The Dreams

The bad stuff in foster care happened some time ago. It has been 7 years since I left my last "bad" placement & I left the first "bad" placement two years before that. So, why do I continue to dream about being stuck there two or three times per year.

In the dreams, I am as I am now. In spite of this, I am stuck in a bad foster home. It is not always clear if I am still there from before or there again. What is clear is that I've done nothing wrong, but am accused of it anyway. I cannot leave my room, even though I have my own real, adult obligations to fulfill. I'm depressed, angry & humiliated. I should not be here & know I deserve to be treated better, but don't know what to do about it.

Other than being an adult, the dream is a fairly accurate picture of how I felt in those placements. I was often accused of things I didn't do & treated like I was there to serve the needs of the adults in the house. In one placement it was the foster mom & in another it was the foster mom's adult daughter & her fiance, who lived with us but paid no rent & treated the foster kids like beggars.

Perhaps I am still angry about the injustices incurred in there. Anger is an intense emotion. Why don't I dream about the intense emotions I had in foster care that were good? Why don't I dream about when my foster sister was born, when I graduated from high school or when I was placed in TAG classes? Those intensely happy feelings had to be as strong as the anger. Is itbecause I was able to express that happiness & it got filed under "complete" in my subconscious mind?

There has never been an appropriate time to express all of my anger. At the time those things were happening, I could not talk about them. Once it was over, my new foster family didn't want to hear about it. By the time I found an outlet besides them, it seemed like it had been too long ago to talk about anymore.

The whole time I was in foster care, I was forced to go to therapy. I had some really lousy therapists & I was not ready to think about what had happened yet, so it did not help much. Now that I could finally use it, it is no longer being offered. Isn't that typical?!