are You Sharing your dreams with Dream Killers?

Today I decided to share my full dreams with a pretty good friend of mine. When I saw she didn’t respond about what I had said I made the mistake of pushing for it. Yeah, big mistake. Huge. This friend told me well I hate to burst your bubble… and then she went on and on and on. Well, I asked for it. After reading what she wrote, I started to doubt myself. She started to sound like every negative person that has ever shat on my dreams.

My First Dreamkiller; my mother.

Anytime I had an idea or a dream, one of the things my mother often said to me, in her frequently melancholy, Cuban-Spanish voice and intonation,”Hay! Porque no te quedas conforme?” This translates to, “Oh gosh! Why can’t you just be happy with what you have?”

I remember one particular day, it was a few months after my having left my ex-husband, and when I had made the mistake of sharing with my mother that I wanted to go to graduate school to get my Masters degree in social work, and that I also wanted to get out of the little podunk town that I was living in, with her.

That was my mistake. Sharing my dreams with her. And I did this often. She was the closest person to me. And while she was very generally supportive, she didn’t want me to dream too big. And she especially didn’t want me to leave her. In an instant, and as soon as my dreams left my lips and entered her ears, she started rattling off the names of several of my childhood friends, whom she felt were not doing well. She then proceeded to compare these people to me.

She went on and on about how so-and-so never finished high school. How another person hadn’t gone to college. And how yet another one was living in “substandard ways” …. whatever that meant. She continued her tirade about how poorly these people were doing and how well I was doing by comparison. She said she was trying to drive home the point that I should not complain about my life. But what she was really trying to do was to keep me from wanting more; she didn’t want me doing anything that was too different from what she wanted for me … or for herself.

First the pin, then the deflation.

I remember feeling so deflated, so frustrated, and so sad for a good moment. And it’s not that I had anything against what my friends had chosen to do with their lives. It just wasn’t what I wanted to do with mine.

But pretty soon, as is my nature, especially when it involves my mother’s negativity, my sadness turned into upset and then into anger, and honestly a bit of rage.

I retorted with, “Why do you always have to compare me to people at the bottom?! Why don’t you compare me to anyone at the top?! Why couldn’t I reach for that level of height?! And then for some reason, I added, “Why can’t you compare me to Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton?! I find that statement kind of hilarious now, but these were the women that I was reading about at the time. Those women motivated me. I read about them and I enjoyed their stories.I felt a resonance.

Anyway, my mother liked both of those women. And by that point I had allowed my own Cuban to come out (the big and loud one), and she relented. She just kind of looked at me, probably deflated in her own argument that was going nowhere good. With that, she said, “Bueno, allá tú.” This translates to, “Alright, whatever. Do your thing.” And she went into her room and closed the door, as per usual when I’d won an argument.

Some years later, as I started to understand my mother better, including her mental illness and her major depressive episodes, I grew to have some compassion for what she was trying to do. It was complicated and there are many layers to her, but I think she was mostly trying to protect me from her own failures. She was trying to protect me from all of the things that she had dreamed about, and that she had tried to do, that had gone wrong.

She saw too much of herself in me. She was over-identifying with me; she was projecting herself, including her fears, her doubts, and her own life errors, onto me.

So close and yet so far.

This is what can happen when people that are really close to us, however well-intentioned, kill our dreams. Often the people closest to us are our Dream Killers. And they can do it because they are the closest to us. They’re the persons that we see most, that we spend the most time with,and that we most trust because we feel that they know us the best.

But one of the most important things to remember here is that while they may know us they aren’t us. And while they may know us, they also know the “us” that hasn’t yet done the thing. They know their version of us, and they’re comfortable with that version. And depending on the relationship, we may feel that if they don’t fully buy into our dreams we won’t be able to achieve them. We won’t be able to move towards them. We might feel that if they don’t believe in our dreams, our dreams might die right there at their feet.

If this is a partner or a parent or someone that we are dependent on for significant emotional support and/or maybe even financial assistance, then the stakes are even higher.

Staying emotionally safer.

It’s extremely important that we consider just whom we’re letting into our dreams. It’s very important that they’re emotionally safe people; people who can see us fully as separate persons from themselves, even if we are deeply connected to them. If these people are especially close to us, we can feel deep hurt and sadness when these people, in particular, aren’t able to support us. We can feel deflated and crushed when they don’t believe or see what we can see for ourselves.

The stakes are even higher when our vision is just forming; when it’s still fragile and murky. Especially if it’s something that we know we are just compelled to do because we can’t stand one more minute, one more hour, one more week or one more month of not doing the thing.

But if we can move past the darkness in these folx voices, and if we can separate them from us, including remembering where they end and we begin, we can move from dreaming to planning. Hopefully we take actionable steps and we get into the doing.

This doesn’t mean that everything’s going to work out. But in my life, if I had listened to most of the people that killed my dreams I wouldn’t have done much of anything.

Not everyone around you is going to share your vision. Not everyone around you is going to know and understand your abilities and what you’re really willing to do to achieve the thing. They know you for the sameness that you’ve been in.

Sometimes our dreams can threaten others’ realities. Sometimes our dreams scare people around us. They might ask themselves what if they actually make it? What does that say or mean for me? What if they fail and by being attached to them, that part of me that believed in them, helped them, and/or maybe even funded them fails, too?

creating a paradigm shift.

One of the things that I really try to tell myself when I’m starting to freak out about something that I want to do, but that I’m scared to do, especially when the Dream Killers, and their accompanying doubts and fears are in my ear, is to ask myself the following questions:

Are my fears based in reality?

Are the scary stories I’m telling myself based in fact; are they based on what really happens?

Remember, feeling terrified doesn’t mean that that terror is true. It doesn’t make it real.

It’s important that we remember our track records. It’s important that we remember the skills that we have. It’s important that we understand and know ourselves quite well when trying to make our dreams realities.

Other good (truth telling) questions are:

What are we willing to do to make this happen?

What are we willing to let go of to make this happen?

And one of the biggest questions that I ask myself before I take on a big risk is:

“If the bottom falls out, what’s my backup plan?” Making peace with the worst case scenario is where the rubber hits the road. You have to be willing to both accept, as well as be prepared to both find and solidify ways to mitigate it.

I achieved many dreams this way. This is still my go-to formula. I used it to get into college and to finish my bachelor’s degree. I used this formula to leave and to divorce my ex-husband. I used it to get my masters degree and my clinical licensure to become a psychotherapist. I used it to start vanlifing, and to start traveling all over the world. And I’m using it again, now for my next chapter.

Dreams require huge intention, focus, research, planning, actionable steps, tenacity, and mitigating for the scary “What if the bottom falls out” scenarios.

And while dreams also sometimes compel or even require us to share them with others, be careful with whom you share your dreams. You could be talking to an inadvertent, and yet well-intentioned, Dream Killer. But despite the destructive nature of these persons, remember that your dreams are yours (not theirs) to kill, or to run with and turn into realities.