Explore Metaphor

“We can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something  else.” 

 - George Eliot

David Grove, a New Zealand psychotherapist, worked with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) clients.   He noticed his clients used metaphors to describe troubling emotions and traumatic memories.  They transformed emotions: grief, fear, pride or happiness.

Conveying the emotion required language to express the experience of the feelings. By using metaphors, his clients  discovered their real feelings.

Grove paid attention to clients’ metaphors and their personalized significance.  If a client stayed with a metaphor long enough, it elaborated.  Often it evolved into a kind of parable that contained a lesson. “The metaphors had a consistent structure and a direct relevance to the clients experience, “ Grove says. “When the metaphors changed, the people changed too.”

He used the metaphors to achieve emotional insight and psychological change and called it “Clean Language.”  Clean language is meant to, “pare away the therapist’s own assumptions, ideas and biases.”  It’s a blank slate on which the client paints a metaphorical landscape.

Clients pursued the unexpected and idiosyncratic. Grove did not interpret the imagery which he believed interfered with the therapeutic process.

Grove devised questions to elicit and enhance the client metaphors.  The questions addressed the metaphor itself not what is thought about it.  The experience stays in the moment.

Metaphor has a paradoxical power.  It distances an experience by equating it with something else.  Bt writing the details. it brings the experience closer.  If you talk about what something is not, you determine what it is.

Creative Write: Try this exercise with your writing today.

Choose a situation where you felt fear, grief, pride, or joy.  Write in a metaphor.  For example, you can begin with: I feel like an animal out of its cage.

After you write the initial metaphor, list questions below the metaphor and go into detail.
What kind of animal?
What does it look like in shape and color?
What about the sounds and movement of the animal?
What does the animal eat?
Where does the animal want to go?

Notice where a freewrite takes you.