Why Does Our Mind Communicate Through Symbols?

In one of his early sessions, Moses imagined himself fighting a multi-headed dragon. This was a huge animal, which the young man felt was much stronger and more powerful than him. The more Moses tried to defend himself, the fiercer the dragon became and the more cruel and merciless were his attacks.

In the following sessions, Moses continued to fight the dragon. Gradually, he was gaining confidence and understanding the strategies that the monster devised to defeat him. He began to feel stronger, to be able to dodge his attacks and, from time to time, he managed to make the leviathan recoil. Finally, the day came when Moses, feeling strong and powerful, was able to defeat the dragon and cut off all its heads.

In this last session, Moses asked me what this image of the fight with the dragon could mean. Instead of giving him a straightforward interpretation (which could be wrong), I talked to him about how symbols work in therapy.

I explained that sometimes we have such devastating experiences that our minds hide them to avoid the suffering of reliving this situation over and over again. I also commented that this concealment of the past does not prevent the pain caused by abuse from continuing to be very present in our lives.

Trauma, the unconscious and the symbol

Although we try to forget the trauma, it continues to affect us in our day to day life. In order to heal it, we need to bring to light all the repressed emotions in the past (pain, anger, sadness, etc.). Right at this point in therapy, symbols appear to help us realize this awareness.

Suddenly accessing traumatic memories can be too shocking for the person and could cause severe shock. Let’s not forget that access to these memories was blocked by our mind as a protective measure.

However, when our unconscious finds a suitable opportunity (such as the therapeutic environment), it begins to dose the repressed information through symbols.

Through symbolic scenes or images, the person can work on the resources they need to feel increasingly stronger and prepared to be able, later on, to face (and face) all the details of the real experience of their past. Moses, for example, in his fight with the dragon, felt that he was able to face it and even defeat it.

How Moses defeated the dragon

As he progressed in his therapy, Moses understood that the dragon represented his father and all the violence that, in his childhood, he had received from him. The father of Moisés was a rude and authoritarian man who did not admit any protest or complaint on the part of his children. “With him there was no possible dialogue; either you did what he said or you suffered the consequences ”, the young man commented to me in one of his sessions.

Moises remembered getting the occasional spanking or slapping when he was little, but what his mind had completely forgotten was a brutal beating that his father gave him when he was 9 years old. It was only when he had advanced enough in his therapy that the young man was able to recall all the details of this very traumatic episode. In fact, the beating was so fierce that the boy was unable to attend school for a week as a result.

Living a childhood under the yoke of an abusive father had left a deep mark on Moses. He was a boy withdrawn on himself, unable to defend himself when someone attacked or abused him. His self-esteem was so damaged that he believed himself worthy (as his father had told him in his childhood) of all the misfortunes that happened to him.

Thanks to the previous work, which he had done facing the dragon, Moisés was able to access the memory of the beating and, in addition, he was able to regain his self-esteem to face the image of his father and release all the pain and anger that he had repressed during years.

Symbols are the words and phrases with which our unconscious communicates with us. If we let ourselves go and relax our analytical / rational part, we can access all the information about ourselves that resides within us.

Symbols provide us with very valuable information and give us a second chance to put on the table everything that was repressed and that needs to be healed. We must be very attentive to listen to the hidden message that they bring us from our unconscious.