Emotion-image therapy (EIT) [analytical and effective]. Nikolay Linde
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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.
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.
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