First published in www.odemagazine.com 7 Feb 2011
The secret life of metaphor
James Geary
Metaphor is most familiar as the literary device through which we
describe one thing in terms of another, as in Shakespeare’s famous line
from Romeo and Juliet, “Juliet is the sun.” But metaphor is much more
than a mere literary device employed by love-struck poets when they
refer to their girlfriends as interstellar masses of incandescent gas.
Metaphor is intensely yet inconspicuously present in everything from
economics and advertising to politics and business to science and
psychology.
Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about one metaphor
for every 10 to 25 words, or about six metaphors a minute. Metaphor
conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through
advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions. In
the mouths of politicians, metaphor subtly nudges public opinion; in
the minds of businesspeople, it spurs creativity and innovation. In
science, metaphor is the preferred nomenclature for new theories and new
discoveries; in psychology, it is the natural language of human
relationships and emotions.
Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words.
New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly
plain that metaphor influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in
surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways. Metaphor has finally leapt
off the page and landed with a mighty splash right in the middle of our
stream of consciousness. That impact is making a big splash in the field
of psychology, through metaphor therapy.
Through a process called symbolic modeling, psychotherapists
James Lawley and Penny Tompkins help clients create and explore
metaphors around crucial emotions or personal dilemmas. To learn more
about the technique, I booked a session with them. A few weeks before
our appointment, my mother died and I decided that my mother’s death
would be the starting point for our conversation.
By the time I met with Lawley and Tompkins, my mother’s funeral was
over. The initial shock had passed. I had spent a week cleaning out her
house, the house in which I grew up. Now things were getting back to
normal. The routine business of living had resumed. As I struggled to
identify exactly how I felt, to reconcile the contrast between the
intensity of my mother’s death and the abrupt return to normalcy, the
best I could come up with was, “No different.”
“Anything else about that ‘No different’?” Lawley asked.
“The feeling is everywhere, diffuse,” I said, “like a light blanket, not
noticeable because it’s so light. The most remarkable thing about
it is that it has so few characteristics. It’s almost nothing, like
wallpaper.”
“Anything else about that ‘wallpaper’?”
“You ignore it, especially if it’s drab.”
“Anything else about that ‘drab wallpaper’?”
“I don’t like it, its drabness. It reminds me of the house I grew up in.”
My family moved to the house I grew up in when it was brand new, in the
early 1970s. As a teenager, I loathed that house. It symbolized to me
everything that was flimsy and oppressive about growing up in the
suburbs. The hollow plywood door to my bedroom still had the deep gash
cut into it when my brother threw his shoe at me and missed. The plastic
towel rack in the bathroom still fell off the wall every time I tried
to hang a wet towel on it. The lawn and the driveway were still
impeccably maintained, just like every other lawn and driveway on this
impeccably maintained street.
In going through my mother’s things, I was struck by how few personal
possessions she had. She had lots of bric-a-brac—Norman Rockwell
commemorative plates, several plaques with “An Irish Blessing” printed
on them, some mildly patriotic trinkets—but little else. The trinkets
kept turning up everywhere, not just on the walls but also in drawers,
under beds, in closets, many of them sealed in plastic bags.
My mother also had an astonishing array of Christmas and Halloween
decorations, which she carefully packed up and stored after displaying
for the holidays. This stuff had always made me inexpressibly depressed,
something about the impersonal sameness of it all, like wallpaper.
Then, in the powder room closet under some old packets of aspirin,
bottles of foot spray, and a variety of stray Christmas tree ornaments
(all sealed in individual plastic bags), I found my mom’s 1944 high
school yearbook. In its warped and moldy pages was a pile of old
photographs along with the drawings I had made as a kid for Mother’s
Day, Christmas, and my parents’ wedding anniversaries.
The photographs showed my mom in all her glory - dressed as Mother
Earth, wrapped in a bed sheet with a plastic Christmas wreath on her
head, during one of the many parties my parents threw in the basement;
at the front door during her surprise fiftieth birthday bash, gasping in
delight and disbelief as she watched Aunt Peggy outfitted as a drum
majorette leading a parade of friends and relatives down the middle of
our street; tanning in a lawn chair in the backyard with slices of
cucumber strategically placed over her eyes.
Among my colorful crayon drawings - full of balloons, exploding
fireworks, and huge red hearts - was an apologetic note in which my
mother explained that the drawings of my sister and brothers were
missing because they had been ruined in one of the frequent
post-rainstorm floods in our basement.
“My mom was fun and funny,” I said. “The drab wallpaper blotted out the colorful patches.”
“Anything else about that ‘blotted out’?” Lawley asked.
“That’s what blots out feelings. Memories of my mother can be splashes of color.”
“When you think about those ‘splashes of color,’ then what happens?”
“It’s not so drab anymore. It comes alive.”
The drab wallpaper concealed a lot of feelings - about my mother, my
childhood, the house I grew up in. By following the metaphor, aided by
Lawley’s gentle promptings, I uncovered memories and emotions that had
been papered over long ago.
Lawley and Tompkins are practitioners of “clean language,” a form
of talk therapy developed by New Zealand psychotherapist David Grove.
Grove, who died in 2008 at the age of fifty-seven, worked with people
suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) - war veterans and
victims of violent crime or psychological or sexual abuse. In the 1980s,
he began noticing that when clients described their most troubling
emotions and most traumatic memories, they always spoke in metaphors.
It is easy enough to label a specific emotion, such as grief, fear,
pride, or happiness. It is much harder to convey the actual qualitative
experience of that emotion. But metaphorical language can describe the
indescribable. Saying that grief is like “having your heart ripped out”
or that joy is “popping out of your body like a champagne cork” is not
just the most vivid way to express the experience of these feelings, it
is the only way to express the experience of these feelings.
“We can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is
something else,” George Eliot wrote in The Mill on the Floss. In saying
that my feelings about my mother’s death were like drab wallpaper, I
discovered what my feelings really were.
Lawley and Tompkins, who are based in the United Kingdom, spent five
years studying with Grove to produce a systematic account of his
approach to metaphor in their book Metaphors in Mind: Transformation
through Symbolic Modelling. “I noticed, if I didn’t force people when
they were talking they would naturally start using metaphor to describe
their experience,” Grove told them. “So I realized here was another way
to structure experience. I decided that metaphor was a whole language
worthy of study.”
Grove paid careful attention to clients’ metaphors, observing that they
gradually took on a highly personalized significance. If a client stayed
with a metaphor long enough, it became increasingly elaborate, often
evolving into a kind of parable that contained an important lesson. The
metaphors had a consistent structure and a direct relevance to the
client’s experience. And when the metaphors changed, Grove noticed, the
people changed, too.
Grove devised clean language as a technique to help clients, those with
PTSD and those without, develop their own metaphors - and use those
metaphors to achieve emotional insight and psychological change.
Grove’s clean language involves the relentless pursuit of the unexpected
and idiosyncratic in client metaphors and the commitment to hold fast
to the client’s own words and imagery. Allowing the client’s unconscious
to analyze itself through metaphor is key to how Grovian therapy works.
But Grove believed that client metaphors were unique to individuals
rather than being of universal significance like Jungian archetypes. He
also went out of his way to avoid interpreting client metaphors, a
practice he believed only interfered with the therapeutic process. Grove
called his language “clean” precisely because it pared away the
therapist’s own assumptions, ideas, and biases. Clean language is meant
to be a blank slate on which the client paints a metaphorical landscape.
The technique, he once told Lawley, is for the client to “interrogate
the metaphor until it confesses its strengths.”
To facilitate these interrogations, Grove devised questions to elicit
and enhance client metaphors. Grove’s questions address the metaphor
itself, not what the client or the therapist happens to think about the
metaphor. The therapist’s role is “to pay unbelievable attention to the
client’s exact words,” according to Tompkins. “You have to walk side by
side with the person through their metaphor landscape. You have to keep
the attention on their experience in the moment. The power of directing
attention where people don’t normally go is astronomical. When you
notice the uncanny in a metaphor, when you hear the shock in the
client’s voice, you know you’ve hit pay dirt.”
So, when a client uses a metaphor in a clean session, the therapist
treats the phrase literally and begins asking questions of it. “When
someone says, ‘I’m a ticking bomb,’ normal logic says, ‘That’s not
real,’” Lawley explains. “Clean language asks, ‘What kind of bomb? Is
there anything else about that ticking?’”
For Grove, metaphors carry information, and that information can only be
accessed through the metaphors themselves, not through a therapist’s or
a client’s clever explications of them. Explication is not only
unnecessary but also unhelpful. “Questions couched in ‘normal’ language
ask the client to comment on his experience,” Grove wrote in Resolving
Traumatic Memories: Metaphors and Symbols in Psychotherapy. “Every time
he does that he comes out of a state of self-absorption to perform an
intellectual task which interrupts the process we are working to
encourage and to facilitate.”
That process - the process of personal transformation - is about
experience rather than interpretation.
Metaphor has a paradoxical power. It distances an experience by equating
it with something else, but in so doing actually brings that experience
closer. “By talking about what something is not, you understand what it
is,” as Lawley puts it
“Our questions will have given a form, made manifest some particular
aspect of the client’s internal experience in [a] way that he has not
experienced before,” Grove wrote. “The experience is alive and real; not
just contained in words or dissipated in answers. We structure an
environment internally: the client is going to experience rather than
describe what the experience is like.”
Clean language is not limited to therapeutic encounters. The practice
has been used by the British police force to help officers with their
interviewing techniques; by the British National Health Service to
improve patient-doctor communication; in Northern Ireland and Bosnia as
part of the post-conflict reconciliation process; and by major
consultancy firms as an aspect of their management training schemes.
Caitlin Walker, a consultant who designs learning and development
programs that address diversity, conflict, and leadership issues, has
used clean language with unruly British adolescents in the context of
anger management sessions. Working with one teenage boy who had a long
history of getting into fistfights, she asked: “What happens just before
you hit someone?”
“I just switch, Miss,” he replied, snapping his fingers. “I go red. Everything just goes quiet.”
“You ‘go red.’ You ‘switch,’” Walker repeated, using the teenager’s
exact words and also snapping her fingers. “‘Everything just goes
quiet.’ And when it ‘goes quiet,’ what kind of quiet?”
“Like shutters, Miss,” the boy said, cupping his hands around his eyes
like horse blinkers. “I can’t hear anything in my head and it’s like I
can only see the one in front of me. The next thing I know is people are
shouting, someone’s lying on the ground, and I’m in trouble.”
Walker then explored what happened just before he hit someone: “You ‘go red,’ and when you ‘go red,’ what kind of red is it?”
“Blood red. It just gets red and I get angry, like my blood’s boiling.”
“And when ‘my blood’s boiling,’ what happens just before it’s ‘blood red’ and ‘boiling’?”
“It’s cooler!”
“And when ‘it’s cooler,’ ‘it’s cooler’ like what?”
“It’s cool blue, like the sky, like my Mum,” he replied, looking upward and- uncharacteristically - smiling.
“And ‘cool blue, like the sky, like your Mum,’ then ‘blood red’ like
your ‘blood’s boiling,’ and then what happens after ‘blood’s boiling’?”
“I get raj [enraged] and attack. Then it’s out of me and I run and look
at the sky and think of my Mum and breathe in blue until the red’s
gone.”
Through this clean interrogation, Walker helped the boy see the full
spectrum of thoughts and feelings preceding a violent encounter. She
asked the boy to think of his color metaphors the next time he felt
himself losing his temper, and to use the metaphors to get himself out
of the situation before fists started flying.
When they next met, he reported back: “You know I go red? Well,
yesterday I felt it happening. I get up in the morning, blue and
relaxed, then I see Dad’s drunk - red! Then I have to put dirty clothes
back on cause he hasn’t done laundry - red! No money for the bus - red!
I’m cold and I’m late for school - red! I get to school and get
detention and I’m red and anyone says anything it boils! So, I thought,
what if I walk to school past the duck pond and I stop and look in the
water, cause that makes me blue and if I breathe in blue and think of my
Mum then I won’t boil so fast.”
Now, every time this boy feels himself going red, he breathes in blue by
the duck pond near his school. With his anger under better control, he
has been able for the first time to start building friendships with his
classmates.
This translation from metaphor to real life is a central tenet of
Grovian therapy. To encourage that transition, Grove often asked
clients to actually do something related to their metaphor, a technique
he picked up from Milton H. Erickson, a psychiatrist who specialized in
clinical hypnosis.
Erickson often used parables in his therapeutic work, coupling these
with specific tasks for clients to perform. One of Erickson’s clients
was an alcoholic. Erickson told this man a bit about the humble cactus,
how the plant conserves water and can survive for up to three years in
the desert without rainfall. He then told the man to go to the local
botanical gardens to observe cacti.
Erickson never heard from the man again. Many years later, after this
client had died, the man’s daughter visited Erickson to tell him that
her father had been sober since the day he went to the botanical
gardens.
Erickson called these tasks “ambiguous-function assignments,” but their
role in furthering psychological change has become far less ambiguous
since he began experimenting with them. In describing difficult
emotions, we often use metaphors of containment: we keep our feelings
bottled up, our bad memories sealed off, and our resentments buried. To
test whether the physical acting out of these metaphors had a
psychological impact on the experience of these emotions, researchers in
Singapore and Canada devised an ambiguous-function assignment of their
own.
They first asked participants to write down their recollections of a
recent decision they regretted. Half the group then sealed their texts
in an envelope before handing it in; the other half did not. When
subsequently asked how they felt about the regrettable decision, those
who had sealed their recollections in an envelope reported significantly
fewer negative emotions.
In a related experiment, the same research team asked subjects to write
down two things: their account of a news report about an infant’s
accidental death and their plans for the weekend. Half the group sealed
their account of the infant’s death in an envelope; the other half
sealed their plans for the weekend. The researchers found that those who
had sealed up the story of the infant’s death recalled fewer details of
the event than those who had sealed up their plans for the weekend.
Their conclusion: physical closure helps achieve psychological closure.
Grove used ambiguous-function assignments with his clients, too. If, for
example, a client had said, “I’m in a brick tunnel and I can’t see
either end,” Grove might have sent the client to a transport museum to
find out about tunnels, to a bricklayer to learn how tunnels are built,
or to a DIY store to buy material to construct a replica tunnel. The
goal: to translate insight into action.
After I finished cleaning out my mother’s house, there was only one
place left to look: the attic. The entrance to the attic was through the
top of my bedroom closet. I knew we never kept much of anything up
there, because that was where I hid things - my teenage diaries, in
particular - that I didn’t want my mother to discover. Still, I thought I
would check the attic just to make sure nothing was left behind.
When I popped my head into the attic, I discovered three dilapidated
hatboxes. In each of the three boxes was one of my mother’s hats from
the 1960s. One hat in particular I recognized: a pillbox hat made of
bright pink feathers. Black-and-white shots of my mother wearing this
hat were among the cache of photos I had found in her high school
yearbook.
The hat was covered in fine black dust and a few of the feathers had
fallen out. But, despite nearly forty years in the attic, it was still
intact.
I took the hat home. I had it cleaned and repaired. It now occupies
pride of place on our mantelpiece, a little splash of color from my
mother.
Watch a TED Talk by James Geary on metaphor.
This is an edited extract from James Geary's book, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World, published in February 2011 by HarperCollins.
© Ode Magazine USA, Inc. and Ode Luxembourg 2009