For therapists and mental health professionals is subconscious mind fascinating place, source of who we are, what drives us. One of the purposes of therapy is to help us bring subconscious into consciousness.
You might ask why would we want to do that?
Because once subconscious becomes conscious we can decide what we want to do with it, change patterns of our behaviour and decide if how we function, how subconscious drives us functioning serves us or not anymore. Very often we run on autopilot and our autopilot drives believes we have within us about ourselves, about others, about the outside world. We can be reactive or hold strongly negative emotions towards someone/ourselves or the opposite we might feel very connected and close to someone else. Therapy helps to understand these connections and the believes we hold. Sometimes these are creating negative feeling within us and standing in our way, making our life miserable. To understand where our emotions and feelings are coming from we need to understand ourselves and bring some of the unconscious into awareness.
Sometimes this can be painful process, because often our believes are tighed with emotions, which are stored in our bodies for every time we were not allowed to express them. As we start discovering things about ourselves these emotions start to be released and we need to feel them.
Therapy is a place where thanks to bunch of therapeutic tools and a therapeutic relationship these can be released and if needed brought into consciousness in a safe paced manner. There are different types of therapy for different issues, not every therapeutic process works this way as relived past experiences can be sometimes harmful or unnecessary and different direction in therapy is needed.
Once they are felt they leave our body and won’t drive our autopilot anymore. This might mean that what once you believed about yourself, for example that you are a bad person, because someone told you such thing in the past and you hold them very high (for example a parent, teacher etc.) can be reframed. This believe entered your consciousness, you felt the emotions related to it and now you can reframe the believe to your benefit. This can be done through finding evidence when you were actually a good person. This evidence helps you to reframe believe about yourself.
But that is another story for another day.
In order to begin ‘reframing’ process firstly we need to find out what the believes are. One of the great tools for doing so is intuitive drawing with a purpose. In this article I would like to explain you how to use ‘house floor plan drawing’ as an intuitive symbolic tool to uncover some unconscious believes.
What you need:
Pencil
A4 paper
Some coloured pencils (optional)
What you do:
Draw a floor plan of your house. This house needs to have 4 rooms – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual room. Now think what is your house like? Draw a floor plan of the house. How many floors are there? Is there a playroom? What rooms apart of the 4 are there?
Once you are done drawing the rooms make a speech bubble for each room and think about what is the purpose of the room, what is inside, what you do inside of each room. Add any objects into the room if you feel as they need to be there.
Don’t read farther until you are done with the exercise!
Unless we go to every room every day even if keep it aired we are not complete person. Is there a room in your house where you live most? How do you feel about it? Is there a room you don’t visit much or never? How does that make you feel? If you have more then one floor are these connected with stairs or somehow? If not how does that feel, why do you think there is disconnection to the rest? If you put playroom in where is it positioned? Is there access from everywhere in the house or just one entrance? Do your rooms have any doors and windows? Is there a hall way? How do the rooms connect to each other? Are there any empty unused spaces? Is there any cupboard and storage? If so how do they make you feel?
Now after thinking about this all…
What would be a title for the floor plan?
Thinking about the process of creation your floor plan you are learning something about yourself. The floor plan represents you and each room is part of yourself. If there are any disconnections you are now aware of them and can start slowly changing it.
If you look at the floor plan now is there anything you would like to change or add?
Once you are done think about how this exercise made you feel? Are there any emotions what need to be felt? What do they connect to? Did your mind wander somewhere? Into any memories while drawing?
Let me know if you learnt anything about yourself doing the exercise? Of course if you feel like you want to share publicly in the comments.
Mindful art…
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