Phototherapy
GOALS OF PHOTOTHERAPY
• help teens begin to dream and tell their story through image and imagination
• inspire teens to catalyze and recognize the power of their imagination
• teach teens to begin to trust their imagination and inner life as the ultimate guide through life
• realize their differences and uniqueness through images and story
DEEPEN AWARENESS & IMAGINATION
Potential for deepening awareness of the unique self begins in adolescence. Creating an image of any kind is imagining. And imagining is awakening the longing of each soul for truth, beauty, love and creativity. Images arise in a meaningful way in our awareness through art, imagination, visions, dreams, and daily life. But for teens to recognize their own images and trust imagination, they need guidance.
FINDING WORDS & IMAGES
Teenagers often don’t often have the language to describe their thoughts, sensations, feelings and desires. One of the great shadows of the digital age is that children receive images from outside and cease to have faith in their own. Most kids are so bombarded with media, enticed by surface promises, that they don’t yet know the value of their dreams and visions. Without experience of the creative potential of their imagination teens remain disconnected from deeper longing and desires.
THE PROCESS
In phototherapy, I use photographs to facilitate creative self-expression in the form of storytelling, poetry, and song writing as an avenue into relationship, understanding and meaning. I’ve cultivated images from various photographic traditions: social documentary, architectural, nature, fashion and art. They can be used in a number of exercises, depending on the teen’s motivation and desire. I might, for example, invite a teen to choose an image from the set, then talk about what he sees and likes in the portrait, landscape or scene. Simply describing what he sees in the image, he begins to express some truth about his own experience. And the more he associates to the photo, the more he seeds the ground of his life with his own story, images and imagining, which is central to the healing and soul-making work of psychotherapy.
