What Were You Solving? Symptoms as Messengers | Sacred Alchemy
“What brilliant solution were you trying to find?”
This is the question I ask when someone is stuck by a diagnostic label treatment-resistant symptom or a pattern of suffering that hasn’t responded to everything tried.
I believe symptoms are teachers beneath their surface, offering solutions. They’re extraordinarily faithful, persistent and intelligent, solving problems that couldn’t be addressed otherwise.
Let me explain. Helen arrived with a folder containing letters from three consultants, a psychiatric assessment, a fourteen-year list of diagnoses and a neatly typed summary of all treatments she’d received. She placed it on the table as if it were an introduction.
I looked at the folder and her, then asked, “Tell me about before.”
She looked uncertain. “Before what?”
“Before all of this began.”
The story unfolded like a tapestry of a woman’s life. She had developed a chronic pain condition with an uncertain cause, co-morbid depression, treatment-resistant anxiety and a pattern variously described as somatisation, conversion disorder or psychosomatic presentation. The folder detailed her diagnoses.
However, the story she told me was different. It painted a picture of a family system centred around one person’s needs, where her role from a young age was to be well, to need nothing, to be competent, capable and undemanding. And it described what happened in her body when that role became unsustainable.
The pain arrived three months after her mother’s death. Her mother, whose illness had shaped the family for forty years, whose needs had organised everyone around her, including this woman who had spent her entire adult life being the one who was fine.
“What were you so brilliantly solving?”
The pain solved something nothing else could. It gave her, for the first time, permission to need, stop and be the one who required care rather than providing it. This was difficult to consider because she’d never been allowed to simply ask for those things, as the family system lacked a framework for her needs.
The symptom wasn’t the problem; it was the solution.
“My practice tells me I can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Moreover, it tells me that to place neurosis and psychopathology solely in personal reality is a delusional repression of what is actually, realistically, being experienced”
― James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World
II. Hillman and the Fantasy of Illness
James Hillman wrote, in Re-Visioning Psychology, that the fantasy of illness is first of all fantasy, and not illness.
That pathologising must be met by imaginal thinking rather than clinical thinking.
That fantasy can use any sort of content, divine or morbid, and none of this content should be taken literally until all of it is recognised as fantasy.
Imaginal thinking is the practice of engaging with a symptom on its own terms: as a living image produced by the psyche, carrying meaning that has not yet been received, saying something in the only language available to it. It is the refusal to collapse the image into a category before you have found out what the image is actually doing.
Clinical thinking, which is necessary and has genuine value within its domain, asks: what is wrong? What is the diagnosis? How do we reduce or remove the presenting problem? It engages with the label and the symptom hierarchy. It is oriented, quite rightly, towards relieving suffering.
But there is a significant limitation in clinical thinking as the primary or sole frame: it treats the symptom as the thing, rather than as the communication. It hears the metaphor and responds to it as though it were a literal fact, and in doing so, it consistently misses the question that the symptom is carrying.
What were you so brilliantly solving?
III. The Symptom as Faithful Messenger
In shamanic traditions, illness is seen as a message from the soul, body and the broader web of relationships and meaning that define a person. The healer’s role isn’t to simply remove the illness but to listen to its message, understand its intent to restore, protect or communicate and work with that intelligence rather than against it.
The Jungian tradition expresses this understanding through different language. Symptoms are symbols – living images that engage with both conscious and unconscious life. They’re not reducible to their literal meaning; they point to something beyond direct knowledge or expression, growing more urgent until acknowledged.
Consider a young man I worked with who’d been in OCD treatment for six years. His compulsions were elaborate and time-consuming, gradually taking over his daily life. He’d received effective cognitive-behavioural treatment and medication, yet the compulsions would reduce and then return, each time in a slightly altered form.
When I asked what they protected against, he looked and said “Protection?”
What would happen, I asked, if he didn’t do the OCD?
He replied, “Everything would fall apart.”
What exactly?
He said, “I think my mother would die.”
The OCD began when he was eleven, during his mother’s first serious depressive episode. The magical thinking, compulsions and rituals were his solution to the unbearable reality of loving his mother and unable to prevent her suffering. By doing everything perfectly, precisely and in the right order, he believed the world would hold together and she would be safe.
Six years of treating the OCD as a disorder hadn’t touched this core issue. The OCD wasn’t a disorder; it was the most creative, faithful and determined act of love an eleven-year-old could muster. Any clinical intervention that didn’t honour that love would be insufficient.
What were you so brilliantly solving?
Alexia Elliott Sacred Alchemy Leicester and Online
IV. The Danger of the Literal
Hillman’s warning that none of this content should be taken literally until all is recognised as fantasy is an active practice. This requires the practitioner to maintain the imaginal frame even when faced with the strong cultural pull towards literalisation.
We live in a culture deeply committed to the literal. This manifests in the belief that facts are the only reliable information and diagnoses should be scientific. The body’s presentation is seen as objective data to be measured and categorised. While this commitment is useful in many contexts, it also limits the most important questions in the consulting room.
When someone says they feel like they’re going mad, they’re producing an image. The clinical response focuses on the literal: is there psychosis, dissociation or what’s the mental state?
The imaginal response stays with the image: going, mad, what is mad. Where are you going? What’s on the other side of madness? What within you needs permission to move?
Both responses are necessary. Clinical assessment is part of good practice. However, if it comes first and before imaginal engagement, it closes down the image before it has finished speaking. This leaves the person feeling, as many of my clients have, that they’ve been assessed but not heard.
The most treatment-resistant presentations I’ve encountered share a common feature: they’re symptoms treated as illnesses rather than received as communications. They’ve been reduced to their literal content, diagnosed, medicated, therapised and managed. They’ve persisted not because they’re intractable but because the underlying question has never been asked.
What were you so brilliantly solving?
V. Imaginal Engagement in Practice
Imaginal thinking isn’t abandoning clinical responsibility; it’s about holding both simultaneously. It involves clinical awareness for safety and structure, alongside imaginal awareness delving into the real work.
Practically, this means leading with questions rather than categories, following the person’s imagery rather than imposing a narrative, and treating symptoms as figures, presences or communications rather than problems. It’s asking: if this symptom could speak what would it say? What’s it trying to protect? Where’s it trying to take you?
These aren’t metaphorical exercises; they’re precise diagnostics reaching into the living, purposeful psyche’s intelligence rather than the imposed categorical system.
They consistently produce what clinical assessment, at its best, aims for but often can’t access: the genuine “ah” of recognition, the moment a person encounters, perhaps for the first time, the intelligence and faithfulness of what they’ve been carrying. It’s the moment the symptom ceases to be an enemy and becomes, as it always wanted to be, a guide.
VI. Conclusion: The Question That Changes Everything
Lets return to my starting point, to the woman with the folder and the story behind it.
She didn’t need her pain fixed; she needed it acknowledged. She needed someone to understand that her pain had served a purpose, something no other aspect of her life had allowed her to do. Slowly and carefully, she needed to discover alternative ways to meet those needs, ones that didn’t rely on her body’s suffering as a mediator.
This journey took time, demanding imaginative engagement with the pain’s narrative and the development of new capacities, relationships with her own needs and permissions she’d never known.
The pain didn’t vanish instantly. However, its quality shifted. She described it as becoming more like a voice than a wall, something she could converse with rather than be imprisoned by.
This transformation from wall to voice, from illness to image, from problem to messenger: this is what imaginal thinking enables, something clinical thinking alone can’t achieve.
The question remains constant, yet it holds transformative power when asked with genuine curiosity rather than therapeutic strategy. Holding it long enough allows the answer to emerge from a deeper level than the conscious mind.
What were you so brilliantly solving?
Alexia Elliott is a hypnotherapist, shamanic practitioner, and psychospiritual therapist with over twenty years of experience, based in Leicester, UK. She works with complex, misunderstood cases through Sacred Alchemy, a methodology weaving together hypnosis, shamanism, NLP, and Jungian depth psychology. alexiaelliott.co.uk