Meeting at the precipice: Creative visualization in the treatment of trauma

ABSTRACT

This paper illustrates the integration of guided visualization, drawn from clinical hypnosis, in a self-psychologically informed treatment with a traumatized patient. In providing a hypnotic script, I serve as a witness and felt presence as I accompany the patient as she draws upon her imagination. Images and written reflections engage her capacity to creatively symbolize her childhood trauma with distance and reflective space. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy unlocks state-dependent memories and stimulates new associations and self-compassion. Within a psychodynamic framework, these creative interventions titrate the destabilizing impact of traumatic recall by empowering the patient as an active agent, utilizing her creative resources to create an expanded, healing narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• Trauma recall
• clinical hypnosis
• companioning
• creative visualization
• EMDR therapy
• felt presence

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Bradley Jones, Kristin Long, Sarah Mendelsohn, Suzi Naiburg, and Judith Rustin for their thoughtful editorial input.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heather Ferguson

Heather Ferguson, LCSW, is faculty and supervisor at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, and faculty at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis Certificate in Trauma Studies, all in NYC. She is a certified hypnotherapist and practitioner of EMDR. She has written about eating disorder treatment, the role of intergenerational transmission of trauma, and the use of embodied techniques to deepen psychotherapeutic engagement. She is co-editor for the Books and Culture section of Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context and maintains a private practice in New York City.