Chaplain Kyle D. Johnson on the use of guided imagery in pastoral care

Neuropastoral Care and Counseling

Neuroscience has broad applications for clinical settings. These applications have important and useful implications for pastoral practice. Clinical Pastoral Education’s development has relied upon understanding how the mind operates. Lessons about the mind from “talk therapy” approaches such as Psychoanalysis, Transactional Analysis, and Person Centered Therapy have given chaplains useful tools for pastoral care and counseling interventions. Lessons from neuroscience may be added to those of the talk therapies.

An example of neuroscientific lessons may be the work of Elizabeth Phelps at New York University. Phelps led a team that conducted an experiment to learn if persons could learn fear by watching other persons suffer an unpleasant experience.[1] Phelps showed a group a movie of a person looking at colored images. This person suffered a mild electrical shock each time a certain color (e.g., red) was shown. Phelps then placed each group member in a MRI and did brain scans while the members were shown colors that included the same color (e.g., red) that the person in the movie saw when being shocked. The MRI scans showed the group members’ fear centers became more active when the same color corresponding to electrical shock was shown even though they were not shocked. Their brains’ fear centers had learned to fear the color that occurred with electrical shocks that another person received in a movie.

The fear learned by the persons in Phelps study involved brain centers not connected to the brain’s conscious centers. This means that using talk therapy tools would not help a person change this kind of fear. The kind of fear that Phelps was studying is common in life.

All of us have witnessed incidents in which another person was hurt. A friend falls down some steps and gets hurt. We learn to be careful on steps even though we did not fall. We see another person drive reckless and have a car wreck. We learn to be more careful drivers even though we did not have the wreck.

Chaplains may encounter persons with this kind of learned fear. A person with heart disease is highly stressed because he watched a parent die of heart disease. Another person is very fearful of gall bladder surgery, a relatively safe procedure, because a friend died unexpectedly after similar surgery. A new mother is terrified of delivering her baby because a sister died in child birth. Talk therapy interventions would be of limited value to these persons because their fears would come from brain areas not open to talk therapy interventions.

One tool that a chaplain could use in these situations is “guided imagery.” The chaplain uses the person’s imagination to create situations in which the person sees herself dealing successfully with the learned fear. Guided imagery reaches those brain centers not available to talk therapy. Guided imagery is easy to learn and can be taught to the fearful person. The person very fearful of gall bladder surgery could imagine watching himself successfully go through surgery. The same type of imaginary scenarios could be used with the other examples.

Guided imagery is one tool of a resource that I call neuropastoral care and counseling. Another example of neuropastoral care and counseling may be found in the ACPE Research Network April 2007 Article of the Month at: http://www.acperesearch.net/apr07.html.

Footnote:

[1] Olsson, A., Nearing, K. I. and Phelps, E. A. “Learning fears by observing others: the neural systems of social fear transmission.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access, (March 15, 2007).

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