Therapy with Integrative Counsel is more than talking. It’s about taking action to better your mental health. For some people, there comes a point in their healing journey where talking doesn’t get them anywhere. Maybe you’ve already dove into your past traumas and relationships, are all talked out, and are craving more. That’s normal! Here are some actions that you can take in therapy:
Action 1: Art Therapy
Art therapy is a great alternative to talk therapy. When you are making art, your brain goes into a relaxed, meditative state, making it easier to get in touch with your intuition and your subconscious mind. The left and the right brain are able to communicate with each other and make connections they otherwise wouldn’t have if you just talked about it.
Additionally, making art helps you step out of thinking mode and into feeling mode. To learn more about how art therapy helps your brain, click here. Because your mind is relaxed and the reward centers are being activated, you feel safe enough to process your emotions and access the wise mind, which is a DBT term that refers to a mixture of the emotional mind and the rational mind. You must draw on both sides of your mind to access the wise mind because both play an important role.
Action 2: EMDR
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a form of therapy that helps people connect with and heal their trauma. Because the brain is actually trying to protect you from these heavy, traumatic memories, it has formed a block around them. This makes it difficult for you to process and heal from your trauma because it’s just being shoved back without you even realizing it. Without treating the mental wound, it just festers and causes suffering. EMDR helps safely bring these difficult memories and feelings to the surface and allows people to safely work through their trauma so that it doesn’t hurt them anymore. Unlike talk therapy, all of the insights that patients gain from EMDR come from within them, which is incredibly empowering.
Action 3: Active Imagination
Active Imagination is a technique that was developed by Carl Jung and it helps bridge the gap between the conscious and the unconscious mind. The most popular and effective way to do this is through dream work. Our dreams are our unconscious mind’s way of communicating with us. Being able to interpret these dreams and figure out what associations the unconscious mind has with different images helps us learn more about ourselves and figure out what exactly our dreams are trying to tell us about ourselves. A great way to start dreamwork is to read Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth by Robert A Johnson. In the first part, he mentions that you should take each separate image of their dream, and list all the associations you have with that image. In doing that, you are allowing the unconscious mind to speak, and are decoding the language it uses to communicate with you.
If you would like to start Art Therapy, EMDR, or Active Imagination, our clinicians can help you! Click here to schedule a consultation.
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Alli Cravener is a social media coordinator and writer who is passionate about connecting people through words. Alli studied English at Arizona State University and has found her niche uniting concept and content in the realm of mental health and the expressive arts. Alli’s interests include painting, history, learning about other people, and wearing the color pink. She likens herself to a “mouse in a palm tree”, and she loves it that way.
