From the author: An article about how the same tool - the mechanism of association - can be used both to escape from reality and to return to it. Man in is actually free, but he does not realize it. Bardo Thödol. Tibetan Book of the Dead When we watch a movie or listen to another fascinating story from a friend or friend, we unconsciously try on what is said on ourselves. We put ourselves in the place of the main character, imagine how we would think and feel if we were in a similar situation. This is a standard mechanism of association. To use Roberto Assagioli's language, we engage in a process of identification with the object of a story or film. At the same time, we temporarily disidentify with ourselves in order to better understand the story we heard about someone, to delve into its meaning. In this way, we seem to live several lives, finding ourselves in several places at the same time: here and now and in some virtual world of the narrator . Moreover, the main thing for us is the latter. Association serves as a way for us to understand the world. Having taken someone's position and become accustomed to it, we begin to better understand the person, the motives of his actions and the way he perceives reality. Establishing emotional contact or rapport occurs much faster and easier through association with your interlocutor. Association is an innate tool that helps model and learn various skills. This is how we learned to speak, move, walk, smile. We modeled this on our parents when we tried to imitate them by carefully watching and listening to them do it. Association helps us remember information that we thought we had forgotten a long time ago. Proof of this is the phenomenon when a person in the process of hypnosis can remember the license plate of a car that he saw only briefly. This is based on the skills of detailed detailed association with some event from the past. It seems that the identification tool described above is indispensable and vital. On the one hand, this is true. But on the other hand, this tool can become a limitation for us. Milton Erickson also said that the same tools allow us to both enjoy life and be deeply unhappy. Association is just such an example. We associate ourselves with what we perceive, and the longer the process of perception lasts, the stronger this association. Many people identify themselves with their body, hairstyle, makeup, car, clothes, forgetting about other aspects of life. Some people associate themselves with some kind of social role: boss, subordinate, parent, loser, etc. And it happens that someone has identified with his insecure or aggressive part and does not imagine that there are other ways of perceiving himself in the world. Thus, we can say that there are a lot of traps of consciousness that distract a person from the process of reality through the same mechanism of association. As a result, most of the time a person lives not “here and now,” but “there and then.” In this case, it becomes increasingly difficult to be flexible and recognize that our current way of perceiving reality is only one of many possible options. It even gets to the point where it is difficult for a person to put on new clothes or somehow change his image, because he cannot disidentify with what is familiar to him. In psychotherapy, the association mechanism is actively used in order, on the contrary, to return a person to reality. One example is identifying with an obstacle or internal resistance to change. The technique allows the client to look at the problem from within the cause of its occurrence. Disidentifying from your current unwanted state and identifying with the cause of the problem often helps you see the solution. Another example is an association with a desired state or needed resource. At its core, this is the same care about reality, only artificial. The client moves away from the problematic state and connects his creative... ☼☼☼