Encourage the patient to draw, paint, mold clay, make music, journal, write poetry, dance, both in the sessions and at home. These creative arts can help a person express and work through their inner experience. The language of symbol and metaphor can help integrate what can never be fully verbalized. Evaluate for medication Some practitioners, such as John Perry, MD, have argued that medication only inhibits a person's ability to concentrate on the inner work and it mutes the psychic energy needed to sustain the effort to move the process forward. When medication is used to simply repress the inner process, it becomes frozen in an unfinished state.
Suppression can impede the potential for a complete working through to a point of resolution.
But sometimes the process is so intense that the person is overwhelmed and becomes very anxious. That person could benefit from slowing down the process. Bruce Victor, MD, a psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist, uses low doses of tranquilizing or antipsychotic medication to alleviate some of the most distressing feelings and allow the person to better assimilate the experience. The resolution of this seeming contradiction lies in the assessment of whether the presence of the debilitating state serves the function of psychological growth. Medication practices have already been influenced by new understandings of spiritual emergencies.