Using Movies for Personal and Spiritual Growth

Movies operate on multiple levels, offering diverse experiences and insights. In this article, we will explore Birgit Wolz's classification method, which delves into three distinct ways films can be utilized: prescriptively, evocatively, and cathartically. Prescriptive utilization involves employing films as models or illustrations to portray desired qualities or behaviors. Evocative utilization entails using films as tools for self-discovery, while cathartic utilization involves finding emotional release through cinematic experiences.

The Prescriptive Way

This approach is based on the assumption that watching a movie can put us into a light trance state, similar to the state often achieved via guided visualizations. In therapy, this kind of trance work is designed to help clients get in touch with a mature and wise part of themselves that helps them overcome problems and strengthen positive qualities. This is a combination of watching certain films with conscious awareness combined with effective therapeutic methods that help to reach deep layers of the psyche to bring about healing and growth.

Using the Prescriptive way, specific films are recommended as a kind of teaching tale, to model problem-solving, or to access and develop an undiscovered capacity. They also can be chosen to demonstrate the wrong way of doing things so the viewer can learn by proxy.

The Evocative Way

Another way of utilizing movies in a therapeutic and growth-provoking manner borrows from dream work. Films can be seen as the "collective dreams" of our times. When certain movies resonate with us, they touch the unconscious part of our psyche. A film may move us deeply. A character or a scene might also upset us intensely. Understanding our emotional responses to movies, just as understanding our nighttime dreams, can serve as a window to our unconscious. Both are ways to bring our unconscious inner world to a conscious level.

One of the most effective ways of using dreams to tap the wisdom of the unconscious can be found in Jeremy Taylor's book Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill. You can adapt some of his basic principles for the interpretation and utilization of dreams to the process of self-discovery and growth through films. As you understand your responses to movie characters, you will get to know yourself in ways of which you were previously unaware. Consequently, these responses will teach you how to reach increased health and wholeness. This is possible because expanded awareness alone often helps us to let go of unhealthy patterns and reconnect with our authentic self.

In this process, films are used in an evocative way. Different from the Prescriptive way, the choice of films is not limited to a certain kind of movie. As it is possible to gain insights from any dream, your emotional responses to almost any kind of movie can teach you to understand yourself better.

The Cathartic Way

Our cultural preference for processing emotions cognitively instead of feeling them in our bodies tends to maintain and prolong distress. Emotions are stored in the body, not only the mind. Cathartic therapeutic techniques allow therapists to help clients access these stored emotions and release them. These methods are based on the assumption that the more catharsis clients experience, the faster they move through the healing process.

Painful emotions can do more than produce tears; they have also been proven to create stress chemicals in our bodies. Catharsis helps to counter these by releasing buried feelings. Nature has provided us with natural cathartic processes like laughing and crying to move us through and beyond our pain.

Because many films transmit ideas through emotion rather than intellect, they can neutralize the instinct to suppress feelings and trigger emotional release. By eliciting emotions, watching movies can open doors that otherwise might stay closed. For many of us, it is safer and therefore easier to let go of our defenses while watching a movie than it is in real life with real people. By identifying with certain characters and their predicaments, we can experience emotions that lie hidden from our awareness.

Most of us respond differently to different kinds of humorous or sad movies. With our unique sensibilities, some of us like intellectual humor, some gallows humor, some slapstick, etc. You will find the best emotional release when you choose a movie using your own experience of your typical emotional responses.

The above are the three main paths of film therapy. In future articles, I will explain how movies can help us make changes, as well as remind us of awareness exercises and reference videos.