Once a student I didn’t know came to me and said: “I treated my boyfriend using your method, he had a stomach-ache. His stomach-ache passed but his back started aching. How could it happen?”
– Tell me – I asked – what were the images?
– I don’t remember…
– And what methods of impact did you use?
– I don’t know…
– What problem did you reveal?
– [the look of not understanding] None…
– How can I tell you what you have done and why it happened? You should study first and only after that use the method…
It is not sufficient just to know EIT, our therapeutic work corresponds to all the requirements of any psychotherapeutic work. We face the same difficulties that all others face – resistance, transferring, projection, lack of trust, mental rigidity, prejudices etc. To be able to work in the line of EIT one must have at least basic knowledge of psychoanalysis, analytical psychology of Carl Jung, individual psychology of Alfred Adler, transactional analysis of Eric Berne, body therapy theory of Wilhelm Reich, gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls, etc.
It is impossible to apply the method mechanically, as a set of technical tools. It is necessary to treat a client with empathy, model his problem on yourself, solve it as if it were yours, and only after that solve it for the client. It is necessary to get the client’s experience, solve your own problems in this way. It is necessary to have well thought over life philosophy, to have an open heart and to be able to clearly formulate moral principles.
Any form of psychotherapy is a subtle intellectual, emotional and spiritual activity. It is an elitist profession, but the demand for such professionals is great. The number and quality of such specialists should grow. I hope that my experience and many tangible successes in EIT may help to reach this goal.
Introduction
Psychotherapy is treatment of soul and treatment by soul. This is what the famous Carl Jung said. But this brilliant definition is not sufficient to understand what a psychotherapist does. In our country, a psychotherapist is perceived either as a doctor writing out prescriptions or as a hypnotist filling his patients with what is necessary.
In contemporary terms psychology is a scientific and practical branch of psychology meant to help a suffering person solve his or her psychological problems in the course of specially organized professional communication. Some forms of psychotherapy, for instance, art therapy or body therapy don’t fully match this definition, but the basis of psychotherapy is invariably a conversation, a dialogue. Psychotherapy is conducted either individually or in a group. Most of the clients of a psychotherapist are mentally healthy.
Psychotherapeutic conversation is professional not just because it is conducted according to definite rules, but also because in the course of the conversation the doctor uses the great volume of his professional knowledge and methods aimed at helping the individual to solve his or her own problem. Those are analytical methods meant to discover true reasons of psychological problems. Or they may be teaching methods, meant to work out skills and abilities that could help deal with a problem situation. Or they may be methods encouraging the client to work on himself or herself. Or creating model methods which helps create a, so to speak, “laboratory” model of the problem in order to solve it. Or development methods, helping develop the client’s personality, to uplift it, if we may say so, so that as a result he or she could easily solve the problem himself. Or transformation methods, helping change emotions, behavior or way of thinking of the individual. And other methods…
Somehow or other, psychology can fulfill only two interconnected tasks – to help a client in self-knowledge and to help him in self-change. It cannot and must not fulfill any other tasks. A psychologist or a psychotherapist are only conductors or “stalkers” helping the individual travel around his/her own inner world. The main work is done by the one who came to get some help, and without his work on himself nothing can be done. Rare exceptions only prove the rule.
From that come important consequences. If the client thinks that his problem is caused not by himself but some outside forces, then we can’t help him. In other words, if a client thinks that he can’t control himself, can’t cognize himself and change his behavior, way of thinking, emotions and character then psychological therapy can’t be provided to him. In this case, he considers himself to be a victim of some independent from him outer forces so he can’t change anything.
If he believes that his problem is connected with malfunctioning of his brain, he should turn to psychoneurologists or psychiatrists. If he thinks that his problem is connected with some telepathic influence on him by aliens, the use against him of some psychotropic weapon, influence on him of an inner voice, which orders him to this or that, the influence of his neighbors who pull out his thoughts from his head, he should turn to above mentioned professionals. If he thinks that an evil curse was put on him, that he was bewitched or that an evil spirit got into him, he should go to a person with extrasensory perception, to church or to psychiatrists. If he believes that his problem is connected with some wrong or illegal actions of some people, he should go to the police, to a lower or city administration etc. If he thinks that his problem is caused by the lack of money, he must learn to earn it. And if he thinks that to resolve all his problems he must become the president, change all men [or all women], better the country, all people, the world, morality, in this case he should go to Father Frost, Gold Fish, God or well-known Pike.
If the client doesn’t understand that his problem is rooted in his own self, psychotherapist can’t help him. Psychotherapist will, anyway, try to patiently explain to the client what the problem is, but if the client doesn’t agree to take the responsibility for his problems, the work will fail.
Therapy through emotions and images is not outside the specter of psychotherapeutic directions, it is not magic or panacea from all diseases, it addresses inner forces of the person himself seeking to remove all barriers on the way of harmonization of inner psychic forces and programs. These aims are reached by impacting emotional states of the client through the work with inner that is imaginative images of those very states. The main methods are models, analysis and transformation. Transformation is made by the client himself, in the same way as he himself creates images of his states. The doctor helps him do it, revealing those emotional states which are clue elements for resolving the problems. He also helps produce images, analyze them, he gives his interpretation of the images, offers some ways how to influence them. He helps continue the process of transformation to ultimate completion, controls ecological purity of the result and fixing it in real life.
Different therapy directions work with images; they are first and foremost gestalt therapy and symbol drama. But it was Sigmund Freud who interpreted images in dreams [20], and Carl Jung applied the method of active imagination [21,22]. NLP, art-therapy and many other directions up to behavior therapy also use images [23,24]. Nevertheless, we claim that we have invented something new in this field. There is something similar in all directions of psychotherapy. They have more in common then different. But it is little things, small “details” that make up the style of each method, and the style determines how effective the method is for certain tasks, how easy it is for the doctor, and how simple and understandable it is for the client.
Therapy through emotions and defined as a new our country’s method [modality] of psychodynamic direction in psychotherapy.
We should recognize balanced combination of analytical research and corrective impact in one process of working with images of emotional states [“two in one”, so to speak] as a specific trait of EIT. Another characteristic trait of EIT is that the result is most often achieved there and now, at the same second when an adequate means curing the inner emotional conflict is used. It is determined by the fact that EIT is a causal psychotherapy that is it as aimed