About the cards
 

Itzikcards - Professional Emotional Projection Cards

Stimulating therapeutic communication with pictures & words of the inner self 

 Itzikcard kits, by creator Yitzhak Schmulevitch, are indispensible and powerful  tools  for active and creative stimulation of therapeutic communication under therapeutic circumstances. 

 The cards use metaphoric stimulation to bridge people's inner world of content with their  external  world of being.
 

Each card features a beautiful and colorful hand painted illustration which contains a calculated mix of messages and symbolism.  This mix is triggered at enticing the mind of your viewers through their sense of vision, to dive directly into the deepest corridors of their mind, thereby reaching and touching their subconscious thoughts. 
 

Every experience is a memory, a picture catalogued in our mind to build an internal museum of pictures. 

Our brain places all pictures in the various halls and corridors of that museum in our mind, according to theme, subject and experiences we face in our life: a love hall, a career hall, a hall of social life, a hall of family ties, etc. These halls conduct a busy and dynamic relationship between themselves, constantly moving pictures about, backwards, forewords, and from one hall to another, rearranging their order. When we take a card and study it, and when we deliver our reaction to that card, we are actually taking a live tour in our internal museum, actively participating in the rearrangement work. This active participation of ours can be recruited to healing, empowering and directing ourselves or our patients towards better goals, and more efficient ways of reaching them.
 

Every picture stands for a meaningful story, incident or experience.

And yet, the picture as a picture constitutes no more than a one dimensional trigger stimulating further internal investigation. Thereby it creates a connection or a longing; it reflects an existing condition, a past situation, or a yearning of some kind, the most significant of which will rise and surface before the others. The way we react to it, the way we describe it or sense it, reveals our strengths and weaknesses, our abilities and disabilities, our driving motivations and the obstacles we face or invent, and most importantly, the powers, skills and abilities we own that can hold us and carry us through rough times.

Experienced professionals, listening with a sensitive ear, will be able to expose the strengths and powers a person possesses and can use in the journey of his or her life.

They will be able to identify the drawbacks blocking this person from manifesting and leveraging his or her strengths. They will be able to determine whether or not this person's story is optimistic, and to recognize the nature of this person's conduct in life: active or passive, a participant or a bystander, etc. Sensitive identification can help a therapist, coach, trainer, advisor or any other personal development or mental health professional - reach more accurate diagnoses in less time, leading to better and more focused treatment plans.
 

Working with Itzikcards allows the persons being treated to express their feelings in a completely unthreatening manner.
 

Each card draws them inside themselves and receives a current interpretation. All attributed meanings are projected on external images and situations as are illustrated on the cards, and not on the person's life itself. Thus, any relevance to his or her current situation is derived through therapeutic work, indirectly, yet not less effectively – usually even more so. More often than not, attributed meanings go deep to reach latent feelings, and wide to touch new possibilities, wider perspectives and new angles. 

When working with Itzikcards, the pictures, the words, we can imagine a triangle crated by: occurrence, card and meaning.

The occurrence or situation which engages my thoughts at this moment, and which is related to one aspect of my life; the cards I pick out from the deck and the meaning I ascribe them. The internal relationships within this triangle allow us to look at same situations differently and to experience deeper strata. The same cards may be assigned different meanings at different appointments. They most important insight to remember is: any attributed meaning is relevant only at a given time. 

Another perspective considers and analyses the images conceived as front and central, as opposed to those conceived as background in the person's eyes 

Matters that engage us tend to manifest in front of our eyes wherever we look, in comparison to other matters which seem to stay in the background. For example, a person with a certain illness will tend to hear about this illness everywhere, and a person looking to buy a car will tend to suddenly notice 'for sale' notes more often on the road. Hence when working with Itzikcards the focus on relationships between front and background images becomes significant as a means to reach a better identification of matters that most engage our patients' thoughts and reflections in their inner mind.   

 Words in word cards substitute codes that stand for comparable and non comparable situations in a person's life. 
 

Words trigger an inner motion picture that is tied to that word – but does not necessarily carry universal meanings. For example the words 'fear' or 'anger' may trigger different motion pictures in the psyche of different people, and also different pictures for the same person at different times. Triggering a scenario and causing it to surface with the cards will deliver significant insights in any treatment.  

 When we think about working with Itzikcards we should imagine a door opening and leading inside, into a person's inner world. 
 

The card is a door, behind which dwells a living story, an occurrence, a sequence of experiences. These stories, which surface up to become narratives, are significant to therapy, to self development and to empowerment processes. Within a narrative shared by a person lies a deep encounter with his or her internal world: powers, drawbacks, values and beliefs, strengths and weaknesses, fears and hopes etc', whether they are real or imaginative, whether he or she possess them or are possessed by them.

 This is why Itzikcards used skillfully in therapeutic situations will bridge barriers; eliminate psychological and mental filters and clear obstacles, opening a direct path for the immediate occurrence of effective therapeutic communication.     
 

Itzikcards are designed for professional therapists, psychologists, coachers, social workers, counselors, organizational consultants, mentors, trainers, family and couple consultants, pedagogic staff , learning disability teachers, and all other personal empowerment, personal development and mental health specialists, working with all age ranges: from young children to adults and seniors .

Itzikcards can also be used at home for stimulation of creative communication between parents and children, couples, friends, etc., as well as for entertainment and social games, individually, in couples or groups.

 

Choose from more than a dozen different Card Kits with varying treatment focuses and themes. Each kit contains beautifully hand painted pictures, printed on high quality cardboard cards, and suggestions for work.

 No prior knowledge is required. 

 

Yitzhak Schmulevitch, Creator

 

Yitzhak Schmulevitch is an accredited organizational consultant (from Bar-Ilan University, Israel), and a trained group leader certified by the Israel Ministry of Education.   

Throughout the development of his professional path he studied a multitude of realms of knowledge including: Gestalt therapy, The Miracles Course and Psychodrama. 

Mr. Schmulevitch is today a full time teacher and coach, working with all treatment and emotional therapy centers in Israel, including:  coaching, family therapy, group mediation, parents and children, teens and disadvantaged youth, various addictions such as alcohol and drugs, and eating disorders.

 

"I began my professional work with the cards over a decade ago, after being exposed to this medium in one of the workshops I attended.  In the course of the work process a door opened into my internal world, awakening creative aspirations within me.  Entering this internal world enabled me to create a beautiful language, develop it into workable tools, and introduce it into the world of modern emotional empowerment and therapeutic professions.

Through my vision I created various and diverse therapeutic card kits, some of which are centered on specific worlds of content, such as parenting, children or women, while others are designed to be wide open and touch every type of content. 

Into my work I try to introduce the richness and diverseness of our world, in order to give each and every person a handle to grasp, and a visual to identify with, when working with the cards.  From animals to shoes and hats, from eye-glasses to magic and wizards, from geometric symbols to adults and children, all are recruited in the cards to make your journey to happiness shorter and more efficient – whatever happiness means to you.

 

I view my creation as an expression of my authentic experiences from my personal encounters with the world around me.  This creation I am now giving to you, with my love, hoping that you will be inspired by it as much as I am."