Season 2025: Episode 15 -- Joan K. Peters teaches us how psychoanalyses can help us find more peace

Joan had a rough beginning when her father died young (Joan was only 2) leaving her mother destitute with two young children. She examined this early life in her late 20s during psychoanalysis and uncovered all kinds of connections and meaning about some of her issues and patterns. 

She contrasts these psychoanalytic sessions with later ones in her life in her new memoir -- "Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis"

Through her personal sharing, she illuminates how psychoanalysis can help us understand our own stories and feelings.

Available on Amazon: Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis

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Original music "Saturday Sway" by Brendan Talian (for all interviews before 2025)

Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:20  
Lynne,

Unknown Speaker  0:33  
Hello and welcome to "The Storied Human". My name is Lynne Thompson, and today my guest is Joan K Peters.

Unknown Speaker  0:40  
She was born in New York City and got her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Chicago. She's published a novel and two books about women and work, and is a professor emeritus of literature and writing at California State University at Channel Islands. She lives in Ohio with her husband, her dogs and her chickens. Her new book is untangling, a memoir of psychoanalysis. Learn more at untangling joan.com

Unknown Speaker  1:09  
we're going to talk a lot more about that book, which is an amazing memoir written in the narrative style of Mary Carr. The author recounts her two analyzes, one when she was in her 20s and another in her 60s, that form one continuous story of immense discovery and healing. She dramatizes firsthand accounts of how she and her two very different analysts unlock the traumas, losses and terrors of her past, enabling her to confront and understand them, and finally, feel free to fully enjoy her life.

Unknown Speaker  1:46  
Welcome Joan, it's an incredible book. I'm so happy to have you here today. I'm so glad to be here.

Unknown Speaker  1:55  
So I'm tempted to start in the beginning, but sometimes people have a feeling of somewhere else to start.

Unknown Speaker  2:02  
You know, one of the things I like to start with is, is why I wrote the book, and people are always telling me that, Oh, my God, you've disclosed so much. People don't talk about these things and

Unknown Speaker  2:19  
and these things are what's in our deepest self, what's in our minds. And

Unknown Speaker  2:28  
I'd like to just say that

Unknown Speaker  2:32  
one reason why I did it is because our families and we have inherited such silence about who we really are and what's really happened in our family and our extended family,

Unknown Speaker  2:51  
our parents, our grandparents, my grandparents were all immigrants and had tremendous upheaval in their lives. Never talked about it. That was the old country. Never talked about what happened to them. My parents never talked about what happened to us. And I think that it's kind of an American tradition. And I really wrote this because one of the things I learned in psychoanalysis myself is that all of these things I kept bottled up in me, my fears, my longings, my insecurities, all of that came out in The psychoanalysis in therapy, and I realized and was happy to learn from my my therapist, that it was just perfectly human to feel this way, and that there were good reasons why I felt the way I did, why I experienced such profound loneliness, Let's say, and how that that kind of basic loneliness, which was there, whether I had friends or family or whatever, had a real origin story, and it sat inside of me, and I had to find it and own it and and understand that it wasn't something to run from and be ashamed of. And I think that we, particularly in America, are rugged individualists. We think we have to stiff upper upper lip and go it alone and just stop whining and get to it. And I think we are an invigorated people because of that attitude, but I also think that it often means that we don't

Unknown Speaker  4:51  
share our vulnerabilities, we don't admit them to ourselves, we don't explore them so that we don't have a chance to.

Unknown Speaker  5:00  
Heal them and and and make sure we're not passing it along to our own children and our acquaintances and our friends and our colleagues. So I think I wrote it with a sense of mission, you know that i i read it that way, yeah, like you really are going to say, look, look, look at this. You know this, I found out this, and there was a good reason, and there's a connection. Yeah, it's funny as as you move through life, and you and I've gone to therapists on and off, and I really highly recommend it.

Unknown Speaker  5:35  
I noticed that, you know, not that I know a lot about mental illness, but I did, you know, sort of pick up on

Unknown Speaker  5:43  
the definitions of some of the things that were prominent for me. And I would look at people and say, that is an undiagnosed case of blah, you know, like, Yes, that's right.

Unknown Speaker  5:54  
And you feel compassion instead of, I think that's what's so great, is that knowledge is power, right? Like you feel compassion instead of getting irritated, that's right, to just get irritated. But now I go, Well, you know that person's hurting, yes, a lot of hurt there, exactly. But you know, you brought up such a great point, if we don't heal these things, we're acting out of them, and we're unconscious, right, right? And, and really, that stiff upper lip only takes you so far. Yeah, well, I mean, you can, you can, in fact, get very far. I mean, I think many people who are high achievers, people who can cut off their emotional selves,

Unknown Speaker  6:36  
producing and achieving and and, of course, they can go through life being very destructive and self destructive.

Unknown Speaker  6:46  
And I think, you know, I think it's very important to

Unknown Speaker  6:51  
look at it's not blaming. I think people fear that therapy is going to end up having you blame your parents for everything that's wrong with you, that's not it at all. It's really exactly what you just said, which is, as you understand what makes you act the way you do you you begin to understand your parents and what made them who they are, and they, too, acted out of fears and and traumas that they might not even have known. You know, in in my own case, my father died when I was two, and my mother married a new person when when I was five, and that early life, she was only 26 years old. She had two small children, and her husband died no money. She nursed him for a year because they couldn't afford a hospital and she had to go go back to work. She was a model. Just a week after the funeral, we were

Unknown Speaker  8:06  
we were alone. Her family couldn't help her, and that obviously was so traumatic for her to live through, and she didn't have the kind of background that would have prepared her for that sort of challenge. Her own parents didn't even speak English. They didn't read and write, you know, they weren't able to help. And I think that what happened is she simply had such pain in that part of her life that the way she handled it, which is actually the way many, many parents handle painful things in their family. She just never spoke of it again. We were never mentioned it. It never happened. We don't I never knew who, who this man was. I kind of knew that there was this dead father that we were never to speak of. That was it. And when you have that kind of

Unknown Speaker  9:07  
hidden secrets and so on, that's corrosive.

Unknown Speaker  9:13  
It meant that I could not

Unknown Speaker  9:16  
connect with myself as a grieving child as a frightened child as a I watched my mother give my father morphine injections, and I watched him he he was not in his right mind, and it was terrifying for a little kid. Now, all I'm saying is that something my mother did what she knew how to do, which was stiff upper lip, lip. It never happened. She would tell us, if we asked a question, you were children, you didn't know anything. And of course, that's not ever the case. Children do know they pick up.

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
Fear. They pick up insecurity in the parent. They pick up something tragic has happened, even if they have no idea what death is. In my case, I certainly knew my father disappeared, and I also knew he wasted away and was sick.

Unknown Speaker  10:18  
So I think, I think, I think to bring everything out in the open, you have such a better chance of knowing what what it is, not having it turn into these demons and Phantoms in the back of your mind that you dare not go near.

Unknown Speaker  10:39  
Yeah, so strong. The image I got when you were talking about that was your mother boxing it up, yes, just putting it in the back of her mind. Yes, it's such a prominent, important thing back then was we just, we don't, it will go away if we don't speak of it. It's like the power of not naming things. That's right. It's exactly what, what men tend to do. They did a study saying men think, well, if I don't name it, it doesn't exist. It's not going to bother me. And I think women do it too. People in grief do it, yeah,

Unknown Speaker  11:13  
yeah. That comes up that's so strong and that you started your life that way. You know that that was your young life, right? Right, and I and the other piece of that, which I think is so important, is that the rest of my childhood was very regular, very seemingly normal, as as it is with many people,

Unknown Speaker  11:38  
my mother and father gave us Christmas presents. They they made sure there was food on the table, and we ate together and

Unknown Speaker  11:47  
and everything was orderly. But what I also learned in therapy is that a very ordinary life with decent parents who never locked you in the basement

Unknown Speaker  12:01  
can also be traumatic. And in my case, my mother was was a very remote person. She wasn't warm and affectionate and cuddly, and I think a lot of it had to do with how traumatized she was by her own life, including being left with two babies and no money, and and

Unknown Speaker  12:28  
and a husband who died an awful death. And I think that the way she was is strong. And I'm, I'm very grateful for that strength. I inherited a lot of it, and, and of course, that's a beautiful thing. And she was also very competent and

Unknown Speaker  12:51  
and very charming. And yet there was an absence in my home. There was an absence of the warm, loving atmosphere that a child needs to grow and what I learned in therapy and again, it's not blame, because I do understand what happened is that my mother was unavailable to herself. She couldn't really be available with joy in parenting. She was too upset by by life, and bitter and withdrawn in her personal sphere,

Unknown Speaker  13:35  
even though she may have done everything correctly, she wasn't her heart wasn't in it as as it were. And I think that that's true for many, many people. And it's important to understand that the absence of warmth and joy and and and real physical affection from parents is itself a trauma. Children need that, and if they don't get it, they can't flourish. It's children are not they can't just receive intellectual messages about you know, you have a you have a secure home. That's very good, but that's not enough.

Unknown Speaker  14:20  
Children need to be held. They need to be their fears need to be addressed. You know, all kinds of things that I as a parent loved doing, because I think, you know, in a way, I didn't get it. But it's, this is again, not about blame. It's about turning, turning the focus on yourself, which is what I learned to do in psychotherapy, and saying, how did this affect me? How did it affect me that my mother never hugged or kissed me? Now, as a as a grown up, you're almost ashamed to admit that

Unknown Speaker  14:56  
it's the need, you know, the child need.

Unknown Speaker  15:00  
It for that kind of physical affection and that kind of embrace of life. And I, I think that what I did was

Unknown Speaker  15:15  
press it all down and and then, as you say, I acted it out in being too needy, with my friends, with my with my lovers, and I didn't even know I was doing that, but it came from this. You didn't know where it was coming from either, right? It's that unconsciousness that's so hard, right? Because you don't know, you don't know why you're but you keep repeating the scene. I remember that feeling in my 20s of having these patterns and saying just going crazy, like, what am I doing, right? Yeah. And why do I feel that if this lover leaves me, I will die? You know? I mean, it's never the case that you will die, right? You might die, yeah? And when Yeah, just to understand that, as you say, I think it's so beautiful that you emphasize not blaming your parents and that you have compassion, because who could go through that at your mother's age right? Especially back then, where there were less opportunities for women and she had no money, and she got through that. So I have to admire that, and I can speak to this myself, because

Unknown Speaker  16:30  
I know now I look back on my parents, and I had a I was lucky. I had that warmth, and I had that that my parents really cherished me, and I'm very grateful for that, and we had some problems later, but that's okay, as long as you get it when you're young. Yeah, yeah. It really is so important to get it when you're young, you know?

Unknown Speaker  16:51  
But I looked back on my parents, and they had left their childhood homes, and no one left Pennsylvania back then, and they had moved to a whole new state for a whole new job. They had no money, two little kids. They were both in their 20s, and both of them had lost both of their parents. Oh, I now I understand that is hard to get through one parent is hard to get through losing four and having to go through all that, and you're so young, so I have compassion for them in a way that I didn't before. And I think that's really important to connect with that and say, Look, that that My poor mom, my poor dad. They were they had their own things, you know. And you're right. Nobody will back then. Nobody talked about anything right

Unknown Speaker  17:42  
to talk about anything. And I would even go so far as to say you were shamed if you did Yes, right, or if you wanted to, especially when your parent cut it off and made you feel like there was something wrong with wanting to connect in some of the sadnesses of life, you know, like you could only connect when everything was fine. Everything's okay, right? Everything's okay. I

Unknown Speaker  18:08  
even got that from my peer group growing up, yeah, that I thought too much, and I was too sensitive, and I make too much of a big deal out of everything, yeah, and I realized now, when you look back, I didn't make too too much of a big deal out of everything. I just felt a lot and said it, yeah, but that was, that, was they put the kibosh on that, because everybody needs to maintain this certain way of being, you know, it's like you don't know the rules. You know, you don't know the rules, yeah? And I think part of what you're expressing, which is very moving to me, is the wish to connect with others about those sensitive feelings. And that brings us back to the original theme that I mentioned about this mission of having people admit and and look at acknowledge and share their feelings. You know, one of the sweetest responses I got to to my book was somebody saying,

Unknown Speaker  19:07  
you make me feel like I want to be real with people too. Yes, you know, that's how I felt reading it. You were just so honest and open, and you invite people to feel their own. That's right, own connections. You know, you just said something amazing to me. I think that's the whole reason I have this podcast, still trying to connect, and I found a way to do it on a bigger scale, because I have such a need to do that, and to bring people's messages forward and to share. I mean, I always say, you never know who's listening to us, and you never know who you're going to help. And I do love that. I love that part of what we do here, and I love, I love that there are brave people like you who took the time. I mean, this book, the bibliography alone, like you just really took your time and build.

Unknown Speaker  20:00  
To this beautiful book. And yeah, I just think it's going to help so many people. It's so personal, but you know what they say, the more personal something is, and the more universal? Yeah, yeah, it's so weird, but it does work that way. And

Unknown Speaker  20:17  
I'm just so struck with now, what? What made you feel that mission like what? What propels someone forward to do something like that? Well, first of all, I mean, just writing the book was, I was writing about my psychoanalyzes, and usually that's something people hide. Often they don't even say they're in therapy, because maybe you'll think I'm crazy, or, you know, like I'm self indulgent, or whatever, we're very we're very private with such private people, and I felt such excitement in what I learned, particularly in my second psychotherapy, my first, my first psychoanalysis was really all about finding out my family secrets, my my analyst would push me back out into the world to go find cousins, aunts, uncles I may have never met to put it together the History 28 right? You're in your late 20s, yeah. And that was amazing. That is amazing. And I had, as I say, I, what I had learned to do was just cut it all off and carry on. And I was very successful in the world. You know, I got, I was a college professor. That was pretty great, from where I came from, but I had there was something I would, I would I would just cry for weeks on I didn't know why I would get depressed. I didn't understand why I was so lonely all the time and all of these feelings. It didn't make sense, because my life was okay. It was better than okay, and I had to really when I went into psychoanalysis, I only did it because I was having I had nightmares all the time and and I would wake up screaming. And finally, my lover said, you know, people don't wake up screaming

Unknown Speaker  22:24  
twice and three times a week. You need help. And I did. I didn't know anything about psychoanalysis, and I went and again, what I learned there is she gave me my life back because I didn't even understand the family dynamics and how much,

Unknown Speaker  22:45  
how much this early life really mattered and and knowing about it really mattered. I found a cousin who

Unknown Speaker  22:58  
seemed to who had lived with my dead father, not the not when he was dead for for years, when she was growing up, and she met me for lunch. We sat down at a table, she took out a card. She said, I want you to see this. And she pushed it across the table, and it was my father's business card. It said lucky dresses. I mean, he had a he had a little company that made cheap knockoffs of fancy ladies dresses. And I saw that I had never thought I had any feelings about this man. I didn't know, you know, he never came back to me in a dream, nothing and I looked at that card, and gushes of tears came out of me, and obviously I had a connection to to him. I had known him for two years. He was my father. We were never allowed to mourn him. We were not taken to a funeral, nothing. We just got sent to an aunt's house. And when we came back, we had a different life. And we, we we never again saw a picture of him. We never saw anything that was related to him. So

Unknown Speaker  24:20  
I, I think what I'm saying is that was so miraculous. It was absolutely miraculous to me, what I was learning and and, and that all of these, how it affected my mother, and how my mother then affected me.

Unknown Speaker  24:38  
All of it, why she was so cold. Why she, she had been so traumatized, why I was for her the mark of the end of her, her life with this husband, because when I was born, they, they really, they had diagnosed him, right? So I.

Unknown Speaker  25:00  
You know, I began to feel all of these feelings, and feel

Unknown Speaker  25:07  
who I was, and put pieces together. And then in the second analysis, I really began to understand why some certain emotional problems persisted in my life, and I needed to go deeper into,

Unknown Speaker  25:25  
I mean, I had the material now from that first analysis, now I needed to investigate the emotions, and that's where people really can look around them and see what is it that's going on for you? Know, maybe it's depression, maybe it's being anxious. For me, I was very controlling. I had to have everything very perfect. And I learned that inside of me, I was so afraid of the emotional chaos that really was there since I was a child and had to, had to feel everything on my own, because we were never allowed to talk about any kind of sad feelings or scary or I mean, I would wake up when I was a little girl. I would wake up with nightmares and and my mother would never talk about them or cuddle me or anything, go back to bed. And

Unknown Speaker  26:23  
I think I needed to

Unknown Speaker  26:25  
really explore all of that. And again, I feel like we live in a culture that says, Get over it, right? That's our theme song. Get over I think you're right. I think especially I've noticed when you lose someone, sorry, when someone dies, I noticed people still expect you to be better after a certain amount of time, that's right. And I lost my mother. I had two little kids. I lost my mother in 2001

Unknown Speaker  26:52  
very suddenly. Was horrible. She had suffered a lot. And

Unknown Speaker  26:58  
you know, I'm I'm a therapy person. So I went to therapy when I wasn't dealing well with Yeah, and I talk about it on the podcast. I have a couple of solo episodes, because I think it's really important to acknowledge that grief has its own timing. Yes, and it hits you differently depending on I mean, and we don't just grieve when we lose people like I found out a lot about

Unknown Speaker  27:20  
other kinds of grief that we don't even acknowledge as grief, like when we get laid off. A lot of people are being laid off now, yes, yes, they've been there forever, and those people that work with are like their family, but they're just expected to like, tut, tut, I'm moving on. And no, it's it's a time, it's a time of grieving. And when I lost my mom, I realized that people were expecting me to be better and my my a member of my family said that her mother told her that, you know, you just need a year, you need to go through each season and you'll be better. This is my mother. I was so close to my mother, it took me two years before I felt even close to normal, and I have I was developing complicated grief, which is depression mixed with grief. And my joke is, you know, I'm a type A personality, so of course, I couldn't just have regular grief. I had to go for the

Unknown Speaker  28:10  
big, you know, with gusto. I make a joke about it, but that therapist was so gentle and kind and guided me through it. And a lot of it was what you were talking about, what came out was totally unrelated to the grief, right? Was the bottled up emotions that she was picking up on. She goes, you've been stuffing things down for years, and I think that's what you're talking about. A whole lot of us are stuffing things down, and we don't know that. We don't even know that it's there. We don't we think we're done, we're over it. We didn't talk about it. We moved on. But she said, You can't do that forever. It builds up. It's never going to go away. And you just have to move through these feelings, as scary as it is. But I think a lot of people feel like I did, like I'll never stop crying if I start crying, or I'll never stop feeling this bad feeling, yeah, and I think we just would rather avoid, and I I'm really struck with your

Unknown Speaker  29:06  
idea of the chaos within you know that that fear of that chaos, because I too am, was very controlling. I was working on it,

Unknown Speaker  29:16  
and it's such an illusion, too, right, that we control anything, yeah, right,

Unknown Speaker  29:22  
but we hold on to it. Nonetheless, you just bring up some wonderful things, and I wish people really hear what you're saying. Well, I mean, I think we have we can learn so much from watching our own children. You know, when my daughter was two years old, I could see how attached she was to her daddy, and how she held on to him. And she, she, you know, if he was lying on the floor, she would just climb on top of him and hang on. And you know she, he was hers. He belonged to her. And that made me on.

Unknown Speaker  30:00  
Understand more about what I must have felt for my own father. And when I was eight years old, I found four pictures in my mother's drawer, hidden, and they were picture. Two of them were pictures of me sitting on his shoulders. I had never seen a picture of this man. I didn't know he really existed, and what I saw in those pictures was physical connection to him, me and him. I'm holding on to him, and he's holding me and I, I began to see how terrifying having him disappear from my life without anyone saying anything about it, and and I didn't. I was not verbal enough to

Unknown Speaker  30:56  
to ask questions. I was only two, and I couldn't make, I couldn't make sense of it. And what happens with small children when they can't make sense of things is, you can see it. They begin to act out. They begin to

Unknown Speaker  31:17  
to they may shut down.

Unknown Speaker  31:21  
You know, they're, they're, it's almost like creatures, you know, like animals, will curl up in a ball if things are

Unknown Speaker  31:30  
frightening and potentially life threatening.

Unknown Speaker  31:37  
And I think that we're very we're almost ashamed of wanting to go into all of that detail, as if that that, as if that's weak, that's that's just somehow navel gazing. Well, I think that that in order for us to really live our lives we're not we have to know our whole selves. You know, when people shut off a big part of themselves, I always I had the experience. And another reason why I went into psychoanalysis for a second time is I had this again, this wonderful life. It was everything I had worked for, and I couldn't fully be in it.

Unknown Speaker  32:28  
I was always, you know, kind of three steps away from depression. If, if I, you know, if, if, if some friend, dear friend, moved away, that kind of loss would would just throw me, possibly into a depression, if somebody I loved didn't was seen to pull away from me, even if it weren't true, if it was my I'm over sensitive illusion of it,

Unknown Speaker  32:57  
I could go into a Depression and and even that was true, even with my daughter and I remember being in therapy and saying,

Unknown Speaker  33:08  
understanding that I was so

Unknown Speaker  33:12  
overindulgent in a certain sense, because I was afraid she wouldn't love me, you Know, and that that went back, in my case, to my fear that

Unknown Speaker  33:27  
if I wasn't good enough, that somebody, somebody I loved, would disappear, like my father did, or or just be very cold like my mother was. Oh, my God. So all of that is, is is coming out in our lives and how we are, with our children, with our friends, with our husbands and wives, you know, so you're not living the life you could live if you could, if you could live your life.

Unknown Speaker  33:59  
And I'm so struck for you. This happened so young, like you said, you weren't even verbal yet, and yet, it has this reverberating effect that, luckily, you were able to explore and understand. And it just brings up this idea that we can't

Unknown Speaker  34:17  
even very young children are feeling intense amounts when things happen and we can't ignore that's right things. We can't ignore these things. Yes, and it's true, even with a child who's, let's say, seven or eight, where they don't have they might have language, but they might not have the language to express these very complicated feelings, especially if there's no place for them. Obvious place for them is, it's like they haven't listened to your show with the invitation to talk about

Unknown Speaker  34:54  
complicated things, you know? And yeah. And I think as grown ups, we forget that. I remember.

Unknown Speaker  35:00  
A really beautiful post that said your child is not overreacting, your child is not spoiled or having a tantrum. Your child has no tools for dealing with this thing. And this thing is the first time your child has ever experienced this thing. So yeah, they don't have that way of regulating or judging how excited to be. Right? This is a big thing, right? That's right. So that's, I mean, if you think about how little things are big things, when you're young, what happened to you is so deep and you know, like you said, you you weren't verbal, you were so young, it wasn't talked about later, I think that you would have had a more healing experience if your family, I know nowadays, people remember the spouses that were lost, or, you know, they have pictures, they talk about the relative. That's right, none of that was available to you. So, that's right, it just made it worse. But honestly, we don't have the tools when we're young, and we don't know how excited to get about stuff, because it never happened to us before and and part of how you learn how excited to be, or that you're frightened, and it makes perfect sense, is by a parent's

Unknown Speaker  36:13  
reaction, how they they, you know, how we all with children, say, Oh, that must have, that must have really been scary, and then you talk about it, or isn't that fun? And part of the reason, part of what we're doing, is mirroring the child, explaining that, that that's how you feel. And, and this makes perfect sense. Or, I know you feel very upset, but you can't hit little Charlie, you know, and, and so we're, we're giving them the tools. You can feel it, but you can't act it out. And, and, you know, we, we have to have parents who are attuned and willing, and if the parents are themselves emotionally limited, if they themselves have all kinds of problems that are coming out with the children, if they're threatened By the children's feelings,

Unknown Speaker  37:20  
I think then the child just learns to be ashamed of all of those feelings, and learns to be frightened of them, and they turn into chaos inside.

Unknown Speaker  37:35  
And that's kind of part of the the journey of what I call untangling and and what I think a good therapist. And sometimes, when your problems are really complicated, you know, you need a deeper dive, and that's psychoanalysis, and that just gives you more tools than you would get in therapy. And I know people don't often know the difference between therapy and psychoanalysis, but I think a big piece of it has to do with when you can't get to those feelings

Unknown Speaker  38:17  
by just talking about them, right? You use methods in in psychoanalysis, like free association. I was fascinated by that part of your book. Could you talk more about that? Yes, I was not. I mean, I I arrived in my 60s. I knew what had happened to me, but I knew it intellectually. I didn't really explore the emotions with my first

Unknown Speaker  38:44  
analyst. It was all I could do to to construct what had happened to me,

Unknown Speaker  38:52  
and now I was really in a different place, but I could not access I had tried just therapy, and it was, nothing was changing. And I started this, and in free association, you begin to

Unknown Speaker  39:12  
be able

Unknown Speaker  39:14  
stuff comes out of you, as it were, you can't even believe you just said that. But it's it's using your unconscious, it's loud, it's allowing your unconscious to speak, as opposed to your conscious self, which is where you usually speak from in therapy. And the other really big area of difference is transference. So in psychoanalysis, another way of having access to that deeper, gnarled self is how you start to feel about your your your therapist. In therapy, it's still a.

Unknown Speaker  40:00  
Conversation in psychoanalysis, you begin to have feelings about this other person, and that becomes part of

Unknown Speaker  40:13  
the the therapy. Is why you may be

Unknown Speaker  40:18  
with my with my psychoanalyst, for example, she would try, she would try and express warm and caring feelings to me. And you would think I would really be crazy for that, like, oh, boy, right,

Unknown Speaker  40:34  
right. But she was a maternal figure, and I had never had a maternal figure that expressed warm and and caring feelings for me. So I was was offended by them, and I would try and keep her at a distance. We're here to work on I'm doing my free association, and you're doing my dream analysis, and let's keep it to that, you know. And I didn't even realize that what I was doing was acting out the only way I knew to be with a loving, caring figure, which which a therapist is and should be.

Unknown Speaker  41:13  
And I had to work through that and allow us to connect in a very deep way, and to really realize eventually this person loved me and I loved it's so amazing, yeah, and I think it's, it's almost what's happening in psychoanalysis is almost like re parenting.

Unknown Speaker  41:34  
It's so I never, I never thought of it that way, because there it is. It's a, it's a an authority figure who has a doctor, no less, who is focused all the attention on you and on being attuned to you and able to do the kind of mirroring I talked about before, and explain your feelings in a new way, so you understand them better and to care about everything that happens to you. Well, that's what we all wanted in a parent, and not everybody got it. Oh, but I'm just saying that really is part of the difference between therapy. I mean, therapy gives you some of that. Psychoanalysis just gives you a lot more. And sometimes, when your life got your emotional, life got tangled up, too much for therapy, you can take the next step, especially, you know, a lot of therapists are trained as psychoanalysts too, and they do both. So that's so cool. Yeah, you know, something went through my mind when you were describing that. I remember years ago.

Unknown Speaker  42:54  
I think I read this, this technique where if therapist asks you a question, you say, I don't know, and the therapist might say, Well, would you say if you did know

Unknown Speaker  43:04  
guard, right? Yeah, they kept you off guard, and you just say it. That's right. I think there's that feeling, and I've had this myself in therapy, like, oh, well, I just said that. That's not relevant. And the therapist knows better. That's right. That's exactly it. Yeah, it's very relevant. Yeah, it's very relevant. And in my case, a lot of what was inside of me and inaccessible to me came out in nightmares. I mean, so I really needed, I can't even, well, I mean, it's not, it's, in a way, it's lucky, because it's very graphic, you know, you can really see. And I had, I had to have somebody who could work on dreams, because they were, you know, they were just

Unknown Speaker  43:45  
earthquakes, every, you know, every other night. And I, I had that material so somebody who's trained in dream analysis, you know, was really helpful to me. And that's actually how my my psychotherapy began. When I was 27

Unknown Speaker  44:08  
I was I was pushed there by by my nightmares, so they served a purpose, yes, and she really

Unknown Speaker  44:18  
unraveled the nightmares to an extent, but I was I when I, when I was in my 60s, they came back and and, and my, my second psychotherapist did a much deeper analysis, and that was really the end of them. Then finally,

Unknown Speaker  44:39  
they were really your Bellwether, yeah, yeah. And I think that that's true when you know certain people who were troubled enough have comes out in dreams, or, by the way, in psychosomatic. You know, there are the illnesses, yeah, that have no real physical, yeah. I mean, very often.

Unknown Speaker  45:00  
Somebody will have,

Unknown Speaker  45:03  
not that these things are not real, but they might be be propelled by,

Unknown Speaker  45:09  
by, by your

Unknown Speaker  45:12  
anguish, right? Yeah, maybe there's constant stomach aches or, or, for me, it was also restless legs or headaches all the time, or, you know, some sort of physical ailment that has a psychosomatic component. For you, not every million that you mentioned that, because I don't think we talk about that enough. That's right, and I don't know

Unknown Speaker  45:39  
medical doctors should be trained more in that.

Unknown Speaker  45:43  
But the dream work is so cool that you had that. I actually had that as a component of a creative writing class years and years ago in college, and she was so fascinating the professor, she would have us write down our dreams. She would have us go into our dreams. She would have us ask the characters in our dreams, ask them questions. It was just a wonderful way to uncover what was there. I mean, it was part of the writing class, but it was also to help us understand ourselves. Yes, and I had the most interesting thing happened during that class. I had written a poem about my mother and her sister visiting their their mother, my grandmother in a mental hospital. They had sort of told me their version of it all these years later, and I had absorbed it, and as a writer, I had interpreted it, and I wrote this poem, it just sort of came to me about their visit, and

Unknown Speaker  46:41  
I I guess I felt like I had no right to do that, because I had dream after Dream, which the professor helped me understand

Unknown Speaker  46:50  
guilty dreams, like things I was taking that I shouldn't have taken and I never would have connected all that. And I just want to tell people it can be that exhilarating to, sort of, to have that moment when you understand, oh, that's what my dreams are, exactly, right? Yes, it was so

Unknown Speaker  47:10  
monumental, because I was like, what's going on? Like, one of the dreams is so interesting. I was at a concert, and I had to go to the bathroom, and I couldn't all the stalls were locked, so I had to crawl under, and it was dirt. It was a dirt floor, and in the dirt were these jewels, these little golden earrings. And I grabbed them. I said, Oh, these are beautiful. And I took them.

Unknown Speaker  47:31  
And in another case, I went to an old house, and there was an antique doll in the dirt floor of the basement. And I took her. And so when I asked the doll, I literally went into that dream and asked the doll, she said, I'm so glad you found me. I've been here so long. Oh, I got chills, and I was I thanked the teacher. Later, I said, you just cracked open, a huge thing for me, and I understand the guilt I have in writing this poem, and that poem went on to win an award

Unknown Speaker  48:03  
that year, and I had to share the award with my roommate, who was my first podcast interview, by the way,

Unknown Speaker  48:11  
and I said, Yeah, it's a cash prize, and I had to split it because she was a good writer,

Unknown Speaker  48:17  
and they never had to split it before. But anyway, that was just so monumental for me, the work that can be done in dreams. And it stuck with me. And I always take my dreams seriously. I always question that. I would encourage listeners to do that, to spend time. I know people do dream journals, but yeah, I just think for everyone, I just want to do like a little plug for That's right, Your dreams are trying to tell you something, right? Just like your nightmares were an alarm. Yes, dreams, yes. You know, quotation I read it said, you know, the the

Unknown Speaker  48:52  
day's events can affect your dreams that night, but the dreams that night affect the next day's events. They're that important. They're another half of your day, and that turned my head around. I was like, and you, have you ever felt like that? Like I've had a dream, and I'm like, in it still I'm awake, but I'm like, it's, it's like, it's like a stew that I'm still sitting in, you know, like I can really feel, yeah, so they're home heal. They stay with you. You. It's almost like a different reality, but it's part of you, yeah, and and they, it does feel like

Unknown Speaker  49:26  
they have something to tell you. I mean, it's your psyche. It's your psyche that predicts that. I'm so struck by the fact that your nightmares wouldn't let you not look at it. That's right. Part of you wanted to heal the other part of you well and and I, I have to say, I really learned something profound from it, but, but just to stay for a minute with your dreams. You, you mentioned two dreams, and what I want to suggest is that.

Unknown Speaker  50:00  
You don't have to be in psychoanalysis to be psychoanalytic in your thinking. So psychoanalytic thinking is really about

Unknown Speaker  50:10  
taking, in this case, your dream. It can be

Unknown Speaker  50:16  
behavior patterns, or or, or anything, and just staying with it and really examining it. So in both of those dreams, there was a dirt floor, and that's in itself, an image that feels to me like it wants to be. It's telling you something, that dirt floor is not a random, you know, yes. And if you could just write that down that dirt floor and let yourself re associate where does that take you, and let yourself go wherever it takes you, and really look at it and try and imagine what it could mean to you. It's something. What is dirt to you? What is a dirt floor? These the two both have treasures, yes, and, and that's very unusual. So you not only have a dirt floor, you have a very unusual dirt floor right with the treasures in them. And that's something to begin journaling and working with and staying with and taking seriously. It can tell you something. So in my case, the nightmares that came back in my 60s,

Unknown Speaker  51:41  
the same nightmare, just different versions of the same nightmare. It would always be, there would be

Unknown Speaker  51:47  
a couple of

Unknown Speaker  51:50  
men. It could be one man a woman. It was didn't matter. But they were killers, and they were they were coming. They were coming to me, I understood this. You know, that maybe I left a door open, maybe I maybe it was I'm out in the middle of

Unknown Speaker  52:12  
nowhere looking for a house that I'm supposed to find. And there are,

Unknown Speaker  52:20  
there are wild animals and, and I can, I can see that there's a tiger, and I know it's hungry, and I'm out there alone. So the killer doesn't have to be human, but it can be a hunter with a gun, and I know he's going to kill me. So it's always that, and, and the theory is that it's your dream. You've created it. And finally, my my analyst explained to me that one part of me was killing off another part of me. Oh, my God. So I had, I had because it's both. It's your everything in the dream, I had split it off into two parts. One

Unknown Speaker  53:04  
is me as a recognizable me, and I'm terrified, and I because I know that this guy is and that's when I would wake up screaming, when I know I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, it's the it's the end for me. I know I'm going to get killed. And and so then it really took a lot of a lot of heartfelt examination to understand what I was trying to kill off in myself and and that took a real connection with how I was responding to my analyst. I was so afraid of needing her, loving her, I would only have one of one of the chapters in my in my book is called her work and mine, because that's the way I saw our relationship. We were there, we were working. We were doing her work and my work and and then we would, we would have interpretations. That's the end of it, yeah.

Unknown Speaker  54:08  
But really it was so much in the relationship, yeah, between us, and allowing me to

Unknown Speaker  54:16  
accept not only that she cared about me as as a person, but that I was growing more and more dependent on her. I cared more and more. Yeah. I mean, really, that was terrifying to me. And so these dreams came back and and I think it was so frightening, because when I was a child that I couldn't. I wasn't allowed to be dependent in that way. I couldn't, you know, when I was two, my mother went off to work. She's probably gone nine hours a day because of the commute and so on. So the she left us with babysitters, not very good ones, because she had no.

Unknown Speaker  55:00  
Money, you know, just a bad situation. But my point is

Unknown Speaker  55:05  
to feel that dependency.

Unknown Speaker  55:08  
It ended up getting me rejected by my mother. She couldn't. She had to, she had to raise a child who was tough. That's what she thought.

Unknown Speaker  55:20  
She had no room for that. She did, but that's not really,

Unknown Speaker  55:27  
you know, that's not a whole person, right? At what cost? Right? Yeah, so I, and that's, that's where dreams can really, they get complicated to interpret, but we can do a great deal of self interpretation,

Unknown Speaker  55:42  
if we really just allow ourselves to sink into a dream and not run away from it and and really listen look at its imagery, and that's what your dream is asking you to do, too, to look at that imagery. It was amazing, actually, because when my aunt came to visit us from California, she read that poem, and I was so scared, and my mother had read it, and they looked at each other, and they looked at me,

Unknown Speaker  56:11  
and my aunt said, How could she know? How could she know this? And it was so validating. Oh yes, I did know. Somehow I did know. And yes, I was just gonna say so much of what you're saying, I do through poetry. I get Yeah, I write poetry, and yeah, I let the floodgates open. Now that I'm older, I let whatever comes come and that's sort of what you're talking about. It's a wonderful thing. I think everyone should do more of that. Well, it's a tool. It's a tool. You have poetry, other people journal, you know, right? But let's come Yes, don't judge it. Don't judge your thoughts. Because you're doing that free association. You're doing that sometimes by yourself, and you're judging it before it even comes out. Yeah, could be helpful. It could be, you know, you could you could learn something. Well, I'm particularly, I think part of what I'm giving readers in my book is you don't have to be ashamed of it. This is human right. It's there for that emotion, even if it's aggression and violence in your psyche. It's there for a reason. You it's telling you it needs to be expressed. And if you don't, if you, if you don't express it, you will act it out often, in violence. And I mean emotional violence, not physical violence against yourself. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  57:41  
I mean, you know, in a kind of crazy way, I was killing off a part of me that I thought was unacceptable or dangerous to feel, you know, to look at that. And it took a while. What did I say? What do we say? We say I am my worst, own worst enemy. We say that, yeah, yeah. It's true sometimes, yeah. And I think, you know, I think about that, Thoreau quote, the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. And I think so many people are hurting and, and, and a lot of it has to do with because we're, we're

Unknown Speaker  58:25  
we're ashamed of our feelings, and we can't true, yeah, allow them, and we're soldiering on no matter what. That's right, right? That's right, exactly. But it doesn't work. I remember when I was in a very deep

Unknown Speaker  58:39  
state of grief, and I went to the store, and I had to do something, some clothing store for the kids, and I'm, I'm walking back to my car, and I'm turning around, and I'm watching these people come out of the store, and they're laughing and they're talking, and I just had this mad urge to walk up to one of them with a microphone. How do you do it?

Unknown Speaker  59:01  
Are you carrying sadness? Yeah, just sort of that separation, you know, like we're all carrying something, and it's really good to remember that. So that's what I want to know from you too, is that, do you think your compassion just increased and deepened as you went through these things? Your compassion for others incredibly and and again i i It changed my relations, like with my daughter. I wasn't so afraid anymore that she wouldn't love me as as my analyst explained to me, children love their parents. You know, even parents who are not so necessarily nice to them. They just, they don't know any different, right? They're there. They Yeah, I mean, we're, we're attached to our parents and and I, once I I get, once I got confident in that, and I realized that, and I understood that it was my own neediness and fear from.

Unknown Speaker  1:00:00  
My experience I had, it was much easier for both of us, because I wasn't, I wasn't kind of all over her, worried that she wasn't going to, you know, be happy with me,

Unknown Speaker  1:00:13  
and I gave her more space, and I had more space, and,

Unknown Speaker  1:00:20  
you know, I could just let, let, let her be and know that we were deeply connected as mother and daughter. And so it opened things up. And I wasn't so anxious. I wasn't such an anxious mother. It's a gift, yeah, and I think that that's very, you know, that's, that's very typical, is we, we act out our insecurities with our children. You know, it's so true. Yeah, well, I can't thank you enough for coming on. I feel like I've learned so much already. And, oh, I'm so pleased. I'm just so happy that you're sharing this. Is there anything else that you want to talk about? Did we miss anything? I don't think so. I hope, I hope people will get in touch with me if they read my book and feel themselves able to understand themselves better. Because I think I do try and offer that, that, you know, fundamentally we're we're humans with very similar basic needs. So it comes down to those we forget. We're all connected. We really are. We're not that different. So how can people reach you? I like to have people say it out loud, because sometimes people don't read my show, right? Yeah. Well, you can reach me through my website, untangling joan.com

Unknown Speaker  1:01:43  
and you can also just reach me through my publishers, Roman and Littlefield. And you know, if your listeners are want to reach me, I'm I'm at joan@peters.net

Unknown Speaker  1:01:58  
that's my email address. That's great.

Unknown Speaker  1:02:01  
Well, thank you so much. Thank you. I just feel lucky to have talked to you today. Great. Well, I'm so glad you had me On. I appreciate it. It was great. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai