Revisualization

Written Revisualization helps your brain deal with difficult memories and difficult people. There are certain ways of writing about these people and experiences that can help your brain heal from what happened to you.

Certain difficult experiences from your past live on in your brain as trigger points. When we talk about “getting triggered,” we are talking about what happens when present-day experience activate those trigger points.  Written reprocessing helps shrink the size of those trigger points so that you can react to the present instead of reacting to the past. 

I use two kinds of reprocessing:  written revisualizations and written dialogues. Each of these can help you heal your brain from difficult encounters with difficult people, especially your parents. 

A revisualization is a way of writing down a memory that impacted you in a negative way. You focus on taking in the data of what happened while leaving aside the interpretation that you recorded along with the data. Once you have formed a solid picture of what happened, you will use your fully-formed adult brain to create a more accurate interpretation of what was actually happening, especially in your antagonists’s mind.

Set the stage

• Pick a scene where someone important to you impacted you in a negative way. 

• Try to make the scene more vivid in your mind. Can you see it clearly and full color?

• What is the color of the flooring, the walls, and the furniture? What does it smell like?

• Who is your antagonist (the person who contributed to your suffering)

• Besides you and your antagonist, who else is there?

• Where is each person in the scene

• What is upsetting about what your antagonist is doing?

• How do you react to your antagonist?

• How do others react to your antagonist?

Watch the movie

• Why is this scene upsetting?

• Pay attention to what you actually see, not what you think you should see

• Pay attention to what you can’t see. What is missing? What comes next that’s not in the movie?

Map your antagonist’s mind 

• Did they know what you were thinking and feeling?

• What is there body posture?

• What is the expression on their face?

• What are they feeling?

• What are they trying to hide from you?

• What are they saying?

• What were they thinking about you?

• What were they feeling about you?

• What did they think you were feeling?

• Did they know that you were suffering?

• Were they OK with you suffering?

• Did they want you to suffer?

• Did they enjoy your suffering?

• Force your brain to take your antagonist’s perspective. How do they feel about you? What’s their agenda for you? Are they aiming at you or are you collateral damage?

• It takes willpower to make your brain focus on these kinds of questions. The rewards are often commensurate with the effort.

Study your antagonist

• Get into their mind and look at how they feel about you.

• Look at the scene from your point of view, from your antagonists’s point of view, and from the side. 

• Put yourself inside your antagonist’s head and figure out how they are seeing you

How do things turn out?

• What is the real-world impact of what happened?

• How does it affect your relationship with your antagonist?

• How does it impact others?

• Did you talk to anyone about what happened?

• Did you avoid talking to anyone about what happened?

Based on Chapter 9 of Living at the Bottom of the Ocean by David Scharch, available as a free PDF.