Emotion-Image Therapy. Analysis and Implementation. Nikolay Linde

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