therapies are practically oriented. They assume that life problems in the wake of mental disorders can not be solved by analyzing them over and over again, but by the fact that those affected change their behavior in stressful situations.

That's why behavioral therapists do not go through every dream in detail to decipher "hidden messages." On the other hand, it is important to them whether certain situations occur again and again in nightmares and which situations correspond to those in the everyday world.

Then it's about the patient changing his behavior in exactly those situations and the situation losing its sting. Is there a real conflict in the dream? If not, then behavioral therapy is about getting the nightmares under control and allowing those affected a higher quality of life.

Confrontational therapy against nightmares

Success shows the confrontation therapy, which overlaps with therapeutic writing, therapeutic painting and other methods of self-recognition. Patients write down their nightmare and read it out loud to the therapist several times in succession. They should absolutely admit and talk about the negative feelings that occur.

Often it helps to write down the content of the nightmare. (Image: jcomp / fotolia.com)

They talk about these negative feelings until they eventually become less and at best disappear. Dr. Renate Daniel of C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich advises: "It certainly helps to discuss the nightmare with someone and to understand it." According to the expert, conflicts should be considered and a solution sought, because in their experience, the difficulties would not disappear from all. It is advisable for those affected to see how he / she can deal with the problem - because even by dealing with the subject, the soul is calming down.

But it is not a duty to talk about dreams with another person Daniel. Even writing down everything could already help, because most of the experience must only be taken in words or recorded, explains Daniel. Then it could even be enough if the records are put in a drawer.

Imagery Rehearsal Therapy

This active imagination takes one step beyond the confrontation with the oppressive images. This is not just about getting the nightmares to consciousness, but actively changing them.

The victims not only write down the contents of their dream, but relax and take the pictures in front of the inner eye. Here, with recurring dreams, it helps to keep a dream diary and to become more and more clear about the pictures that appear.

The patients change the content in their imagination until the stressful elements have lost their terror. This method is great for people who have a good imagination anyway.

It is especially important when the dreams suggest real conflicts. Then it even promotes it to better handle these real problems. It does not conflict with brain research, but practically applies its findings. When nightmares are indeed problematic, they do not adequately perform this work if they cause problems again.

Imagination therapy helps the nightly work to a certain extent on the jumps. If the nightmares provide the raw material by pointing out stressful situations, the affected person consciously works through these situations.

It does not have to be about the real situation, but only a figurative expression of it. For example, I keep dreaming that a general sends me to the front, where grenades tear my bowels, and I change the content so that I say no, and the general has no more power over me, it could be so planting in my unconscious that in real situations I also say no when people make unreasonable demands on me.

The nightmare researcher Reinhard Pietrowsky sees it as meaningful if the therapist participates in interpreting the dream images, but warns against lump sums, as they are in the esoteric scene and in "miracle healers" are common. According to the interpretation of the dreams may indeed be useful for the therapy - but rather as a starting point for important topics and "not so flattened that one closes about spider dreams on the fear of a dominant mother," said the expert.

Many nightmares are about being persecuted. (Image: grandfailure / fotolia.com)

ask questions

According to Dr. Renate Daniel is the most common nightmare motif to be followed. Now it would be about the following questions: Which emotional part is it that persecutes me? What exactly is haunting me? Is it guilt or the past, old beliefs or patterns of behavior? Does the dream have anything to do with me? Am I reckoning that a relationship is not going? Who is following me or what am I running away from? Are these things that I'm embarrassed about? Answering these questions is already a big step on the way to solving them.

When is a nightmare therapy useful?

If you suffer from chronic nightmares, therapy is highly recommended. They feel like someone dripping water through their roof and lacking the simple tools to cram the hole.

Nightmares weigh just as hard as the methods of getting them under control are easy to learn. If no deeper disturbances are present, ie the dreams are for example an expression of a severe depression, the quality of life of those concerned improves after only a few sessions. The bad dreams disappear, the sleep is relaxing again, the patients are fitter, they have more energy and feel better.

Dr. Renate Daniel reports a particularly dramatic case in which those affected sought therapeutic help decades or too late. It was a 75-year-old woman who had never had any contact with psychotherapy. The daughter had sent her mother now, since this has suffered from nightmares since her 15th year - that is, for 60 years. The sufferer had already given up hope for help because of the long time, but after about 15 therapy sessions, the nightmares finally stopped. "It did not take too long for the soul to calm down. That really impressed me, that working on this chronic problem was relatively easy. Daniel.

Compensation or corrective?

In 1934, Ferenczi saw dreams as an attempt to psychologically manage traumatic experiences. Carl Gustav Jung held all dreams, including nightmares, as a means of the psyche to control himself and to compensate for and correct experiences.

Accordingly, the nightmare just compensates for the parts of the personality that denies the dreamer in the life of the watch. The more someone denies his embarrassing parts, the more drastic his dreams logically point out.

The opposite is the hypothesis of continuity. She suspects that nightmares continue the watchful life. The fears of the waking person are therefore also the fears he has in the dream.

Jung did not just assume that someone always dreams exactly the opposite of what he is one-sided in his waking life. An overly optimistic person does not necessarily have nightmares to show that not everything is bathed in pink clouds.

Rather, according to Jung, a dream can grotesquely overstate one-sided fixations. The negative thoughts of a culture pessimist, who assumes that society is going down the drain anyway, could thus increase at night into a nightmare in which apocalyptic monsters ravage the world, showing him that his view of the world is exaggerated.

According to Carl Gustav Jung, negative thoughts in the dream can also massively increase to illustrate the exaggerated view of things. (Image: grandfailure / fotolia.com)

The dream script

Dream Therapy is based on the fact that nightmares that come back are stored in the brain as a script. At the same time, this script is little networked with autobiographical memory; The affected persons perceive negative emotions, which are also repeated in the thoughts of the day, but receive little concrete hints when it comes to a concrete experience behind them.

The REM phase of sleep is characterized by a high degree of images, which in the dream become more or less coherent stories. And the script in the brain is now, casually speaking, in the shape of a comic book. The more the nightmare repeats, the stronger the pattern becomes, because the connections of our synapses reinforce the familiar. In addition, the intensity of each dream strengthens the process.

At the same time, certain personality traits such as neurosis, "thin skin", hypersensitivity or depression lead to the stress that the respective dream triggers. Distorted perceptions and unhealthy behavior in turn prevent the brain from excluding the script.

These include, on the one hand, perceptions of people whose nightmares are part of far-reaching affective disorders. Anyone who suffers from psychosis and who torments paranoid delusions, who is driven by persecutory anxiety at night and during the night, hardly succeeds in keeping a distance from the negative emotions.

Also endangered are people who misinterpret the meaningful advice to make the dream happen, as "to fall into the feelings of the dream". Anyone who enters into negative feelings such as fear of death, anger or despondency without thinking, in which they become stronger and at some point a habit without alternatives.

Altpraum and fear

Research on whether nightmare and fearful personality hang together produced different results. To date, a direct connection is not proven - but there is a connection between diagnosed anxiety disorders and repeated nightmares, which are a symptom of these mental health problems.

Clearer is a connection between people with "thin borders", ie highly sensitive and frequent nightmares. Such people have a high permeability between reality, fantasy, daydream and dream. They are open, their relationships are as intense as they are conflicting, they respond intensively to criticism, and they reflect a lot on the problems of their fellow human beings, sometimes so much so that others' problems become their own.

Such people have a great imagination, are easily hypnotizable and easy to enthuse. Often they are exceptionally creative and have direct access to their inner imagery - they often paint or write fantastic stories.

Those affected often take dreams very seriously and have a strong understanding of dream symbols. They are also sensitive to physical stimuli such as odors, light or noise. At times, after waking up, they can barely distinguish between dream, fantasy and reality.

These people have intense and frequent nightmares; However, this is not generally because they generally have more negative feelings than people who do not dream that way, but they dream in general intensely and often. Their entire dream world is extremely active, and they also experience massive nightmares.

Especially creative people often dream of very bizarre things. (Image: Andrey Kiselev / fotolia.com)

Creativity and nightmares

Connected with thin-skinned, but not identical, is creativity. Especially creative people often remember their dreams and experience in them imaginative stories, but or because of that many and often bizarre nightmares.

Here is true: Because they experience a total of a thriving dream world, they also have more beautiful dreams and nightmares.

gestalt therapy

The Gestalt therapy according to Pearls sees itself at the interface between therapy, theory and phiosophy. The basic idea is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Pearls assumed that dreams contain important clues of a human being to themselves, but that they need to be deciphered.

The dream does not necessarily contain the solution of a problem, but would often only show the problem. Dream figures, events and figures would show aspects of the dreaming.

The difference with psychoanalysis is that the therapist is not the one who analyzes the dream. He accompanies the dreaming rather. The dreaming himself designs the dream work. It is essential to activate the dream experience.

Role playing and hot chair

The methods of Gestalt therapy include, for example, psychoactive role-playing games and the "hot chair," where one participant tells his dreams and the others listen. In the dialogue, the contents should become clear.

Instead of "analyzing" the dream, Gestalt therapy encourages people to play and express the content, as it expresses behavioral alternatives, mental restructuring and the needs of the person concerned.

Relaxation

Therapists also use detente techniques to alleviate nightmares. This is about raising the threshold at which they are triggered by reducing the stress of those affected.

Among these procedures is Progressive Muscle Relaxation, developed by Edmund Jacobson specifically for anxiety disorders. Autogenic training, meditation or yoga can also help with relaxation therapy.

Relaxation techniques alone are not enough to deal with dreams because they only reduce the trigger stress. But they can be a good complement to other therapies, especially for people who are acutely affected, similar to a headache tablet that relieves the symptoms.

Relaxation techniques can support a therapy in an acute case, especially in acute cases. (Image: fizkes / fotolia.com)

sleep hygiene

Reducing stress is also the motive for conditioning procedures and psycho-education. This includes education on nutrition, exercise, the sleep environment, stimulants and stress management strategies.

While there are no studies that prove the evidence for the effectiveness of sleep hygiene in nightmares, it is plausible to assume that undisturbed sleep is also helpful for nightmare therapy.

Some dreams actually have to do with such external circumstances. For example, anyone who devours heavy meals before falling asleep might dream of being unable to move.

Enlightenment means, for example, to give those affected information about the genesis of nightmares and their frequency and intensity in order to relieve it.

exposition

Exposure therapy assumes that nightmares can be amplified like any other behavior, but also become weaker or disappear. This makes them similar to triggers that trigger anxiety.

Those affected confront the nightmare until it does not cause them any more fear. Therapist and patient find out the scary elements first. Then the patient is desensitized to these elements, for example by the dreaming relaxing. If he is relaxed, he imagines parts of the nightmare, until he can imagine the whole dream without fear.

Studies have shown that this systematic desensitization is superior to pure relaxation methods.

Selbsexposition

Self exposure goes into therapeutic writing. The dreaming write their nightmares here and then introduce themselves again. In contrast to systematic desensitization, this imagination does not progress step by step and relaxation techniques are lacking.

Exposure therapies lead to fewer, weaker or no nightmares. One drawback, however, is that it puts a burden on patients to face the anxiety-filled dream situation. Many patients therefore do not expose themselves to such therapy and have to resort to other procedures.

Caution is advised in patients with post-traumatic nightmares. Here an exposure can be harmful, because it would be like a trauma confrontation, but without being able to provide the appropriate framework. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)
Specialist supervision: Barbara Schindewolf-Lensch (doctor)

references
https://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-19461/Dissertation%20Th%C3%BCnker.pdf
http://www.psychosoziale-gesundheit.net/pdf/Int.1-Alptraeume.pdf
https://www.bluewin.ch/de/leben/lifestyle/redaktion/2017/17-03/albtraeume-und-was-sie-bedeuten.html