Mining Your Metaphors

Change the metaphor, change the self.

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Left Brain/Right Brain and Mining Your Metaphors

March 20, 2017

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.


Filed Under: brain neuroplasticity, Coaching, Cognitive Science, Counseling, memory, metaphors, Mind/body, Subconscious Messages, Therapy, TransitionsTagged: holidays, left brain/right brain, patterns, subconscious, symbolic modeling

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

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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