Using art as a way to shift your focus and create stories.

Allow your eyes to softly focus on Dreaming Of Boats and imagine you are about to go on a journey. Imagine you are entering the art and allowing the boats to take you to a creative space, letting go of your everyday self. Continue focusing on the art and observe what comes up.

What influenced me to become a visual artist?   By Bob Sellers

During my career as a psychotherapist, my most meaningful work from which I learned the most about process and myself, was as Director of Metaphoric Psychodrama. I directed groups for years with Counselor Interns where I discovered that to understand what was missing in a person’s life, I had to get into a zone with a particular type of focus, requiring no effort. In the process of preparing the group to do individual work, I would use a visualization process that put participants into a light trance.

Group members would come into the group session not knowing what I had planned for them. Something ‘out of time’ would be created. I would hear the definition of their personal story, and I would figure out why their story wasn’t working the way they wanted it to. As I heard their definition of their plot, my focus as the director was to discover the flaw in their story that they misunderstood.  Their perception was often damaged by someone else’s map of reality. While they didn’t realize it, they had within themselves what they needed to discover about their problem and what they needed to change it (re-perceive it). They did not realize this and, therefore, felt stuck. What they needed was an enlargement of their story.

As the director of the psychodrama, I would listen to what was their concern. Then I asked them to play different characters so I could better understand their concern and what was in the way. I would myself “Why is their story a problem? What is missing? I realized that they misunderstood the story they had created in their life. I would create several different stories with different characters requiring them to play different roles, some they may have never played before. When appropriate, I would ask the participant to write a fictional story stimulated by the roles they had played, bring their story to the following group, and read it out loud. I would know from their story if they were finished with their work or needed to do further work in the group.

At the beginning of this work, I would know intuitively what to do to change their story but did not understand why. Later, I learned that what I was doing was creating a story that was a parallel metaphor to their own story. The “why” does it work, was interesting to me. The art we have created has helped me understand the why. Because the art contains archetypal characters, I began creating archetypal stories stimulated by the art. I have always had an imagination that is in touch with archetypal characters.

The traditional psychologist looks at a person’s history to re-understand it. The way I would work, called their history to the surface to create fictional outcomes. This approach plays at the unconscious level. Ego is out of the way. Defensiveness, etc, is out of the way. Moments of creativity occur based upon some evolution of a story, a metaphoric re-perceiving of the story.

So many purposely misunderstand themselves (denial). The metaphor helps them to get by the little guard at the gate that keeps them from misunderstanding themselves. While they didn’t often understand why their conflict no longer continued, it didn’t matter. Things just seemed to work better in their life.

Later, after retiring from the role of Therapist, I wanted to try something new, to discover new ways of exploring my creativity while drawing upon my background as a psycho-dramatist. My co-creative partner and I wanted to see the effect of using archetypal characters and stories using a visual medium, an entirely new medium for us. Our art images can be a vehicle to assist individuals when they are asked to imagine themselves as a character in the art image, thereby enlarging their identity and exposing different parts of themselves, perhaps hidden parts. Through the process of writing a fictional story or role-playing a character in an art story that is not like them in any conscious way,  a person may enlarge their identity in their everyday reality. In this way, the writer gets around the little guard at the gate in the unconscious, reminding them of the feared dangers that could lie ahead. The pain of stepping out of denial and facing your dragons to become conscious of what is beneath the surface is a transformative experience. When your story goes far away from your normal reality, you are freer to invent alternative options for yourself.