Speaker 1 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctor's wig show, where I show you how bad states of mind and difficult life issues aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it.
Speaker 1 00:00:27 Hey, people greetings. How are you? I hope you and your significant others, friends, family followers, and all manner of loves are doing well. I'm hibernating in my music studio, like a bear and a cave I've been spending recent days alternating between writing songs and writing psychology essays in the past. Music and psychology felt like two totally different things for me. And I couldn't do them so closely together, but over time they became one. And the same thing for me, just two different ways of bringing out the deeper, hidden parts of the psyche today's topic is relationships. We're always in relationship with something. Even if it's just with ourselves. I wanna expand on what we did in episode 52, how to use visualization to work on a relationship conflict in the exercise. Two people sit together silently and meditate on how they feel with each other.
Speaker 1 00:01:40 Then they make inner images in their minds of what they feel and share these images as unfolding stories or movies. The exercise closes with a respectful discussion about the implications of each other's visualizations for the relationship using visualization to work on a relationship or in any situation is a powerful method. Folks often use it to help them get into a certain state of mind, improve their performance at something clarify goals they want to accomplish, or even to try to heal physical illnesses. But this exercise uses a different application instead of visualizing what you want to feel. You made pictures of what you actually do feel in your subconscious. You start with what you feel and use visualization to amplify and unfold the process. Instead of trying to create an experience, you simply expose the one that's already there, but hasn't been acknowledged, or at least hasn't been communicated to the other person.
Speaker 1 00:02:55 The idea is that the truth will set you free. It might hurt. It could even shock, or it may delightfully surprise the other person. You never know, but it'll have a more real truthful and often healing effect than what usually happens, which is we stay stuck in our half conscious half truths about what's going on in ourselves and in our relationships. So how does visualization help us expose the inner workings of our psyches? Visualization is the main component of imagination. The word imagination comes from the Latin verb, imaginary, meaning to picture oneself. There are two interesting aspects of this root definition. The first is that imagination consists of pictures. You see? And the second is that these pictures are your own private inner experience, but imagination extends beyond just pictures. For example, you and imagine feeling something, hearing something, smelling something, tasting something, and so on imagination is your ability to sense life in a way that isn't normally a part of our socially agreed upon external reality.
Speaker 1 00:04:19 It's your own inner reality, for example, you and I may look at a car and agree that it's a blue, 1967 Camaro parked at the corner of fifth and main street. But then our perceptions will diverge because of our inner stories and how our imagination brings them to life. I might visualize a red Camaro in my mind because I used to drive one. I might even go further and have a crazy vision that I'm flying it through the air blasting blues music from its tailpipe. That actually sounds pretty cool. You might imagine that the owner is an account and having a midlife crisis <laugh> and maybe this leads you to think about where you're at in your life, who knows, and all this can go down in a fraction of a second. Your imagination is your inner dreaming process. It includes all your senses and expresses itself in every facet of your, your life, your hopes, dreams, problems, states of mind, night, dreams, relationships, career health, and destiny.
Speaker 1 00:05:36 It's your inner story. Continually unfolding in pictures, feelings and sounds. And it's trying to guide you down the right path in life. Some of this process is conscious, but a lot of it isn't. As soon as you close your eyes and let your senses express themselves, you tap into your subconscious, the inner domain that contains the seeds of your true desires, dreams, ideas, creativity, and also your trauma and pain, but also your healing and enlightenment. When you're in a relationship conflict, there are lots of things happening at once. And most of them are unconscious. Specifically. There are three levels. First is the interpersonal or communication level words, body language, imagery, and so on. Go back and forth between the two people in every can of an interaction signals and messages are being sent, received, and reacted to it's a multi-layered incredibly complex process. Second is the intrapersonal level where each of your subconscious processes are entangled with the other persons.
Speaker 1 00:06:59 For example, if you had a negative experience with your father and consequently have what's known as a negative father complex your partner's behavior, almost regardless of what it is, is going to possibly trigger you either with good reason or not. And your partner will project the, of their subconscious onto you. All this goes on under the surface, it's like, you're both standing in water and can't see what's happening underneath you. Just experience the effects, hurt anger, sadness, jealousy, boredom, fear, frustration, confusion. And so on. The third level is the systems level or what I call the level of we, you and the other person form a system, a dynamically integrated unit governed by a story. I use the word we, because couples press this level. When they say we experience this and that we believe this and that. And so on. This is the aspect of a relationship in which the individuals take secondary importance to the relationship as a system.
Speaker 1 00:08:18 So there's a lot going on and this is why relationships can be so complicated. The solution is to use your imagination, to tap into your subconscious in order to bring forth the true, authentic content of your processes. This has the effect of writing the ship, correcting the path on all three levels. It's a way to you or both of you down a new road. Now there's an interesting aspect of imagination. I wanna tell you about when you use it. It seems like your senses, seeing, hearing, feeling, moving, smelling, et cetera, are distinct functions, but they're not. There's a lot of crossover in how they operate. Have you ever heard of synesthesia? It's where one of your senses, for example, hearing gets perceived one or more additional senses such as sight. So the sounds you hear gives you images of those sounds. You can also perceive objects like letters, words, shapes, numbers, and even people's names with a sensory perception like smell, color sound, or even flavor sign scientists are really interested in folks who have extreme abilities at this, but we all have it to some degree.
Speaker 1 00:09:43 And it's the key to making unconscious processes conscious by translating information in one sensory channel into another, you can make information that's obscure and doesn't make to you into an experience that you can consciously understand and connect with. The exercise uses our capacity to have a cross censory experience by showing you how to make images out of your feelings. Visualizing what you feel is a powerful way to bring consciousness and tension to what otherwise is often a vague or confusing experience. What you feel has a whole story behind it that you may or may not be aware of and becoming aware of. It gives you a way wider perspective, which in turn gives you increased freedom in how you deal with those feelings. <affirmative> it also helps you cut through a lot of the entangled messes you can get into in relationships as a musician, I'm really aware of how powerful visualization can be.
Speaker 1 00:10:54 Every musician is different, but most of us visualize pitches to some degree, whether we realize it or, or not folks with perfect pitch, which means you can play a note on the piano and they can tell you what note it is without looking commonly associate each pitch with a color. If you have relative pitch, which means you can identify a note only if you hear and know what a nearby note is, meaning you notes by their relationship to other notes, it's common to associate colors or images of the keys or threats on an instrument or some other image that converts sound to pictures in your mind, but there are other ways to do it as well. Strangely, I associate pictures to body feelings. Each note is a feeling tone in my body. <laugh>, it's hard to explain, but that's how I hear sound. Sometimes it goes the other way too, where I feel something and imagine a sound that expresses it.
Speaker 1 00:11:59 That's when I write a song, I remember having a band mate who was strongly color oriented, and sometimes we had trouble communicating. He'd say, make that section more dark purple <laugh>. And I'd say you may even like a vibrating feeling in your belly. And then we just look at each other and laugh. We knew we didn't process sound the same way, but it was okay with us. We figured it out well enough. Some songwriters mess around on their instrument until something catches their ear. Others hear a melody in their head and then find it on their in instrument. Sometimes I have visions or hear word phrases in my mind, but usually I feel something first and then convert it to sound. Everyone's different. We all process our perceptions in our own ways. Every relationship involves dreaming. Sometimes relationship dreams come true. And sometimes they don't.
Speaker 1 00:13:01 The problem is when they don't, but we're still dreaming. I've worked with couples where anyone in their right mind can see that one of the people isn't sensitive, disconnected, or even abusive, but their partner doesn't see it. He or she insists. The other person is wonderful. Why dreaming dreams are powerful and can blind you. So it's really important to connect with your subconscious feelings and learn to express them, meditate on and explore what you're pretending to feel or see work on your fears and blocks to expressing these deeper feelings and needs and work on your courage to express yourself. See you next time. Stay aware. You can follow me on social media at Dr. Wig, and you can sign up a on the mailing
[email protected], where you'll receive discounts on private coaching events and merchandise, weekly personal growth tips, and lots more be well.
