Case
Studies
Case
Study #1
Alexandra was thirty years old,
active and successful, but worried. She had developed a
number of lumps on her breast. Although several eminent
physicians had diagnosed them as harmless, benign nodules,
she was worried that they were precancerous, and wanted to
know if she could do anything to make them go away.
Alexandra was intensely involved in every aspect of her
life. She worked long hours, traveled frequently in her
work, and kept a busy social schedule as well. She often
felt tense and tired, and wanted less stress in her life,
though she saw that as a problem separate from her breast
lumps.
As part of her consultation, she was asked to relax and
then to let an image of the lumps come to mind. She
imagined them as rocks in a stream, and was upset to see
they were partially obstructing its flow. As she looked
more closely, however, her perception of the rocks changed
dramatically. She noticed that they were very smooth,
shiny, and lustrous, and looked more like pearls than
rocks. Alexandra immediately understood that, like pearls
in an oyster, these lumps had formed in response to
irritation and represented an attempt to protect her from
further harm.
When asked what would need to happen for the pearls to be
able to dissolve, she sensed a need to “remove the source
of irritation.” As a result, she made changes in her
scheduling, her traveling, and her diet, and the lumps in
her breast disappeared within a few months.
By paying attention to her problems in this way, Alexandra
not only learned a valuable lesson in stress management,
but also personally experienced the wisdom of her mind and
body working together to maintain a healthy equilibrium.
Her symptoms got her attention, and her imagery allowed her
to understand both the meaning of her symptoms and what she
needed to do to allow healing to proceed. In her case, the
imagery may not have dissolved her lumps directly, but
showed her what she could do to allow that to happen.
Case Study #2
A 57-year-old executive with recently diagnosed diabetes
mellitus was recalcitrant and not compliant with the
medical regimen for his illness despite good diabetes
education and the urging of his physician, family, and
friends. When asked to allow an image to form of his
disease, he imagined it as a ball and chain around his
ankle. When prompted to express his thoughts and feelings
about it, he replied that he hated it because it was
weighing him down, preventing him from leading a normal
life.
After inducing relaxation, he was asked to express his
feelings toward the image, and then to let it communicate
back to him in a way he could understand. The ball took on
a sad face and said it was sorry, that it didn’t want to
hurt him, but it was exhausted and needed some special
care. He began to feel some empathy for it, and over time,
the ball and chain turned into a small dog on a leash. In
his imagery dialogues, it became a friend to him and
assured him that he would feel better as well if he took
better care of himself.
He realized that this was clearly in his own interest and
as he began taking better care of himself and his ‘little
dog’, he became more physically active, changed his diet,
lost weight and ended up a year later feeling “better than
I have in years!” Interactive imagerysm helped
him to gain a different perspective on his problem, to
access and express his emotions, to find a better way of
relating to his illness, and actually led him to make the
changes that brought about good control of his disease.
While disease remission does not always occur, this type of
imagery experience almost always leads to better
self-understanding and enhanced coping skills for dealing
with a chronic illness or condition.
Case
Study #3
Jeffrey was a successful middle manager in his thirties who
had recurrent peptic ulcers for many years. With the help
of a certified Imagery Guidesm, he learned to
relax and use simple visualization to give himself
temporary relief from his stomach pain. He pictured the
pain as a fire in his stomach and would then imagine an
ice-cold mountain stream extinguishing the fire and cooling
the scorched area beneath it.
He was surprised and pleased to find that relaxing and
imagining this process for a few minutes would relieve his
pain for several hours to a day at a time, and he used it
successfully for about two weeks. Then it stopped working.
His pain grew worse in spite of his visualizations, and he
began to despair. In his next session, he was asked to
focus once more on the pain and allow an image to arise to
help him understand why the pain returned. He soon became
aware of an image of a hand pinching the inside of his
stomach.
At the guide's suggestion, he mentally asked the hand if it
would tell him why it was pinching him, and it changed into
an arm shaking a clenched fist. He asked the arm why it was
angry, and it replied, “Because there’s a part of you
locked away where no one can see it, and it’s getting badly
hurt.”
He was then asked to form an image of the part that was
locked away, and he saw a transparent sack that contained a
“chaotic whirling of things inside - nothing is clear,
everything is zooming around, bumping into everything
else.” All he could make out were colors and shapes and a
sense of discomfort. After observing them for awhile, he
quietly said, “My heart is in there, and it’s getting
bumped and bruised by all these things.”
Jeffrey was then asked to imagine opening the bag, but as
he began, he became afraid and said there was too much pain
there to let out all at once. The guide asked him to let
just one thing out of the bag and then let an image form
for it. He imagined his father’s face and recalled a number
of painful childhood interactions with his father, who was
quite emotionally abusive.
Over a series of sessions, he began to come to terms with
the feelings he had locked away about this and started to
feel much better emotionally and physically. In this way,
he not only obtained relief from his ulcer pain, but also
learned a method to better express and respond to his own
emotional needs.
Case
Study #4
Alice was a woman in her forties who had recently undergone
surgery and radiation to treat a breast cancer tumor
discovered several months earlier. She was an intelligent,
composed woman who felt that imagery and visualization had
already been enormously beneficial in helping her to
tolerate her treatment and recover from her cancer.
However, she continued to be bothered by a persistent pain
between her shoulder blades. Repeated examinations and
X-rays by her cancer specialists had failed to identify any
physical cause of her pain. She wanted to understand why it
was there, and what she needed to do for it to go away.
Her Interactive Imagery Guidesm then used an
imagery technique that allowed her to dialogue with an
imaginary wisdom figure called an Inner Advisor. Alice
relaxed and imagined herself on a beautiful beach at the
base of a high cliff. She asked for an image of her Inner
Advisor to appear and imagined a man who looked like Merlin
the Magician tending a fire. After greeting him, she asked
him about her back pain.
After a few seconds of silence, she broke into tears. She
said her advisor told her that she needed to ask for help,
and that’s what brought on the tears. She had been strong
and courageous throughout the entire cancer ordeal, calming
and reassuring to her husband and family.
She always went for checkups and treatments alone, though
it frightened her, because she felt her husband and kids
would be frightened if she asked them for help or company.
Though she was often aware of her own doubts, fears, and
concerns about her illness and its treatments, she had
never allowed herself to express them in an attempt to
spare her loved ones from the anxiety it might produce.
Alice told her Inner Advisor her concerns about her family
being scared if she asked for help. Her Advisor answered,
“They are already scared. They will feel better if they are
included in your trials and have an opportunity to be
supportive and show their love for you.” She realized at
once that this was true.
She then imagined asking her husband John for help. She
laughed, as in her mind’s eye, she saw him taking out his
appointment book and thumbing through it. She asked him
(still in imagery), “Do you have time?” and he looked at
her over his half-glasses and said, “We’ll make time.”
When she came out of the imagery experience, her pain was
substantially relieved, with “just enough left to remind me
that I actually need to talk with John about this in real
life.”
Case
Study #5
Jason was a twenty-four-year-old actor with asthma since
childhood. He was quite adept at imagery and found that
deep relaxation and visualizing his bronchial tubes opening
widely could help him breathe more easily with less
medication. He was pleased to find he had this ability and
used it successfully for almost a year.
Then he stopped doing it regularly, and his asthma grew
gradually worse until he came in one day wheezing audibly.
He said that he had met a woman he was spending a lot of
time with and "didn’t have the time to do imagery." He was
invited to relax and ask if there was any part of him that
was standing in the way of using his mind to help himself
feel better. An image of a small, somewhat agitated dwarf
dressed like a Roman soldier came into his mind. The
dwarf’s name was Romeo who said he was “on guard,” that the
“roads were closed until further orders,” that he was
“protecting the kingdom within,” and that he had his job
ever since he could remember.
Jason felt strongly that the roads were symbolic both of
his bronchial tubes and the “road to my heart.” On further
exploration with the dwarf Romeo, Jason began to see that
while sometimes bringing him sympathy as a child, his
asthma really served to cut him off from intimate
relationships in his life. He recalled several flare-ups
associated with budding romances, and the embarrassment it
had brought him, yet he also felt that at some level it was
trying to protect him from heartache.
The direction of Jason’s work now started to focus on how
Romeo could protect him from emotional pain while allowing
interchange along the “roads” that led inside. Jason
imagined an elaborate series of checkpoints as various
distances from the center of the “kingdom,” which showed
itself as an image of a heart. He experimented with
allowing images of different people to reach different
checkpoints, and noticed how that felt.
He issued imaginary “passes” and “security clearances” for
people, and found that rather than being unconsciously
“closed up tight,” he was able to become more intimate with
some people. He started to use his remaining asthmatic
reactions as signs of the need to pay attention to his
feelings, and over time found them a valuable guide to
developing healthier relationships.
Jason found his “resistance” to be a loyal ally, trying to
do a necessary job with inadequate training and support. As
he realized the important function of this resistance, he
was able to help carry out its function more effectively,
and found it to be an important part of his movement toward
greater wholeness and healing.