Emotion-Image Therapy. Analysis and Implementation

The solution of the problem will be returning your feelings and parts of your personality connected with the desired object. During this process the subject integrates again with lost emotions abs parts of his personality and only then he really lets go the object of his desires. In other case a person may let go the barrier, if he put into it important feelings, but in fact it was an illusion though it prevented achieving normal goals. In the first case the person stops suffering as he doesn’t have conflicting feelings any longer he becomes indifferent to the object. In the second case the subject can achieve the desirable aim, the question is whether it is good.

In other kinds of psychological problems, the task of a psychologist may be, for example, to help the client accept this or that aim or barrier, return the rejected parts of his personality and recover his personal integrity. As a result, the pathogenic emotional state, that causes undesirable or neurotic behavior and/or negative psychosomatic state disappears. When a client complains about a domineering negative state, the image of this state will show the doctor the essence of the emotional fixation which makes the basis of his problems. The doctor’s task is to understand the reasons of the fixation, to help the client realize what these reasons are and get rid of the fixation by, for example, integrating with lost earlier positive feelings and/or parts of his personality. There may be other methods but I’d like to point out one more time that we choose the method which will deliver from ecologically wrong attachment or fixation. You can achieve this by mentally influencing images, but as images are the embodiment of the emotional state of the person, as a result, these states change and the fixation disappears.

Let’s repeat actions may be different. Sometimes it is necessary to let go some offence or forgive yourself some mistakes of the past, sometimes it is necessary “to unclench the paw” to stop holding the image of the sweetheart who was unfaithful, or to say farewell to the dead. Sometimes it is necessary to accept yourself as a loser, to forgive your father who abandoned you, to refuse some inadequate prohibitions imposed by your parents in your childhood, to stop identifying yourself with some pain that you experienced in the past, with shame or any other psychological trauma. The EIT helps the client fulfil these tasks. Chapter six describes various methods of overcoming emotional fixations.

Summary

1. The structure of a psychological problem is determined by fixed energy of desire which can’t be realized because there exists some barrier.

2. Fixed energy of desire is subjectively experienced as agonizing unrealizable feeling which causes suffering becoming a chronic negative emotional state.

3. The reasons which don’t let solve the psychological problem are in the psyche of the person himself.

4. The solution of the problem always presupposes liberation of the person from this or another fixation.

5. The initial problem may be one of the five indicated earlier [see above]. On the basis of the initial problem a person forms six methods of adaptation, which create symptoms and new problems.

6. Problems can be of different levels and types. The level is determined by the degree of the damage of the personality and is a function of the strength of the emotional fixation.

7. The type of the problem is determined by peculiarities of adaptation mechanisms, created by the person to adapt to the existence of the initial fixation.

8. The initial fixation [model one] is determined by the fact that the subject connected in his mind some feelings and/or parts of his personality to have a contact with some object.

9. Liberation from the fixation and the end to suffering may often be achieved when feelings or parts of the personality “invested” before are returned.

Chapter 4. Images and analitical work with them

It is clear from the previous chapter that our aim is to transform “pathogenic” emotional states and images are the means to do it. Images are just a leverage letting to apply an effort for the necessary transformation of emotion. But besides images are an effective means to analyze psychological problems of a person. Because images are the language of the subconscious. It was yet in Sigmund Freud ‘s psychoanalyses that they were used as material for analyses, first of all for interpreting dreams [20]. Sigmund Freud ‘s interpretation of dreams is still important. But when you use spontaneous images expressing the emotional state, which the client is complaining about, diagnosing usually comes very quickly.

At first when I started to develop this approach I simply wanted to use images in order to influence the actual negative emotional state thanks to psychological link between image and state. But I was at once disappointed about mechanistic methods of influence on the image in order to change the state. Removing a negative image from the body, its destruction by any means, like burning or burying, changes nothing in the actual state of the client. It may even do some harm if the real problem which made him come, remained undiscovered and is not being solved in the course of working with the image. All such forcible and mechanistic methods are from the point of view of psychoanalyses nothing but psychological defenses, covering up emotional conflict and not resolving it.

Sometimes the client’s accepting a negative image, expressing good feelings toward it and turning it into a positive image leads to curing the initial problem. For that reason the EIT attaches the key meaning to the analyses of that inner conflict and that initial fixation which lead to emergence of undesirable symptoms. The method of influence is chosen depending on “psychological diagnosis” which becomes revealed by “a solidified” in the person’s psyche unresolved emotional conflict, which makes the basis of a pathogenic attachment [fixation].

Images are the primary language of the psyche, the language of the subconscious, they are more closely connected with emotional world than verbal expressions. Verbal influence doesn’t have a very strong connection with emotional world, even if it does influence emotions it does so mainly because of imaginative expressions that are used by writers and poets in their works. Speech is a secondary language of the psyche and relates more to consciousness and social interaction.

The main function of images is to bring information about outside world, to be more exact to model inside yourself some properties of objects, outer space, other living beings. You can “play” with these models of the outside world forecasting future events, rehearsing your actions and assessing other people’s reactions. But this part of images only partly relates to psychotherapeutic work. In fact realistic images are used by psychotherapists too. Arnold Lazarus, for example, reports how imagined trainings [a real game was imagined] helped a tennis-player who had broken his arm to prepare for the would be match [24]. Imagining real situations helps to arouse real feelings in the client, can help work pour skills in your mind. In the EIT the psychotherapist is interested in the images modelling tin inner world of a person, telling something about him, that means images of his fantasies, reflecting feelings and features of the personality that creates fantasies. These fantasies are not accidental they reveal the essence of his inner conflict.

All psychologists are aware of projective methods of studying a person. An individual is offered to demonstrate his imagination by different means: to draw a man, to draw a family, to draw an animal that doesn’t exist, to make up a story about a picture, to finish a sentence, to tell what images he can see in some senseless colored stains and so on. As is known in these creations a person involuntarily expresses his personality, his character and his problems what is necessary is to be able to interpret these creations. These interpretations are not a final proof, but they are based on the experience accumulated by many generations of doctors, as well as on the personal experience of a certain doctor and his intuition. These interpretations should be confirmed by other information, for example, if you share your hypotheses with the person you test and he will willingly confirm them then the possibility of a mistake becomes much smaller. However, in practice not always you can share your interpretations [for instance for ethical reasons] and this makes your work harder.

The doctor who was the first to use projective methods in psychotherapy was again Sigmund Freud. He created the method of free associations when a client was lying on a couch looking at the ceiling and saying everything that was coming into his mind not hiding anything from the doctor. Not for nothing they say: “He who has pain is speaking about it”.

The doctor made up a picture from the free associations and interpreted this set of seemingly disconnected fragments of consciousness as the result of past events and related to them emotions. Amazed by the insight of the psychoanalyst the patient confirmed that those events and feelings really took place in his life, but he forgot them. He was surprised that those events and feelings in fact were the reason of his neurotic symptoms! After such realization [insight] the undesirable symptoms could disappear. At that time it was a real revolution!

As was mentioned, Sigmund Freud created a method of interpreting dreams [27,28]. He understood that some unrealized desires of a person were projected in dreams. He showed that all images and the plot of a dream are not accidental, they have some hidden meaning which could be deciphered. So a dream provides to the psychoanalyst some very important information about his patient. This information comes out of the patient’s subconscious and in a symbolic way expresses his hidden problems, something that he doesn’t know and even doesn’t want to know about himself. Sigmund Freud considered the analyses of dreams to be “a tsar’s way” to the subconscious, because when a person is asleep his inner censorship weakens and his desires move around defenses and penetrate into the consciousness in an allegorical form which makes the work of a doctor easier.

The meaning of many images of different people’s dreams proves to be the same. It became a truism that the image of a snake corresponds to phallus and the image of a sink corresponds to women’s genitals. But it would be wrong to interpret all dreams only as sex symbols. Even the image of a snake may mean just a snake, if a client was really frightened having met a snake and then having such a dream. Putting questions to the dreamer the doctor specifies the subjective meaning of images and of the whole collision expressed in the dream. Let me explain these points by one example from the book by R. Osborn “Freud for beginners” [29].

A woman asks her psychoanalyst why in her dream she was suffocating a small white dog.

– And didn’t have a conflict with somebody the previous day?

– Oh, no. Just my sister-in-law came. She is so mean; she always says nasty things. I told her: “Go away, I don’t want such a mean biting dog here!”

– And incidentally, isn’t she small and white?

– Yes, she is… And how do you know?

Those interpretations of images which are true of dreams are also true of fantasies, projective pictures, the creations of art-therapy, symbol drama and of the images which you get working with the EIT method. But a doctor must always take into consideration the individual character of the client and what is special about his life situation, not to make a mistake in his interpretations. It is better to put questions to the client which will allow to confirm your hypothesis or will lead you to some new ideas because it is the subjective meaning that the client attaches to his images that is the most important. Standard interpretations can be road-signs, but you shouldn’t fully rely on them. At the end of the book we give a brief dictionary of images, which may be often met in the EIT, and their standard meaning. But it is more important to master the methodology of getting the meaning of any image, because in our practice we constantly face unexpected images or unexpected meanings of familiar images.

But… resorting to dreams while analyzing a certain problem is somewhat difficult for a few reasons. If a client comes to you he seldom has in his mind a ready dream that could be a clue to solving his problem. Even if he remembers some dream then not all dreams are related to the problem he told you about. They may be of a special local nature. For instance, some conflict could take place at work on the previous day and it was reflected in a dream but it doesn’t relate to a phobia that the client complains about. Usually either the interpretation of dreams is specially dealt with or when a client comes to a regular séance under a strong impression of a new dream. During my practice, I interpreted hundreds of dreams and I will give an example of an unexpected and revealing case.

Example 5. “Cut off head”

I was taking an exam in a private institute pf higher education. A student, a grown-up woman answered the first question and then hurrying and worrying asked me to explain her dream, that had been torturing her for the past two months. I understood that the problem was very important for her and agreed.

It was a repeatedly coming nightmare. In her dream, she is in some room and wants to get out of it but some people don’t let her do it. She can’t leave and has to watch how some man is being executed. She sees his neck covered with blood when his head is being cut off. It was horrible… and it repeats every night.

I said that I couldn’t be sure but there was no time for a more detailed analysis, but one thing is obvious in her real life she was in a very unpleasant situation, that she wanted to escape from, but failed. It was also clear that she had a very serious conflict with some man.

She confirmed my thoughts but explained herself very carefully.

– Yes, I want now to divorce, but can’t do it because I have a baby. It is a year and two months. The main thing is that I don’t understand why I want a divorce. But after the baby was born I began to hate him more and more. Though before that everything had been all right with us, we loved each other very much. We had a wonderful sex-life… He has some shortcomings, he is somewhat difficult, but I don’t have any serious complaints.

– Maybe he was unfaithful, or beat you or did something else…

– No, no! He treated me very well, but I can’t do anything with myself. Why can it happen so?

– It’s difficult to say… But often after a baby is born in the mother’s psyche the conflicts that happened in her parents’ family may come to the surface, because involuntarily she sees herself in her baby. Do you have a girl?

– Yes… My father abandoned the family when I was a year and a half.

– May be a program lives within you that when a baby is a year and a half you must divorce your husband… But I am not sure.

– True, I divorced my first husband when my baby was a year and four months.

– If it is so we can say with confidence that you are following this program.

– And why I hate him more and more?

– You simply want to have an emotional basis for the ready-made decision.

– Goodness gracious! [She grips her head], What a horrible woman I am! What should I do? Is it possible to correct the situation?

– Come to my séance. We don’t have any time now.

Commentary. She didn’t come to the séance, and I am not aware of the distant results of this short analyses. I hope she was sensible enough not to spoil her own and another person’s life, proceeding from scenarios acquired in her childhood. I am sorry I didn’t ask her about what her mother told her about her father and I didn’t interpret the execution of a man in her dream as realization of her hatred of her father because he left her… Then it could be clear that her hatred toward her husband is a typical example of a transfer, and it would help her to overcome these feelings. But had very little time…

The reason why it is difficult to use dreams is that not everybody remembers his dreams or remembers only a part of them. Dreams have lots of details, many different images, sometimes even a number of stories. To decipher content of dreams takes a lot of time and ends in realization, but not every time it leads to cure or to taking the right decision. In the EIT the interpretation of an image is just the beginning of the way to the solution of the problem and the change of the state of the client.

Consciousness is a part of the mental area of psyche, but the problem lies in feelings rooted in subconsciousness. Consciousness can’t be permeated by feelings but this is necessary for real changes. It is specially created this way to be a dispassionate observer. The realization must be accompanied by some remorse that is by the desire to change, to remake everything. This is the understanding of your mistakes filled with sincere feelings. But this is not all, you must really do something with your feeling which don’t obey your reason. The heart is still loving or hating, you still want something forbidden, you are still feeling pain because someone hurt you… What can be done with it? Psychoanalyses relies only on new insights, on a thorough work on the whole life history from the viewpoint of the basic conflict, on ever more profound realization.

In this sense the EIT has some analytical and corrective advantages over the psychological method of dreams interpretations. We ask the client to create a spontaneously emerging image the one that expresses the emotion which is the clue to his problem [more details are below]. So the created image, as a rule, fully corresponds to the essence of the problem, its interpretation is not really difficult and proves “to hit the aim”. Naturally this a bit of a simplification. Not infrequently the work with the EIT turns into a long analytical work with all the “intricacies” of the traditional analyses. Besides, the created image makes it possible to do the corrective work at once guided by the same image. As the image is associatively connected with emotion adequate influence on it will automatically tell on the emotion fixing the problem. As soon as the emotion disappears the problem stops existing any longer. The client thinks that he works with his image but in actual fact he works on himself. Let me give the examples of such quick work in two claustrophobic cases.

Example 6. “A little hedgehog and a drum”

At an instructing seminar a woman psychologist asked me to help her get rid of claustrophobia: “It is not so bad, but all doors in my home are taken off”, -she said. The problem emerged after her baby was born, and the baby was seriously ill during a year.

I asked her to imagine that she was in some closed up space, a room, for instance, and to tell me about her feelings. She replied that even just imagining the situation she is very nervous; her hands are shaking and her heart is throbbing. It is difficult to bear this state. Then I asked her to imagine the image of this feeling right in front of her. Without a long consideration, she said that for some reason it was like a small hedgehog who was beating a drum with wooden sticks. At first sight it is nonsense, how can claustrophobia look like a small hedgehog with a drum? However, a hedgehog is always a man, and a small hedgehog – a boy. I asked:” Have you got a boy?” and the answer was affirmative. Then it became clear that the mother’s worrying about her sickly son brought about the fear of closed up spaces where she couldn’t control what was happening to him. And the drum is the mother’s heart that is worrying about the hedgehog.

And how can this problem be solved? Obviously, the fear about the baby is connected with the customary feeling that he is helpless and needs her control. So I proposed:” Obey me, and later I will explain everything to you. In your mind tell the hedgehog that you allow him to be healthy and independent and not to need you support and constant control”. She repeated this in her mind several times, feeling better and better. Soon she saw that the hedgehog dropped drum sticks went to another room and played with some toys, he didn’t need her control anymore… Her heart calmed down, her hands stopped shaking. The test by imagining her in a closed-up space showed that she was quite calm, claustrophobia passed. Then I offered her my explanations. All the work took ten minutes. On the following day she confirmed the result.

Example 7. “Claustrophobia”

At the international congress that took place in Ekaterenburg under the auspices of the Professional Psychotherapeutic League I managed to remove claustrophobia during just five minutes. This is how it happened… Before the final meeting after which I had to immediately go to the airport, a colleague of mine came up to me and asked if I could receive her friend who very much hoped to get my help… Only ten minutes were left before the beginning of the meeting…

– Aren’t you staying for two more days? What a pity, and we hoped…

– Invite your friend at once, sometimes you can say something important during ten minutes only…

She ran… and found her friend at another seminar. We took our seats on the center of a large hall, where different lessons were taking place in different parts of the hall.

It turned out that the young woman has been suffering from claustrophobia since her childhood. She is afraid to be in a lift, in a closed room, when there is no one near her. I asked her to imagine herself to be in the lift and to describe the symptoms of her fear. Being in an imagined situation she felt rapid heartbeat and breathing, fear bordering panic, and the coming fainting. I asked her to imagine these symptoms as an image sitting on the chai in front of her. The image was surprisingly calm, not aggressive and fear was not revealed in it. It was some furry creature looking like Winnie the Pooh that was looking at the client with some expectation. It became clear at once that it was a part of the client’s personality that evidently felt a kind of emotional dependence and was waiting for something. And if so it could be the childhood state of the client [the Inner Child], it means that in her childhood the client had some emotional problems, connected, no doubt, with one of the parents, most probably with the mother. If this image is connected with the state of fear, then it is the child’s fear. And what can be the fear of a child who is looking expectantly? Most likely this is the fear of being alone, the fear of being rejected! I pondered a little, and then the client offered:

– Maybe I should send it away? [She didn’t understand that it was the image of herself in her childhood]

– By no means! [The experience shows that such offers express the hidden conflict attitude to the Inner Child]. On the contrary, tell it that you will never leave it never reject it. That you accept it totally as it is. This is for experiment. I will later explain.

– It is getting smaller.

– Repeat the same words one more time… How are you feeling?

– I am feeling better, the fear diminishes. Now it has turned into a wooden doll lying on the chair. [The image of a doll means regression to the age of a suckling baby.]

– Keep on repeating the same…

– Oh! [She looked surprised.] For some reason it got into my breast and dissolved there! [It means that she accepted the Inner Child as a part of her personality and by doing so removed the conflict with her childhood part. If this conflict was really the phobia’s cause, then the feeling of fear must stop.]

– That’s fine, l will explain it to you later. Imagine again that you are in the lift… What are you feeling?

– … [She looks surprised even amazed, as she couldn’t say a word]

– Is there no fear?

– No, there is the expectation of fear…

– This is just the habit, but there is no fear. Your problem has been solved. Your claustrophobia is your childhood fear of being alone. A closed-up space provokes your fears of being alone. Some time ago you probably had some injury. Did your mother do anything in the wrong way? If you wish you can tell me but it is not necessary.

– Yes, I was always afraid to stay alone. If there is somebody near me I am not afraid. In my childhood I was always waiting for my mother’s return from work… [She was crying.]

– Don’t ever send away you Inner Child, he wouldn’t feel alone anymore! Do you like this result?

– Yes, I do! [She rushed to embrace me still crying.]

I wished her all the best in her life, hoping for a future meeting. Still a few minutes were left before the beginning of the meeting, I was not late…

On the next day her friend called ne by cell phone, she confirmed that everything was all right.

These two examples are given to show how quickly and easily the analyses of a psychological problem and its correction can go on with the help of the EIT. As doctors say:” The one who diagnoses well, treats well”. These cases also illustrate the principle, that when you work with the EIT “the cure” happens here and now, if the correcting influence is used adequately. But to be able to get such results one must know a lot, quickly analyze problems and train one’s intuition. The work of the doctor that we can see is only “the above-water part of the iceberg”, its effectiveness is determined by having and correct using of “the under-water part”. So not always things happen so easily and quickly, often the image analysis is long and hard. Not everything depends on the doctor, 80% of success is provided by honest and concerned work of the client.