Psychologist Dr. Will Cupchik's book, THE ROPE TRICK: CLOSE YOUR EYES AND OPEN YOUR MIND TO BETTER KNOW YOUR RELATIONSHIPS, offers an original mental imagery exercise that enables one to reveal the current state of a relationship in just minutes and also describes how to appropriately interpret the imagery experience.
The Rope Trick exercise was created by Dr. Cupchik, a life member of the American Psychological Association, in the early 1970s, and he later spent nearly five years thoroughly investigating its effectiveness as a means of satisfying his PhD dissertation requirements in counseling psychology at the University of Toronto. This book describes in easy to understand detail why the Rope Trick works and how to use it to better understand the current state of one of your important relationships.
One of Dr. Cupchik's most important findings was that our unconscious minds likely provide insights into our relationships via the Rope Trick because they recognize that the actual 'ropes' imagined very likely represent the current state of our 'relationships'. This is likely so in large part because every word and phrase that might be used to describe the characteristics and functions of a rope are the very same words and phrases that can be used to describe the characteristics and functions of a relationship. Long or short, thick or thin, weak or strong, flexible or rigid, colorful or bland, bound together, tying the knot, unravelling, breaking apart, etc are all words and phrases that can be descriptive of the characteristics and functions of both particular ropes and relationships.
In this book, Dr. Cupchik presents the Rope Trick mental imagery exercise in full and offers numerous examples of relationships in various states of good and poor repair and how they are represented by the characteristics and functions of the ropes that were imagined by the users of this exercise.
Dr. Cupchik also sought out and found another material object, namely a 'bridge', that performs essentially the same role as a 'rope', in what he later termed the 'Bridge Trick'. He also recognized that a particularly powerful concept that may epitomize the features of a relationship is that of a 'rope-bridge', a prime example of which is the Golden Gate Bridge that connects the city of San Francisco to Marin County. He also explains why so many persons may have chosen to end their lives by leaping from that epitome of a rope-bridge structure and suggests why a suitable barrier may be an unfortunate but definite necessity.