Atlantis Improves Your Skills As A Healer

Imagery is much more than a valuable self-help tool. It is a tool that helps you build trust with your patients. It is a tool that is useful in every aspect of psychotherapy with the exception of treating acutely psychotic patients. It is a tool that improves the quality of life in the medically ill. And as you will soon read, imagery is a tool that allows one to directly alter physiology in ways that speed recovery.

How does imagery assist in psychotherapy? Let's say you want to help your patient or client improve his relationship with another person. When your patient uses imagery, the other person in question "comes alive" to your patient. With imagery your patient is able to see, hear, touch, and talk to the other person directly. Talking about a relationship is frequently just intellectual and not experiential . . . and not practical.

Remember the lemon exercise? It is much more powerful to visualize a lemon than to merely talk about it. The same holds true when you are working on a relationship - either in the course of psychotherapy or in your own personal growth. Using imagery will take you much further and in a shorter period of time than will words alone. Words, unfortunately, frequently take us around an issue. Sometimes they lead us to the issue. But, as you know, powerful experiences go beyond words. Images belong to the world of experience.

In reality, your patients are already using imagery without knowing it most of the time. Sometimes their imagery helps them and sometimes it works against them. Negative self-images, for example, work against your patient. The deliberate use of imagery allows your patients to have imagery work for them. But don't be fooled into thinking the science of imagery is just about learning to have a good self-image. The deliberate use of imagery is a quantum leap ahead of just having a good self-image . . . and it is several quantum leaps ahead of positive thinking.