Getting Unstuck. Timothy Butler

opens up into a phrase as we write. It is the first recognition that there is an aspect of our experience we have yet to fully own, yet to put into the language that would allow us to pick it up and know it as a real part of our life. Any real vision that can lead us forward can only be built upon and first experienced through images.

      For Marcy, the image came in a dream.

      I’m walking on a trail through the woods, along the edge of a large lake. I am very tired; I have been walking for a long time. It is autumn and late afternoon; I am alone. I notice that a car is coming slowly down a narrow dirt road through the woods toward me. As it comes closer I see that it is a brand new, brightly shining, cherry-red minivan. It stops near me and I walk over to it. The door opens and I climb into the large front seat on the passenger side and, exhausted, settle back comfortably.

      The driver turns to me. He is my father.

      Once such an image emerges, we struggle to make sense of our new imagination and where it may realistically lead us. The first task is to extract key themes, the “code” of the emerging vision. Next, the emerging images, themes, and dynamic tensions need to be “amplified,” or described in a fully extended way. A new picture develops, sometimes surpassing our ability to find words to describe it. But as we amplify the image, it may reveal aspects of our situation that are conflicted, paradoxical, or disturbing, but which, at the same time, present a fuller picture of our situation and a fuller picture of what needs to be acted upon.

      This amplification may be initiated by a perceptive friend or a professional counselor who probes and challenges our new responses; over time we can ourselves develop the skill to follow images to their wider meaning.

      In Marcy’s dream, the images seemed to be right there, some more important than others. Marcy’s hyperachieving childhood was there in that young hiker’s fatigue and sense of loneliness, that long walk along the edge of those wide waters. But I wanted to know about that cherry-red van.

      “I find my attention drawn to the van.” I said, “Can you see it in your mind’s eye?”

      “Yes.”

      “Look at it, hold your attention there. What is happening?”

      “It is big, very big. I am walking toward it.”

      “How are you feeling?” I inquired softly.

      Marcy was silent.

      “How does its bigness make you feel?” I pressed on.

      “Safe, it makes me feel safe. I am relieved,” she answered, her voice soft.

      “It is big and it is red,” I said, encouraging her to stay with the image. “Just pay attention.”

      Marcy’s eyes began to well up with tears. Here was her father again when she, exhausted and tired of this traveling, needed him. He was big and strong and, even if silent in the driver’s seat, full of a quiet, unstated, but impossible-to-miss love. The image of the dream was presenting a reality for which neither Marcy nor her father yet had words.

      Marcy chose a very direct way to take what she had learned from our work with imagery into her life. Her father was ill and bedridden. During her next visit to him, she told him her dream, and she told him what the dream meant for her. She thanked him for being that big, strong, and warm presence for her, for always being there to come back to from her adventures and travels. His presence, at home and in the background, was a hitherto unacknowledged base from which she could venture out and take the risks that had led to her remarkable achievements.

      These things needed to be understood and spoken. For Marcy, big adventures lay ahead—possibly marriage and a career path that would lead her away from the explorations of her twenties into the commitments of full adulthood. It was now sinking in that there would no longer be a paternal support van following her on these journeys. It would be ever more important that she acknowledge the meaning of her father’s presence, and take the gift of that presence inside herself for help during those times ahead when her hike might again seem tiring or lonely.

      Marcy’s working through of what she needed in order to say goodbye to her father seemed to open up other parts of her life. What she had originally seen as issues involving job choice and a relationship she now saw in the larger context of a leave-taking; she was exiting her young adulthood with its deep roots in the emotional bonds of childhood and adolescence.

      Having grasped the underlying source of her impasse, she was ready to act. She and Henry decided to marry, and they moved to Atlanta where more substantial jobs were available for both.

      Once impasse is understood as a necessary crisis, it is possible to look at such tough times as opportunities to make choices that reclaim meaning in our daily lives. Marcy’s father’s impending death brought her to a point that literally stopped her, though she was not aware of what was happening at the time. But his dying actually brought her to a threshold that she had to move through to grow up and step more deeply into life’s currents.

      Before we take up the work of deepening our imagination, we must look more closely at the impasse experience. A life impasse fulfills a specific purpose in our psychological development. It is a call to return to and integrate aspects of our emotional and psychological being that have been set aside because of competing life circumstances. In the next chapter we see how as an impasse deepens, it brings with it unresolved issues from our past.