Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul — and you answer.
When we realize that images and symbols from dreams are a dialogue between our psychic or somatic intelligence and our conscious mind, it becomes easy to see that drawings too may be a form of communication with the collective consciousness and our greater self. I was introduced to spontaneous drawings at a workshop facilitated by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in the late 1970s. Kübler-Ross, a psychiatrist, Jungian, and author of On Death and Dying, devoted her life to improving medical professionals’ understanding of death as a growth process that involves stages of adjustment (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), and she beneficially influenced the hospice concept and care of terminally ill patients.1
One of Kübler-Ross’s therapeutic tools for opening communication between the dying patient and the people involved in that patient’s care was the use of spontaneous drawings. Drawings helped to reveal emotional issues that patients and family members had not felt comfortable discussing, and these drawings provided another means of identifying unfinished business before the death happened.
Having learned about the significance of dreams, and having witnessed the positive effects of guided visualization, I was excited to attend the Kübler-Ross workshop, meet Elisabeth, and gain a new Jungian surgical tool to share with my patients.
Throughout the weekend, a mixture of patients and health care professionals were given the opportunity to share their emotions and life experiences and create drawings. These workshops were followed by sessions in which Elisabeth introduced and practiced the interpretation techniques she used.
I was surprised by the authenticity of what Elisabeth revealed to me from my drawings alone — things I had been consciously unaware of, and which she brought to light through her questions and observations. For example, I chose to draw an outdoor scene depicting a snowcapped mountain and, below it, a pond with a fish jumping out of the water.
When Elisabeth studied my picture, her first question was: “What are you covering up?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I thought my picture revealed how much I value the peace and beauty of nature. She then pointed to the snow.
“You used a white crayon on white paper. Putting white on white was unnecessary; you added a layer that suggests you are covering something up. You also drew a fish — a spiritual symbol — but it’s a fish out of water.”
A year before the workshop, I had shaved my head. Many thought I did it in support of my cancer patients, but it was simply an inner desire I couldn’t resist. I had no idea what my motivation had been until that day in the workshop. I suddenly realized I had been keeping a lid on my feelings, as well as on my spirituality, in order to protect myself from the pain I felt at being unable to fix and cure all my patients. Cutting my hair had been a symbolic attempt to remove the lid, but I needed to uncover more than skin.
The snowcapped peak and jumping fish illustrated my feelings of separation from my spiritual, loving self, just as my shaved head was not about revealing skin but was a symbolic act, like that of a monk who uncovers his head as a symbol of uncovering his spirituality. Once I understood that, I found inner peace, and Elisabeth became my guide and teacher.
The insights I gathered at the workshop confirmed that communication was happening between my conscious and subconscious through the drawings. What excited me as a physician, however, was what I observed in the drawings of the people attending. Not only were psychological aspects of their lives reflected in their sketches, but also many of them drew anatomically correct aspects of their bodies and diseases without even realizing they had done so. Being a surgeon, I recognized the anatomical structures that patients and psychologists often had little or no knowledge of. Because of the physical and psychological aspects of the drawings, I was convinced that the practice would create a valuable means of communication between patients, physicians, and other people involved in the patients’ care. I went back to my office and the hospital armed with a box of crayons, my new surgeon’s tools.
Many physicians refused to believe what I was telling them; it was not something they had been exposed to during their training. How to teach your patients to induce self-healing is not a topic taught in medical school. So until the physicians experienced what I had observed and participated in, they refused to accept it.
Spontaneous drawings are an excellent resource for prevention, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of an illness. Rather than replace medical interventions, the drawings become an additional resource and enhance the physician’s skill. With insight into the patient derived from the wisdom of the subconscious, both physician and patient can make better therapeutic decisions. People thought I was crazy when I asked my patients to create drawings before making any treatment recommendations or decisions, but every time patients got over their fear about not being artists and just drew, the drawings proved to be powerful guides that we could not afford to ignore.
Doctors are not trained in how to speak to people, so when they say, “We’re giving you chemotherapy and here are the side effects…,” they don’t precede it with: “This will cure you or prolong your life.” It’s like the TV ads: after they tell you a pill is good for you, they say it might give you a heart attack, make your liver fail, sterilize you, make your hair fall out, or kill you. As scary as the ends of the ads are, at least they start with the benefits of a drug before they tell you the possible side effects. What patients hear from doctors about side effects is designed so the hospital and doctor won’t get sued. The hospital and doctor don’t think about the effect words from an authority figure have on a patient’s feelings and decision-making process. That’s why I always start out with: “This can make you well and add years to your life” or “It can cure you. There are some side effects, but they don’t happen to everybody.” I call it “deceiving” people into health. I slant the information for their benefit, accentuating the positive, because people can be talked into health or illness.
One man who came to see me insisted that he did not want chemotherapy even though it was the recommended treatment for his cancer. He was unable to express the reason for his concerns, but I was certain I knew what the problem was. He was afraid of the side effects because of what his physician had said. I asked this man to draw a picture of the recommended treatment (fig. 18). He drew the chemotherapy as yellow fluid running into him, not all over his body and making him sick, but going directly to the cancer. It was coming from the east and looked like sunlight — a positive sign of energy. On the left side of the page, one of his white cells was riding a horse and piercing the cancer. I explained to him that his intuition was saying chemotherapy was the right treatment for him and it was going to work.
When you connect with a patient’s inner wisdom, he recognizes that it’s coming not from the doctor but from within himself, and suddenly the lightbulb goes on; that moment of enlightenment occurs, and you can see it in his face. At that point, I said to him, “Go and get the chemotherapy; it’s the right thing for you to do.” His attitude had changed, and he was able to accept the recommended treatment. He approached his chemotherapy treatment with hope and confidence, and it turned out to be the right choice.
Another patient drew an illustration of his kitchen with everyone in his family shown upside down, as if they were standing on their heads. I asked him to explain what was going on, and he said he had chosen to treat his cancer with a macrobiotic diet instead of chemotherapy. “The kids don’t eat with me anymore. My wife hates preparing it, and I don’t like eating it. I’d rather have chemotherapy.” Until that drawing revealed his growing sense of sadness about the diet undermining his family relationships and his feelings of loss at not being able to share meals with them, he had been unable to voice his unhappiness about his decision not to have chemotherapy.
“You don’t have to treat your cancer with vegetables,” I said. “You can still elect to have chemotherapy and treat the cancer that way.” His eyes lit up and he looked happy for the first time since he entered my office. Seeing his true feelings illustrated on paper motivated him to choose what his instinct felt was right for him, and he had the chemotherapy treatment.
When the subconscious and conscious minds, a patient’s two sources of wisdom, are in conflict about a treatment, the patient will inevitably suffer more problems and side effects. You may have two patients with the same cancer getting the same treatment. But when one patient draws the operating room, and all you can see is him alone, lying on the operating table, this patient will have more trouble related to pain and postoperative side effects (fig. 57). When the other patient draws an unmasked surgeon holding her with music, love, God, and rainbows, she will awaken from surgery sore but free of major pain or side effects, and she will recover rapidly (fig. 58).
Patients’ unexpressed fear of treatment can often be identified by the images in their drawings. When a patient draws a negative image such as her chemotherapy syringe filled with black liquid (fig. 52), I have her visualize the same therapy with a positive result, one that is free of side effects. I created a CD called Getting Ready that helps patients to adopt positive thoughts and beautiful images related to their treatment. These become autohypnotic and help patients make the right decision and prepare their bodies to expect a positive result no matter what that treatment is. After a week or so, the patient’s next drawing will look different compared to the original version, and it will confirm that the conflict between intellect and intuition has been resolved to the benefit of that patient. Treatment can go ahead then with few or no side effects and will produce better results. If a patient cannot visualize a positive result, I try to help him or her clarify the difference between trying not to die and choosing what is right for him or her.
In earlier chapters, we discussed the power of creative visualization to stimulate the immune system’s reaction to chemotherapy and cancer. When a patient draws his treatment and shows white blood cells eliminating the cancer (fig. 59), or a patient draws beams of golden light streaming through her body (fig. 58), this patient is utilizing God-given tools for self-induced healing. Whatever we imagine, and what we focus on, sends a message to our body, so when we draw healing images our body follows through. After guided visualization, if a patient’s drawings show positive symbols and imagery (fig. 64), I have no worries about the outcome of her treatment. Such people have a remarkable recovery record, and I know this patient will be okay.
Disease often strikes where the body has stored painful memories of the past. A patient’s inner wisdom recognizes that these memories need to be acknowledged in order to heal. Psychologist and author Alice Miller says, “The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and someday the body will present its bill … until we stop evading the truth.”2 In Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, she says, “Your real felt feelings will never kill you; they will help you find direction. Only the unfelt yet powerful emotions and needs, the feared and banished ones, can kill us…. Therapists were surprised to see that once patients could … take their unwanted emotions seriously and develop them into a direct and healthy language, full recovery was possible.”3
Pain helps us to identify and define ourselves; when we realize that, and work with it, all pain becomes labor pain, or growing pains. When spontaneous drawings bring up old hurts from the past, they make it possible to deal with psychic wounds that have the potential to become physical disease. And labor pains are worthwhile when we give birth to our true selves.
Dr. Caroline Thomas, a professor and psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Medical School, had medical students fill out a personality profile and draw a picture of themselves as part of a long-term study that continued to follow them after they left medical school and that collects data to this day. Years later Thomas looked at the medical histories and found that specific aspects of their original drawings and personality profiles significantly correlated with diseases the students experienced after medical school, and they also correlated with the parts of the body that were affected. This stimulated further medical research into predicting with some accuracy what diseases people are likely to have later in life, and in what part of the body, based on personality profiling. One of the factors for predicting cancer turned out to be a profile that reported a low level of closeness to parents.4
Children in particular are unprepared to deal with physical or emotional trauma when it happens, and they are vulnerable to whatever their adult authority figures impose at the time. If caring adults do not help them deal with trauma, children will resort to a coping mechanism that leads them to store the feelings and memories of events in their subconscious mind and body, to be dealt with at a later time or never resolved. Seeds of anxiety, grief, fear, abandonment, and other emotions plant themselves in parts of the body and lie dormant until years later, when the immune system is challenged by the stress of grief or another traumatic event. It is then that these seeds can manifest into conditions such as cancer, heart disease, respiratory or digestive illness, allergies, and more. These potential illnesses are often revealed in patients’ drawings — and not just their own potential illnesses but also those of other family members.
I would be concerned about a mother’s drawing of her family in which her son carries an empty oval object that resembles the hole in the nearby tree trunk — a symbol of the family’s situation surrounding the mother’s cancer (fig. 61). This patient’s drawing shows her son at the end of the line, not connected to anyone. The boy’s life is like the empty vessel under his arm. Analyzing a drawing like this enables the parents not to feel criticized but to see their son’s unexpressed loneliness and grief, even when it is expressed intuitively in the mother’s drawing. The father needs to be connected to the mother, and the family to each other; together they can take whatever action is needed to help the boy feel loved and supported as the family members go through the ordeal.
Connections between significant or traumatic memories and one’s present state of health are often revealed in the drawings. Once they are made visible, the person can give much-needed attention to the past affliction and the soul. This is never about blaming the patient, but about how our emotions create our internal chemistry and affect our genes and health.
A good example of this is a nonbelieving reporter who asked me for an interview. Right away I could see that this very intellectual person lived in her head, not her heart. I realized it wasn’t going to be a pleasant interview, so I had to do something to change her perspective right at the start. I said to her, “While I finish up with the last two patients, please draw a picture of yourself.” She agreed to do so, and when she handed me her drawing, I saw a figure with a big head, so I realized my diagnosis of her attitude was correct (fig. 45). Her drawing also contained a clock with one hand pointing at twelve.
The safest question for me to ask her would have been: Why is twelve important to you? She might have responded, “Twelve months ago my house burned down.” But I wanted to really shake her up, so I took a chance and, pointing to the clock, asked, “What happened when you were twelve years old?”
“It means I don’t like deadlines.”
“But there’s only one hand on the clock. What happened when you were twelve years old?”
She burst into tears and told me that at twelve years of age she had been abused. That’s the part that always impresses me — numbers in drawings are no accident. From that moment on, it was a different interview. The reporter understood that her inner wisdom was telling her to pay attention to the feelings of the traumatized inner child, to stop hiding from the memory by living in her head, and to seek therapeutic help.
Drawings not only connect aspects of mind and body, but they also integrate patients’ lives outside the clinical arena with somatic aspects of their diseases. A doctor sent me a drawing by a patient who was having pelvic problems. Despite giving her various treatments, no one had been able to relieve her symptoms. Her drawing revealed a heart, like a valentine heart, with a large crack in it and twenty drops of blood dripping from the heart. I told him to ask her what happened when she was twenty, and her answer revealed sexual abuse at the age of twenty as the etiology of her problem. Numbers are not always about one’s age; she could have answered that twenty months ago something happened. When she received counseling for the trauma, her symptoms were relieved.
Other drawings have identified the causes of symptoms. One girl’s mother was distraught, believing that her child’s enlarged cervical lymph nodes were a sign that her daughter had a lymphoma, a disease that ran in her family. When the woman brought her in to be examined, she also brought two of the child’s drawings. In one picture the girl had drawn herself with a swollen neck and face, and in the other she drew a cat with large front claws. I told the mother not to worry, that her daughter had cat scratch fever. Tests and a biopsy revealed this to be the correct diagnosis.
When we expose the unconscious and reveal the inner truth, disharmony between individuals, families, and health care professionals ceases. No longer do intellect and intuition remain in conflict, so true healing can occur. There may be physicians who will say, “Who has time for this?” My answer is that you save time by using drawings. When a child with cancer tells me she is not getting enough time from her family, I can talk to six people in her family and try to clarify the issue, or I can ask her to draw a picture of the family.
One child with cancer drew her family seated on a couch. At the end of the couch she left an empty space for one more person, but she drew herself seated on a chair at the other side of the room. Her parents’ arms were either wrapped around her siblings or protecting themselves, and they were physically distant from their sick daughter (fig. 62).
I didn’t need to spend an hour explaining to the parents that their daughter was feeling abandoned, for one look at the picture said it all. Once they understood their daughter’s viewpoint, they were able to express how their fear of losing her had resulted in their withdrawing emotionally as a coping mechanism and so they could be strong for their other children. The fact that the sick girl drew herself in the spiritual color purple also said to me that she knew she was going to die of the cancer.
The picture played a significant role in changing the parents’ behavior. They began talking with each other more about their feelings, and they gave their daughter the extra attention and loving support she needed. Not only did it help the child through her ordeal, but also the whole family grew closer before she died. When we allow spirit and symbol to serve life, we can be unique guides and life coaches for those we care for and about. We can be aware of the truth and not see a person’s death as a failure. And we can allow ourselves to continue our lives free of guilt, as this child’s parents were able to do.
To create your own drawings or to facilitate the work of others, you need not be an artist or therapist. All you need is some plain white paper and a box of crayons or colored pencils. You must have all the colors of the rainbow available for use, plus black, white, and brown, since every color has meaning associated with it.
I avoid telling people what to draw, because I want their unconscious, inner wisdom to have the freedom to create a drawing that reveals unasked questions and unspoken desires. But when cancer or another disease is the situation or theme, I ask the person to draw a picture of himself that shows his disease and treatment, with his white blood cells eliminating the disease. I avoid using words that suggest killing or a warlike approach, as I am interested in helping people to heal their lives and bodies, not focus on their enemy. I may also ask a person to draw a self-portrait, an outdoor scene, or his home and family.
You can draw a picture that relates to a decision you have to make, such as a job choice, the person you will marry, or upcoming surgery. I encourage people to include any images, objects, and symbols that pop into mind while they are working on their drawings. Children are not self-critical as they work, but adults need to be told there is no wrong way to draw the picture; this is necessary to eliminate their fear that they and their drawings will be judged and found wanting.
The evaluator’s first step is to write down her immediate overall impression and identify any feelings evoked by the picture, such as isolation, anger, sadness, or joy. The next step is to see what is in the picture (people, objects, movement and direction of movement, body size, and so on). Notice what is missing (such as hands or feet) and what is odd about the drawing, as well as any accidents or errors (such as lines that cross over a person). The evaluator should pay attention to the colors used, to their intensity and shade, to available colors that were not used, and to any odd color choices (such as a purple sun). She should also pay attention to numbers and count recurring objects. In a picture that has multiple themes and elements, the evaluator can make note of which quadrants each symbol or image is in. She should observe how completely the drawing fills the page and check to see if the artist also drew on the other side of the paper.
Before analysis begins, the artist should be available to discuss the drawing with the evaluator and answer questions related to it. To interpret it correctly, we need to know why the person drew what he did. For instance, a child handed me a drawing done entirely in black crayon, and I was worried about him until he said, “I have two older brothers. That’s the only crayon I ever get.”
The evaluator must understand that she represents an authority figure. If she bases her interpretation of the drawing only on her own understanding and beliefs, she may misinterpret it or may appear to criticize it — and both of these can cause harm. The drawing is not meant to be read like a horoscope, but should be used as a therapeutic tool for discussion with the artist so that correct interpretations and choices can be made.
As an example of an evaluation that needs clarification, consider a patient’s drawing of his treatment that includes a black cat walking across the floor. Let’s say that, to the evaluator, the cat suggests something negative, a threat, when in reality the patient has a black cat and his subconscious is expressing the idea that the cat’s presence during treatment would be something positive, a source of comfort and love. Instead of revealing an emotional problem or threat, the black cat in this drawing represents an important aspect of the patient’s recovery needs.
The color purple, a spiritual color, may reveal a coming transition from physical body to spirit through an appropriate symbol, such as a purple butterfly going up into the sky. But a patient who draws himself wearing purple may not be predicting his own death. For him purple might represent his spiritual nature. Or it may be the color of his favorite basketball team, and so may signify a victory over his disease, one that will enable him to attend and enjoy many more games. It is essential, then, that whoever is guiding the artist in the interpretation of his drawing be open-minded and nonjudgmental during the dialogue between them, for the artist is the expert in analyzing the meaning of what has been drawn. The therapist is there only to help bring out the hidden meaning, as one would do with someone else’s dream.
Past, present, and future may all be represented in a person’s drawing. At some level of consciousness, we are aware of the future because, as Jung said, we unconsciously create our future far in advance. This awareness extends to important life changes and events, as well as to our upcoming death, whether it will be due to an accident or a disease.
One drawing, done by a woman with cancer, showed her husband flying a purple kite. I realized she was saying that she was ready to go and that he wasn’t able to let go of her because she took care of everything. When I suggested this to her, she went to him and said, “I’ll train you.” Six months later he told her he cut the string, and she responded, “I’ll die Thursday when the kids get here from California.” And she did.
I asked one woman to draw a picture, and she drew a gravestone with three green shrubs planted in front of it. To the left, soil was piled beside an empty grave. Green is the color of life, so it seemed to suggest that in the face of death she chose to live instead. How long do you think she lived? She was interred in the grave nearly three years to the day after she drew this picture (fig. 24).
Drawings can simply relate to what is happening now in the artist’s life, but those that contain multiple objects or complex content can often be divided into quadrants where the past, present, and future are revealed, as on a grid.
The center of the drawing represents what is centrally significant to the artist, as in the drawing of the woman who represented her breast cancer with two sails on a boat (fig. 12). The upper right quadrant of a picture represents the present, or the “here and now” (see fig. 19), where the artist, diagnosed with cancer, shows his children as birds in the top right corner. Downward-pointing wings reveal their current grief about the situation and their inability to help their dad. The lower right quadrant represents either the near future or the recent past; the lower left represents the distant past; and either the far future or the death concept is shown in the upper left. For example, if someone drew on one sheet of paper several different places he was thinking of moving to, whatever place occupied the upper left would be the one he would move to.
A perfect example of the quadrant theory is illustrated by figure 21. A neighbor of mine stopped by and told me she was depressed, so I asked her to do a drawing for me. In the upper right (the present) she was walking downhill with four rays of sunshine behind her. “I am feeling down about my divorce and those are my four children. They are my sunshine,” she said. In the lower right (near future or recent past) there were eight stick people in red (strong emotion), but she didn’t know what they signified. The lower left (distant past) contained waves of seawater, and she said she’d grown up in a house on the beach. In the upper left quadrant (far future) she’d drawn black clouds. She believed these referred to her upcoming divorce.
Weeks later, after sending her kids out the door to catch the school bus, she took an overdose of sleeping pills to commit suicide. The amazing thing is that the children refused to get on the school bus when it arrived. Something told them they needed to go home, which they did, so they found their mother and saved her life. She awoke in the intensive care unit with eight angry members of her family standing around her bed (red stick people).
Susan Bach notes that movement and direction are also important in the drawings. A bus traveling down to the left side of the page would denote a downward spiral in the physical or emotional state, whereas one starting from the lower left and climbing up to the right can indicate improvement or climbing out from the darkest depths.5
One more caution must be mentioned here: the placement of objects in quadrants should be used only as a guide, for there are no rules cast in stone when dealing with individuals’ subconscious language. Quadrant placement is not a science but a theory based on common traits seen in hundreds of people’s drawings, so it may not always be applicable.
Numbers play a significant role and should be considered carefully, because they are one way that we store memories. Just as archetypes represent a larger idea, numbers can be meaningful, complex symbols. Jung said, “I have the distinct feeling that number is a key to the mystery, since it is just as much discovered as it is invented. It is quantity as well as meaning.”6 Numbers may appear in the drawing as numerical figures, such as the seven on the sail of a boat (fig. 65), or they can be quantities, like the number of green shrubs (fig. 24) or of windows on a plane (fig. 70).
Colors contain universal meanings: yellow represents energy; green is growth and life force; black symbolizes sadness or despair, and so on. Once again, however, caution must be advised, because people may have unique personal or cultural symbolic meanings. A color itself should never be judged as good or bad. In China, for example, red signifies good luck and prosperity, while in America it often represents the passion of anger or of love. The wise physician or therapist will ask his patient: “What does this color mean to you?” Interpretation of the drawing then becomes far more helpful to the patient and people involved in his care. Remember that the individual may actually have a gray house with a black roof (fig. 63), so we need to know the facts.
In general, black represents grief and despair. Red signifies strong emotions ranging from pain or anger to love and passion. Orange is symbolic of change, which can be a good thing if it is the color of your treatment. Yellow is energy, and you want to see it in your treatment, not your disease. Green, blue, and brown are all natural, life-supporting, healthy colors, but when they are pale, or especially when they fade in a series of pictures drawn over time, it can mean that the life force is fading. White signifies that something is being covered up, since the page is already white, just as pink or gray can represent red or black covered up emotionally. Purple symbolizes a healing property, spiritual growth, or a transformation, such as the transformation from being a living person to becoming spirit.
For further information, I heartily recommend two books I mentioned earlier, and whose authors have helped me in the past: Life Paints Its Own Span by Susan Bach and The Secret World of Drawings by Gregg Furth.7 Both books are entirely devoted to drawings.
Pictures can reveal problems that patients don’t speak to their doctors about, often because the patients are unaware of them consciously. At the same time, their subconscious is aware, and art provides a visual language to get the problem across. I found it particularly helpful to show parents their children’s drawings so they would see the messages their children were putting forth but not feel like I was criticizing them. When a boy portrayed himself like a black insect on the operating table (fig. 44), it revealed his lack of self-esteem. His parents could see he needed more than plastic surgery; he needed their love.
In family drawings it is important to pay close attention to facial expressions, bodies touching, and space between people. Missing people or missing body parts, people’s positions, and any oddities or errors also reveal important areas of conflict. Freud pointed out that when a person’s conscious mind is at variance with his subconscious, the conflict that the patient could not voice always escapes in the guise of an error or omission in his speaking, writing, or drawing. He believed there are no mistakes; that the subconscious is demanding attention.
When a nun with cancer handed me her drawing of her family members (fig. 68), their body positions revealed they were not open to each other. I told the nun she would have to let them know she needed their support or get help from someone else, because the family was simply not there to supply it.
You don’t have to be sick to reap the benefits from creating drawings. You can use them to understand yourself and other people better and help them to know themselves better, too. With adults and seniors, comparison drawings of themselves today and themselves twenty-five years ago can be a revealing exercise that confirms their sense of self-acceptance and identity. Feelings of discontent will show up in the “today” picture when the self is depicted as fat, bald, and unhappy compared to twenty-five years ago, when the self was depicted as slim, happy, and with hair. This provides an opportunity to address the person’s feelings in a beneficial way.
Among seniors, drawings often spark communication about who they were, who they are now, and who they can be. For example, one man drew only one picture and said, “That’s me then and me now.” He had never stopped giving love or caring for others; the nursing home he lived and died in now has a memorial to him in its library. When the younger generation who care for the residents of senior homes learn more about their clients through drawings such as these, they cease to see them as just a bunch of oldies; each resident becomes an individual, a human being with a story.
One example of using drawings for making important life decisions is beautifully illustrated by a medical student who came to me for advice. His dad, a doctor and a friend of mine, had died of cancer. The son had become unsure about whether he truly wanted to be a doctor, fearing that the pressure and emotions experienced by people in the profession were part of why his father got sick. I said to him, “Draw a picture of all the professions you’re thinking that you might go into.”
He came back and handed me three drawings. In the first (fig. 13), he was a politician. He was the only person in the picture who had an ear; he didn’t have hands or feet, and neither did anybody else. There wasn’t much color in the picture and it was framed in black, so I said “No, don’t be a politician.” When he handed me the next one (fig. 14), he said, “I could be a teacher.” I advised him not to go for that either. All the nice colors were outside the window. Inside there were red desks, an emotional color, and nobody in the room had ears or feet, including him, so I said he would feel trapped if he went into teaching. Then we looked at the last one (fig. 15), of him as a doctor. The one thing missing was the ear again, but I thought that related to his fears about his father, as if he were thinking: “What am I going to hear that’s going to be a problem for me emotionally?” But the room was a healthy color with a green floor, plants growing, and a blue desk. He was reaching for the patient. The room had a door too. If things got tough, he could step out the door and take a vacation. His purple pants were a spiritual color. This showed that his connection to people was based on an awareness of life at physical, mental, and spiritual levels. He eventually became a psychiatrist, and he’s happy at what he’s doing.
Pick a situation, subject, problem, or decision you are considering. Draw your choices and observe the details the following day when you can view them intellectually — as if someone else did the drawing — and you are no longer consciously blind to the symbolism portrayed. Share the drawings with someone you trust. Ask that person to tell you what he or she sees in the picture and how it makes him or her feel. This person’s comments, together with your own interpretation, will give you more insight into your problem and will help you to make a self-serving, authentic choice. Remember: you are the only one who knows the truth behind the symbolism, so don’t let others impose their incorrect interpretation on your inner wisdom and knowingness.