Imagination, Creativity, and the Language of the Soul

Caring for the Soul in Counselling:
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​Imagination, Creativity, and the Language of the Soul

​“In soulful therapy, imaginal modes of inquiry—poetic, aesthetic, religious--
are as legitimate as the medical and scientific modes for
​understanding and processing reality.”
- Ottens & Klein

Imagination is amongst the greatest therapeutic tools one can use to engage the soul. This is because imagination is the language of the soul (eg. Moore, 2021; Quillman, 2020). Imagination is how we experience and perceive what exists beyond our rational cognition. We must suspend our disbelief towards our own beyond-rational modes of knowing in order to experience the soul, in order to work with our own intuition. Imagination is the language the unknown uses to call back to the known. It is the bridge between ‘what is’ and what could be. 
 
In counselling, we can care for the soul by inviting the imagination to play an important role in the therapeutic process, both implicitly and explicitly. We can open the counselling space up to imagination by trusting the process and waiting in the unknown. We can use the imaginal as an intervention tool. And we can also engage with imaginal modes of inquiry. All of this can help us explore, nurture, and understand deeper needs that exist beyond our immediate ability to grasp.  

Implicit Imaginal Work
 
Perhaps the most important way imagination works in a soul-focussed therapy is implicit. 
 
This orientation to therapy relies on the imagination of the therapist and the client—this is how the “third space” of the therapy room gets created (Domash, 2020). To engage with the not-yet-known requires imagination, and to create this third space where all the possibilities of the not-yet-known live, requires client and therapist to let our imaginations interact.
 
This third space is a space of possibility—the kind of space poet’s talk about, like Rumi’s “out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field—I’ll meet you there” (Barks, 1997), or John O’Donohue’s (2006) “adjacent field of unrealized possibility” that, in his address to the American Psychological Association, he said was a counsellor’s main job to guide people to.
 
Counselling is a transitional space—a liminal space. It is a space to “turn away from our fixed understandings and reified self-image and enter a transition state full of dynamic possibility. Such is known as a liminal state” (Denham-Vaughan & Edmond, 2010, p. 14). This liminality is “a state of uncertainty and openness which leads us to the threshold of new possibilities, events, lifestyles, or states of mind” (p. 14).
 
This transitional, liminal space is the land of imagination, is only accessed via the imagination, whose job it is to see beyond the already known or already occurring.
 
This is therapeutically beneficial—“entering  this  imaginal space helps the patient see beyond the literal, tolerate paradox and ambiguity and become more flexible and fluid. The imagination can transform” (Domash, 2020, p. 13). “We see imagination at work when clients, for example, are helped to find more choices beyond a rigid worldview, to see hope where once hopelessness reigned, or to find freshness in routine” (Ottens & Klein, 2005, p. 36).
 
And this is the place from which we can open ourselves up to the beyond-rational aspects of our experience, such as the cries of our soul. By waiting in the tension of the unknown and trusting the process we can create space for this to occur—we can attune to this. This is something that develops in a therapeutic relationship. Holding the tension of the unknown for our clients allows us to enter this transitional space together, where the imagination reigns and the soul is nourished (Domash, 2020; Ottens & Klein, 2005).
 
Explicit Imaginal Work
 
We can also engage with the imagination in counselling in a more direct way.
 
Popular imagination-based interventions include imaginal experiencing, an evidence-based intervention that involves imaginal exposure to triggering stimuli (eg. Feary et all, 2022; Zoellner et al, 2023). Here the power of the imagination is utilized to create new associations with previously unendurable material.
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The imagination is also used somatically, by tuning into body sensations and following whatever images, pictures, ideas, feelings show up. Here the embodied imagination is harnessed, which, as discussed here, is one of the ways the soul uses the body to communicate with us (Quillman, 2020).
 
Many therapists already have the imagination in their toolkit with the popular SIFT metaphor, through which we ask clients to explore any Sensations, Images, Feelings, or Thoughts they can discern around a particular issue or stressor (Siegel, 2007).
 
We can also use imaginal modes of inquiry in counselling by engaging our creativity, including music, which can be regarded as medicine for the soul (Mazokopakis, 2020), visual art, which is a form of soul-making that aims to restore sense to the clients inner and outer world (Green, 2020), and poetry.
 
Poetry, in particular, is regarded as an important imagination-based language of the soul. Writing poetry is seen as a process of developing a personal soul-language that reaches deep into our essence as human beings (Lorenz, 2020) deeper than the voices reached through cognition alone (Green, 2020). It’s a process of “diving deep down in the human soul and illuminating the darkest, unfathomable corners of the human psyche” (Sharma, 2020, p. 3), and is seen to have a “self-healing mechanism similar to the body’s ability to heal wounds” (Lorenz, 2020, p. 3). Ultimately, writing poetry involves exploring and experiencing the self through a creative and imaginative lens—a way of relating to the self that the soul craves (Moore, 2021).
 
Jungian therapy also uses myth to explore the human soul. This is because myth is story, and all life is story—utilizing myth in the therapy room places the personal story in the realm of legend, makes the personal story larger than itself, more purposeful (Moore, 2021). Through this lens, the personal story takes its place in myth—it’s not just you facing this, these are the trials all humans have faced through all time (Moore, 2021).
 
To engage with the soul, counsellors can directly invite the imagination into the therapy session, encourage creative exploration by clients in their own time, or use the imagination implicitly by waiting on the not-yet-known. The soul, as a felt-sense beyond (or below) our rational cognition, requires the imagination to be able to speak to us, to speak through what we already think we know, to guide us to that adjacent field of unrealized possibility.

References

Barks, C. (1997). The essential Rumi. Castle Books.

Denham-Vaughn, J. & Edmond, V. (2010). The value of silence. Gestalt Journal of Australia and New Zealand, 6(2), 5-19. 

Domash L. (2020). Imagination, creativity and spirituality in psychotherapy: Welcome to wonderland. Routledge.

Feary N, Brand R, Williams A, Thomas N. (2022). 'Like jumping off a ledge into the water': A qualitative study of trauma-focussed imaginal exposure for hearing voices. Psychol Psychother, 95(1), 277-294. doi: 10.1111/papt.12372.
 
Green, D. (2020). Mortification meanderings: Contemplating “vulnerability with purpose” in arts therapy education. Arts in Psychotherapy, 68, N.PAG.
 
Lorenz, D. (2020). My unique poem is me: our poems are universal. A creative interactive poetry Therapy inquiry. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 33(4), 252–264.
 
Mazokopakis, E. E. (2020). Music as a medicine for the soul in Bible and Christian patristic tradition. Journal of Religion & Health, 59(3), 1217–1219.
 
Moore, T. (2021). Soul therapy. HarperCollins.

O’Donohue, J. (2006). The therapist’s task. Psychology Networker. Symposium presented at Psychology Networker Symposium, Washington, DC.

Ottens, A. J., & Klein, J. F. (2005). Common factors: Where the soul of counseling and psychotherapy resides. Journal of Humanistic Counseling, Education & Development, 44(1), 32–45.
 
Quillman, T. (2020). Neuroscience and the therapist’s love for the patient: Intersubjective space, the embodied imagination, and transformation. Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, 22(1), 1–29.
 
Sharma, D. (2020). Writing poems: a waste of time or a savior of life – an autoethnographic exploration. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 33(3), 164–178.
 
Siegel, D. (2007). The mindful brain. Norton.
 
Zoellner, L. A., Lehinger, E. A., Rosencrans, P. L., Cornell-Maier, S. M., Foa, E. B., Telch, M. J., Gonzalez-Lima, F., & Bedard-Gilligan, M. A. (2023). Brief imaginal exposure for PTSD: Trajectories of change in distress. Cognitive and Behavioural Practice, 30(3), 341–353.