Imagine

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. 
— John Lennon, “Imagine” (1971)

I remember waking up on my bedroom floor one more time. A bruise on my left side from a fall I didn’t remember. My head humming. What jolted me awake was fear—not of consequences, but of a foreboding certainty that there was no way out. I had proven to myself, time and again, that I couldn’t stop. I had jumped off the cliff and was freefalling with nothing to break the fall. I would not wish that feeling on anyone. Total, utter hopelessness.

Bessel van der Kolk, the psychiatrist who wrote The Body Keeps the Score, describes what happens when trauma traps people in the past. When someone is pulled constantly back to their worst moments—the last time they felt intense involvement, deep emotion, real aliveness—they lose what he calls mental flexibility. The mind stops generating new possibilities. “Without imagination,” he writes, “there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach.” It is what happens when the nervous system learns, through repeated experience, that the future holds only more of the same. The mind builds walls to survive.

You cannot argue someone out of that logic with more logic. When despair makes sense—when it is the reasonable conclusion of lived experience—piling hope on the hopeless is not help. It is noise. The person already knows the list of things that might help. They have heard the suggestions. What they lack is not information. What they lack is the ability to picture themselves on the other side.

Then a friend’s message came through on my phone. I don’t remember the details of what he said or what I said. What matters is that after days—or was it weeks?—of being blinded by hopelessness, I could suddenly remember what it had been like to be sober. More importantly, I could see myself on the other side again. Having a life. Having a future. My imagination was flickering back on.

This is what the best helpers understand. Motivational Interviewing doesn’t ask “here’s why you’re wrong”—it asks “what would you want?” It calls on imagination for the answer. Spiritual pathways ask us to act as if, to imagine a power greater than ourselves before we believe in one, that can guide us back into the light. Faith is imagination given legs. We are invited to picture something we cannot yet see, and walk toward it.

John Lennon didn’t argue for a better world. He asked us to imagine one. That song has outlived him by decades because imagination precedes change. The mind that got us into trouble cannot think its way out—but it can catch a glimpse of something different. Sometimes that glimpse is enough.

Thanks to my friend Gord Garner for his ongoing inspiration.