Words are remarkable things. Precise, powerful, and endlessly useful. And sometimes, completely inadequate.

This is something I encounter constantly in my coaching work with midlife women. Women who are highly articulate, professionally accomplished, and yet struggling to put language to what they are experiencing. The hormonal fog. The identity shift. The sense of arriving at a crossroads with no map. They know something significant is happening. They just can’t quite say what it is.

That is where collage comes in. Not as a creative exercise, a bit of fun with scissors, or a Pinterest mood board. As a serious, evidence-based coaching tool that works with the brain in ways words genuinely cannot.

Here is the science behind it.

We Were Visual Before We Were Verbal

Long before written language existed, humans communicated through images. Cave paintings. Symbols. The visual record of lived experience. Before children can speak, they make sense of the world through seeing. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s biology.

Allan Paivio’s dual coding theory, first proposed in 1971 and stress-tested through landmark experiments throughout the 1970s, demonstrated that people have substantially better memory for pictures than for words. The reason is structural. When we encounter a word, it is encoded through a single pathway. A picture is encoded through both visual and verbal channels simultaneously, creating a memory trace that is more layered, more durable, and significantly easier to retrieve later.

The implications for coaching are considerable. A collage a client makes in a session doesn’t just capture a moment. It creates a memory with real depth. In one landmark study, participants viewed over 2,000 pictures at 10 seconds each, and were over 90% accurate in a recognition test several days later. The brain holds onto images in a way it simply doesn’t hold onto words.

This matters when the insights are hard-won. You want them to stick.

What Happens Inside Your Brain

Research published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience confirms that visual imagery activates a network of brain areas from the frontal cortex through to sensory regions, overlapping with the default mode network. It can function much like a weak version of actual perception.

In other words, looking at an image that resonates with you isn’t passive. It is generative. It activates the same systems that real lived experience does.

Visual stimuli and emotional response are processed in closely linked brain systems. This is why a photograph can stop you mid-scroll before you’ve consciously registered why. The emotional response arrives first. The reasoning catches up later. Kahneman described this dynamic as System 1 thinking, fast, intuitive, and image-driven, alongside System 2, which is slower and analytical. Most coaching conversations operate almost entirely in System 2 territory. Collage drops clients directly into System 1 and surfaces what is already there, running quietly below the surface.

When the Words Won’t Come

This is where the science becomes specifically relevant to my work.

Perimenopause doesn’t only bring hot flashes, broken sleep, and unpredictable cycles. It specifically disrupts verbal processing. Research from large longitudinal cohort studies, including findings from the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation, consistently shows that the perimenopausal period involves real, measurable changes in verbal encoding, verbal memory, and processing speed. Word-finding difficulty is among the most commonly reported symptoms. Women describe knowing a thought is there, and simply being unable to retrieve the language for it.

This is not imagination. It is neuroscience.

A 2026 review published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience confirmed that transient reductions in verbal learning, attention, and processing efficiency may occur during perimenopause before stabilising post-menopause. These are not signs of cognitive decline. They are a temporary, hormonally driven shift in how the brain accesses and retrieves verbal information.

And here is what strikes me about this. Traditional coaching is an almost entirely verbal process. Two people in conversation, thinking out loud, finding language for experience. When verbal access is disrupted by hormonal fluctuation, the coaching model itself can create additional frustration. You are being asked to do the very thing that feels hardest.

Collage sidesteps this entirely. It doesn’t require language at first. It asks something different: what catches your eye? What are you drawn to? What are you pushing away? The brain responds to image before it responds to language. And that instinctive, pre-verbal response often carries more honesty than anything that comes from the analytical, editing mind.

The image does the early work. The language comes later. And when it does, it tends to be more accurate.

Getting Past the Gatekeepers

To access deep knowledge or long-held beliefs, you have to get past the conscious mind’s habit of editing, explaining, and justifying. Words are the conscious mind’s first language. The moment a client begins to articulate herself, the narrative kicks in. What you hear is often the polished version, not the real one.

Visual metaphors work differently. They surface thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that a client genuinely cannot access through talking alone. Not because they are hiding them. Because those beliefs exist below the level of verbal processing.

I see this again and again. A woman picks an image she can’t quite explain. We stay with it. We explore what it means to her, not what it should mean. What emerges is something she has known for years but never had language for.

Human thought processes are largely metaphorical. We understand abstract experience through concrete comparisons, usually without realising we are doing it. The image a client selects is almost always an expression of one of these unconscious metaphors. A closed door. A pair of running shoes. A map. She is communicating something about where she is and where she wants to be, far more efficiently than she could have said it in words.

Once a metaphor is visible, it becomes changeable. That is where transformation actually happens.

Something Shifts in the Room

I run regular collage workshops for women. And what I notice, every time, is that the moment of recognition rarely comes through language. It comes through image.

Women frequently declare that something is resonating before they have the words to explain what, or why. There is a particular kind of knowing that happens when you pull an image from a pile and feel, wordlessly, that it belongs to you. For women who are navigating hormonal shifts that are interrupting their usual thinking patterns, that moment of non-verbal recognition is genuinely powerful. The thinking is still happening. The brain is still working. The route has temporarily changed, and collage meets women exactly where they are.

There is something else, too. Collage creates permission to play. That is not a small thing in midlife. Many of the women I work with have spent decades being competent, responsible, and in charge. The invitation to make something messy, non-linear, and personally meaningful, with no right answer, is quietly subversive. Something softens. And in that softer, more relaxed state, discovery becomes easier and insight comes faster.

The collective dimension matters enormously. When women share their collages in a group, the recognition across the room is almost immediate. Someone sees her own experience in another woman’s images before a word has been spoken. That moment of being seen without having to explain yourself is particularly significant for globally mobile women who often carry their transitions without their usual community around them. Collage reduces isolation in a way that talking alone rarely manages.

The Science Holds Up

Collage isn’t art therapy, though it shares some of its roots. It isn’t journalling with pictures. It is a structured methodology grounded in neuroscience, developmental psychology, and decades of evidence about how the human brain processes, stores, and transforms experience.

When language fails you, or the route to language is temporarily blocked, images offer an alternative path to insight. One that is often quicker, more accurate, and more lasting.

It just happens to involve scissors.

This article was inspired by the original work of Andréa Watts and the Collage Coaching Technique at UnglueYou. Her work on the science behind collage as a coaching tool is recommended reading for any practitioner in this space.

If you’d like to know more about how collage can support your coaching journey, how it can contribute to positive coaching growth within an organisational setting, or if The Age of Renewal programme sounds like something you’ve been waiting for, I’d love to hear from you.

Sara Beattie

References

1. Paivio, A. & Csapo, K. (1973). Picture superiority in free recall: Imagery or dual coding? Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 176-206.  https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90032-7

2. Pearson, J. (2019). The human imagination: the cognitive neuroscience of visual mental imagery. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 20, 624-634.  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-019-0202-9

3. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2026). Menopause-related brain fog as a midlife window in women’s brain aging.  https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2026.1814092/full

4. Standing, L., Conezio, J. & Haber, R.N. (1970). Perception and memory for pictures. Psychonomic Science, 19(2), 73-74.

5. Watts, A. (n.d.). The Collage Coaching Technique: What is collage — the science behind the art. UnglueYou.  https://unglueyou.co.uk/collage-coaching-technique/what-is-collage-the-science-behind-the-art/