The Power of Metaphors
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By: Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht
The subconscious is always looking for solutions, but our defenses and traumas can keep us from connecting the dots. We have evolved to digest our daily experience through REM sleep, but traumatic and other anxi-ety-provoking material can prevent REM sleep from doing its job. However it is that we become stuck, one of the solutions to being stuck lies in the art of metaphor.
Metaphor means creating a story or idea that symbolizes something. For example, you might write a story about a famous event in history, but change the characters into various mythological or magic characters. Many of the most famous stories are actually metaphors for what was going on politically at the time they were written. Many more are love stories that resemble our own love lives in various ways. That’s why we can relate to them.
But Erickson contributed a great deal to using metaphor for healing. Metaphor bypasses the conscious mind, and helps the subconscious process issues that are stuck. Metaphor can help us process things that we did not process on our own.
The book Little Annie Stories is a wonderful collection of metaphorical stories to tell children that is in-tended to help them deal with difficult issues like bed wetting. The book My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. is an excellent addition to the library of anyone interested in the Milton model and metaphor.
One way to begin building metaphors is to read collections of them, that is why I recommended those books. Of course there are others. You can begin building metaphors by picking a challenging issue, and changing it into a story about animals. Whatever the challenge is, turn it into something that has a similar emotional significance. For example, if the challenge is about regaining self esteem after a failure, the story could be about the animals going to a dried up watering hole, and going on a search for water.
The thing that makes a metaphor healing, is that there is some kind of healing message embedded in the story. In the water metaphor, the animals going on a quest for water is like someone not being stuck in low self esteem, and going for new opportunities. Being thirsty didn’t stop the animals, it drove them on. Having a failure doesn’t stop people, it drives them to build the needed skills and seek new challenges. So the water is the metaphor for success and self esteem at the same time. Since people have parts, as we have learned. Different characters in the story can match different parts. One of the animals could say, “It’s hopeless, there’s no point in going on, we must stay here and hope for rain.” The ensuing dialogue could be a message to the subconscious to turn the voice of hopelessness into a voice for motivation.
During my NLP trainning I came across a CD set Bandler did in 2000 called Design Human Engineering. Now I can design my own metaphors using my “control panel” and don’t need to “read collections of them”. It’s a great tool.
Thank you! Quick and to the point.
Good article!
And thanks for the book suggestions!
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. “prices are rising”). A conceptual domain can be any coherent organization of human experience. The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, which often appear to be perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain
This idea, and a detailed examination of the underlying processes, was first extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work Metaphors We Live By. Other cognitive scientists study subjects similar to conceptual metaphor under the labels “analogy” and “conceptual blending.”
Conceptual metaphors are seen in language in our everyday lives. Conceptual metaphors shape not just our communication, but also shape the way we think and act. In George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work, Metaphors We Live By (1980), we see how everyday language is filled with metaphors we may not always notice. An example, of one of the commonly used conceptual metaphors is argument as war. This metaphor shapes our language in the way we view argument as war or as a battle to be won. It is not uncommon to hear someone say “He won that argument” or “I attacked every weak point in his argument”. The very way argument is thought of is shaped by this metaphor of arguments being war and battles that must be won. Argument can be seen in many other ways other than a battle, but we use this concept to shape the way we think of argument and the way we go about arguing.
Conceptual metaphors are used very often to understand theories and models. A conceptual metaphor uses one idea and links it to another to better understand something. For example, the conceptual metaphor of viewing communication as a conduit is one large theory explained with a metaphor. So not only is our everyday communication shaped by the language of conceptual metaphors, but so is the very way we understand scholarly theories. These metaphors are prevalent in communication and we do not just use them in language; we actually perceive and act in accordance with the metaphors.
go well
I love metaphors, I use them often in daily life situations, people love stories, they see perhaps a glimpse of light in a dark situation and that maybe all it takes for them to break out of their trance. Nice article. My voice will go with you is a wonderful addition and reference book. I too recomend it.
Thank you for the examples and tips!
To me, your first sentence says it all!
You write: “…is an excellent addition to the library of anyone interested in …”
Whenever I read such a line I think – my bookshelf is already much “wiser” than I am, and I know that there are plenty of truly excellent books to help it become even wiser.
But hey, “Little Annie Stories” is for my children – not for my bookshelf. I think that I like it