Clover House Therapy - The Complementary Therapy Centre for Children

Imagery as used in Clover House means working with the imagination.

Clover House works with a child, or teenager, and their family. Our client is usually the young person, sometimes it is the family. Families come to Clover House with a problem. Many of the families will have sought help elsewhere before coming here. Such help usually involves diagnosis, labelling and logical analysis.

A different approach is to assume the problem has a basis in the past which results in habitual thoughts and emotions; these constitute the problem. Possibly other people’s habitual reactions are also part of the problem.

A useful word that can be used to describe these habits of thought and behaviour is the ‘unconscious’; thoughts beyond conscious awareness. It seems that the unconscious responds to metaphor and stories. In Imagery we use techniques, stories and metaphors to communicate with the unconscious and generate change useful to our client.

Rapport, or undivided attention, is essential. It is gained by entering the client’s world; not by asking the client to enter the therapist’s world. Entering the client’s world can sometimes make the imagery worker appear strange to the unaware; the work can be intuitive. If a client appears to be ready for change, the imagery worker will dive in and seize the moment. Anyone unaware of these principles is likely to find the imagery work puzzling, but the imagery worker is simply getting rapport, seizing the moment and helping the client change his or her unconscious thought processes.

Games and stories trigger the use of the imagination, and clients adapt the messages in the stories to themselves. As they adapt the messages, they change their habitual thoughts. Obviously, one chooses games, metaphors and stories that are acceptable to the client.

A typical example might involve using chessmen, toys or cards to represent the important people in the child’s life – the client can move them around, group them, and talk about them. Or a Russian doll, the one with other dolls inside her, can be used to tell a story about how someone got better, quickly. Sometimes it is enough for someone to sit down and relax and use their imagination (in guided ways) to produce images of their problem going away.

Imagery uses the client’s own imagination to enable the client to generate their own solution to the problem. That solution is the one most likely to work.

What to expect at an Imagery Session

I will talk and ask questions of both the child and the parents to get a full picture of 

• The problems you are experiencing
• What would be the ideal outcome
• To find out family dynamics, or arrangements, habits affecting the child and family, especially negative or dysfunctional ones.
• To fully observe verbal and non verbal language as a way of understanding
• To establish goals of about three symptoms to score out of ten to improve

•  To establish a relationship to enable mutual work of techniques to support and encourage children to clear emotional attachment to incidents and traumas upsetting them
• To encourage change of thinking and behaviours for reducing negative habits
• Encouraging new supportive positive habits and thinking.
• Providing stories and examples that illustrate issues rather than advise and instructions where deemed necessary to give an individual session to a parent in distress