What do you immediately think of when you see the word imagination?
A child at play, a daydream, something frivolous or slightly unknowable?
Dictionary definitions of imagination include: the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses’ Or perhaps more broadly and succinctly ‘a creation of the mind’.
In some senses everything new begins in the imagination. To decide what to have for dinner, where to walk, where to go on holiday all of these everyday decisions begin with our ability to imagine.
Before we even choose psychotherapy, we have to be able to imagine the future can be different to the present. Common therapeutic starting points all require the use of imagination to form pattern, narrative and meaning. In TA, we contract for the work we will do together – what do you want from therapy that will enhance your life? What changes do you think you will need to make? How might it look at the end?
We use our imaginations every day, common descriptive sayings use our capacity to imagine to give impact to our words, the bluebells spread out like a carpet is a much richer description than there was a lot of bluebells. Psychotherapists of many modalities have been harnessing the power of the imagination in healing for decades. Use of metaphor is common in most psychotherapy sessions as we reach for rich descriptions of our experiences.
In the faculties of the mind video series on you tube imagination is described the process by which we create concepts we have never seen by combining familiar information in new ways. For example I would love to go to Costa Rica -despite never having been I can conjure up images of rain forest and azure sea and feelings of warmth. I can do this so well he sensations in my body change. This gives rise to some interesting possibilities. Imagination has been harnessed to help heal the body, compete in sports, prepare for speeches and interviews and, of course, in psychotherapy.
The possibilities for the imagination as a therapeutic tool are almost limitless and very individual. Dreams, fairytales, stories of all stripes, myth, legend, analogies with specialist subjects, imaginative space, journeys, imagined protections, imagined conversations. The list goes on…
Some of the most powerful Imaginative work I have had the privilege of doing is in the area of trauma therapy. Babette Rothschild’s the body remembers case book uses imagination powerfully to help clients restore their sense of being Ok and to help put traumas in the past and generate feelings of safety now. This kind of therapy harnesses our neurobiology…If I imagine a beach then all the same neurons fire that would activate if I were stood on the beach including those responsible for physical sensations. If you close your eyes for a second, imagine a beach and focus on your body sensation you will feel it change. How it changes will depend on your experience of beaches.
So if I have been unsafe in the past – I can use my imagination to re-train my body that I am safe now. Use of guided imagery and somatic experiencing, in the presence of a boundaried and established therapeutic relationship, harnesses our biology, integrating attachment, sensation and memory through our imaginations. Gestalt psychotherapists have known this for decades encouraging clients to tune into their here and now experience, using chair work, experiments and phenomenology to explore a clients experience. Story, dreams, creativity and play can all be used therapeutically to connect with our clients experience and enhance our work.