Right. We'll get going now. Thank you very much for joining this morning.
Joining us this morning, this is the last of our mental wellness series that we've been hosting from
the Department of Experimental Psychology here at the University of Oxford.
My name's Cathy Creswell and I'm based here in the Department of Experimental Psychology, and I've been really enjoying presenting this series.
If you haven't joined us before, please do have a look at our YouTube channel for the Department of Experimental Psychology,
where you'll find all of the previous talks in the series.
And they include a really broad range of topics, including coping with trauma, depression, low mood, sleep problems,
stress and anxiety, grief, a range of other topics that we hope will be helpful for you and people that you may know.
And just a few other things, bits of housekeeping to say.
And the session will run till 10:45. We encourage you to take a break after the session.
Sometimes the sessions do raise lots of thoughts and feelings for people.
So please do take a break, reach out to people should you need to.
We'll also ask you to complete some feedback at the end. So we'd be really grateful if you could do that.
And also, as you listen we'll be recording
this session and it will also be shared on our YouTube channel and we're also live on YouTube as well.
We're delighted today to be joined by Dr. Hannah Murray,
who is a Research clinical psychologist in the Oxford Centre for Anxiety Disorders
and Trauma in the Department of Experimental Psychology in Oxford.
And Hannah has particular expertise in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and
will be talking to us today about understanding and managing troubling mental images.
And I'll be handing over to Hannah shortly
but just to let you know that after Hannah's presentation, we'll have time for some questions that people have submitted in advance.
But as this is all our session, we also are going to open up the chat so that people are able to ask questions in there too.
So please do put anything that you would like to ask Hannah in the chat as she's speaking or afterwards.
And we'll try to get through as many of your questions as we can.
But without further ado, I'm delighted now to hand over to Hannah Murray.
Thanks, Hannah. Thanks, Cathy, and thank you all for joining.
I'm just going to share my slides.
Hopefully you can all see that. So good morning and welcome.
Thanks for joining us today.
And as Cathy says, I'm going to talk about mental imagery and particularly the troubling mental images that people might have,
which I think is a topic that kind of cuts across a lot of different psychological disorders,
is all talk about, but also things that can affect all of us from time to time.
So a little bit about what I want to cover. First of all
I'll talk briefly about why mental images are important, mental images in psychological disorders and therefore also in their treatment.
And then I'll talk a bit about how we can transform mental images, both clinically and for ourselves.
So I hope that sounds all right. So, first of all, why are mental images important?
Well, let's try a little test of this. Which of these makes you hungrier?
The word cake for me. Or me saying cake or an image or a cake.
How about this? What makes you more anxious? The word height or an image of a high place?
It's probably the latter, because usually images have much more of a kind of powerful connexion to our emotional responses than words do on their own.
And this is something that's been demonstrated experimentally. This really lovely study by Amy Holmes and and colleagues,
where they gave people a word and an image and asked them to combine them either in an image in their mind or in a sentence.
And the words were either positive or negative.
So, for example, the words sync with a picture of someone swimming in a lake or a positive word or a neutral word,
benign word like swim and the picture of someone in the lake.
And you combine those either into an image, a picture in your own mind, or in a sentence.
And what they found was when their participants combined them into an image, had a much more powerful impact on their anxiety,
they felt much more anxious with those negative words and certainly with the benign words.
It had a much more powerful impact in terms of reducing their anxiety.
So we think that images have a really powerful connexion to our emotions and probably one that's more powerful than words.
And when we think about what's happening in our brains when we imagine something, it's actually very similar to when we perceive it in real life.
You wouldn't have time to look at the scans and lots of detail,
but this is from an FMRI study where they ask people to imagine an object and then they show them pictures of the same object.
And if you look at the subject subtraction and they use those images, the different parts of the brain,
you can see that almost exactly the same parts of the brain light up when we imagine something as to when we directly perceive it,
probably our imagination as a sort of subset of the same processes that happen in our brain
then when we actually see something in real life.
And we can also demonstrate this ourselves so we can do a little exercise for a moment. If you feel comfortable to just close your eyes for me.
And I want you to imagine that you're getting home from work at the end of the day and walking in your front door of your home.
So just imagine opening the door and pushing it open, stepping inside, and what you could see around you as you enter your home,
what you can smell, maybe any sounds that you can hear.
Try to bring that into your mind's eye and your mind's ear.
Maybe take off your shoes and feel the floor feels like home to your feet.
And then I want you to imagine walking to your kitchen.
And again, pause there, have a look around, what you can see, what you can smell, what the temperature is like.
And walk over to your fridge. And I want you to open your fridge and notice the changing temperature and take out a lemon.
And then carrying that to a chopping board, pick up a knife and cut it into four segments.
And then I want you to imagine picking up one of those segments of lemon and just notice how it feels in your fingers,
waxy surface, what the flesh looks like. Inhale it. Have a little smell.
Now, what does that smell like? And then I want you to imagine taking a bite into that memory segment.
So you can open your eyes. I imagine for some of you that exercise would have been quite easy.
You'd have been able to generate a kind of quite powerful mental image. For others
it might be a little bit harder,
and that's just because it's a sort of natural variation in the population in terms of how readily we can generate powerful mental images.
But for those of you who were able to get a strong mental image,
you might have noticed that when you bit into the lemon, you've got some sort of physical impact of that,
Your mouth might have even started to water a little bit where you might felt a bit of that kind of impact the sourness as the lemon.
And that's because, as I said earlier,
our brain is kind of responding to mental imagery in much the same way that it does two things that we're directly perceiving in real life.
And that's why it can be so powerful.
It can affect on a sort of physiological state, like making the saliva come into your mouth and it can also affect our behaviour.
And you know, I've talked many so far about sort of visual imagery.
The imagery, of course, is multi-sensory. And the same thing would happen if we did something that tapped into all the auditory imagery.
So, for example, if I played you a song and a familiar song to you,
and then I asked you to play that song back in your head again and listen to it with
your mind's ear, as it were, you would be able to kind of hear that song almost as powerfully as you can hear it
when I play it to you in real life and the same bits of your brain would light up and you might even
notice yourself doing things like taking an intake of breath as if you going to sing something,
even though you're only playing it in your imagination so that your your mind is kind of
giving you the same cues to behave as it does when you see something in real life.
And of course, this is colonist in lots of twisted ways.
And for example, in sports psychology, the power of visualisation is recognised that when we are going to compete in a major event,
we often rehearse over and over again it going well and how or what went wrong
and that kind of has a powerful impact on behaviour that can improve our performance.
Okay. So hopefully I've convince you that mental imagery is important and that it's powerful and that can affect both our body and our behaviour.
So let's talk a little bit in psychological disorders.
So I work on post-traumatic stress disorder, as Cathy said, and mental imagery obviously plays a huge role in this disorder.
You know, people have been experiencing symptoms of traumas that they've suffered that
come into their mind with powerfully in flashbacks and images and nightmares.
And a lot of those images will be memories, but some of them will also be images that have sort of changed over time.
So, for example,
in nightmares, there's often input from other things that have happened in our lives or the story of the trauma might be told in different ways.
The emotional experience is the same, but the imagery might be quite different.
And also what we find in post-traumatic stress disorder is sometimes people have images where they didn't necessarily directly experience something themselves,
but perhaps have learnt about it and have generated images of what that might have been like.
So for example, learning that someone has died who was close to them.
They might have imagined what that was like.
And then those images, which we would sometimes call constructed images, can become intrusive in their own right.
So imagery is really important for post-traumatic stress disorder.
But actually, a lot of evidence now is showing that imagery is really important and other disorders.
So, for example, in social anxiety disorder, people are often plagued by images of their worst fears.
You know, they might, during a social encounter, have an image of how they might be coming across in their brain, in their mind,
which is a kind of worst case scenario, for example, that they are bright red or that they're sweating,
that they look terribly nervous, or with their face distorted.
And they might also get images from the past as well.
So what we call kind of socially traumatic events, not quite the same as PTSD, but times in the past where something has gone bad,
badly wrong socially, whether they've been humiliated or bullied or something like that.
These images might break in when they're in social situations. And in other countries as well, phobias.
People typically have images of kind of the worst version of the thing that they're
afraid of that come to mind or fearful of what we would call flash forwards,
which is kind of imagining something in the future.
So like with a spider phobic, I think it might be a things like getting caught up in their hair, or under their clothes or something,
something which hasn't actually happened to them, but that they can imagine,
then that generates a kind of little fear for any sort of focus out there.
JT The that obsessive compulsive disorder, people commonly get sort of images that fit with their false sense.
So for example, that contamination, they might almost feel as if they can sort of imagine their body crawling with germs,
or dirt in some way, they might also get fearful images of the things that they fear happening or things that they fear doing,
like harming other people and so on. So images are important, you know, I've mentioned a few,
but actually in probably the full range of psychological disorders across a lot of these different things that we work with clinically.
And they might exist in different forms. You know, they might be memories, they might be flash forwards, they might be constructions,
things that we generated from our own imagination, which can be very concerning or frightening.
And they might be what I'm calling kind of defining self images, which is where we develop an image of our selves,
which it sort of comes to really dominate the way that we view ourselves in some way.
And that might be driven some negative experiences in the past. It might be from thoughts that we have about ourselves.
And when we think about sort of what keeps psychological disorders going,
it might be that those images and the beliefs that they're associated with have a very close relationship and a bi directional imagination.
So, for example, this would be a pretty dysmorphic type feeling that you're very ugly,
that you've got an enormous nose, for example, that other people think the same way.
If you think that about myself, you're likely to spontaneously generate images, for example, of the size of your nose.
And of course, the more you have those kind of images, the more it's going to fuel that belief about themselves that this is true.
It really sort of consolidates those self beliefs. So images and beliefs have this kind of mutually maintaining relationship.
And similarly, the way that we cope with images might form a big part of certain psychological disorders.
So typically when images are negative or unpleasant, distressing, what we're going to try to do is get rid of them in some way.
So, for example, this would be a typical kind of OCD type thought or image.
If you have an image of when a train is coming to a platform,
you just get this image in your head of pushing something in front of the train, one day jumping in front of the training.
So which, by the way, is a really common image. A lot of people get that when they're standing on a train platform.
But if the way that you cope with that thought coming into your mind is to start changing behaviour,
thinking, okay, it's unsafe for me to go to train stations because I might actually act on this.
So I'm going to avoid stations. I might ruminate all the time on what this means about me as a person, and I might try to push that image away.
And one thing we know about images is usually the more which one pushed out of our mind.
Actually, the way the more they can come back in is called the rebound effect.
If you have a try, really trying hard not to think about something often it's the only thing that you can think about.
So these types of behaviours will then maintain not only in not only the images,
but also these beliefs that people have about this, about themselves and these kind of relationships.
These types of vicious cycles form a big part of psychological disorders.
What maintains distract. And therefore they are an important target for therapy.
So sometimes in treatment, what we try to do is transform negative and distressing images.
So this is what I'm giving you a few more a few more ideas about.
And I'll say at the end, this might be something we can also try ourselves.
So it's a technique that we commonly call imagery rescripting.
It's not a new idea, actually. It's been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years. There's actually evidence the ancient Greeks
did some imagery rescripting and dream transformation, things like that when they were trying to treat psychological and spiritual distress.
And it's formed of other therapies and begins gestalt therapy, hypnotherapy, you know, imagery scripting and
And Beck talked about it in the old days of cognitive therapy.
But certainly in recent years, it's really kind of gathered a lot more attention in CBT.
And we use it now quite frequently, not only in PTSD but across treatment
For lots of different disorders. And essentially what imagery rescripting is, it's kind of rewriting an image,
changing what happens in an image, whether that's a true memory or a constructed image.
I'll give you some examples of that. So when we work with trauma memories and post-traumatic stress disorder,
what we usually try to do is kind of pull out what might be the key memories that's maintaining a person's distress.
So we're looking for key memories or moments during the trauma, which if we experience that coming back in these nightmares and flashbacks and so on.
So I've got an example here of someone I work with who was sexually assaulted in childhood by their piano teacher.
And what we do in cognitive therapy is we really try to understand what
specifically is it about those moments or those memories that creates distress
For that person? It is often more important, personal meanings attached that might be different for everybody.
So for this person, the meanings that were attached to those moments were a sense that they're in danger, associated with fear,
and also a sense of that they made a mistake, that it was their fault that they sometimes caused this to happen,
which was associated with powerful feelings of guilt.
So when we working these types of memories and PTSD, we can try to update them with new information,
the things that we know now that the person didn't know at the time.
So, for example, for this person it's that they're safe now, no one's abusing them anymore,
that their piano teacher has any contact with them and can't harm them any further.
And also and this is something we might work with, with a whole range of of cognitive techniques,
but that it wasn't their fault that they were only a child, they weren't even aware what sex was at that time.
And that thought playing with the adult in that scenario with the perpetrator.
So these are things that the adult knows, but that the child doesn't know.
So to bring that new information back into the trauma memory so that the child knows
it and so that the trauma memories can be sort of updated with that new information,
we reactivate the trauma memory by talking again about what happened, and then we bring that new information in and connect it back with the memory.
So this is a kind of standard technique and cognitive therapy for PTSD that we call updating trauma memories.
And when we use rescripting we're trying to essentially do the same thing to bring that new information in via the image, via changing the image.
So, for example, rather than just saying, I'm safe now and it wasn't my fault,
we can change the story of the trauma memory to bring that new information in a different way.
And as we were saying earlier, because images can be more powerful than words alone,
sometimes this can be a faster way to really connect and resonate with that new information that new emotional image.
So a typical rescript, for example, for a childhood trauma is to actually come into the trauma memory as the adult self.
Sometimes the therapist comes in too find that out and then do the things that the child in that scenario needs.
So perhaps rescue them, take them to a place of safety, perhaps comfort them, then perhaps tell them that it's just themselves,
perhaps confront or punish the perpetrator if that's something the person wants to do.
And all of this is led by the client typically. When we do this, technically it's up to them what they want to do.
We just kind of help facilitate it and help them imagine it. So essentially what we try to do is still update
this information. Information is still the same. I'm safe now and it's not my fault.
But we're using an imaginary script to bring that thing.
So kind of other emotional themes that are common in PTSD memories, things like fear, shame, powerlessness, disgust.
And what we're trying to do with the scripting is to create an alternative emotional experience.
So the script should try and counteract those negative emotions that are there in the trauma memory.
So if someone is very fearful, we want to provide them with a sense of safety.
If they felt very ashamed, we want them to be able to access beings of compassion.
If they felt powerlessness, we want to experience mastery.
If they felt disgust. Then we want them to feel decontaminated and clean.
And this is true of kind of all of the different types of negative emotions.
We want the rescript to introduce a new emotion experience that counteracts that negativity.
So a couple of other examples.
This is from a client who was tortured and felt a very strong sense of injustice and anger about the way that they had been treated,
which was totally, you know, reasonable and understandable because what happened was was grossly unfair.
And this person hadn't ever being able to get justice for it in real life.
So what we tried to do and in between rescripting was find a way for her to
feel a sense of power and a sense of justice being served in the interim.
So what she wanted to do was kind of revisit the scene of the trauma,
which was a prison in Iran as a kind of avenging Djinn, which is a kind of evil spirit.
And she destroyed the prison and she freed the prisoners that were still being held back.
So she was able to kind of inflict some punishment on the perpetrators and experience a sense of kind of justice being served,
even though that wasn't possible in real life. Another example.
This is a clinic discussed shame, memory after sexual assault.
This is someone who had kind of spiritual beliefs.
Some people script liked it because we created them like sort of magical elements.
Some people like their rescript much more pragmatic, practical things that can actually happen in time and space.
And that's fine. You know, we just go with whatever our clients want to do.
But for this person, they wanted to go and clean themselves in the magical waterfall.
And then she had a guardian angel who visited her and reminded her that she had nothing to be ashamed of.
So that vision of being clean and being cared for and experiencing compassion were key elements of her rescript.
So they're different for everybody.
And and there's a kind of whole range of really imaginative stuff that we can do to kind of transport transform images.
And by the way, we're not pretending with our clients that something terrible hasn't happened, or that this really could have happened in real life.
What we're doing is just sort of changing the feeling associated with the memory to try and bring in these new meanings and these new emotions,
which can then disrupt the the re-experiencing of the trauma memory, which in a moment comes back again and again in its original horrible form.
So we just trying to interrupt that process, but we're not trying to pretend that what happened didn't happen and that it wasn't terrible.
And maybe we can use these kind of techniques in other disorders as well.
So, for example, with phobias, what if, rather than imagining the kind of the terrifying spider,
the worst case scenario spider, we imagined this cute little guy, the misunderstood a spider.
I listened to a podcast recently where there's a guy talking about the spider research and he researched wolf spiders,
who are the kind of common spiders that you sometimes see in British households,
which can be quite big and I'm certainly honestly quite spider phobic.
And he was explaining that actually good spiders, the ones you see around your house, water,
are usually kind of lonely males looking for a mate and that they, if you put we can't hear it with a human ear.
But if he puts a tiny microphone to them,
they're singing this sort of sweet little song to kind of attract mates and even do a little dance with their front legs.
And it tends to transform the way I thought that was how spiders. Rather than thinking of them as
kind of frightening things that were dashing at me. I sort of could see them as this just kind of slightly hapless,
lonely bachelors looking for a mate or maybe like in Harry Potter where Ron Weasley was transforming his feared demon
Bogart, I think they were called, he put it on roller-skates.
He made something that was frightening into something that was kind of ridiculous.
So maybe we can transform things that we're afraid of in our minds to take a lot of the fear away.
Similarly, with social anxiety, when we're fearful about our a social encounter,
like our first day at a new job or doing a presentation or something like that, instead of imagining it going wrong,
maybe we can imagine it going really well and use that kind of power visualisation or positive imagery,
which is we know will have an impact on our physiology and on our behaviour.
So I'd encourage you to to try these kind of techniques yourself.
Either wish memories from the past, if you have things which bother you.
And if you've got sort of self defining negative images, maybe have to think about what I've told you about rescripting.
What are the meaning of those images to you?
How do they make you feel? And what might be a kind of different emotional experience?
What might be a way for that scenario to end differently in your mind that would bring in a sort of counteracting emotion?
And could you transform those memories of those images that you have to bring in those new endings and to give yourself a
different emotional experience. If it's something that you're frightened of or something that you have flash forwards about.
What if this happens in the future? What if that happened?
Could you try rewriting the story of how those things end so that they end in a different, more positive way?
We can't predict the future and we can't change the past.
But what we can do is change our appraisals of those things and our emotional reaction to those things.
And one of the sort of avenues towards accessing those new emotions can be through imaging.
Alright. So I'm going to finish back.
So free to email me or contact me on Twitter if you've got any questions about this stuff or if you want me to share any resources, or
any of the papers that I've mentioned. So I'll stop sharing.
And then I think we have some time for questions. Wonderful.
Thank you ever so much, Hannah. And we've had some questions that have come in on the chat already, as well as our pre-prepared ones.
So what I'll start with one of the questions in the chat. You were talking a lot about what you do as therapist,
but obviously as as you came to the end, you're talking about things that people things people might be able to do on the set by themselves.
And one of the questions was, would you advise someone to seek help to process a childhood trauma, or could they try to deal with it themselves?
Oh, yeah. See, I mean, I'm.
You know, it's hard to say without getting kind of more information, I guess, about how that affects the individual because,
of course, you know, many people have childhood traumatic experiences that can affect them in lots of different ways as an adult.
But certainly, if there were memories from that which are bothering you, causing a lot of distress,
especially if they're coming about repetitively and in kind of negative images,
nightmares, flashbacks, many things, than I absolutely say to to seek help.
And, you know, I'm a PTSD person, so I've got always PTSD on the mind.
But actually, trauma can be a real trigger for all sorts of different emotional psychological problems
As an adult.
So if there's something that that's going to causing you kind of significant impact in the day to day life, then definitely on station couch.
But I guess the things we can do for ourselves perhaps are things where, you know,
we have images that that aren't causing us day to day problems in our functioning, but perhaps just kind of all just a little bit,
like I say, define a little bit about ourselves that we don't like or that give us the sort
of the wrong messages in some ways that we can use as techniques to manage.
Great. Thanks very much. And I suppose they're still very much talking about images from previous experiences.
We did have a question that was submitted in advance.
Asking about does the approach to mental images differ for real images versus imagined images?
And also in the question I highlighted that maybe sometimes you don't know whether this is a real image or something that I've imagined.
Yeah, absolutely. No, that's true. And. It's a really interesting question because, you know, when you think about memories,
you know, our memories aren't exact replays of what's happened in the past.
You know, they're reconstructed every time we we remember something.
And that reconstruction is influenced by other sources, you know, things that are happened since and things that are happening to us now.
Similarly, you know, our imagination is really fuelled by our memories.
When I asked you that exercise about imagining walking into your house and so when
you were drawing on memories of going into your house to create those images.
So I'm going to misquote this
I remember exactly how you said it, but there's a quote, which is something along the lines of all memories are imaginings
and all imaginings are memories. Those mental processes are really closely interlinked.
And certainly the way that we work with them, you know,
things like a dream rescripting you can use with real memories, you can use with constructing memories, memory.
We all constructed images that we know aren't memories and certainly you can use it when you don't know and certainly from
especially memories that come from already childhood before we we're not clear what exactly is a true memory and what's not.
And there's lots of evidence to show that, that some of our childhood memories might be accurate,
some actually might not be accurate and might be the products of imagination and that it's really hard to tell the difference.
You know, and again,
the same things kind of happen in our brain when we kind of access memories of things that really did happen versus things that we imagined having.
There was a nice study actually with people who believed that that they had been abducted by aliens, so a sort of highly improbable memory.
But those people fully believed it to be true.
And when they sort of analysed the quality and quantity of those memories and the kind of physiological reactions associated with them,
they were almost identical to memories that could be verified.
So yeah, it's a nice question because actually there's a clearly huge overlap between.
constructed images and memories that we can address in a very similar way.
Thanks very much. You talked about obviously the critical a critical part being the connection between the emotion and the image.
And we had this specific question about shame. And I wondered if you were able to comment on shame specifically, and, for example,
where people are thinking back to their past mistakes and feeling that sense of shame
and how people might be able to make peace with those sorts of memories and images.
Yeah. It's real. It's a horrible emotion. Shame. And, you know, it's often a big part of the work that we do in PTSD and but for all of us,
you know, I can access memories of things that I'm ashamed of in the past. And they still give me a real kind of like shiver now.
I think, you know, as I've talked about before, sort of trying to find a counterpoint to the emotions as well.
From a shame, that's kind of compassion. And, you know, when we if you imagine talking to someone who cares a lot about you,
what they would say when you tell them about something that you feel very ashamed of,
often they would be much less critical of you than you are of yourself.
So we can kind of use imagery to embody that more compassionate perspective.
Deborah Lee has this really nice technique that that's called the perfect nurturer,
and it's kind of it was designed for people who have very high levels of shame or self-criticism
and who really struggled with that process of being compassionate towards themselves.
So it's a kind of way of like outsourcing that compassion to an imagined being that you can then seek kind of advice and comfort for.
So what she advises doing is imagining what qualities are kind of idealised caregiver would be this perfect nurturer.
So they might be someone who you know looks like your grandmother whom you'd love to very much, who smells like a comforting smell to you.
Who's got a voice that's really kind of soft and gentle, comforting and caring.
And you sort of imagine this kind of being.
So it could be a spiritual elements as well, or it could be kind of more in the form of a real human.
And then imagine sharing that experience with them or imagining them entering the memory of
the thing that you feel ashamed of and what they would do and what they would say to you.
And probably they would want to comfort you, maybe want to hug you and imagine being on the receiving end of that compassion.
Because I think sometimes when we can't generate those self-compassion experiences for ourselves and connect with those emotions,
if we can sort of externalise it in a way and then imagine being on the receiving end of it, that can help.
And I think also, if we imagine giving compassionate care to someone else, if you imagine, for example,
a child crying and how you might comfort them and how we might care for them, what the tone of your voice might be, how you would say how you would act.
And we can often generate that externally, and then we have to kind of practise internalising it ourselves.
So yeah, I'd give that a try if you've got that kind of shame.
I think that relates really nicely actually to one of the questions in the chat, which is about compassion and sympathy.
And I think just I think if I'm understanding it correctly, the question is really about that,
where people are struggling to access compassion and sympathy from others.
Is it going to be difficult for them to engage in either altering their images
until they've got that that compassion and sympathy from others?
And I guess until you feel understood by others, it may be difficult to engage in actually making it, making a change.
Apologies if I haven't quite understood the the question properly, but I think it's really about, you know,
how can people deal with that, that problem and be able to access the sympathy and compassion that they might need?
And is that important as a first aid? I think it's important and I think it's a challenge.
And I think, you know, especially, you know, many of the people we work with, with PTSD,
especially if they've had many traumatic experiences and especially the kind of traumas that started in very early childhood,
you know, feeling compassion for yourself is just not a muscle that you developed
Emotionally if you know what I mean. So it can be really hard when in therapy we're asking them to try and develop that that side or to see their
experiences in a different way that they might just not have access to that that counterpoint perspective.
So that's where these kind of imagery exercises can be useful and can be a way of just sort of practising. It might not be something that happens quickly.
It might be something that that needs a bit of time.
I think the thing I'd say is, you know, restricting these techniques, they usually sit within a kind of whole course of treatment.
So I've just sort of isolated this technique and talked about it.
But it's not the only way that we would work on these types of experiences with these types of emotions in therapy.
It's just kind of one one way of doing it, and it actually doesn't see everybody.
As I said earlier, some people generate energy readily and really naturally,
and they take to rescripting very quickly and find it a very powerful technique.
But I've certainly worked with some people where it's it's just not quite been that cup of tea and they
find it harder to generate images and actually they prefer working in a kind of more verbal domain.
And that's okay too, you know.
But I think people I've worked with, they've often been surprised that sometimes when you introduce a technique like
rescripting people are a bit sceptical of it.
But actually when they try it, they sometimes are surprised by the power of the kind of imagery that can generate the emotions associated with that.
And that actually picks up on a couple of questions in the chat, which is sort of about,
you know, how do you help people image, image better for want of a better way of saying it?
And and so I guess that sounds like you're saying that to some extent.
Some people are, you know, just have richer imagery than others.
However, there might be some people who maybe if they sort of allow themselves to go with it,
actually are able to engage in it better than they might might be able to expect.
It sounds like you're saying you wouldn't kind of, if people are not experiencing images,
you would want to be pushing that necessarily kind of work with what works best for individuals that you would say,
are there things that you think help people to create richer images and be able to use imagery more effectively?
Yeah, I do think it's something you can practise, you know, and sometimes what we would do is kind of help people practise imagery,
which is kind of benign imagery before we start working on more traumatic memories.
So, you know, do a kind of imaging exercise, you know, the one I did with you earlier, with the lemon.
But you can ask people to imagine the sort of things like their home after work and what that looks like.
And and people can often generate quite a powerful image.
And then often what we do is sort of give them practise in manipulating images because that that's something new to people.
You know, you can if you or someone you generate imagery quite readily, you might not not have ever tried to transform, or rescript to your images.
So we sometimes get people, for example, to imagine a kettle boiling.
And that's a good one because it's nice and multi-sensory and the sounds and visual stuff.
And so you kind of imagine it boiling, what that looks like and the steam coming out of the
kettle and then getting them to imagine going back into the kettle.
And now I want you to change the image into black and white rather than into colour.
Or now I want you to you know, instead of steam coming out of the kettle,
I want you to imagine that little ping pong balls are flying out the car or whatever it might be,
but getting people sort of just to start playing their imagination
With modifying images and actually there's interesting evidence that with kind of trauma memories and
unpleasant images, even just doing things like changing the details of the image,
even if you're not kind of bringing in a new emotional experience can reduce the power of the memory as an image in itself.
So it's almost like once we know we've got a bit of control over our images and once we can see that
they are like a product of our mind's eye rather than something which has this kind of power over us,
which often like it does,
once we realise we can manipulate and change them and we've got some sort of self-efficacy then in that relationship with our images that in itself,
Can reduce distress.
So it can be a powerful technique but that certainly those kind of things can help people just yeah, build up the skill of accessing and manipulating images.
But yeah, as you say, it might not be for everyone. And personally I wouldn't kind of, you know,
push it and push it if someone wasn't finding it a helpful technique and we can move on to other techniques.
I'm afraid we're not going to get through all of the questions have come in.
But just one more question for you. We've talked quite a lot about images, images from past experiences.
What do you tend to work in different ways if you're helping people combat stressful mental images of the future?
And so there was a comment specifically about, for example,
if someone's currently facing uncertainty in aspects of their life and may be experiencing stressful mental images, so a future focus.
How would you approach those? Would it be the same or are there any things that would be different?
I yeah, I mean, I guess I've talked a lot about images from the past because that's what I work with.
But certainly people do have images, you know, fearful images of the future.
You know, and as we talked about, this kind of link between all our beliefs of thoughts and all images is really close.
So if we're really worried about something happening in the future.
We're likely to generate images which are associated with those beliefs.
You know, if we think something bad is going to happen,
then we might start imagining that. But the problem is that A those negative images are going to sort of stimulate lots of negative emotions
and B they're going to kind of reinforce those beliefs and is going to feel more likely that there's bad things going to happen.
So I guess if we notice that process happening in ourselves, you know, that it's really kind of fuelling our worry when we generate these images.
Perhaps we can do things to try and kind of. Interfere with that process or break that link.
So perhaps, as I say, you know, imagining different scenarios that might be better, you know, more positive flash forwards,
we can't influence necessarily the outcome, but worrying and generating a lot of negative imagery isn't necessarily helpful.
So I think once people kind of recognise that that link and they can try and generate alternative
ways of thinking about future and alternative ways of imagining it, that might perhaps influence that.
Okay. Thank you ever so much. And I'm very sorry to everyone who put a question in the chat that we haven't been able to reach,
but hopefully you've been able to get some useful input on some of the things you were asking about through the responses Hannah's given.
But thank you ever so much for joining us today. Hannah, it's been really wonderful to have your talk and to add this to the series.
Just a reminder to those you've joined about the series.
So it's all available on the Department of Experimental Psychology YouTube channel, which you can search for directly or look at via our website.
And Halley's just posted more information on that in the chat. Before you completely
leave today we'd be really grateful if you complete the feedback form that will pop up.
It would be really useful to have that for us to be thinking just about future things that we may do beyond this series.
And I do suggest, as we're coming to the end of this series, like to say a huge thank you to Halley Cohen and Kaja Winney,
who have done all the work behind the scenes to make sure this series has run really smoothly and has helped us reach a
really large number of people with this sort of evidence-based guidance on all things mental health and mental wellness.
So massive thank you to Halley and Kaja for all of their support and huge thanks to all of our speakers across the series.
As you know, as I've said a few times, please do go and visit some of the other talks because there were some really you know,
there were really wonderful collection, which we hope will be really useful for you.
So thanks ever so much to you all for joining us. And we look forward to seeing you again in some other form in the future.
Thanks a lot. Bye bye.