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.

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.

Lost and Found: An Artist’s Brain Revealed

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?

The Edge Effect in Metaphor Landscapes

In the counseling/coaching technique I work with, Clean Language, we use the term ‘metaphor landscape’ to describe the inner world of a client that is populated by personal metaphors  or symbols laid out in specific locations, like a map. While each client’s landscape is unique in its details and their interactions, I find some symbols are used frequently: rivers, lakes, and mountains; flowers, birds and fountains; trees, fields, and roads.

Perhaps it is because these “personal ecosystems” appear repeatedly with my clients that two words caught my attention as I was thumbing through a permaculture gardening book recently. The terms ecotone and edge effect are new to me.  An ecotone* is a transition area—a place between two plant communities, for example, the area between a meadow and a forest. Ecotones may be distinct lines, such as one created by a farmer on a mower, or they may be broader areas, such as many mountain slopes or wetlands.

Often these transitional areas have species of flora and fauna common to the ecosystems of either side, as well as additional ones that thrive in neither of the other two. It is this characteristic that is described as the edge effect*: the tendency of such an area to have a greater diversity of species than exist in either of its bordering communities.

Clients’ metaphor landscapes demonstrate an edge effect, too.  It is in those moments on a metaphoric bank, just before a client wades into a river, or goes through a gate or leaps onto a boat, when the client faces some significant, even transformative, change. Here on the threshold, the client may know things not only about the two worlds, the one behind and the one ahead, but also about things which are found in neither worlds, but which are crucial for staying a new course.

Symbolically, the space between worlds may be a single step, like through a doorway, or it may involve numerous steps, like across a bridge or down a hallway. Sometimes the distance is measured in time as well, as in a journey on a boat between two ports. However wide or narrower the space, however long or short the time spent there, it is a space that holds information unique to this overlapping of world views.

To think of these terms ecotone and the edge effect as metaphors is a wonderful way to describe the significance and potential this “in-between” time or space holds.  They are good reminders for therapists and coaches not to rush clients heedlessly through such spaces, but to explore them for their potential riches.

These spaces in a metaphor landscape are not always comfortable places to be. How appropriate then, that the word ecotone comes from eco– and the Greek word tonos, meaning tension. To move from one way of being to another may require significant preparations for readiness and a rallying of resources.  The steps before the shift can seem hair-splittingly small. It’s easy to gloss over a client’s statement as a common turn of phrase when s/he says  “I want to be able to start to change,” but notice: there is a want, an ability to start, a starting, all before s/he gets to the changing!  Each step may involve consequences to explore, a decision to act, and courage to be mustered to step away from the known and into the unknown.  All the more reason to pause at such choice points to learn more about resources and resolve, about the process needed for change.

Often clients come for help when they are living in a broad “ecotone”, in a space between two worlds or ways of being.  As we explore both where they may be stuck and where they want to go, these new metaphors will remind me to consider “the edge effect.”

 

 

 

*Definitions taken from wikipedia.org entries for ecotone and edge effect

Metaphors for Tough $$ Times

A lot of my clients are anxious about their financial security. Can metaphors help?  C. C., Denver, CO

In today’s difficult economic times, many people are stressed out about their circumstances. If you are a helping professional working with struggling or anxious clients, you’ll be glad to learn that metaphors can help. Wondering how that could be, when jobs are in jeopardy and bills need to be paid now?

While metaphors aren’t likely to cause employers to start hiring again (actually, they could…but that’s a subject for another blog), you can help clients develop vivid metaphors  for an inner state or way of feeling to feel more resourceful and more hopeful now.   If  your client can summon more optimism, feel more in control, or find strength to face a storm, s/he will reduce the flow of stress hormones in his/her body, a benefit in multiple ways, and have more energy to devote to problem-solving… and joyful living.

 

You can take these four simple steps to discover and strengthen a supporting inner resource:

  1. Ask your client to recall another time when s/he felted stressed about a challenge. What personal quality or characteristic(s)  did s/he use to cope? It might, for example, have been courage, an ability to stay calm, or stubbornness.
  2. Get a metaphor for that quality with a simple question. If the client says, “Well, I guess I was brave,”  you ask, “If you were to draw a picture of that brave, what would it look like?” Invite your client to actually draw it or just describe it aloud.  Perhaps s/he would draw a surfer riding a huge wave or a lion tamer with a whip and chair, controlling a roaring lion.
  3. Help your client get a vividly detailed picture of this resource by asking these simple questions about what s/he describes.  Use only the exact words/short phrases s/he uses!  The point is to get your client more familiar with and to strengthen his/her own resource, not to make suggestions about what you think would be helpful–and that includes adding or changing even small details!
  • Is there anything else about that [client’s word]?
  • What kind of [client’s word or phrase] is that?
  • Where is that [resource word]? O the inside? On the outside?

Examples: Is there anything else about that “surfer”? What kind of “riding” is that “riding”? Where inside is that “brave”? On the inside? On the outside?

Keep on asking  “what kind of…” , “anything else about…” ? and “where is… ?” questions until your client has a well-developed metaphor, full of sensory details.

4.  Encourage your client to return to this image whenever s/he want to feel that resourceful way again.

And if you try this exercise with a client, comment here on how it goes!

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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