From the author: Published in the newspaper "Zaporizhian Sich" on October 3, 2013 Olga Garkavets in collaboration with journalist Irina Chiganova Maps can help you tell about yourself What is our life? Isn't this the dream or the fairy tale we tell ourselves? In the repertoire of techniques of modern psychologists, a tool has appeared with which they can decipher these fairy tales of ours. This miracle is called - metaphorical associative cards. ZS asked Olga Garkavets, a family psychologist and specialist at the Lavanya development and training center, to tell her what it is. Over the past year and a half, this method has played a leading role in Olga’s practice; recently she even began conducting training seminars for psychologists on the use of this technique. “Associative metaphorical cards are my favorite tool when working with clients,” says Olga. - Their other name is emotional cards. Let me clarify that these are not playing cards, not Tarot cards, but special psychological ones. It is impossible to remain indifferent to these pictures; each card evokes different emotions, feelings, and raises deep layers from our unconscious. Even if you ask a person to blindly take out several cards from a deck and describe them, then each person will take out something different from their subconscious and will interpret this or that image in their own way. In this case, logic will be turned off, but the person will tell his life and what worries him at the moment. - Olga, in what cases do you use this technique? - Emotional cards are so universal that they can be used with clients of any age and completely different in intellectual level. The second point is that there are quite a lot of people with difficulty in verbalization; it is difficult for them to tell what is happening inside them. Either because they don't know or because the vocabulary isn't big enough. Another important point: there are a lot of people with a high degree of control, and it sometimes takes a lot of time to establish trust between the client and the therapist. For such people, talking about themselves is not safe, because it means allowing them to somehow see what is inside them. And when they talk about the card, they feel safe. - What problems of your patients did emotional cards help resolve? - I use cards at different stages of counseling and psychotherapy. Here is a small list of problems and topics that I worked with using emotional cards: betrayal, divorce, the problem of choice, guilt in front of my own child, whom the mother wanted to get rid of before his birth, guilt after an abortion, childhood aggression, hyperactivity, lack of motivation to children’s studies, family conflicts with assault, teenage depression with a suicide attempt, the search for one’s purpose and meaning in life, “I have no strength, I constantly feel tired” and many others. In my practice, only one client flatly refused to work using this method. She took out the cards, saw her situation and said, “This is not about me.” This means she was not ready to face herself. The first rule of a psychologist: do not drag a person where he does not want to go. How does a session of working with a client take place using projective cards? - There are a lot of technicians, it all depends on the client’s request. But any, even the simplest technique, for example, asking the client to take out several cards from the deck and describe them, will still lead to him describing himself, his environment and his life situation. And no matter what deck is used, the essence of what is happening will be that the psychologist sets the direction for the work, and the client does all the work himself. The task of the psychologist is to gently, comfortably and safely for the client help him open what is closed. Sometimes the client doesn't even understand what's happening. Maps work at a very deep level of the subconscious, both in working through problems and in the area of ​​resources. Sometimes clients experience effects on a bodily or emotional level, e.g..