How Worriers Misuse the Emotional Imagination

by Peter Michaelson (copyright 2005)

Worriers are allowing their creative capacity to be used against their best interests. That happens whenever their imagination is engaged in a self-defeating manner.

We all have unresolved conflicts that cause negative emotions. Through our inner conflicts we can easily become triggered and feel deprived, helpless, controlled, abandoned, rejected, and criticized. Our creative capacity or our imagination can contribute to this process of suffering.

When that happens, we begin to focus on painful memories from the past, or we embellish upon unpleasant circumstances in the present, or we make dire speculations and considerations about the future. When our imagination is entangled in such a way with our emotions, we call it the emotional imagination.

In psychoanalysis, the emotional imagination is called the visual drive, which is understood to mean the creative life force, the symbolic expression of our humanity that includes our emotional association with images, metaphors, pictures, ideas, and concepts.

The emotional imagination can be used either for our pleasure and benefit or for our displeasure and harm. When we are not conscious enough, our emotional imagination is usurped by the negativity in our psyche and used for dark or at least for self-defeating purposes.

A common form of unnecessary suffering is worrying. Through the emotional imagination we conjure up visions of worst-case scenarios. It is, of course, irrational. Nonetheless, we convince ourselves that it is somehow important to think about all the bad things that could happen any day now.

However, the worrying person, in creating his grim tomorrows, is cultivating the feeling of being helpless, deprived, and abandoned right now—in the here-and-now. Of course, many of the things about which we worry—painfully, sometimes fearfully so—never happen! That doesn’t matter to our unconscious negative agenda. Because of our secret willingness to collude in our unresolved negativity, we don’t need facts or reality to generate negative impressions and consequent suffering.

Often the root of worry is our compulsion to experience the feeling of helplessness. A person, for instance, who worries about his children being injured or killed, or about his house being burglarized or his stock portfolio crashing, can perhaps take a few precautionary measures. But, ultimately, we have limited control over future events. The fact of our limited control becomes entangled in our self-doubt or inner passivity to produce anxiety, worry, and fear. (In past centuries, superstition and fear of evil forces were earlier forms of worrying.)

Another insidious form of misusing the emotional imagination involves what one client termed his “skeet-shoot.” Despite having a college degree and intellectual interests, he had been working as a waiter for several years. He regularly came up with plausible ideas for more satisfying and creative work, but within a short time he had managed in his mind to shoot down these ideas and quickly lose any enthusiasm for them.

The process of undermining himself involved, through imagery and speculation, his wholesale production of possible problems and obstacles in his career path that he felt would be insurmountable. This “skeet-shooting,” which left him miserable and dejected, served his unconscious readiness to go on living with himself through a familiar, painful paradigm, that of being an underachieving individual who simply did not have the power to carve out his destiny.

Again, this combination of his inner passivity (meaning his sense of being overwhelmed and thwarted by obstacles) and his inner critic (which assailed him for being a hopeless dead duck) left him shattered on the grounds of his shooting range. It was the feeling he had no more control over his life than the outcome of a movie he was watching.

To stop misusing our imagination, we have to become more conscious and inwardly alert. We have to see the inner games we play that thwart our best interests.