Using Guided Imagery for Emotional Clearing
(This article originally appeared in print under the title "Using Guided Imagery for Positive Change" in the April/May/June 2008 issue of "Open Exchange Magazine" under the title “Using Fantasy for Positive Change in Hypnotherapy”)
Our lives are full of fantasy. We live in a perpetual daydream. The great spiritual teachers all seem to agree that if we could live in the present and give up illusion, we would be enlightened and filled with joy. The question arises: might be use the human talent to fantasize and daydream to be happier? Might we be able to use our imaginations to change the way we feel, process the past, and face the future?
This is exactly what we do in hypnotherapy. Guided fantasy, also known as guided imagery, is used to process past trauma and to reframe destructive thoughts and feelings about the self that may have resulted from the trauma. It is also used to change habits of projecting negatively into the future. Let me give an example from a case history.
A law school graduate named Linda (the name has been changed) comes to see me because she is dreading the upcoming bar exam so intensely that she can no longer study for it. Instances of this kind of paralysis have become more frequent and intense as she has proceeded in her professional training. She tells me that she comes from a working-class immigrant family which exerted huge pressures on her to excel in all arenas and to represent her family and ethnic group positively. I lead her into hypnosis and we do what is called a regression–I ask her to go back in time to a moment when she first experienced anxiety similar to her exam phobia. She recalls having to play the violin at a school talent show when she was eight years old. Because she was a shy and self-conscious child, going up to the stage before a large crowd was torture. To make matters worse, her parents rebuked her severely afterward for playing a few notes incorrectly. Ever since then, she has dreaded any kind of exam or public speaking in which her performance would be judged.
In hypnosis we have the opportunity to rewrite this kind of painful memory. We cannot change or erase trauma, humiliation, failure–but we can imagine an alternate, healing outcome. In this case, I ask my client–for people can speak while in a state of hypnosis–what she needs to turn this traumatic experience into a positive one. She says she wants to leave the school and go outside and sit in the playground. In her fantasy, she sees herself leaving the stage and going out to play for a while on the grass. There she experiences a deep state of relaxation. A beloved grandmother appears, and Linda imagines them going back into the school auditorium together. She sees herself playing the violin confidently with her grandmother standing next to her. She makes the same small mistakes but this time her grandmother praises her for her hard work and accomplishment.
Of course, the fantasy doesn’t change what happened–Linda still had an experience she found unbearably anxiety-producing. The way the hypnotic process works is by inserting into the client’s emotional field an alternate experience—in this case, one in which performance is linked to feelings of relaxation and support. When triggered by a challenge, Linda’s subconscious will in the future have a place to go beside the traumatic incident in church; instead, it can remember her experience of relaxing in the courtyard, then playing confidently with her grandmother by her side. The fantasy drains the emotional charge from a negative memory by supplying a healing fantasy alongside it.
What makes this process so powerful is that the client herself, guided and supported by the therapist, supplies a “corrective fantasy” that is the exact remedy for whatever ails her. Used in this way during a regression, fantasy can activate aspects of the personality that were thwarted in childhood. The mind, at the deep level of the subconscious, gets to experience confidence, support, unconditional love–in short, whatever was missing from the original situation.
Linda and I continued to use guided visualizations to prepare her for her upcoming exam. Like most anxiety, Linda’s was based on negative fantasies about what might happen–that she might fail, freeze, forget everything she had learned, and be humiliated. We worked on providing her with alternate projections for both the test itself and its outcome. She saw herself going to the exam wearing a protective bee-keeper’s jumpsuit that would give her the privacy she needed to concentrate and shield her from subsequent judgment if she failed. Because of the competitive nature of the bar exam, she did need to prepare herself for possibly failing and needing to retake it. We worked on increasing her self-esteem and helping her both to understand and feel that her self-worth was not connected to the outcome of the exam. Over a series of sessions she developed the image of the jumpsuit, adding pockets that contained a photograph of her supportive grandmother, positive messages and talismans. She regained her concentration, was able to study for her exam again and went into her exam with an excellent attitude.