rule, the client is encouraged to ensure a balance between images of horror and “positive” images. In psychotherapy, resources are the inner potential of a person, for instance a skills, abilities, knowledge, competence, experiences, talents, interests and strengths of which the patient is often unaware. The capacity for symbolisation is usually well developed in trauma patients; after all, they used fantasies of a better world to survive. Therefore, imagination exercises such as the “safe place” and the “inner helper” present an advantageous method. This method makes use of the clients’ faculty of imagination; they are instructed to imagine a safe place and, subsequently, to paint it. This image shows a landscape, a large meadow with horizon, sky and sun. In stressful everyday situations, the safe place offers support, strength and consolation, even though these internal images can never be found in the desired perfection in the outside world. The school of Milton Erickson (1981) calls this approach utilisation. A cat (pic.6-p.39) can be used as an “inner helper” during the stabilisation phase, as a companion, consoler and guide. In this phase of the therapy the artwork is not subjected to depth psychological interpretation. At first, the aim is that clients have these positive internal images safely at their disposal when they are in need and feel alone and helpless. Just as well, the helper could function as a cheer leader who encourages and emboldens. This exercise is an essential prerequisite to confronting trauma, for the helpers will then be able to lend their support. Another goal of the stabilisation phase is to learn controlled abreaction by means of a safe frame, in order to bring lowering of impulse control like anger into a fixed and thus controllable form. To this end, the client first creates the frame and makes sure that it is safe. The action impulses connected to the aggression can then be expressed within the frame. During the stabilisation phase, surfacing images are often connected to body perception. In this im-
43