Best Friend, Worst Enemy

Imagination is both of these things. It can trap you in overwhelming anxiety, can paralyse you with fear, or it can release you to lead the life that you could and should be leading. And the good news is that you have the power to choose which it shall be. If right now you are prone to acute anxiety - and if you’re not, why on earth would you be reading this? - it feels as if choice is one thing that you don’t have. Anxiety is in control and you just have to submit to it or make the best of a bad job. This is an illusion and one that we must tackle, so let’s look at what imagination is and how it works. Imagination is the capacity to picture something which is not present or not happening right now. And your imagination is a very powerful one.It paints two pictures side by side. It paints a picture of what might happen, and it also paints a picture of how you would react. The trouble comes when you accept the pictures it provides as certain to happen. Let’s take an example. It’s time you went to the dentist for a check-up, but you don’t enjoy trips to the dentist. So what happens? The thought of going to the dentist immediately conjures up for you the dentist’s chair, the masked face of the dentist staring down at you, the feel of fingers, mirrors and other gadgets being inserted into your mouth, …. you get the picture. But as if that wasn’t enough, you get a picture as well of you, sweating, trembling, bursting into tears, panicking, fighting to get out of the chair and escape. What a lethal combination of images! Is it any wonder that you put off the idea of ringing up for an appointment until next week, like you did last week and the week before. And yet none of this is actually real. All of it is simply a figment of your fertile imagination. But it has the power, if allowed to go unchallenged, of bringing about a self-fulfilling prophecy. You begin to feel anxious at the mere thought of making an appointment, and once the appointment is made the anxiety persists and increases until indeed you arrive at the dentist’ surgery a gibbering wreck, and now with the added complication of fearing that you are going to make a fool of yourself; and we all know that, in the words of the saying, “I’d rather die than make a fool of myself.” Where did these powerful images come from? From you. You created them with the help of your imagination. So immediately we have all the proof that we need, that you have a powerful imagination. The problem is that you are using it destructively, when you could be using it constructively. If you can imagine a negative outcome and be convinced by it, then you can equally imagine a positive outcome and be convinced by that. It’s simply a matter of practice. Where people had phobic anxiety it was very popular among therapists a few years ago to use a scaled approach to desensitisation. I don’t know whether it’s still popular, but it can certainly be helpful for many people. It involved drawing up a hierarchy of anxiety, usually consisting of about ten steps. An example would be a fear of spiders. You take a sheet of paper. At the top, you write down the most terrifying thing involving spiders that you can imagine. Then at the bottom of the sheet, you write down the very smallest situation that would involve a spider but cause you little or no anxiety. For instance, it might reading the word ‘spider’ in a book or newspaper. Next, half way up the sheet you write down something that falls roughly half way between these two extremes. Finally you slot in another four in the bottom half and three in the top half, so that you have a list going from one end to the other in order of severity. You begin the desensitisation process down at the bottom, repeatedly reading the word ’spider’ until it causes no anxiety at all. Or put another way, until it gets boring because it’s so easy. Boredom is a great healer! Now, you go up one level and work on that in the same way until you have switched off its capacity to trigger anxiety, and so on and so on until you can confront your worst fear related to spiders and not react to it. At that point, you are no longer arachnophobic. I was going to describe this process as climbing a ladder, but I don’t think that’s helpful because it suggests that the hierarchy is still there, but you have learned to overcome it. The vandal in me prefers to imagine a different scenario. When reading the word ’spider’ no longer has any power, you saw that bit of ladder off and throw it away; the second rung is now at the level previously occupied by the first. You then progressively saw chunks off the ladder until the top has come down to you. No climbing involved. Now you make a bonfire out of all those redundant chunks of ladder and toast a marshmallow or two by way of celebration. There’s only one fly in this particular ointment; sometimes the bottom rung itself generates too much anxiety to get started. That’s where imagination comes in as a helpful friend. That’s what we look at next.