San Diego Therapist Blog: Regina Huelsenbeck, PhD

Have you ever heard that the psyche speaks another language? Psyche's language consists of images, symbols, music, and poetry. For this reason, many psychoanalysts encourage their clients to draw and paint. The active use of this imaginal muscle gets things to shift inside, often shifting things which have been stuck for a very long time. For this same reason people are encouraged to pay attention to dream images. Dream images are theorized to be important and decodable messages from the unconscious--- they are spoken in psyche's imaginative symbolic language...

"What we call a symbol is a term, a name, or an image which in itself may be familiar to us, but its connotations, use, and application are specific or peculiar and hint at a hidden, vague, or unknown meaning...A term or image is symbolic when it means more than it denotes or expresses" ~Carl Jung  

Symbolic language and images point beyond themselves.

These elements (images, poetic and symbolic language) have the power to shift us from the inside out. Sometimes, actually often times, the shift takes place without conscious comprehension/understanding of what has taken place, just like poetry.

"Love after Love"  by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome.

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

~Derek Walcott
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Feast on your life",

Regina

After surviving or while living with a life threatening illness such as cancer, people often feel estranged from life. Individuals may feel detached from work, friends, colleagues, family members and even alienated from themselves. 

This disconnected feeling is normal. Cancer is a traumatic experience: one which stirs questions about some of the most foundational elements of life: things that most of us take for granted: namely one's body, life purpose and continued existence.

How can we re-connect? How can we come back to life? How can we feel connected to things and others again?

The first step begins with reconnecting to yourself. Believe it or not, almost everything we experience in relationship to others is fundamentally nurtured by the relationship we hold with ourself. Cancer causes us to question who we are. The cancer experience calls our identity into question- who we thought we were may not actually be.

A simple way to strengthen the connection and intimacy with yourself is through telling your story. Buy a journal and begin at the beginning. Begin to write down the bones of your story-- and do not leave one little thing out- this is for you. Scribble onto the paper, write with abandon, without censor, tell your journal everything. Allow the paper to feel what you truly experienced. 

When you are done writing down your cancer story, you can continue with this tool and use it to befriend yourself each day, for the rest of your life story. In essence, you are beginning to befriend yourself, get to know yourself and discover who you are.

Connecting back into life and with others will be less of an ordeal when you know more deeply who you are.

Warmly,

Regina

 CHECK OUT THIS BOOK: "Writing down the Bones" by Natalie Goldberg