Emotion-Image Therapy. Analysis and Implementation

2. Emotion as the main goal

But some things that people deal with are meant in fact for the only purpose to feel certain emotion; in this case emotions are both the goal and the result of some kind of activities. It is for this that fans come to the stadium, people listen to music, some people gamble, go in for extreme kinds of sports, meet with friends, mark holidays, let off fireworks, dance and sing and, why not, make love. Some psychologists think that orgasm is not an emotion, but what is it then? Emotions themselves are important, they give us something, and it is also important. And it is clear that positive emotions give us health, fill us with energy. Negative emotions tell badly on how we feel, on our health, deprive us of our strength.

When a person is incapable of feeling pleased, of feeling positive emotions, we call it apathy, nothing matters for him. If he not only wants nothing, but is constantly in low spirits, feels dysphoria, then we can speak of depression. In other cases, a person is worried all the time. He feels guilty, sorrowful. Then the goal is to get rid of those unpleasant feelings.

There is always room for improvement. Everybody seeks to have good feelings, positive emotions which make the basis for adequate reactions, clear thinking, ability to be creative. In soviet culture this optimal emotional state is Called happiness, in Hinduism – Samadhi, in Buddhism – enlightening [purity in spirit], in Christian tradition it is divine grace. Happiness is the feeling of absolute psychological freedom which can be defined as the feeling of limitless opportunities. In this state a person gets so much energy that he feels as if he were overfilled with it and, because of that, with good feelings. Whatever he does, it is easy and not tiring. The surrounding reality is perceived as comfortable and safe, other people don’t arouse the feeling of threat, he thinks about them with warm and friendly feelings. This is how a person in love feels, when he knows that he is loved too, and then love and joy overfill him.

Happiness is a man’s natural state. He can get to this state when all the obstacles to feeling happy are removed. These obstacles are numerous negative emotions, taboos and tensions. Taboos and tensions in their turn can be fixed as chronic emotions, and a part of them can be positive. The paradox is that to be happy it is necessary just to get back to you true self, to stop suppressing and distorting your nature.

3. The way you feel is also an emotion

People care a lot about how they feel, but they don’t consider it to be an emotion, they consider it to be the consequence of the state of their health. But even when feeling well or feeling bad is the result of good health or illness, a person feels it as any other emotion. This emotion actually expresses or reflects good or bad state of the body, and it can cause some changes in the body, for example, the secretion of adrenalin or other hormones. It is the so called autonomous nervous system that runs the whole inner “chemistry’ of the body. It is not subjected to conscious management, but is by emotions that it is governed by. If a person chronically has certain emotional states, the impact of these emotions can lead to some psychosomatic disease.

It is true, all emotions are in fact felt physically, bodily. In what other way can we know about our feelings? They are not flying in the air, after all… That is why the word “emotion’ has two meanings: one is emotion such as love or joy and the other – the state of our body such as cheerfulness, wholeness, liveliness vigor etc. What we call how a person feels in terms of his health is bodily feeling. “How are you feeling?” – we ask someone meaning how he himself feels the state of his health. “Well”, he complains, “my heart aches a little.” Pain – is also an emotion, suffering – is emotion, happiness – is emotion. In NLP it is called kinesthetic representation of reality that is representation connected with the body. For us emotion is the subjective expression of the state of a person and his body as one whole, in its unity, and not just information. These are both the reactions of the body, inner changes in the body and also feelings which occur in the inner world.

4. Emotion as energy

Emotion is a motive pushing a person to some action. It is a kind of “gasoline” or “electric power” getting to some parts of the body to stimulate some activity. The emotion of fear makes the body shrink or run away and stop any contact with the frightening situation. The emotion of anger stimulates the repulse to the aggressor and even to attack the object putting obstacles on the way to some aims. In this sense emotions are the embodiment of inner energy which expresses itself in various forms and fulfils different functions. In fact, no action can be made unless it is motivated by emotion. A need, a motive are scientific notions, but in actual behavior they are felt as emotions which push to action. We can say, for example, that sexual attraction is determined by the need to continue your family, but this need is felt as love and sexual desire. This feeling makes a person look for a suitable match and then find means to gain his or her sympathy etc.

Negative emotions also have a very important function in regulating a person’s behavior. They restrict possible was of behavior which, as a rule, are dangerous, harmful or socially unacceptable. Trying to avoid such feelings as shame, guilt, fear or anger at oneself, the person doesn’t make actions which can arouse such feelings. But once they arise such feelings have a destructive effect on a person’s health and psyche. But sometimes a person can have such chronic feelings not because he did something that deserves punishment but for no reason at all. These and similar emotions may be destructive for the person himself and for the people surrounding him.

5. How people deal with emotions

Let’s remember that emotion is energy directed at performing some action. If there are no emotions there will be no actions which is exactly what happens to a person who suffers from apathy. However, if there are no emotions it means that they are fixed somewhere where there is no hope that they will be realized. Apathetic person ousted all his emotions because he was disillusioned about reaching his main goal, and without achieving it all other things of no importance to him.

If some emotions are not desirable are in a way dangerous for a person, he starts to resist them. For instance, he controls them, ousts them, suppresses, freezes, sublimates, projects, isolates etc. People worked out many ways to deal with emotions but essentially they are the same, in the sense that what you can mainly achieve by them is not a solution of the problem but escaping from it, not their remaking [treatment] but their withdrawal from consciousness. However, realization of these emotions in actions which may be dangerous is avoided. Though this final point is not so evident, as in some cases these emotions break out indirectly. Anger, for instance, may be directed not at the one who caused it, but at a different person. Besides, suppressed and ousted emotions sometimes distort psychic activity itself and lead to inadequate behavior.

The main characteristic feature of EIT is just that it offers quite different ways of working with emotions, primarily with chronic negative emotional sates as it is chronic negative states that lead to psychic and psychosomatic distortions. The treatment is made on the basis images of emotional states, which make it possible to remake the very emotion and resolve the problem. But images are not the aim in itself. They are only a means of affecting emotional states. An emotion is a kind of energy, so negative, destructive energy can be transformed into positive, creative form. In another case, negative energy can be simply “let go, then it disappears and positive energy comes to its place. In this case, much energy which was spent on controlling “bad” energy is saved. Opposing forces can be reconciled and joined… More details will follow.

6. Emotion as the basis of choosing a decision

To understand the logic of EIT it is necessary to keep in mind that emotions are not just the immediate energy source for actions but the basis for a particular form of behavior and thinking too. Emotional states constitute the basis of behavioral reactions, thoughts and feelings. Every emotional state determines the selections of actions and circumstances which a person faces. Being in a certain state people don’t notice any delightful events around them, in another state they don’t notice difficulties, in a third they invariably find some reasons for fear and worries and in fourth – find some pretext to enjoy oneself and so on.

Every emotional state makes it possible to pull to the fore some forms of behavior which are potentially possible but cannot be elicited if a person is in a different state. In other words, earlier existing emotional states determine a possible choice of actions and thoughts which can be realized by a person proceeding from these states. Thus, if a person is in the state of fear, this state will not let appear the reaction of joyful laughter or thoughts about your successes. Anger lets attack, behave aggressively. Joy lets laugh and have fun, socialize in a friendly way. Sadness lets complain, cry, avoid socializing, pity oneself and so on. It is difficult to imagine a situation when a person in anger would express joyful and kind reactions. Such behavior would be insincere, and everybody will see it, even if he manages to successfully imitate another state. But in case a positive emotional state comes the needed reactions will come by themselves, without any additional instruction. Though sometimes additional instruction is necessary.

One of the most frequent complaints that makes a client turn to a psychologist for help is about poignant, irrational and uncontrollable negative emotions, which they would like to get rid of. Just take obsessive fears which are absolutely groundless, and yet they may sometimes destroy a person’s life. For example, the fear of closed up spaces [claustrophobia] may lead to the situation when a person can’t not only go up and down in a lift but even enter a toilet in the office and working becomes impossible.

Phobias and worries, depressions and sorrows, anger and guilt, grief and a psychological trauma, emotional dependence or “absence” of any emotions, inability to understand emotions [alexithymia] – all this may be the reason to go to a psychologist. Emotional disorders [the last word reminds of a hospital, of diseases diagnoses and medicines for that reason in future I’ll avoid such terms] are numerous and various. They cause many additional life problems. But therapy through emotions and images deals not only with such problems.

From our point of view all psychological and psychosomatic problems are caused by some chronic fixed negative emotions which at present may be quite groundless. As soon as you remove this fixed pathogenic emotion, all problems that have grown like shells on the initial ground will disappear. It is this that can explain such “miracles” made with the help of EIT as immediate cure if the right method is applied. The best illustration is the correction of psychosomatic problems. When fixation is removed, the pain goes away, breathing becomes free, complete relaxation comes, and the client feels an unusual surge of energy. But in order to apply the method correctly it is necessary to find the right point for applying it first that means the initial fixation point. You will read about it later. Now, however, we will give one example of such quick cure, though there will be many such examples ahead.

Example 2. “A spider on the back”

At one of the seminars I asked my students to show their work. One student asked to solve her psychosomatic problem. For two months, she has been suffering from constant pain in the back, which didn’t let her sleep well, the back hurt in any position of her body. She went to doctors but they failed to help her.

I asked her to make an image of this pain. She saw it as a very big spider sitting on her back. As a spider is usually the symbol of a man, I supposed that she had a serious problem with a man. It turned out that her friend is a drug addict and she keeps trying to save him from this addiction, but in vain. She tries to break up their relations but for some reason can’t get rid of him. We tried different methods to free her from the presence of the spider on her back but nothing helped to save her from the harmful emotional dependence.

She realized that she would not be able to save him that she sacrifices her health and her life, but for some reason she couldn’t let him go. Then I offered her to imagine that the spider is sitting on a chair, sit on this chair and become this spider in her mind after that on his behalf answer the question: “Does he want to be saved and brought on the back to some place where he doesn’t intend to go?”

“I don’t want to get where she is dragging me, what has she taken into her head?” – replied the girl with somewhat rough male intonations. Replying as the spider the girl understood that in actual fact he didn’t want to be saved that’s why he resisted. At this very moment she could let the spider do to be more exact it disappeared from her back by itself, and the pain in the back went away too. That evening she broke up with this narcomaniac. In some time, she met another man married him a child was born she is happy. Since that time, her back didn’t hurt [at least during four following years]. But she still remembers the main question that I asked her. She told me this story four years after the séance which I had forgotten already. The séance lasted not more than 20 minutes.

COMMENTARY. It is clear that the student couldn’t cut agonizing relationship because of the wrongly understood feeling of responsibility toward the young man, she hoped for a miracle didn’t want to be accountable for his further degradation. That is why she sincerely didn’t make use of the methods offered her earlier. After speaking on behalf of the spider she understood that he didn’t want to saved and his further degradation is determined by his own will and she is not responsible. She realized that she was carrying him on her back against his will.

This direct realization which couldn’t be achieved before by any arguments of a physician, made it possible for her to let this man go and stop straining her back to save him. That’s why the pain in the back passed at once and never came back. She could part with this man, get rid of emotional dependence, truly refuse from the wrong feeling of duty which fixed the problem situation and caused the pain in the back to be more exact in the shoulder girdle. We can refer this problem both to the area of psychosomatics and to the area of emotional dependence. Both problems are difficult tasks for traditional therapy.

If we can change the state with the help of EIT the needed reactions come by themselves. This is such a great surprise for some clients that they begin to suspect that they were hypnotized. After a week of successful séance one of my clients started to ask me with some prejudice why in a relevant critical situation he behaved not in his usual way but in a new way, which surprised him and troubled. I explained that his initial state had changed, so he himself produces new reactions and if he was pleased with them. Yes, these reactions pleased him, but he was surprised that they were produced as if by themselves, not by his deliberate choice and not after some thinking but just by themselves. I explained again that sincere reactions meant that he had really changed, and that was good, but I am afraid he didn’t understand this logic and wasn’t pleased.

So you can and should work with the emotional state itself helping not only understand what caused it but transforming it into a positive form.

7. Emotional states

Some emotional states are kept in one’s psyche for years and even decades. It was Sigmund Freud who pointed out that all events and feelings are preserved in one’s subconscious part of our memory in the present tense irrespective of how long ago something happened. Emerged once emotional states continue determining the perception of reality, thoughts and behavioral reactions of a person independently from his consciousness. Because of that a person says that he can’t do anything with himself, even though he realizes that he acts inadequately and has feelings which cannot be explained rationally. Our theoretical premise is that it is negative emotions that cause any psychic and psychosomatic disturbance.

Figure 1 shows the scheme explaining these ideas

The basis of human psychological world is his essence.

This notion is difficult to define, but this is what we really are, our essence. Carl Jung called it selfhood, you may call it your soul or your deep Ego, but we prefer the term essence. The essence predetermines main capabilities of a person is the initial point that unrolls into his potential. The essence has its layers, levels and parts, but normally is a whole, well-integrated formation. Any damage of the essence can lead to serious psychic disturbances even to psychic disorders. In such cases the essence seems to break up and its parts start fighting with each other. There is a supposition that in case of schizophrenia a person rejects himself fully, totally which is the reason of wrong perception of reality [delirium, hallucinations].

When disturbances are not too bad depressions, panic attacks, neurosis of obtrusiveness, psychosomatic diseases may occur. For example, a person may reject his Inner Child or some “bad” part of himself. He rejects this part but it comes back to him again and again and he lives in constant fight with himself. Different problems of personal identity, for instance, sexual identity also refer to essence disturbances. See some examples further.

The essence can give rise to [or maintain] a certain set of emotional states. According to circumstances these states are more or less probably switched on. A well-wishing essence will hardly produce angry and aggressive states. A depressed essence can’t produce tender, playful and joyful states.

But even if the essence is intact and undamaged the psyche can keep some negative emotional states, which then may act as self-sufficient inner causes that bring about neurotic or psychosomatic disturbances. The theory explaining the appearance of chronic negative emotional states as a result of a psychodynamic conflict will be given later. These same conflicts may damage a person’s essence, when for some reason a person revolts against himself, separates from himself, refuses from himself and even loses himself.

We draw your attention to the fact that the offered model presupposes active behavior coming from deep psyche to the outside reality, and not just reactive behavior only reflecting reality reacting to outer events.

8. Levels of an individyal and the tasks of eit

Both clients and doctors may approach treatment tasks from different premises and at different levels, which depends on theories that the doctor believes in consciously or subconsciously as well as on his aims. A personality can reveal itself ae different levels: the level of behavior, of thinking, of insight [understanding] of states and of essence. Everything starts from the deeper level of essence and gradually unrolls to the level of behavior. Behavior leads to some results according to which a person makes some conclusions. So we proceed from the model of active behavior developing from deep inside outward, and not reactive behavior when behavior is just a response to outer impact.

1. The level of behavior. The most evident task is to find such way of behavior that can resolve some conflict, reach an agreement, protect oneself, defeat one’s opponent and so on. In this case the doctor is expected to give a recommendation about how to behave in this or that situation, what to say, what to answer, what strategy to stick to, how to learn to behave properly so as to get the desirable result.

To work out the right way of behavior psychologists make use of various trainings, give detailed individual instruction, play role games, give advice and recommendations and so on. For such psychologists, behavior is nothing more but just behavior. If a person behaves himself as if he had no fear that means that he really has no fear. Such trainings can really be effective. Some people should be taught proper manners and right ways of expressing their ideas, others should be taught how to socialize and how to be self- confident and so on.

But this way of dealing with psychological problems reminds me a fable about a devil who wanted to become a saint and he implored a priest famous for his sainthood to teach him how to become a saint. Naturally the priest refused for a long time but seeing how sincerely the devil pleaded with him, he finally agreed. He said: “As you are begging so hard here is the first commandment: Whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also. Strictly follow this commandment!” The devil was pleased and he left. But he reappeared in the evening bruised all over. “What “s happened?” – the priest was surprised – “I have told you: Whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other one!” “Yes, – answered the devil, – but I was slapped on the left cheek!”

The priest had to explain to the devil how and in what circumstances one should follow this commandment correctly. It turned out that in some situations one should really let be hit another time whatever part of the body was hit first. In another situation one should run away as soon as possible, in still other situation it is worth to rebuff but by peaceful means, and sometimes it is necessary to bravely defend oneself. In still other cases it is sensible not to go to an unsuitable place and not to have anything to do with bad people and in the fifth case – to evade a blow time! And so on. A detailed instruction was needed for every case; it became a whole book.

But the devil always got into a mess, as there was usually a variant of behavior that wasn’t taken into account in the instruction book, besides he didn’t always have time to take out the book, to find the needed page and to read the right advice! And there were other commandments and they also needed numerous commentaries and explanations, exceptions and variants of behavior.

Many years passed, the book became huge the priest died and the devil failed to learn how to be a saint! Why? What was the mistake? How would you answer this question? Our answer you will read a little later.

2. The level of thinking. The second way to resolve the problem is to influence the client’s thoughts. Potentially thoughts contain a whole set of possible ways of behavior. The right thoughts allow to behave correctly without working out certain ways of behavior, modifying them according to circumstances and tasks.

Thoughts are integrated in a logical system. By logic rules we can combine different thoughts, make conclusions, in doing so influence various areas of a person’s life, following logical ties between phenomena of his psychic life and different situations and ways of behavior. People are used to subordinating their behavior to logic and if a doctor could prove some idea to a client, this idea begins to transform the client’s behavior, effect his decisions and emotions. This is the basis of cognitive-behavioral therapy.

3. The level of understanding. Deeper and more generalized is the level of understanding and meaning. When a person understands something that he couldn’t understand before, he has the feeling of insight, of discovery. Through the process of understanding a person discovers a new meaning of phenomena which opens up for him new opportunities. The meaning can be expressed by different thoughts both verbally and not verbally, for instance, by images.

This is how a teacher can make sure that his student understands properly what has been explained, asking the student to say the same thing but in his own words or to do some unusual task on the ground of what he understood. One and the same meaning can be expressed by different phrases, in different languages, for example, in Russian, in Finnish, in German, in Chinese or it can be expressed by gestures or images. The meaning itself doesn’t have its own universal language, it doesn’t have its own form of expression and yet it can find various forms of expression.