[From the Fairbanks Daily News , December 26 2020]
Fairbanks psychologist helps clients navigate dream symbolism
For Kornelia Grabinska, dreams are not just accidental images that come at night. Instead, they are the focus of her work, and the key she uses to open doors to the core of other people’s psyche.
Grabinska, who has a doctoral degree in clinical psychology, is a Jungian analyst with 25 years of practice in the local community and the founder of the C.G. Jung Society of Northern Alaska. Besides focusing on dreams in her work, she has run workshops on such topics as the Archetype of the Wilderness, Myths of the North and Inuit Folk Tales.
Originally from Poland, Grabinska moved to Alaska in the 1970s and since then raised a family here and fell in love with the history and beauty of the state. “This place is for strong people,” she said. “It does require a lot of strength to live here — psychological, not just physical. Alaska either makes you or you leave.”
Grabinska stayed, bringing her Polish roots with her. In her house that also acts as the office for her practice, Grabinska offers her clients and guests tea with lemon and honey — a favorite drink in Eastern European cultures. “Hospitality is incredibly important to me,” she said. The shelves around the room are filled with plants, Polish and Alaskan bowls, but most of all — books on psychology.
Since she was a young woman, Grabinska has been reading the books of Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytic psychology Carl Jung. But it wasn’t until a winter in the early 1980s when Grabinska lived in the bush in the McCarthy area, that she decided to connect her professional life with it and to spend ten years training in Switzerland to become a Jungian analyst.
Peeling the layers of the psyche
What always drew Grabinska to Jung was the author’s focus on the value of knowing oneself.
“It’s like peeling an onion,” she said. “There are many layers, and for me as a psychologist, it’s very important to get deeper into one’s psyche and find out what are the deep beliefs that govern the decision-making processes that we hold since childhood and that still influence our lives in profound ways.”
She explained that becoming aware of deeply embedded rules and beliefs allows people to potentially change them. She compares this shift to a software upgrade. “As computers update their operating systems from, let’s say, Windows 6 to Windows 10, so do we need to upgrade our operating systems, or our mental processing and decision-making directives that would better reflect who we are now.”
Besides, the process of uncovering the layers of our psyche always brings some surprises. “That’s what truly wonderful about the process,” she said. “It’s like finding a treasure in your own backyard; it’s already there, waiting for you.”
Analyzing dreams
To get to those treasures and awareness faster, Grabinska focuses her practice on a big part of the Jungian approach: analyzing dreams. She explained that even though not every dream means something obvious, some of the images and stories we see when we sleep act as messages from the unconscious side of our mind — a warning sign or an indicator of how we actually feel about our place in life.
Sometimes Grabinska’s clients follow a traditional therapy session scenario and come to discuss the issues they experience in their lives. But other times, they come after having an unusual dream or a nightmare and they try to understand why they dreamt what they dreamt.
“So we start with the dream and what’s always amazing is that the dream always takes us exactly where the issues are,” Grabinska said. “The dreams take us to the heart where we need to be; they are like guides.”
From all the dreams, Grabinska pays special attention to recurring ones.
“If there is important information that the unconscious wants to get through, it will be repeated,” she explained. “And if the person doesn’t get it or doesn’t listen, eventually, this dream can become a nightmare because it’s like shouting at you. A nightmare is like a warning, bell ringing, or red light flashing. You would hope that when someone has a nightmare, they would really pay attention.”
Universal symbols in dreams
Understanding dreams can be tricky because they speak to us in a symbolic language, Grabinska said. To decipher that language, the Jungian psychologists look at what certain objects and concepts mean in various cultures. One example of a resource to help them do that is the Book of Symbols — a thick volume that catalogizes objects and things that would carry a different association or meaning in different parts of the world, time or culture.
The universal symbols tend to appear in dreams quite often, Grabinska said, and often that appearance seems mysterious to the dreamer since they don’t see the connection of those to their lives.
“Even though we don’t have snakes in Alaska, people dream of them frequently.”
The universal symbols are so deeply ingrained in our culture that they often help us understand something about ourselves, she said.
Personal symbols in dreams
However, personal associations always overwrite universal symbols.
Whenever Grabinska is discussing a client’s dream, she starts by asking them what it means to them personally and what feelings it evokes. If they had a pet snake in their childhood, that personal meaning will color the image of a snake and will be much more important than the symbolism of a snake in Buddhist mythology.
“We are unique beings,” she said. “There is no one interpretation of a dream.”
Guiding others through dreams
In the end, the ultimate result of Grabinska therapy would be not only helping a client sort an issue they came to therapy with, but also teaching them to understand themselves better, in parts through learning to understand their dreams.
She helps her clients learn to ask the right questions about those dreams and to understand the symbolic language, both personal and universal. She compares her role to a tour guide — or a river guide.
“If you are going on the river and you know nothing about rivers, I’m sort of in your boat and because I know how to read rivers, I can say, ‘Here are the shallow waters,’ or ‘Here is where you need to switch the direction, following the current or channel.’ People who know rivers, they can navigate them very well.”