Visualizing as a Healing Tool
By Joanne Kabak
Newsday, Tuesday, July 11, 2000

SEVERAL MONTHS AGO, Nathalie Naude of Huntington said the pain and bleeding of her ulcerative colitis had gotten so bad that she was in the hospital facing surgery to remove her colon or an experimental drug regimen that impairs the immune system.

Rather than choose one of those options, she said, "I was desperate to find another way." She decided to add a visualization technique called eidetics to the standard treatment options. Among the many images she used was a vision of her colon in pain—red, bleeding and hot — and then as a healthy organ, cool and blue.

Now, with both her colon and her immune system intact, Naude, 31, said she's feeling better and eating normally. She continues to take prescribed steroid medications, and she has accelerated her use of techniques like managing her diet and meditating. But she gives special credit to the images that she said helped her become a participant in her own healing. As to how the images make a difference, "it's very difficult to explain," she said. "I just know it works for me."

"Using images for a healthy mind and the body has been part of the arsenal available to therapists at least since the last century, but its validity has not been universally recognized", said Erika Wick, professor of psychology at St. John's University.

"Imagery, if applied the right way, is an extremely powerful tool," said Wick. A clinician and researcher she uses imagery in hypnosis and biofeedback. "I have no proof—no statistical studies—that you can really heal better with imagery." But on a case-by case basis, she said, she has seen credible instances in which people have improved once they began the systematic use of imagery under the guidance of a skilled practitioner.

When it comes to healing the body, it's not that you don't take advantage of medical science.

If a person has a broken bone, he or she needs to go to a doctor to have it fixed, said Jaqueline Lapa Sussman, a psychotherapist and director of the International Imagery Association in Manhattan. The role of imagery is "to work with what the mind does around the injury."

For example, she said, when people are in an accident, the image of where they were injured may live on in their mind, causing them to feel helpless and depressed. Imagery can take them back to the look and feel of the split second before impact, when their energy surged in a survival instinct and their mind and body worked together to prevent injury. By going back to that moment, "we can work with the patient to heal much faster", she said.

In retrieving or creating images with patients, who also come for personal development issues such as getting through a divorce or being successful at work, Sussman follows the method developed by Akhter Ahsen, a Yonkers-based psychologist and leading theoretician in mental imagery.

People have lifelike images stored in the brain, said Sussman, whose book on sexuality and imagery is being published next spring. Tapping into them is like seeing a filmed replay of your life. In particular, imagery work focuses on childhood and the experiences with parents, "the source of your knee-jerk reactions, automatic responses and feelings,"she said.

While visualization and imagery can be a shortcut for working with problems, said Wick, "it takes discipline and willpower"

For Nancy Bent, that meant using images several times a day to deal with the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Bent said she tried the medical options available in the 1980s for treating MS, and she also tried doing nothing. But as her condition deteriorated, she started to use eidetic imagery.

She said she began to see how she had been transferring the different emotional issues of her life into her body. I guess it wore me out. Eventually that manifests itself in illness," she said. Among the things she learned through imagery work was that "the major symptoms in my legs were worsened with certain parental images. And when I had positive parental images, the symptoms were lessened."

Bent said she is now symptom-free and works as an eidetic therapist in Manhasset with MS patients and others interested in using imagery. Bent underwent a three-year training program in eidietic imagery and received a certificate from the International Imagery Association. She is now in the process of studying for a PhD in psychology. "I saw through the images that I still had the strength that I thought I had lost," she said. "And that gave me the hope and the motivation to go on."

Although some people feel they can't create images, Wick said it is often a matter of expectations. Rather than thinking you need to see a flower in enough detail to count its petals, all you really need to do is access vague images or feelings connected to a scene. Doing imagery work "is a capacity we probably have to a much larger extent than we know," said Wick.

"But it's like mathematical ability. If you don't develop it, if there's nobody to train you in it, nothing much is going to happen."

As to its broader clinical applications, Wick said, "it's a field that really deserves powerful research."