How Drawing Can Overcome the Mind's Resistance to Growth

In this post, I want to inspire you to go beyond journaling, to give image journaling a try. When we write, our mind can interfere with what the unconscious wants to communicate, but when we allow ourselves to draw without an agenda, the mind is thrown off.

As usual, it was a session with a client that motivated me to write this post. More specifically, it's what happened after our session that inspired me to ask her if I could write about her experience.

My First Midlife Drawing

Click here to watch a video about drawing, where I show "Meeting My Inner Child"

some of the drawings that helped me gain insights I couldn't

have any other way.

Before I get to my client's story, let me offer some context and instruction.

The Controlling Mind vs. The Creative Unconscious

When I look back, I realize that I approached my life like a giant business plan. As a woman coming of age in the 1980s, I had no choice but to adopt a masculine style of consciousness to be accepted into the working world. Let me stop right here, though, to emphasize that masculine does not mean "man," and many men have a dysfunctional and weak sense of masculine. Anyway, for each new vision, I set goals, gathered knowledge, decided on strategies, and took actions that brought results. Everything seemed to make sense... until it didn't anymore.

I had mostly brushed off the first twinge of knowing something wasn't quite right ten years earlier, which meant everything had to dramatically fell apart to get my attention. My mind and intellect were very stubborn. Many things I believed about my life weren't true anymore. Nothing made sense, and I grew exhausted from trying to fix things, like my marriage and the school system.

But I had that moment of deja vu when you see what you couldn't see before. It's so surprising, that it makes you stop in your tracks long enough to surrender to the deeper truth that's been trying to get your attention. I had that moment, and instead of talking my way out of something, I just kept walking, right into a synchronistic event that led me to make the most irrational decision of my life. I was terrified of the consequences, but I knew it was going to save my soul.

You can learn more about my crazy story in my new memoir, When Sex Meets God: A Midlife Unraveling. It took me five years to write it, and now I want to share it with you.

I had to let go of everything, including my professional persona, goals, and assumptions about people. I answered the myserious call to pursue an MA/PhD in depth psychology without knowing why.

I didn't realize that my mind had been controling my life. It sought to keep me safe, but it had gone too far. Now, I would be plunging into the depths of my unconscious, which had its own agenda to bring me back to my feminine nature.

This is not to be confused with "woman," and today, many women have dysfunctional and weak relationships with their feminine consciousness, the part of us that knows before the mind does, like our body and intuition. The feminine isn't direct or linear, on purpose, to get around the mind's need to affirm and confirm existing beliefs, which tend to be limiting.

Learning the Language of the Unconscious

C.G. Jung said the language of the unconscious is the image, which isn't only visual. For me, the image is more like an impression. For example, an emotional reaction is an image we can explore, as is a pattern or dynamic with a certain person or situation. A visual image could be a vivid memory of an event or a scene that is rich with colors, sounds, goosebumps, and extreme temperatures. When the mind cannot determine the meaning of an image, it gets frustrated and wants to dismiss it as trivial, but this is your clue that there is a new insight to discover that will lead to unfolding into who you're meant to be.

There are many ways our unconscious sends us images to get us to explore something our mind is happy to suppress. Science backs this up, first by affirming that up to 90% of who we are is influenced by unconscious forces. Second, your brain's reticular activating system filters the world around you to match your current beliefs and assumptions, which are mostly automatic and unconscious. This system is mostly helpful until you need or want to expand. It's quite complicated how to overcome limiting beliefs, which is why it's not helpful to believe it's a lack of motivation that holds you back. That limiting belief just makes it more difficult.

You can learn more about the ways your unconscious is speaking to you everyday in my last book, Your Soul is Talking: Are You Listening?

Today, we're talking about drawing. It takes a little practice to overcome the artist complex most of us have, but over a two-year period of my midlife unraveling and reconstruction, I gained more insights faster from drawing in my image journal than I would have in discussions with my Jungian analyst or through journaling. In fact, the images I drew often led to my mind being able to help me articulate the insight that first lived in my body's reaction and my emotional response to my drawings.

How Processing Through Drawing Prepared My Client To Respond Differently to an Old Dynamic

My client is an amazing millennial woman with a huge intellect and works in the male dominated field of AI. Interestingly, she is also an artist, and you can find her work on Instagram @vagabond.paints. She came to me via a dream workshop where it became clear she is being prepared for a role to serve the collective. Currently, she's exploring parental complexes to shine a light on certain patterns of reacting and relating that she would like to change. As with some of my clients, her personal journey is strongly intertwined with the collective. I've told her that she's a modern Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt.

So, this last week, our session was rich and dramatic, and she could tell her body and psyche were processing a lot of opposing forces. She was overwhelmed, and her mind was agitated. This was a good thing, and I suggested she paint. Later that night, she shared her images with me.

My eyes popped open. "Did you paint those in that order?" I could see that something was being worked out, that there was a progression.

When I asked my client how she felt after the series of paintings, she said, " Since painting, I've felt relief, peace, and that I can sit with the painful feelings. I listened to classical music while I painted as it reminds me of my childhood playing classical piano."

It turns out that this processing experience would prepare her for what came a couple days later in the form of being on the receiving end of others' triggered projections. My client was able to experience something familiar in a new, more emotionally neutral manner. She could sit with the emotions and be more of an observer of them than be overtaken by them.

This is the myserious magical way of dancing with the unconscious, whose agenda is only for you to expand your consciousness and feel more at peace with your unfolding self.

Curious About My Image Journaling?

Click here to see a video where I share some of my image journaling, along with the insights I gained.

My Book Might Be a Match for Your Book Club.

Through out my memoir, I speak to certain images, which are included in the back of the book, along with discussion questions. If you're in a book club that loves stories about transformative experiences, my book might be a good match. You can reach out to me at dlukovich@gmail.com to book me as a guest at your bookclub to answer all your questions about depth psychology and the midlife experience.

Your individual self-reflection is contributing to what's bubbling up from the collective unconscious. Keep doing your work. We've turned a corner. I can feel it in the air. If you're ready to dig deeper, I'm here for you. Click here to learn more about my services and schedule an exploratory chat.

Thanks for being a self-reflecting human

Dr. Deborah Lukovich