Healing Your Mental Images
Images in our minds are powerful. In fact, to the self, they can speak louder than words. Images are often "concealed" within our feelings.
I'm reminded of a a middle-aged woman I worked with. She'd burst into tears when speaking of her husband. The constant image in her mind was her husband having sex with another woman.
The great psychoanalyst, Dr. Carl Jung, once observed and wrote that he became "inwardly calmed and reassured" whenever he uncovered his mind's images underneath his feelings.
Therapeutic imagery. That's how Dr. Jung put it. You do your therapeutic imagery at your point of trouble, as Jung did.
In therapeutic imagery, you take time to let your mental image take its shape. A person, place, a tactile image, an image of your self - even though exaggerated in some ways. You develop and refine the image until it engulfs you. Your really feel it.
To actively work on the developed image (a movie, not a snapshot!), you nudge your self along it. You become the director of your image. The goal is for you to direct the image organically from negative to positive.
In psychotherapy, our imaginations can do anything. With our imaginations, we can perform cathartic acts of self destruction or self renewal. It's essentially an exercise of choice.
Tend to your imagination. From it springs your life and wholeness.
"As a man thinks in his heart, so is he." (the Bible)
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I'm reminded of a a middle-aged woman I worked with. She'd burst into tears when speaking of her husband. The constant image in her mind was her husband having sex with another woman.
The great psychoanalyst, Dr. Carl Jung, once observed and wrote that he became "inwardly calmed and reassured" whenever he uncovered his mind's images underneath his feelings.
Therapeutic imagery. That's how Dr. Jung put it. You do your therapeutic imagery at your point of trouble, as Jung did.
In therapeutic imagery, you take time to let your mental image take its shape. A person, place, a tactile image, an image of your self - even though exaggerated in some ways. You develop and refine the image until it engulfs you. Your really feel it.
To actively work on the developed image (a movie, not a snapshot!), you nudge your self along it. You become the director of your image. The goal is for you to direct the image organically from negative to positive.
In psychotherapy, our imaginations can do anything. With our imaginations, we can perform cathartic acts of self destruction or self renewal. It's essentially an exercise of choice.
Tend to your imagination. From it springs your life and wholeness.
"As a man thinks in his heart, so is he." (the Bible)
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