01 Jan Avatar in the healing of trauma
What a way to start out the New Year — or this new decade — by seeing Avatar.
I saw it on New Year’s Eve. It completely opened up my world. It was like I popped by head outside the Cosmic Egg (a la Joseph Chilton Pearce) into a rich, vibrant, dynamic world that was utterly captivating and hard to leave.
This morning still enthralled in the movie world I realized how important a vibrant imagination is in healing a trauma history.
As long as we’re caught in the painful world of our trauma we continue to re-enact and relive that pain. What if we create an imaginal alternative that becomes as real and life like? When we do that, as my attachment teacher Daniel Brown, PhD () suggests, we create new internal representations, a new world, in which to live. We shift our perception, shift our experience and free ourselves up.
This is what Jake Sully did when he entered his Avatar’s world. It was many times more vibrant, multiple times more powerfully compelling. It captures with is intense devotion to detail and rich, luminous content.
Now what if we did the same with our inner world? What if we created with such compelling detail the world in which we want, or wanted, to live? Where we are loved – in exactly the way we want to be loved. Where someone is exquisitely attuned to us so when we are hurt they know instantly what we need.
This repairs the fundamental structures of attachment and allows us to deal with the everyday, real life complications of interaction with greater ease and fluidity.