We Imagine Our Way to Healing
On resourcing, processing, and the imagination as therapeutic medium
If imagination is the faculty of possibilities — the full range of what the nervous system can conceive and experience as real — then trauma therapy is, at its core, imaginative work. Not metaphorically. Not as a soft description of something that's really happening neurologically. The imagination is the actual medium through which healing moves.
This isn't how EMDR is usually described. It's presented, accurately, as an evidence-based trauma treatment with a specific protocol and a measurable mechanism. All of that is true. But underneath the protocol is something that the research doesn't always name directly: the work happens in the imagination, and it works because the nervous system cannot distinguish between what is imagined and what is real.
The problem with processing
When someone enters an EMDR processing session and begins to hold a traumatic memory in mind, the body responds immediately. Not as if something happened in the past. As if it is happening now. The nervous system doesn't file traumatic memory under history — it holds it as present experience, available to the imagination at full intensity.
This is both the challenge and the opportunity of trauma work. The challenge is that the experience can become overwhelming — the imagined memory so vivid, so sensorially complete, so real to the nervous system that it floods the person's capacity to stay present with it. The opportunity is that because the body is fully engaged, something can actually shift. The imagination is live. The nervous system is in the room.
The instinct, when someone is overwhelmed by imagined traumatic material, is sometimes to pull them out of it. To remind them that it isn't real, that it happened in the past, that they are safe now. But this doesn't work the way we hope, because the body isn't listening to the reassurance. It's responding to the imagination. And simply telling someone that what they're imagining isn't real doesn't change what the imagination is producing or how the nervous system is receiving it.
What resourcing actually does
This is where resourcing — one of the foundational elements of EMDR — becomes something more interesting than it first appears.
A resource, in EMDR, is an imagined experience that the nervous system has learned to receive as real. A safe place — not an actual location, but an imagined one that the body has practiced inhabiting until it produces genuine feelings of safety, calm, or groundedness. A protective figure. A quality of inner strength or support, given an image and a felt sense. These are built carefully, over time, until the body responds to them the way it responds to real experience. Because to the nervous system, they are real experience.
When traumatic material becomes overwhelming in a processing session, the resource doesn't interrupt the imagination — it enters it. Rather than pulling the person out of the imaginative field and back into ordinary reality, the resource is introduced into the field itself. The protective figure arrives. The safe place becomes present. The imagined support becomes part of what the nervous system is experiencing alongside the traumatic material.
This is a subtle but important distinction. The resource doesn't say to the imagination: stop. It says: here is something else that is also real. Here is another presence in this field. The field widens, just enough, so that the person is no longer alone in the imagination with only the overwhelming material. Something has been added. Something that the body already knows is safe.
Robert Johnson, writing about active imagination — Jung's practice of entering into genuine dialogue with the contents of the imagination — described the essential quality this way: One must sense that it is real, that it is actually happening—even though it is inside rather than outside. If you are detached from it, or just feel that it is nothing but a fantasy you are watching from a safe distance, there is no real experience.
That quality — full participation rather than detached observation — is what I'm looking for when I work with a client on resourcing. The measure isn't whether they can describe the safe place clearly or picture it vividly. The measure is what happens in their body. When the body begins to respond — when the breath changes, when the shoulders drop, when something visibly settles — that's when I know the imagination has been received as real. That's when the resource is actually a resource.
The imagination as the medium of healing
What this means, taken together, is that trauma therapy isn't working around the imagination or in spite of it. It's working through it, with it, inside it.
The traumatic memory is imagined — and therefore present, and therefore available to shift. The resource is imagined — and therefore real to the nervous system, and therefore genuinely regulating. The processing happens in the space where imagination and body meet, which is the same space where the trauma lives.
Healing, in this framework, isn't the replacement of bad imaginative experiences with good ones. It's the gradual restoration of a full imaginative field — one that can hold difficulty without being consumed by it, one that has access to safety and support as real felt experiences rather than abstract ideas, one that is wide enough to contain the past without being ruled by it.
The imagination that once held only the worst possibilities begins to hold more. And in that widening, something that felt permanently fixed begins, slowly, to move.