Rage, Unacknowledged.

I am in a large house that feels familiar, though it is not mine. The rooms stretch wide, filled with overstuffed furniture. Big French doors open onto a beautiful English countryside, the light spilling in like it belongs here. As I move through the rooms, I think they would make good therapy spaces.

In one room, someone is vacuuming the carpet. The noise hums, loud enough to muffle the faint sounds coming from the next room. But I know something awful is happening there. A murder is taking place. I can't see it, but the certainty coils in my chest. I push the door slightly ajar, my heart pounding, wanting to catch a glimpse of the murderer, to know their face. A sudden scuffle erupts, and the door is yanked from my grasp, slammed shut with a force that sends terror racing through me.

I run. I don’t think, I just move, searching for a place to hide. My breath feels too loud, my pulse too quick. I didn’t witness it, not directly, but I know there’s a body in that room, recently killed. And worse! I know the murderer is still there, somewhere close. I wait, frozen, listening for the inevitable sound of footsteps, closing in, hunting me down.

At first, I thought the dream was about feeling like an imposter in my work; as if I were living in someone else's house, holding space that isn’t truly mine. The powerlessness in the dream mirrored the helplessness I sometimes feel with clients, the fear that I don’t know how to support them adequately. Running and hiding felt like an avoidance of the emotional weight I carry. But the more I explored, especially in therapy with my therapist, the dream unfolded in layers I hadn’t anticipated.

My therapist suggested that every element of the dream - the house, the rooms, the door, the vacuum, the furniture - is a part of me. The murder isn’t an external event; it’s internal. One part of me, killing another.

This perspective shifted everything. The house isn’t someone else's. It’s mine. A house I’ve lived in before, but perhaps no longer claim. The overstuffed furniture could be the emotional baggage, the parts of me that are full to bursting with unprocessed feelings. The vacuum; an attempt to drown out the noise, to tidy up, to keep certain truths from surfacing.

The door represents the barrier between my conscious awareness and the deeper parts of myself that I resist exploring; parts that hold real, raw rage. Rage that isn’t just ambient but directed, furious at being silenced, ignored, or contained. And the murderer? My inner girls, enraged at being rejected, attacking my adult self for putting them through this pain again. Although they're not quite the villains of the story; they are the unacknowledged antagonists of my subconscious mind.

I recall saying, "I didn’t realise I had it in me!" when reflecting on the intensity of my rage. my therapist asked me to repeat it, his tone deliberate, as if he recognised the significance of that realisation. It felt like he was nudging me to not just acknowledge the rage, but to own it, to see how deeply it had been suppressed and how critical it was to bring it into the light. 

In the dream, I run and hide because facing that rage feels dangerous. But in therapy, I don’t run. I stay. I sit with it. I acknowledge it. And when I listen closely, I hear what those younger parts need: acceptance and inclusion. Not to be fixed. Not to be silenced. Just to be seen and held. 

“I see your rage. I feel it too. It’s fierce, it’s valid, and I’m not afraid of it. I’m here with you, in the thick of it.”

Saying those words landed. They bridged the gap between my adult self and the parts of me that had been waiting to be acknowledged. The dream felt like an encounter with something that’s always been there, my rage, and a recognition of how destructive it can be when left unacknowledged. I’m still sitting with it, learning how to be in relationship with it without trying to control or escape it. It’s not something to be resolved, but rather something to be allowed, to exist without judgment. Acknowledging it feels like the first step in understanding how it moves within me.