Mining Your Metaphors

Change the metaphor, change the self.

Left Brain/Right Brain and Mining Your Metaphors

You may have seen her on YouTube, but Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, My Stroke of Insight, is still worth a read, especially if you’re curious about the workings of the brain. Taylor, a neuro-anatomist (or brain scientist, as she translates it for the layman), experienced a stroke that flooded the left hemisphere of her brain, leaving her to experience the world largely from her right hemisphere’s perspective. Over the next eight years, Taylor carefully observed her recovery with a scientist’s curiosity and attention to detail. As Taylor worked diligently to relearn to navigate in the world and to recover her former self,  she found one the most life-changing realizations for her was that she had the capacity to make choices she’d never realized were choices.

In the past, when some event triggered a reaction like feeling angry, jealous, or highly critical, she would react reflexively and run the well-established neural pathways. These old pathways, with their myriad interconnections with all sorts of past history and associations, resulted in plenty of unpleasant feelings, memories and subsequent behaviors. After the stroke, Taylor was blissfully unaware of any of these. As her functions returned, she discovered her memory had not been destroyed, but she would have to work hard to re-access and reactivate those pathways…or she could choose not to.

She learned that when an emotion is triggered in your body, its initial physiological effects—hormone release, etc.– last only 90 seconds. After that, if you are still connected to that emotional response, it is because an extensive and complex array of neural pathways has been activated. It may happen so rapidly that it feels like a natural, inevitable reaction. But in that moment at the end of the 90 seconds between the emotion and stepping on the pathway,  one has a choice. Taylor says she realized she could choose to engage her left brain connections with past memories, with fears about the future, with its tendency to fill in gaps of information with assumptions–the “storyteller’s potential for stirring up drama and trauma.”  Or she could “step to the right” and embrace her right hemisphere’s personality and value system, which emphasize staying in the moment and meeting it with compassion. Taylor makes clear this isn’t easy; she says it’s a choice you may make many times every day. But it’s a realization that changed the way she meets the world.

Taylor’s book also offers what I consider supportive evidence for the impact Clean Language has for a client. To cite but one example,  Taylor says, “I believe the real power in experiential recreation is located in our ability to remember what the underlying physiology feels like.” (p. 176) In a Clean Language session, you may re-imagine the past, re-image it. Inferring from Taylor’s book, I suggest that by doing so you are building new neural pathways– ones that serve you better than the old ones.  By using your own metaphors and getting to know not only where they are, but how they feel (Taylor’s ‘underlying physiology’) and by revisiting them often, you can strengthen them and increase the likelihood of ‘going there’ when an unwanted memory or emotion is triggered.

Given that this is the start of the year, it’s a good time to re-image what you’d like to have happen…or like to have had happen in the past. When you notice uncomfortable memories surface or their accompanying old feelings (such as anxiety, sadness, or jealousy) or physical reactions (perhaps shallow breathing, queasiness, or headache), they’re a signal to you that those old, familiar neural pathways are being engaged. Replace them with your new image and its accompanying feelings—emotional and physical. Or… step to the right. And if you read Dr. Taylor’s book,  we’d be curious to hear how you think her experiences explain Clean Language’s effectiveness.

Just how free are we to choose?

We all make choices every day; we gather information, assess our options, and come to logical decisions about our choices. Or do we?

I think most of us would readily admit there are subconscious factors at work influencing our choices. Our past experiences have given us a vast repository of information that informs our logic. And we have personal preferences we develop from those experiences, whether we consciously recall them or not.

But what I’m curious about today is the choices we make that are not informed by our logic or those idiosyncratic experiences singular to each of us. They are the choices that are influenced by things of which we may quite unaware, and that influence all of us in similar ways.

I’ve been reading Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The authors do a fascinating job looking at how we present or frame choices for people predictably affects their behavior. Diners in a cafeteria, for example, more often choose food that’s near the front line and at eye level. The book’s examples get increasingly complex, dealing with everything from pensions and health insurance to encouraging energy efficiency. How we’re presented with choices is every bit as important as what the choices are; we can be ‘nudged.’

Other things I’ve been reading lately show that subconscious influences on our choices don’t stop there. Researchers at the University of Toronto Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli* ran two experiments. They found that people who are socially isolated reported feeling cold (as determined by their assessment of the room’s temperature.) In the second experiment, they offered socially-isolated subjects a choice of warm or cold drinks and food, and found they preferred warm food (presumably, to warm up.)

There’s certainly plenty of evidence in our language that supports this sensory/social association. We commonly use metaphorical expressions like “being left out in the cold”, “getting the cold shoulder” or describing a person as “cold-hearted”—all examples of being rejected or identifying a person as unfriendly. Contrarily, we use phrases like “a warm and friendly person”, a person or idea getting a “warm reception”, and seeing something positive as “warming my heart.”

The same is true for connecting other sensory experiences and our more abstract experiences. We talk, for example, about the sweet smell of success, the betrayal that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. We might talk about the rough road ahead or declare it’s all smooth sailing from here. A heavy topic of conversation is one that is to be taken seriously, while keeping the conversation light means the conversation should be superficial and pleasant.

So we don’t just use our senses to navigate our way in the physical world. Since conception, they’ve been helping to create a personal dictionary that we refer to, consciously and subconsciously, when we seek words or images to describe a feeling or experience. We make sense of a new experience by comparing it to something we’ve already experienced, and we encode it, with all its sensory/physical nuances, with a metaphor found in that personal ‘dictionary.’ Then we use these stored metaphors as part of our processing of every living moment.

Interestingly, Zhong and Leonardelli found it didn’t matter if the social isolating of their subjects was occurring in the room or simply being recalled. It seems once the association has been catalogued by the mind/body, the physical associations are part of the response.

Sounds good, right? Kind of impressed with our cleverness, yes? So creative and efficient! But there are pitfalls. You’re probably familiar with something like this scenario: you happened to be eating cherries just before you came down with a stomach bug. Now you can’t stand even the smell of cherries, though logically you know there was no causal connection.

In regards to social experiences, the problem with our sensory/social associations is we’re too quick apply them in reverse. Researchers have found that if we go into a cold room, we are more likely to perceive a person we meet there as unfriendly. If we are holding a warm cup of coffee, we’re more apt to perceive the person we meet as friendly.** We infer that heavy objects are more important, and subjects were more rigid in negotiations when influenced by hard objects.*** So, we don’t always reach accurate conclusions when we let those associations color our assumptions. But, as we’re not aware of the influence, we don’t question our reactions, checking them against more logical input.

What an intriguing thought: how much of what we judge to be true about the world, about others, about our situations and experiences, is influenced by these erroneous, subconscious associations we’re making? It gives a whole new level of challenge to avoiding assumptions!

Curious for more details ? References:

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (Penguin, 2009)

*Cold and Lonely: Does Social Exclusion Literally Feel Cold?, Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Univ. of Toronto, Psychological Science, 15 September, 2008 . Click here for a  concise review of the experiments and results.

**Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth, Lawrence E. Williams and John A. Bragh, Science 24 October, 2008, vol.322

***Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions, Joshua M. Ackerman, Christopher C. Nocera, John A. Bargh, Science 25 June, 2010, vol.328

For Sale: 3B/2B Metaphor

As ubiquitous as the daffodils and tulips are the For Sale signs cropping on lawns in spring. I wonder, just what makes certain houses appealing? What are people buying, exactly?

Michaela Mahady suggests in her book, Welcoming Home, that inviting houses are ones that speak to us with forms we can relate to, and what we are seeking are spaces that make us feel protected and safe.  “When we see a reflection of our human form, whether in a house, a care or a chair, we have a visceral understanding of it.”

You might say the houses are offering an appealing metaphor.

Consider how often we identify parts of objects around us by the names of our various body parts. Needles have eyes, clocks have faces and hands, tables have heads, feet and legs, pitchers have necks, shoulders and feet.  Nor do we stop at man-made objects: mountain ranges have spines and beaches have heads, as does cabbage. Corn has ears and valleys have bosoms!  We turn to that which we know best—our own bodies—to capture some essence of an object and our experience of it.

“Certain houses that imitate our body form, they draw us in and make us feel more friendly,” Mahady says.

That’s certainly true for my house. A  U-shaped  rancher, its short ends, like a pair of arms, embrace part of the back yard. Along with a fence and landscaping, they create a sheltered and private feel.  Include the water element of a pool, and perhaps it’s not surprising that visitors often choose the same metaphor to describe it– it’s an oasis.  An inviting place of nurturing, relief, even rescue.

As you drive around this spring noticing the For Sale signs, you might play at asking which houses seem homey and inviting to you… and ask yourself why they feel that way.  Is there a metaphor for sale? I’d love to hear what you discover.

And if you think of other examples of objects whose parts we identify with body parts—share them here!

There’s Bromance in the Air

How loving can loving be and still be acceptable?

Figuring out the cultural parameters starts at an early age. Little girls and boys establish close same-sex friendships and hug each other and hold hands. But that changes pretty quickly for the boys. My own experience teaching third graders in the 1990’s showed me that. These eight year old boys didn’t really know what being a homosexual meant, but they knew to call a boy ‘a girl’ or call him ‘gay’ was a clever jab. They wouldn’t have been caught dead holding hands, and a lack of interest in playing roughhouse sports was somewhat suspect. Interestingly, they didn’t tease when a classmate cried if the cause seemed reasonable. But it was clear they were refining…and narrowing… their ideas of what manly behavior was. They were determining what feelings they would allow themselves to acknowledge and how they could express them without begin ridiculed by the other boys.

Is it any wonder that women often complain men don’t have the relationship skills needed for true intimacy? Men squelch the opportunities to develop the skills even before the onset of puberty! Ultimately, we all pay a price for our culture’s homophobia, gay men, straight men and the women in their lives, when males of any age fear being perceived as homosexual and restrict themselves from truly connecting with other males.

But I think change is in the air, evident in the increasing popular use of the term bromance, which refers to a close, non-sexual relationship between two or more men. It’s the male version of what the four women characters in TV’s Sex and the City portrayed—very close, clearly heterosexual friendships. They were unashamedly as important to one another as their dating/marriage partners. For male examples, think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Ben Affleck and Matt Damon; Ross, Joey and Chandler of Friends, Blake Shelton and Adam Levine of The Voice. The term bromance is mainstream now, increasingly the topic of TV series, movies and magazine speculations. It seems it’s becoming acceptable for men to describe their relationships as being more than between friends who hang out and ‘do stuff’ together. It’s not that these relationships haven’t always existed for some men; it’s that they’re being labeled, celebrated and, thus, encouraged.

It’s an interesting term, bromance, with deliberate manly connotations. Coined by editor Dave Carnie in the 1990s to describe the relationships between skateboarders who bonded over their boards, the term’s prefix bro- conjures images of the uber-male, the last one might suspect of being gay. Among friends, the term bromance is used teasingly; it’s not meant to be demeaning or offensive. And hidden beneath the laughter is the acknowledgment that these men are best friends who truly love each other.

As homosexuality becomes increasingly accepted and there is less fear of being perceived as gay, men are more open to deepening their friendships with other men and publically acknowledging their feelings. As men are getting married later and the strained economy encourages sharing living quarters, men are nurturing these relationships later into their adults lives.

We all can benefit from bromances. The world is a better place when more of the people in it have all kinds of love in their lives and build the skills to nurture caring relationships. And the day may come again when we don’t have to describe such feelings using a slightly joking term, just in case someone mistakes our meaning.

Love is… like what??

With Valentine’s Day coming up, I’ve been thinking more about romantic love in our culture.  Have you ever ‘cried a river over’ that special someone who broke up with you? Ever ‘long for yesterday or seek a place to hide away’? Maybe, like ‘everybody’, you just ‘need somebody to love’ ?

We get so many of our metaphors for love from love songs—and often they focus on the pain of unrequited or lost love. Writing or listening to songs about such pain may be cathartic, a step in the healing process, but have you considered the collateral damage: our own optimism and expectations about love?

I came across a quote from High Fidelity by Nick Hornby that put a new spin for me on the power of our metaphors. “People worry about kids playing with guns and teenagers watching violent video games; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands—literally thousands—of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”

And it’s not just kids; we all listen to these songs. They flood the radio stations. The best singers croon them. They are poignant, often beautiful , and we can all relate. But is it the air we want to breathe? With music pumping through our radios and earphones daily, what is meant to be a step in a healing process has become the environment we live in.

Why is it that we ‘fall’ in love? That sounds like it hurts! Why are we ‘love-sick’?  Even our metaphors about the ‘blind’ first stage of love sound dire! It only gets worse as hearts break, they get holes in them, and we’re told we can’t live with the pain and that ‘you’re nobody ‘til somebody loves you.’

So, if we don’t want to encourage a culture of equating lost love or having no romantic partner with utter devastation, what kind of attitudes might we foster instead?

There are, of course, many songs about how wonderful love is. And some empowering songs about not wallowing in lost love’s misery, the sort that promote a “I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair” or “I will survive” attitude; they offer messages about resilience.

We can be careful about what we tell our children and, especially our teenagers, as they begin to wade into the waters of romantic love. Yes, rejection hurts, but after some period of grieving, it’s good to take stock of what you’ve learned about yourself, about relationships, about what’s a good fit for you, and move on. And they need to hear that you’re not defined by your love status nor is your life in limbo when you’re not paired up.

Can we celebrate friendship as well as lovers?  Is there a saint for friends? A special friends day?? Perhaps this Valentine’s Day season, we just need to be more conscious of balancing the messages we take to heart and be sure we’re ‘looking for love in all the right places’: all around us.

Gina Campbell, offering Clean Language trainings since 2005

gina_campbell

A Certified Clean Practitioner with a Masters degree in a developmental counseling field and decades of teaching experience. Read more

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