Emotion-Image Therapy. Analysis and Implementation

In EIT the task of relaxing muscles is done by working with images, and the task is not only to free the stuck emotions but to remove psychodynamic conflict that generates chronic negative emotional state. The initial negative state disappears. Alongside with this sometimes you may get the result similar to full relaxation of the muscle shell in some areas of the body for instance in the back [see example 2] or even in the whole body [see example 4]. But you achieve this by different means than in body therapy and without painful influence on body muscles [see further].

Example 4. “Live mercury”

A young girl turned to me and complained that at some moment in her life she lost the ability to express her feelings [alexitimia]. She prohibited herself to do it and couldn’t overcome her own prohibition. Feelings overfilled her breast and tortured her from within. She lost contact with her mother and her boyfriend whom she loved very much. She lost her ability to express her feelings a year before when her father whom she loved dearly died. She was afraid to express her feelings because she didn’t want to hurt her mother. In their family, they declared the rule that you must not express your feelings you must restrain them. The father particularly insisted on that and was an example of restraint himself.

I asked her to create an image of these feelings. They were like a moving clot of mercury changing its form. It tried to get away from the breast but some armor like a knight’s cuirass didn’t let it go. Then I asked her to give a permission to this steel cuirass to express all its feelings. This paradoxical method worked and the cuirass melted at once, and feelings started flowing from the girl’s mouth [the client’s subjective perception] so intensively that she could hardly breathe, she choked.

To make sure that the process of liberating will not fail because of her fear, I began to calm her down saying that gradually everything will be back to normal. It is just what happened, little by little her breathing became even, the felt that her feelings go on flowing, but the flow is quiet. But she started shaking all over, she felt cold, her hands and feet were shaking but at the same time she was feeling unusually fine. Her body seemed to be very light and disappeared, and the air while breathing is freely moving through her body from the crown of her head to her heels and back. Such sensations are typical of those who had an intensive course of bodily therapy together with rebirthing [the séance of deep breathing].

In about twenty minutes the process ended by itself, the sensation of cold and shaking went away. Imagining her meeting with her boyfriend the girl confirmed that she no had problems with expressing her feelings, the shell disappeared. Her body seemed to have lost some weight, and the air seemed to freely flow within her body. Her eyes shone with happiness, she thanked me and left.

Ways of working with images are numerous. Sometimes it is necessary to let emotions in and not out, sometimes to transform them, to solve an inner conflict, generating them, sometimes it is necessary to refuse wrong convictions, promoting a ban on natural feelings and so on. The story about different ways of influence is still ahead but the connection between emotions and body is the “red line” of our therapeutic logic. It is this connection that guarantees important results in solving psychosomatic problems.

Summary

1. Emotions is energy which becomes revealed in muscles movements.

2. With the help of chronic muscle tension a person suppresses undesirable emotions, so emotions get chronically stuck in some muscle clamps.

3. The system of muscle clamps creates a muscle shell which blocks the free flow of energy about the body and deprives the person of spontaneous and flexible behavior.

4. The muscle shell corresponds to a person’s character. The character is “stuck in and ossified” emotions, which are stereotypes of a person’s behavior.

5. In different parts of the body various feelings and corresponding impulses to actions can be blocked.

6. When the muscle shell is relaxed the person becomes flexible and spontaneous, as though he had no character, but greater energy and freely flowing feelings.

7. Solving basic psychodynamic conflict leads to the relaxation of chronic muscle tensions, removing the chronic block of some emotional state, solving psychological and psychosomatic problems and to the change of character.

Chapter 3. Psychological problem

1. The problem’s inner structure

The novelty and effectiveness of the EIT is to a great extent connected with a new perception of how people’s problems are arranged and how they can be solved. The essence of our approach is that any problem is rooted in some chronic fixation of emotional energy onto some aim, and you can free this energy working with the image of this emotion. Even Buddha called such fixation an attachment and offered a long way of moral development, that helped to get rid of attachments making people suffer. This is correct but psychotherapy cannot and should not make monks out of people, it just helps them to get rid of agonizing and restricting life fixation.

Sigmund Freud [27—29] offered the way of realization deep fixations that by itself leads to liberation. In this sense, what we are saying is not quite new. The new thing is that with the help of images we quickly find the point of fixation, understand the reason and the means of fixation. The new thing is that after diagnosis we ask the client to apply to the image, and in fact to himself [which the client doesn’t understand and so doesn’t resist] some method, liberating him from the initial attachment. This leads to destroying the whole pathological system that had grown on this basis nearly in one instance. If psychoanalyses considered the main element to be awareness, gestalt therapy – emotional experience, the EIT – emotional and meaningful intersubjective [within personal] action.

Let us make it clear, we don’t object to friendly, loving and other normal attachments, which make a person happy. A person frees himself only from such attachments that make him suffer, and are the reason of a chronic negative emotional state, making the basis of pathology. They prevent him from living a normal life, from being healthy, from building satisfying relations with other people. We use original methods allowing to quickly discover the causes of sufferings and to free the suffering individual rather quickly too. As we say: “The irons are removed right here or they are worn forever”. The fixation can melt only at some moment, here and now, at once, if the client is ready to give it up. Everything else is only the preparation of this moment. We will speak about it later.

So, a psychological problem that a person faces may be described as fixation of the person on some unachievable aim. This fixation is felt by the individual as an emotion or some emotional state. The problem becomes a problem when a desire can’t be satisfied and can’t disappear. If there is no desire, there is no problem. If the desire can be satisfied there is no problem either. If the desire can be easily given up, there is no problem either. A child may weep inconsolably when his balloon flew away. If something like that happens to an adult, his desire easily flies away together with the balloon. A grown-up person stops producing emotional energy aimed at keeping the balloon. The energy gets back into his body and he calms down. However, adults have their own desires and they don’t disappear because the “balloon” flew away.

As we have already said a desire always presents itself as emotion or feeling prompting some action. When a person says: “I love you”, -this is a feeling but it is the manifestation of desire. The feeling gives energy; action is not produced without a feeling or emotion. When this energy doesn’t materialize in reaching the aim a person suffers in other words he suffers a kind of damage because the energy was being wasted, and this energy starts disturbing his inner ecology. If he doesn’t stop producing the feeling aimed at achieving the unachievable the suffering becomes chronic.

We should adapt to this situation. A person creates some mechanisms to adapt to suffering the causes of which he forgets. For example, an elderly alcoholic drinks and at the same time cries: “My main problem is that no one wants me…” Some time ago he was a handsome young man, talented, skillful, with higher education. Now he is a ruin of his old self with broken rotten teeth, who drank himself to the position of a loading workman, full of anger because life was unfair to him. He has a good wife and wonderful daughters who love him and take care of him, in spite of his constant drinking and biting character. He comes from a very nice family; his mother and father are Doctors of Sciences but they divorced when he was a little boy and divided their sons. He stayed with his mother but she had no time for him. She was working all the time, often went to great construction sites, dammed the Yenisei river… He realized that no one wants him.

Most of all he wanted to reunite his family and be loved by his parents, but it was impossible, his greatest desire was blocked. He had to adapt to his suffering, he pitied himself all the time thinking that his fate was unfair to him. He envied other young men. When he pitied himself, the best consolation was vodka, it let him forget his suffering, get disconnected and acquire a warm and sweet feeling of a beloved child sleeping on the mother’s chest. If someone saved him from troubles, took him home, undressed, washed, scolded him he felt that somebody wants him. In a hidden way, he considered his parents responsible for his troubles and in his soul, he punished them by his acts of moral lapses. At the same time, he hoped that they will come and prove that they love him. But they didn’t do it and couldn’t…

Alcoholism gave rise to new problems… He began to be downgraded at work, conflicts emerged in the family. And he had to adapt to it too. He had to say that everything around him was wrong, unfair, particularly as perestroika was under way… It was necessary to lower his ambitions, to consider himself to be a victim of injustice [and he did already think himself to be a victim]. And to raise his self-esteem he had to criticize all people and lecture to them. There was little money it was necessary to be economical and suspicious. He had to hide his inner world from everybody, cover up his shame, so his body was always tense, his chest sank in. He could be frank only when he was drunk, then his true feeling got out, but only strangers or his friends-alcoholics could hear them.

If only he could see that little unhappy child [that is himself] suffering from the lack of love! If only he could generously give love to that child, so that he could forgive his mother and father, then a miracle could happen and the gigantic thing of his sufferings and adaptations would break down in a moment and there would be no need of alcohol any longer, it would even become disgusting. If only…

If we can get to the initial cause of the tangle of problems and in some way remove the deep conflict, then the whole system of psychological incrustations can be removed. All pathogenic adaptations will scatter like a house of cards.

You can struggle with the outer layers of a problem for a long time but to the doctor’s surprise all achievements will disappear not leaving any trace, and the old symptoms, which are the expression of adaptations will occur again and again. This will go on till the key change takes place, when the needle is broken, after that all symptoms will become pointless.

There may be a lot of dysfunctional adaptations, practically as many as different psychological and psychical distortions are described. Our view is that even so called diseases can be considered as forms of adaptation to the initial emotional problem. The disease is just the problem that has reached a certain pathological development! Since there are a great number of adaptation firms we will not look at all of them in detail but some variants will be presented. Here we will analyze the structure of the initial problem which leads to emerging the whole system of defenses, oustings and suppressions, secondary defenses and so on. In every case the work with EIT is aimed at getting the person back to being natural, delivering him from all unnecessary adaptations and defenses. Only after getting freedom and naturalness can a person solve the problems to which he surrendered before and because of that created psychological adaptation.

The problem is always a contradiction between an individual’s desire materialized in the energy of a feeling and a barrier on the way to its gratification. If the barrier is something from the outside of the person and can in principle be overcome and the desire is not pathological, then the problem is objective. The problem can be social, economic, scientific, political and so on. It can be solved by an external objective way, that is by overcoming the obstacle and gratifying the desire. For this aim it is necessary sometimes to earn money, sometimes to invent something, sometimes to resort to diplomacy or to turn for help and so on…

The problem becomes psychological only when the reasons of failure are in the psyche of the individual himself. In other words, either the desire is “wrong” or the obstacle on the way to reach the aim is an illusion. For instance, sometimes the obstacle can be impossible to overcome as in the case when you want “to return last year’s snow”. This may be the situation of emotional dependence when love is lost or when a very close person dies. Then obviously, it is necessary to help the individual to get rid of his irrational desire however difficult the task could seem.

When the obstacles are inadequate moral prohibitions, prejudices, complexes, fears and so on, the solution may require not only overcoming the initial impulse but liberating from the obstacle. Since the psychological obstacle can hold back the initial impulse because it is also supported by certain chronic emotions, the essence of the work doesn’t change – the doctor works at overcoming the emotional fixation state.

The problem state in every case may be called a deadlock state. If the actual feelings are strong and there is no way out, some undesirable consequences take place. The initial reaction is most often aggression. The person who got into such situation tries to destroy the barrier but can be aggressive to himself, to his own desire, to the object of his desire, even to strangers. Most people restrain their aggression but constant restrain [control] leads to new difficulties and problems. Another form of reaction is to suppress or oust [suppressing, ousting] one’s own feelings, one’s own desire, grief, anger… The third form is when people transfer their feelings over to other safer objects [transfer]. In the fourth case, people start to avoid any situations in which they may express their feelings [escapism]. In the fifth case, they behave as helpless little children [regression]. In the sixth case, they ascribe to other people their own feelings and desires [projection]. In the seventh case, they quit active life altogether [autism]. In the eighth case, they create symptoms of some illness to justify their failure and not to do something prohibited [forming a symptom]. And so on…

Defenses used by a person help him to adapt but don’t solve the problem. They only preserve the problem and create new problems distorting his interaction with surrounding reality. The key factor determining the degree and the character of the distortions is the energy power of the locked-up feelings and the method of adaptation chosen by the individual. In some cases, this method may become a permanent trait of character or a form of emotional disturbances. The same reason generates chronic muscle tensions [blocks] and various psychosomatic symptoms.

To describe our conception of a psychological problem structure more brightly we can use the following metaphor. In India, they catch monkeys in the following way: hollow out a pumpkin, put some bait inside and leave a small hole, the monkey puts its paw through the hole, grabs the bait, but can’t pull its little fist out because it is bigger than the hole. The hunter comes and catches it easily because it can’t guess to unclench its fist.

People do the same. In their imagination, they have already got the bait and sometimes with the other hand they hold the barrier, and, well, they are caught! Every time you should think what “paw” the client must unclench. At times, there may be quite many such “paws”, but the initial problem is still only one. When it is solved all the rest happens by itself, because “the monkey” is free. The conclusion is: the basis of psychological health is inner freedom. A young man liberated from the unrequited or unfortunate love may say the words of a merry song: “If you bride goes to another man, we don’t know who will be happy in the end!” It means that he unclenched his “paw”. And the one who failed to do it may fall into depression or aggression as in that drama: “Then no one will have you!”

But this is not the only model, there are five main initial problem situations [see further], at present no other variants have been discovered. All complicated problems which seem to have many symptoms and causes in fact go back to one initial conflict, one of five possible cases.

So the initial psychological problem can be presented in one if the five schemes given below [see Fig. 2]. On all schemes the circle means some object desired or rejected by the individual, vertical rectangle is the barrier and the arrow – either the desire of the individual or negative pressure from the object on the subject [which may be called a negative desire of the subject].

The schemes given in Figure 2 show the possible types of the initial problem structure:

A. the feeling is aimed at reaching the aim, the aim and the barrier may be real or imagined, the aim may be really or illusively unreachable, or it may be forbidden;

B. the feeling is aimed at saving from undesirable object, the object may be both real and imagined, it may also be external in relation to the object [for example, an aggressor] or internal [for example, some unpleasant memories; simultaneously with repulsion the object be attracted by an unconscious feeling [“an invisible paw”];

C. the subject has ambivalent feelings about the same object, here is no barrier but the subject has contradictory feelings of repulsion and attraction;

D. two feelings of the same strength are experienced towards incompatible objects [the problem of choice];

E. the subject seeks to get rid of an undesirable object, but he can do it only in contact with another undesirable object [the choice between the two evils].

Fig.2

In all the above given cases we used the word “object” and the object can be not only some thing or another person but some activity, situation, moral assessment, emotional state and so on, which are desirable or on the contrary unacceptable to the subject.

These schemes reflect only initial [primary] problem structure. Further on the problem develops and grows, generating numerous symptoms, creating new difficulties, revealing themselves in different spheres of the person’s life.

Let us give some examples of frequently occurring [but not all possible] problems that we will classify according to their inner structure.

The following psychological problems have type one structure [Fig. 2a]

2. grief, bereavement, unfortunate love and so on.;

3. the desire to change the past, to correct what is impossible to correct, to return “last year’s snow”;

4. morally prohibited sexual, aggressive and other desires;

5.the desire to change other people according to your own standards which is impossible;

6.idealistic, fantastic, exaggerated desires.

Other variants are possible.

The following psychological problems have the structure of the second type:

1. the desire to get rid of the undesirable influence of the environment or other people, who are impossible to get rid of or there is a psychological prohibition to do it;

2. obsessive fears, fixed ideas, obsessive actions and the struggle with them;

3. guilt feelings for something done, suicidal tendencies, anxiety about some past shame, disgrace etcetera;

4. post-tress experience [as a result of an attack, catastrophe, terrorist act, rape etcetera;

5. the desire to get rid of some shortcomings in accordance with some unrealized principles or standards;

6. the struggle with one’s own dependence of various types [emotional, alcohol, narcotic and so on] In other words the second type problem may be based on the first type problem formed before;

7. the denial of oneself.

Other variants are also possible.

In a particular case the second type problem may lead to a vicious circle when the struggle with a symptom or persistent desire strengthens the symptom which gives rise to another round of struggle, etcetera. This circle model was described by L [68] before. This is how some phobias or obtrusiveness, panic attacks can be formed.

Scheme three [Fic. 2c] reflects the problem of ambivalence [that is the simultaneous attraction to the object and its rejection]:

1. love to the hated, despised and repulsive object;

2. the desire to get success, to reach the aim and the fear of success;

3. gratitude and humiliation, admiration and envy, joy and grief, pleasure and fear at the same time and so on;

4. the desire to do and not to do something, to say and not to say, to express feelings and to hide them etcetera;

5. the desire to win over the opponent and the fear of him;

6. the desire for some risk, for suicide, and at the same time unwillingness.

And others…

Scheme four [Fig. 2d] corresponds to the problem of choice:

1. the desire to have two incompatible variants at the same time not to lose either;

2. the choice between the two equally desirable variants;

3. the person’s immaturity his inability to make a choice and take the responsibility, the fear to make a mistake, indecisiveness;

4. a risky choice, determining the fate, winning or losing;

5. constant rushing from one variant to another, hesitation between hope and despair etcetera;

And others…

Scheme five [Fig. 2e] corresponds to the situation when there is no choice, when all variants are bad. For example, life situation is unbearable, so unbearable that you want to escape from it, but if you do it the situation will be still worse. This corresponds to Joe Biden’s model of double clamp [26]:

1. the subject lives with an unbearable person, for example, with a home tyrant, a psychopath, or a criminal but is dependent on him;

2. social disadaptation that leads to autism or a bum’s way of life;

3. moral choice between crime and death and so on;

4. the loss of prestige, bankruptcy, another event that has led to subjectively an unbearable situation, but any way out threatens even greater losses;

5. the choice between suicide and disgrace, giving way to violence and deathly risk and so on;

6. the choice between the husband who is not loved and a beloved person with whom it is impossible to live together for financial reasons etcetera.

And others…

In every case the task of psychotherapy is to help the client to change himself and not to help him change the surrounding reality, to solve the problem resorting to subjective, inner but not outer changes. Certainly, in every individual case it will be necessary to decide what kind of change will be most adequate, will mostly correspond to ecology of the person’s life, what emotional fixation must be removed. For example, if a person is suffering because he takes his loss too hard, then it is necessary to help him say “farewell”, to his loss however difficult it may be. But if he is suffering because he can’t get happiness because he is convinced in his alleged inferiority [and in this case, it is a barrier], then it is necessary to deliver him from the feeling of inferiority. Fear that prevents a young man to tell his girlfriend about his feelings or pass an exam may also be a barrier. In this case, it is obviously necessary to remove not love to the girl or the wish to study but fear that makes a person a psychological slave.