Emotion-Image Therapy. Analysis and Implementation

Summary

1. Emotions is energy which becomes revealed in muscles movements.

2. With the help of chronic muscle tension a person suppresses undesirable emotions, so emotions get chronically stuck in some muscle clamps.

3. The system of muscle clamps creates a muscle shell which blocks the free flow of energy about the body and deprives the person of spontaneous and flexible behavior.

4. The muscle shell corresponds to a person’s character. The character is “stuck in and ossified” emotions, which are stereotypes of a person’s behavior.

5. In different parts of the body various feelings and corresponding impulses to actions can be blocked.

6. When the muscle shell is relaxed the person becomes flexible and spontaneous, as though he had no character, but greater energy and freely flowing feelings.

7. Solving basic psychodynamic conflict leads to the relaxation of chronic muscle tensions, removing the chronic block of some emotional state, solving psychological and psychosomatic problems and to the change of character.

Chapter 3. Psychological problem

1. The problem’s inner structure

The novelty and effectiveness of the EIT is to a great extent connected with a new perception of how people’s problems are arranged and how they can be solved. The essence of our approach is that any problem is rooted in some chronic fixation of emotional energy onto some aim, and you can free this energy working with the image of this emotion. Even Buddha called such fixation an attachment and offered a long way of moral development, that helped to get rid of attachments making people suffer. This is correct but psychotherapy cannot and should not make monks out of people, it just helps them to get rid of agonizing and restricting life fixation.

Sigmund Freud [27—29] offered the way of realization deep fixations that by itself leads to liberation. In this sense, what we are saying is not quite new. The new thing is that with the help of images we quickly find the point of fixation, understand the reason and the means of fixation. The new thing is that after diagnosis we ask the client to apply to the image, and in fact to himself [which the client doesn’t understand and so doesn’t resist] some method, liberating him from the initial attachment. This leads to destroying the whole pathological system that had grown on this basis nearly in one instance. If psychoanalyses considered the main element to be awareness, gestalt therapy – emotional experience, the EIT – emotional and meaningful intersubjective [within personal] action.

Let us make it clear, we don’t object to friendly, loving and other normal attachments, which make a person happy. A person frees himself only from such attachments that make him suffer, and are the reason of a chronic negative emotional state, making the basis of pathology. They prevent him from living a normal life, from being healthy, from building satisfying relations with other people. We use original methods allowing to quickly discover the causes of sufferings and to free the suffering individual rather quickly too. As we say: “The irons are removed right here or they are worn forever”. The fixation can melt only at some moment, here and now, at once, if the client is ready to give it up. Everything else is only the preparation of this moment. We will speak about it later.

So, a psychological problem that a person faces may be described as fixation of the person on some unachievable aim. This fixation is felt by the individual as an emotion or some emotional state. The problem becomes a problem when a desire can’t be satisfied and can’t disappear. If there is no desire, there is no problem. If the desire can be satisfied there is no problem either. If the desire can be easily given up, there is no problem either. A child may weep inconsolably when his balloon flew away. If something like that happens to an adult, his desire easily flies away together with the balloon. A grown-up person stops producing emotional energy aimed at keeping the balloon. The energy gets back into his body and he calms down. However, adults have their own desires and they don’t disappear because the “balloon” flew away.

As we have already said a desire always presents itself as emotion or feeling prompting some action. When a person says: “I love you”, -this is a feeling but it is the manifestation of desire. The feeling gives energy; action is not produced without a feeling or emotion. When this energy doesn’t materialize in reaching the aim a person suffers in other words he suffers a kind of damage because the energy was being wasted, and this energy starts disturbing his inner ecology. If he doesn’t stop producing the feeling aimed at achieving the unachievable the suffering becomes chronic.

We should adapt to this situation. A person creates some mechanisms to adapt to suffering the causes of which he forgets. For example, an elderly alcoholic drinks and at the same time cries: “My main problem is that no one wants me…” Some time ago he was a handsome young man, talented, skillful, with higher education. Now he is a ruin of his old self with broken rotten teeth, who drank himself to the position of a loading workman, full of anger because life was unfair to him. He has a good wife and wonderful daughters who love him and take care of him, in spite of his constant drinking and biting character. He comes from a very nice family; his mother and father are Doctors of Sciences but they divorced when he was a little boy and divided their sons. He stayed with his mother but she had no time for him. She was working all the time, often went to great construction sites, dammed the Yenisei river… He realized that no one wants him.

Most of all he wanted to reunite his family and be loved by his parents, but it was impossible, his greatest desire was blocked. He had to adapt to his suffering, he pitied himself all the time thinking that his fate was unfair to him. He envied other young men. When he pitied himself, the best consolation was vodka, it let him forget his suffering, get disconnected and acquire a warm and sweet feeling of a beloved child sleeping on the mother’s chest. If someone saved him from troubles, took him home, undressed, washed, scolded him he felt that somebody wants him. In a hidden way, he considered his parents responsible for his troubles and in his soul, he punished them by his acts of moral lapses. At the same time, he hoped that they will come and prove that they love him. But they didn’t do it and couldn’t…

Alcoholism gave rise to new problems… He began to be downgraded at work, conflicts emerged in the family. And he had to adapt to it too. He had to say that everything around him was wrong, unfair, particularly as perestroika was under way… It was necessary to lower his ambitions, to consider himself to be a victim of injustice [and he did already think himself to be a victim]. And to raise his self-esteem he had to criticize all people and lecture to them. There was little money it was necessary to be economical and suspicious. He had to hide his inner world from everybody, cover up his shame, so his body was always tense, his chest sank in. He could be frank only when he was drunk, then his true feeling got out, but only strangers or his friends-alcoholics could hear them.

If only he could see that little unhappy child [that is himself] suffering from the lack of love! If only he could generously give love to that child, so that he could forgive his mother and father, then a miracle could happen and the gigantic thing of his sufferings and adaptations would break down in a moment and there would be no need of alcohol any longer, it would even become disgusting. If only…

If we can get to the initial cause of the tangle of problems and in some way remove the deep conflict, then the whole system of psychological incrustations can be removed. All pathogenic adaptations will scatter like a house of cards.

You can struggle with the outer layers of a problem for a long time but to the doctor’s surprise all achievements will disappear not leaving any trace, and the old symptoms, which are the expression of adaptations will occur again and again. This will go on till the key change takes place, when the needle is broken, after that all symptoms will become pointless.

There may be a lot of dysfunctional adaptations, practically as many as different psychological and psychical distortions are described. Our view is that even so called diseases can be considered as forms of adaptation to the initial emotional problem. The disease is just the problem that has reached a certain pathological development! Since there are a great number of adaptation firms we will not look at all of them in detail but some variants will be presented. Here we will analyze the structure of the initial problem which leads to emerging the whole system of defenses, oustings and suppressions, secondary defenses and so on. In every case the work with EIT is aimed at getting the person back to being natural, delivering him from all unnecessary adaptations and defenses. Only after getting freedom and naturalness can a person solve the problems to which he surrendered before and because of that created psychological adaptation.

The problem is always a contradiction between an individual’s desire materialized in the energy of a feeling and a barrier on the way to its gratification. If the barrier is something from the outside of the person and can in principle be overcome and the desire is not pathological, then the problem is objective. The problem can be social, economic, scientific, political and so on. It can be solved by an external objective way, that is by overcoming the obstacle and gratifying the desire. For this aim it is necessary sometimes to earn money, sometimes to invent something, sometimes to resort to diplomacy or to turn for help and so on…

The problem becomes psychological only when the reasons of failure are in the psyche of the individual himself. In other words, either the desire is “wrong” or the obstacle on the way to reach the aim is an illusion. For instance, sometimes the obstacle can be impossible to overcome as in the case when you want “to return last year’s snow”. This may be the situation of emotional dependence when love is lost or when a very close person dies. Then obviously, it is necessary to help the individual to get rid of his irrational desire however difficult the task could seem.

When the obstacles are inadequate moral prohibitions, prejudices, complexes, fears and so on, the solution may require not only overcoming the initial impulse but liberating from the obstacle. Since the psychological obstacle can hold back the initial impulse because it is also supported by certain chronic emotions, the essence of the work doesn’t change – the doctor works at overcoming the emotional fixation state.

The problem state in every case may be called a deadlock state. If the actual feelings are strong and there is no way out, some undesirable consequences take place. The initial reaction is most often aggression. The person who got into such situation tries to destroy the barrier but can be aggressive to himself, to his own desire, to the object of his desire, even to strangers. Most people restrain their aggression but constant restrain [control] leads to new difficulties and problems. Another form of reaction is to suppress or oust [suppressing, ousting] one’s own feelings, one’s own desire, grief, anger… The third form is when people transfer their feelings over to other safer objects [transfer]. In the fourth case, people start to avoid any situations in which they may express their feelings [escapism]. In the fifth case, they behave as helpless little children [regression]. In the sixth case, they ascribe to other people their own feelings and desires [projection]. In the seventh case, they quit active life altogether [autism]. In the eighth case, they create symptoms of some illness to justify their failure and not to do something prohibited [forming a symptom]. And so on…

Defenses used by a person help him to adapt but don’t solve the problem. They only preserve the problem and create new problems distorting his interaction with surrounding reality. The key factor determining the degree and the character of the distortions is the energy power of the locked-up feelings and the method of adaptation chosen by the individual. In some cases, this method may become a permanent trait of character or a form of emotional disturbances. The same reason generates chronic muscle tensions [blocks] and various psychosomatic symptoms.

To describe our conception of a psychological problem structure more brightly we can use the following metaphor. In India, they catch monkeys in the following way: hollow out a pumpkin, put some bait inside and leave a small hole, the monkey puts its paw through the hole, grabs the bait, but can’t pull its little fist out because it is bigger than the hole. The hunter comes and catches it easily because it can’t guess to unclench its fist.

People do the same. In their imagination, they have already got the bait and sometimes with the other hand they hold the barrier, and, well, they are caught! Every time you should think what “paw” the client must unclench. At times, there may be quite many such “paws”, but the initial problem is still only one. When it is solved all the rest happens by itself, because “the monkey” is free. The conclusion is: the basis of psychological health is inner freedom. A young man liberated from the unrequited or unfortunate love may say the words of a merry song: “If you bride goes to another man, we don’t know who will be happy in the end!” It means that he unclenched his “paw”. And the one who failed to do it may fall into depression or aggression as in that drama: “Then no one will have you!”

But this is not the only model, there are five main initial problem situations [see further], at present no other variants have been discovered. All complicated problems which seem to have many symptoms and causes in fact go back to one initial conflict, one of five possible cases.

So the initial psychological problem can be presented in one if the five schemes given below [see Fig. 2]. On all schemes the circle means some object desired or rejected by the individual, vertical rectangle is the barrier and the arrow – either the desire of the individual or negative pressure from the object on the subject [which may be called a negative desire of the subject].

The schemes given in Figure 2 show the possible types of the initial problem structure:

A. the feeling is aimed at reaching the aim, the aim and the barrier may be real or imagined, the aim may be really or illusively unreachable, or it may be forbidden;

B. the feeling is aimed at saving from undesirable object, the object may be both real and imagined, it may also be external in relation to the object [for example, an aggressor] or internal [for example, some unpleasant memories; simultaneously with repulsion the object be attracted by an unconscious feeling [“an invisible paw”];

C. the subject has ambivalent feelings about the same object, here is no barrier but the subject has contradictory feelings of repulsion and attraction;

D. two feelings of the same strength are experienced towards incompatible objects [the problem of choice];

E. the subject seeks to get rid of an undesirable object, but he can do it only in contact with another undesirable object [the choice between the two evils].

Fig.2

In all the above given cases we used the word “object” and the object can be not only some thing or another person but some activity, situation, moral assessment, emotional state and so on, which are desirable or on the contrary unacceptable to the subject.

These schemes reflect only initial [primary] problem structure. Further on the problem develops and grows, generating numerous symptoms, creating new difficulties, revealing themselves in different spheres of the person’s life.

Let us give some examples of frequently occurring [but not all possible] problems that we will classify according to their inner structure.

The following psychological problems have type one structure [Fig. 2a]

2. grief, bereavement, unfortunate love and so on.;

3. the desire to change the past, to correct what is impossible to correct, to return “last year’s snow”;

4. morally prohibited sexual, aggressive and other desires;

5.the desire to change other people according to your own standards which is impossible;

6.idealistic, fantastic, exaggerated desires.

Other variants are possible.

The following psychological problems have the structure of the second type:

1. the desire to get rid of the undesirable influence of the environment or other people, who are impossible to get rid of or there is a psychological prohibition to do it;

2. obsessive fears, fixed ideas, obsessive actions and the struggle with them;

3. guilt feelings for something done, suicidal tendencies, anxiety about some past shame, disgrace etcetera;

4. post-tress experience [as a result of an attack, catastrophe, terrorist act, rape etcetera;

5. the desire to get rid of some shortcomings in accordance with some unrealized principles or standards;

6. the struggle with one’s own dependence of various types [emotional, alcohol, narcotic and so on] In other words the second type problem may be based on the first type problem formed before;

7. the denial of oneself.

Other variants are also possible.

In a particular case the second type problem may lead to a vicious circle when the struggle with a symptom or persistent desire strengthens the symptom which gives rise to another round of struggle, etcetera. This circle model was described by L [68] before. This is how some phobias or obtrusiveness, panic attacks can be formed.

Scheme three [Fic. 2c] reflects the problem of ambivalence [that is the simultaneous attraction to the object and its rejection]:

1. love to the hated, despised and repulsive object;

2. the desire to get success, to reach the aim and the fear of success;

3. gratitude and humiliation, admiration and envy, joy and grief, pleasure and fear at the same time and so on;

4. the desire to do and not to do something, to say and not to say, to express feelings and to hide them etcetera;

5. the desire to win over the opponent and the fear of him;

6. the desire for some risk, for suicide, and at the same time unwillingness.

And others…

Scheme four [Fig. 2d] corresponds to the problem of choice:

1. the desire to have two incompatible variants at the same time not to lose either;

2. the choice between the two equally desirable variants;

3. the person’s immaturity his inability to make a choice and take the responsibility, the fear to make a mistake, indecisiveness;

4. a risky choice, determining the fate, winning or losing;

5. constant rushing from one variant to another, hesitation between hope and despair etcetera;

And others…

Scheme five [Fig. 2e] corresponds to the situation when there is no choice, when all variants are bad. For example, life situation is unbearable, so unbearable that you want to escape from it, but if you do it the situation will be still worse. This corresponds to Joe Biden’s model of double clamp [26]:

1. the subject lives with an unbearable person, for example, with a home tyrant, a psychopath, or a criminal but is dependent on him;

2. social disadaptation that leads to autism or a bum’s way of life;

3. moral choice between crime and death and so on;

4. the loss of prestige, bankruptcy, another event that has led to subjectively an unbearable situation, but any way out threatens even greater losses;

5. the choice between suicide and disgrace, giving way to violence and deathly risk and so on;

6. the choice between the husband who is not loved and a beloved person with whom it is impossible to live together for financial reasons etcetera.

And others…

In every case the task of psychotherapy is to help the client to change himself and not to help him change the surrounding reality, to solve the problem resorting to subjective, inner but not outer changes. Certainly, in every individual case it will be necessary to decide what kind of change will be most adequate, will mostly correspond to ecology of the person’s life, what emotional fixation must be removed. For example, if a person is suffering because he takes his loss too hard, then it is necessary to help him say “farewell”, to his loss however difficult it may be. But if he is suffering because he can’t get happiness because he is convinced in his alleged inferiority [and in this case, it is a barrier], then it is necessary to deliver him from the feeling of inferiority. Fear that prevents a young man to tell his girlfriend about his feelings or pass an exam may also be a barrier. In this case, it is obviously necessary to remove not love to the girl or the wish to study but fear that makes a person a psychological slave.

Let me underline one more time that a subjective barrier is also usually the result of an inadequate emotional fixation. So the aim, no doubt, is not to completely deliver from all desires but from suffering. As a result of correct work the person always gets the feeling of liberation and getting back to the open world of new opportunities, his ability to satisfy his reasonable demands increases.

Let us repeat, in any case the essence of psychological work is to deliver the individual from some dependence on an object or on an inadequate barrier that makes him suffer. In different schools and traditions of psychotherapy this aim is reached by different means. But in all cases a person must become more free than he was before, he must to a greater extent become the subject of his own life than before.

We’d like to emphasize that the above given schemes reflect only the primary [initial] problem structure. Further on, as we have said before, the problem is developing and growing, giving rise to numerous symptoms and new difficulties.

The subject of the inner structure of psychological problems has already been analyzed in different publications several times, so here we will dwell on it briefly.

The first two variants of psychological problems structure are mentioned as far back as in the Buddhist philosophy. As Buddha said there are two reasons for suffering: when a person can’t get what he wants and when he can’t get rid of what he doesn’t want. The general Buddhist recipe is also known: you will not suffer if you don’t have any attachment.

You can think that the EIT method is aimed at complete liberating of an individual from any desires, but that is not so. Every person has a lot of natural and quite normal desires and attachments, satisfying which is necessary for a healthy and happy life. The simplest example – the need to breathe. Most people satisfy this need easily and simply without any difficulties, so they even don’t notice it. However, when breathing becomes difficult because of a cold or asthma every person starts to understand how important this need is. The task certainly is not to make a person stop wishing to breathe freely but to deliver him from the barrier that prevents free breathing. This barrier may be based on some hidden or suppressed emotions, and if these emotions are freed or adequately transformed breathing will get free by itself, as often happened during our séances [see examples given further on]. We seek to free an individual only from such attachments which make him suffer, restrict his life activity and personal growth. Buddha offered the middle way:” If you don’t pull the string it will not sound, if you pull it too hard it will break”.

We gave the example with an alcoholic that shows how a big cluster of problems grows from only one initial cause. Here is another example illustrating how system problems appear on the basis of some initial conflict. A girl was dreaming of making a family of having a beloved man, she thought that life without this is not worth living. But she was convinced that no one will ever love her because she was ugly. That was not true but she thought so because when she was born he father said that:

“this fat-legged ugly creature can’t be given his favorite name Nastja”. The girl was given another quite nice name, but she was told the story for some strange reason. The father criticized her figure later and never embraced her… Unfortunate love added to this and she it was a final proof that she would never obtain happiness. Her father’s directive became an absolute prohibition for her, an obstacle to reach her desire.

The method of adaptation that she accepted was to struggle with herself. The meaning of life for her disappeared, sometimes she had suicidal thoughts. From the age or ten she deliberately suppressed her feelings. A powerful muscle shell held back her feelings, all her body was tense, the girl stooped, her neck got into her shoulders, the brow became immovable like the brow of a marble statue, the countenance became gloomy and hopeless. She isolated herself from people, had only one friend and thought that everybody hates her. She stopped taking care about her looking attractive, stopped looking after her hair, her clothes etcetera. She suffered from insomnia and attacks of hatred towards herself. Sometimes she made little cuts on her wrists with a blade in order to ease the strain… At the same time she successfully studied at a higher educational college and still considered herself a looser.

The client asked the doctor to completely deliver her from sexual desires so that she could live calmly. Naturally this demand was impossible to meet. She has already been in the state of deep depression, suppressing her natural feelings. So the doctor refused to sign such a contract and focused his efforts on discrediting her father’s claims which served a psychological barrier in her problem structure. It was difficult because she lived him. The work lasted about two years, little by little the girl was getting back to being natural and womanly, she started sleeping normally and stopped cutting her hands and so on. She began taking care about herself, it turned out that she had a long fine neck, big eyes, nice hair… But only after disappointment about her father’s criteria her depression practically passed. “I still have a lot of problems, – she said, – but I remember what I was two years ago. It was terrible, I don’t want to be like that anymore”. She met her boyfriend and got married.

Why are these models describing how problems appeared important for the EIT method? First, because they show how to look for the initial conflict properly, using for this purpose images, expressing problem emotional state. Second, because these models prompt how you can remove the initial conflict, when its origin is discovered, if you use an adequate mode of impact. Modes of impact are oriented at a particular origin of emotional fixation, and they always have the same aim which is to help liberate from some emotional fixation. The main methods of working with initial conflicts will be described further on.

Buddha long ago spoke about the role of attachment, and Sigmund Freud long ago spoke about the role of libido fixation on some object. But why does an attachment or a fixation on this particular object occur? Psychology actually doesn’t answer this question. However, a more detailed analysis of scheme one may clearly show how it happens at, so to speak, micropsychological level. Let us remember the metaphor about the monkey that grabbed the bait in in a hollowed up pumpkin and could not pull out its fist, see Fig. 3.

Figure 3a

Figure 3b

On Figure 3 [a, b] we analyze psychological problem of type one and its possible solution in greater detail. Besides the aim, the desire and the barrier it shows a “phantom paw” [an arrow above the barrier] by which a person is holding his aim or his barrier. A small heart shows the feelings that the person has for the desirable object. It is this “phantom paw” that a person cannot or does not want to unclench to let go the aim or the barrier determines his dependence and chronic negative emotions he feels. It determines further painful forms of adaptation to this unnatural situation. And he can’t unclench “the phantom paw” because he put into the object some very important feelings, hopes or even a part of his own personality. When the small heart returns the attraction disappears, which is symbolized be a light arrow directed from the former aim and barrier [pic. 3b]. To resolve other problems different techniques may be used, picture 3 is given as an example.

If a person wants somebody or something he already owns the desirable object in his imagination or is in contact with it. For example, while sitting at the table during some celebration guests look at various dishes put on the table by the hosts they taste these dishes in their mind. You can say that their “virtual mouths” are already eating different dishes, and if some guest likes the imagined taste of food he says: “Would you give me a little of this, please…” That’s why it is so important that food be not only tasty but look nice and appetizing. It means that a person radiates some psychological part of himself which establishes an imagined contact with the desirable object and if this imagined contact is pleasant then the person tries to establish a closer contact with the desirable object, to possess it in some form. It doesn’t always mean physical contact, nor does it always mean absorbing the object, but the subject seeks a desirable actual interaction.

Suppose that one of the guests failed to have the dish which he wanted to taste very much. He may leave disappointed and in his mind leave his “phantom mouth” in this dish, tasting the food when he could still have it. Until this process continues in his mind, he will suffer even if he suffers just a little, feeling sorry about the missed pleasure. After some time he will take his “mouth” out of the imagined dish, will let the dish go and his suffering will stop and he will recover his good health. If he doesn’t do so, he will remember his unrealized desire from time to time and feel disappointed again. He can forbid himself even to think about his loss push his feelings into the area of subconscious, but they will go on influencing his state even from there, and can become a chronic unconscious suffering.