Watching a movie can be therapeutic because it connects us with our desires, activates memories, it shows us new paths or puts words to our most intimate feelings. If you are going through a difficult time, cinetherapy can help.
And it is that the spell of cinematographic images It is one of the most powerful triggers of the unconscious: many movies function as allegories, just like the myths, jokes, fairy tales or dreams used in many therapies. In this article, the writer Silvia Adela Kohan talks about the psychological dimension of cinema as a therapy to heal emotions.
Cinema helps us to understand ourselves
Often you feel a lot of things and you don’t know or can’t put them into words until you see that movie. As it happens with some parts of the body – the knee, the elbow, the navel, the neck – that exist, but do not attract your attention, you can spend a lifetime revolving around something without paying much attention to it until, suddenly, , that insignificant takes on meaning. How did it happen? If it is through a movie, you give meaning to automatism. Why do we sometimes react emotionally to watching a movie and not others?
Immersing yourself in a certain film is looking at yourself in a mirror in which perhaps you had never looked at yourself before. It is very useful to find out what is there about oneself or about oneself in a film. see another who things happen to him similar to what happens to you, or that does what you could do and you don’t dare, it suggests questions about the meaning of the life you lead and the decisions you have made. It is the beginning of the change.
Cinema can be a mirror in which our life is reflected
It can connect you in a new way with yourself or with yourself. Activate your memories, your needs, your intimate desires, your look; It opens doors for you that might have remained closed. Actually, works like a spotlight that illuminates a personal plot, as a reflection, as a filter, as a speaker. It transmits a particular vision of your own reality and provides you with clues to change attitudes and habits that limit you.
Through cinema we can grow on a personal level
It is a stimulant of the imagination and thought, an effective passport to emotions. To live is also to change. The situations experienced by the characters can be a warning to you, a revelation, a path to follow, an impetus for change and lead you to reconcile with yourself.
Be it a complex or banal film, It can suddenly install you in a personal aspect that you had not focused on in that way and makes you start spinning. If the protagonist acts as you would like, casual as Victoria Abril in the doormator sure of what she wants, like Diane Keaton in When you least expect it, You recognize yourself in who you would like to be.
It may also happen that the subject matter does not touch you directly, but can suggest something that could happen to you and thus affirm your beliefs or your wishes. So while for many, The piano, by Jane Campion, represents the liberation of a woman; for others it is the bondage of a woman. For all this film works as a warning.
The same happens with Almost all women are the same Directed by Brian Skeet, where the orderly life of an academic, Margaret Nathan, at the side of her husband, is altered when she begins the translation of a diary written in France. I know of those who rethink their relationship every time they see a Woody Allen movie.
Actually, a film can show you what you could do or reaffirm what you would never do.
Now, a movie can mark you at one point in your life, but not at another. The one that upset you years ago may not suggest anything to you in the present.
When it happens to you, instead of writing it off forever, you could try to figure out what happened. Knowing what mechanisms operated in you that are no longer activated (or vice versa) can give you a lot of information about your emotional state and act as a real therapy.