Images versus words

[vaneramos]

We think in different ways, sometimes verbally and sometimes visually. This may cause confusion if you try to address dysfunctional thinking. Cognitive-behavioural therapy widely employs thought records to analyse causes of anxiety and depression, and to alter mistaken beliefs. This misses the mark with visual thinking.

The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook by Edmund J. Bourne, Ph.D., describes thought records and their application. Understanding thought records for social anxiety on About.com also outlines their use, and you can find a PDF file sample online. On several occasions I have encountered group and individual therapists recommending their use. The same short courses and sessions omitted any discussion of visualization.

Bourne does not. His chapter on visualization begins thus: "Imagery is one of the most basic ways in which your mind stores and represents information."

While I have found thought records occasionally useful, sometimes social anxiety defies efforts to verbalize it. This became vividly evident to me yesterday while driving home. I kept worrying about an incident that happened at work. I attempted to apply the thought record process, but it failed because the memory consisted not of words. It involved a series of images in which I kept replaying someone's facial expressions and body language, and my emotional response to them. Sometimes we describe dysfunctional thoughts as broken tape recordings, but this was a video loop.

David Abram prepared me for this insight. His book Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology preaches the importance of meshing our linguistic intelligence with sensual perception. He is fond of pointing out how our society prefers to separate rational analysis from sensory experience.

Meanwhile I have noticed how hard it can be to recall and record dreams because they consist primarily of visual narratives. Such was the case with the waking dream I recorded here a few days ago. I experienced it as written text on the page, however it evoked elaborate imagery. The events of my dreams usually play against an architecture incredibly baroque. It feels essential to the meaning and yet often gets omitted in transcription because I can't describe it. How would you interpret something I attempted to describe as a series of "tiny rooms, or medallions or puddings"?

Stephanie Dowrick, my favourite self-therapy writer, relies largely on guided meditations involving visualization. Perhaps I should revisit her Intimacy and Solitude and delve into Bourne's chapter, so far unread. I suspect this mode of work might prove more effective—and enjoyable—than thought records.

Comments

[bellakara.livejournal.com]

Interesting looking book (The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook) but I agree that the visual and sensory are so important that to focus on more obvious thoughts means missing some important cues and clues about phobias and anxieties.

I love the idea of a baroque architectural location for dreams. I used to record my dreams on a daily basis and it really trains the mind to remember. Sadly it was a long time ago. It was an interesting exercise and I ought to do it again.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Me too. In my teens I kept a dream journal for a while, and from time to time I have tried to resume it. It can be quite time consuming because a small snippet of dream may require extensive description. It's an investment, but I always find it worthwhile.

[artricia.livejournal.com]

My witchcraft tradition speaks of three souls/parts of the self. One is more sensory and more closely connected to the body. Another is more social, associated with communication, language, logic. The last is what most people would usually call a soul -- the part of us connected to something greater. Most of the witchcraft work I know of -- and most of the religious or ritual work I know of addresses the sensory soul: it works through images and sensory associations to connect the self to something greater.

Abrams talks, in Spell of the Sensuous speaks of our rationality as being used to separate us from the world, and our sensuous selves as connecting us to the world, and this is largely how the witchcraft tradition I'm in sees it: the sensuous self is more naturally connected to the god self, and working with it is powerful partly for that reason.

As far as all that goes, it doesn't really require a religious belief, just a belief in different parts of the self, the larger world, and a sense of how they link up. The animal self is powerful -- a powerful generator of anxiety or calmness, of connection or disconnection. It's one of the ways that religion can sometimes fill in for gaps in therapy.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Abrams talks, in Spell of the Sensuous speaks of our rationality as being used to separate us from the world

I've heard an argument like this before —in fact, I lived by it—and now it irks me. Whenever something in the Bible didn't make sense, we reminded ourselves that the ways of God are unsearchable and we should accept these paradoxes as part of our faith, as the old hymn goes:

Trust and obey, for there's no other way
To be happy in Jesus, than to trust and obey.

My poor daughters had to grow up singing that thing in private school, and how they hate it! It was manipulative, and they knew it.

I am not primarily a rational person. I'm a Meyers-Briggs INFP. My primary function is introverted judgment based on feelings, and secondary is extroverted intuitive perception. Sensing and thinking are less prominent. Theoretically, I don't care so much about being right; but I don't want to feel badly. Maybe that is why I was able to spend so many years repressing rational questions about things that didn't make sense. I was wrong to do so, and people exploited my willingness.

So now I bristle when a pedagogue casts doubt on scientific thought. He opens a Pandora's box of irrational judgments.

My credo is: I believe in metaphor. It allows inspiration and awe to move me around the centripetal gravity of what is real. Abram casts aspersion on what seems to me the centre of truth, and seeks to unhitch the ecstatic momentum.

[artricia.livejournal.com]

So the difference for me is that I'm trusting what I sense rather than what someone else tells me to believe. It's done while honoring the rational, not overriding it. I find overriding one's rational assessment abominable.

I do think there are places where the rational sense is not the best one to use -- that there are other senses that are more appropriate, and a lot of the work I've done in the last several years has been towards developing those senses and making room for them. But in no way do I think it good to go against one's sense of what is, what is right, what is good -- whether that sense is rational or non-rational (not irrational, just non-rational, outside the purview of rationality, the way dreams are for instance).

That's all FWIW, of course. I've been thinking about having commented at all here, and while I'm fascinated at how closely your path resonates with mine in many ways and diverges in that one key area, I am not sure I need to be commenting on it. Perhaps the best response is listening and acknowledging and appreciating -- and I do appreciate you as you are. I think you are dead right to credit the rational, and if it does not get in the way of your full experience of the world -- if it is a key to your more fully experiencing the world -- then that is, if you'll pardon the phrase, a blessing.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

No, you should have commented! I mean, I felt some difficult emotions in response. You are challenging me on some of the same points Abram does, and I won't pretend to be completely comfortable about it. Did I forget to mention I'm fascinated with your chosen path? (Just listen to me INFPing!) My previous comment didn't address half of what you said. I just pulled out a thread that I could respond to, and it made me think and find a way to express something essential for me, i.e. the relationship between metaphor and truth. So your feedback is helpful. I don't expect it, but I appreciate it.

Gotta run for me volunteer shift.