Mining Your Metaphors

Change the metaphor, change the self.

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For Sale: 3B/2B Metaphor

March 6, 2017

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!


Filed Under: Art as Metaphor, metaphors, Subconscious MessagesTagged: people as systems, subconscious

Love is… like what??

February 6, 2017

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.


Filed Under: Art as Metaphor, metaphors, Power of Words, Subconscious Messages, TransitionsTagged: American metaphors, creative expression, holidays, subconscious

Lost and Found: An Artist’s Brain Revealed

January 22, 2017

I am intrigued by memory, how it is stored and how it is accessed, and what metaphors have to do with it all, so I was fascinated to attend a dual lecture given by researcher Mike McCloskey from the Cognitive Science Department at Johns Hopkins University and artist and mother Margaret Kennard Johnson in conjunction with an exhibit at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore featuring the recovery artwork of Lonni Sue Johnson.  A successful illustrator before an attack of encephalitis in 2007 left her with severe temporal lobe and frontal cortex damage, she had produced delightfully whimsical and often insightful drawings, brimming with visual puns and clever conceptual conceits.

Lonni’s illness has basically destroyed her working memory. She remembers her mother, her sister, a few old friends, and little else. She can retain new information for no more than a matter of seconds.  While she can read words, she quickly loses the context, and trying to follow ideas from one sentence to the next is futile. Yet she can read music, and still remembers how to play the viola. Surprisingly, her language is intact. Her personality and her sense of humor are the same, though she remembers very little about her own history.  I watched a fascinating video of a conversation with her, when, given the slightest of prompts about 9/11, she was able to retrieve some details about the event: that it was about a big building in NYC, that it was sad, that there was an explosion, a declaration of war.

As tragic as brain damage is for a victim, for brain researchers, it offers a special opportunity to study how the brain works.  Her story raises fascinating questions about the nature of mind and memory.  About what is lost and what might only be consciously inaccessible. About what is knowledge and what is a skill. About just what one’s personality is– is it or isn’t it dependent on the memories that we imagine helped shape it? To what degree is the subconscious intact and functioning when the physical and conscious mind is damaged?  And what role might word-making and art-making have in neuroplasticity, in laying new neural pathways in the brain to areas we may not suspect capable of playing a role in a particular ability to compensate for the ones that were lost?

The Walters exhibit shows the many stages of Lonni Sue’s drawings over the three years, incorporating her obsession with word puzzles, theoretically an instinctive urge to heal using what skills she has retained and the power of images on paper to extend the time she can hold onto an idea that would otherwise slip away like water through her hands. Representational art-making is always metaphor-making (“It’s like this in my perception”), and to make art is to tap into the storehouse of metaphors in the brain. I was left pondering what further role her metaphors may play in Lonni Sue’s healing.

What it is about her story that peaks your curiosity?


Filed Under: Art as Metaphor, brain neuroplasticity, Cognitive Science, memory, metaphors, Mind/body, Therapy, TransitionsTagged: brain neuroplasticity, inner resources, left brain/right brain, medical applications, memory, subconscious

Metaphors Conceal and Reveal–including Halloween Archetypes

October 24, 2009

Halloween is fast approaching here in the U.S.  Come All Hallow’s Eve, the streets will be filled with little witches,  ghosts, hobos, superheroes, and serial killers. For grown-ups who still relish society’s permission to go extreme and get creative one night a year, there’ll be parties full of prostitutes and politicians, with an occassional rock star and nun thrown in. So what is it that attracts us to the costumes we pick, these archetypical metaphors?

You may claim your choice of a costume is based on what’s in the back of your closet or what you just thought would get the biggest laugh or win the prize for best costume at the party, but undoubtedly, your outfit reveals more about you than you might be consciously aware of. Does your costume display your deepest fantasy? Your secret desire to mock those with different opinions? Your attitude towards authority? Your attempt to overcome your childhood fears? Does it show your naughty side, your rebellious self, your wish for innocence  and simplicity?

Answer such questions, and you’d start to sound like an analyst of old–congitively dissecting associations made with typical costumes, assuming you’d selected yours for typical reasons. Why not instead take the playful, creative approach Halloween invites, and ask some Clean Language questions about the costume you’ll wear?  “And what kind of witch is that witch?”  “And when you’re a princess, then what happens?”  “And when you’re a slice of pepperoni pizza, is there anything else about pepperoni?”  (Don’t have a costume? Draw a picture of what you’d be and ask questions about it.) Archetypes, by definition, have broad, cultural attributes, but your sense of that metaphor will have unique personal resonances as well.

Halloween invites us all to conceal and reveal our true selves. Be playful about exploring your true self….and let us know what you choose to be for Halloween!


Filed Under: Art as Metaphor, metaphors, Subconscious MessagesTagged: archetypes, assumptions, Clean Language, Clean Language activity, creative expression, holidays, masks, people as systems, subconscious

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