Insights From the Summit: The Power of Metaphor
At the terminate of last week, I attended a wonderful conference in New York City, The Expressive Therapies Top. My weekend was total of learning and discovery. Surprisingly though, one of the best teachers I met wasn't at the summit, but sitting across from me on the train. He'd never heard of fine art or expressive therapy before.
Expressive What?
As I began my usual caption virtually fine art and expressive therapy, he shot questions at me left and correct, cutting me off earlier I could terminate my sentences. This might have been unnerving, beingness grilled this way, but it was strangely invigorating.
Backside every question was a supposition, some other question, and a challenge. How does this piece of work? Why this and not that? He was trying to construct a model of understanding. He pushed me to better understand and explicate what I exercise. There'due south a lot of value in that.
Ane of the anecdotes I told him in lodge to aid explicate the piece of work was a visualization and drawing technique I ofttimes practise with clients. I used my own experience with the exercise as my example.
Visualizing a Solution
The practice entails asking the client to choose a physical problem on which to focus. Once this is articulate, you lead them through a short visualization. Kickoff with their attention on their breath, you lot guide them to a state of at-home and inward focus. Adjacent you invite them to imagine that they accept their own "mental screen" upon which images tin can appear.
You suggest to the client that they imagine that whatever they demand to aid them with their problem is going to announced on their mental screen. You encourage the client to accept whatever commencement appears, no matter how odd or unconnected it might seem.
They should spend fourth dimension with the image, noting its colour, texture, weight, scent, taste, and any emotional response they feel while looking at it.
Side by side, the customer creates a drawing of the visualization, and so writes descriptively about the epitome through the five senses, their emotional response, and any other commentary well-nigh the feel.
When I personally did the exercise the first time, what popped up on my mental screen was a peach. Given that I was thinking nearly a piece of work problem, I wasn't immediately sure what it meant, but decided to trust it every bit instructed.
I began telling my seat mate how a juicy peach helped me to see that I wasn't fully affectionate how rich, or "juicy" the work was already. Before I could go on almost my peach metaphor, he cut me off, noting that had an apple popped up, either juicy fruit would take helped me equally, and therefore the image may be less relevant than your power to extract metaphoric pregnant.
That's Just Peachy
I stopped to consider this. It was an excellent question, really. Our ability to open the imagination, experience something new, and consider how whatever metaphor could apply is a very of import element of this exercise. Indeed, had a dump truck come up on my screen, I certainly could accept extracted useful metaphors and lessons.
However, it seems to me that the peach popped up because of the detail lessons I needed in that moment, that an apple tree, or a tree, or a dump truck could not have pointed out to me. I also saw that the peach was a very personal metaphor for me and therefore carried more ability than an apple might have.
Peaches, when perfectly ripe, are an evocative sensory experience. Your fingers are greeted by a soft, delicate peel that is covered with a nearly transparent fuzz. A ripe peach demands care and attention in a fashion that you handle information technology. Grasp it besides hard and you puncture the skin. Apples bruise besides, simply are rough and tumble.
A peach's scent rises to meet you, telling of its sweet.
Apples proceed their sweet hole-and-corner until you bite them or bake them.
When a peach is truly ripe, yous bite it, and the viscid juice runs down your chin, over your fingers, and down your arm.
Apples don't.
I dear me a expert crisp, sweet apple. But it ain't no peach.
The peach taught me to be frail with my expectations on myself and to handle the work with care. It taught me to pause long enough to appreciate it's textures and nuance, it's sweetness, and to drink the juice in each moment before drawing my conclusions.
The peach taught me that trying too difficult would hateful missing the frail beauty and perfection right in front of me. I needed to irksome down, take stock, and see that things were actually quite good. The simply problem was that I was moving besides fast, and my expectations were off.
An apple tree probable could have taught me some very valuable lessons, but for a different problem.
Metaphor
Metaphor is ane of the virtually powerful tools in expressive therapy, and the one that ties all of the expressive arts together.
Whether like my engineer seat mate, you answer to scientific explanations of how metaphor helps to engage more centers in the encephalon than talking alone, or you reply to a more creative caption of how metaphor has helped man kind sympathize and make meaning of our experiences for all of recorded history, yous cannot but recognize the power of metaphor.
Information technology's a brusk hand for agreement our experience. Metaphor is prototype, sound, impact, gustatory modality, and smell. It'south archetypal, universal, and personal all at one time. We are excellent at hiding from our feelings and ourselves in language, simply we are not so adept at doing so when express ourselves through the arts, and the arts, like dreams, naturally engage metaphor.
Letting Go
Information technology turns out my seat mate is office of a team of researchers at MIT creating an emulsion that, when practical to surfaces, will allow things to release and slide hands off the surface. He used the example of a ketchup canteen. Can you imagine not waiting for your ketchup? No whipping the canteen dorsum and forth to coax the ketchup into descent? Good things will come to those who look,and those who don't.
Are you coming out of in that location?
As therapists, we are often looking for emulsions. To help our clients release pain, trauma, sometime habits, and negative idea patterns. And sometimes we are looking for adhesives. To help someone put their themselves, or their life, back together.
At that place's no emulsion that tin make the pain of sexual abuse slide off a vii twelvemonth-quondam's body, or magically make a 40 year-old woman who has always been told she is worthless believe that she is worth being loved. At that place's no chemical that volition put someone's relationships back together for them after years of distance due to mental health and substance abuse problems.
While science has done a lot to illuminate the parts of the states that are chemical, electric, and mechanical, it doesn't understand the soul.
So as expressive therapists, we assistance you speak to pain through metaphor. And which metaphor matters. It is your particular metaphor, informed by your life experiences, feelings, and worldview. Your soul prescribes it especially for you lot.
The Power of Metaphor
Every bit I attended diverse sessions on drama therapy, phototherapy, art therapy, and trip the light fantastic therapy at the peak, I was struck by how primal metaphor is in every single arroyo. I knew this, but looking at it through the lens of my conversation with this human being crystalized information technology for me.
Josie Abbernate talked near the importance of clients and therapists seeing the metaphors in their clients' stories, and how she sees them throughout her own life. She told how her clunky car is often her greatest teacher.
Every time her car breaks down, she asks the mechanic to tell her very specifically what is incorrect with information technology. She listens very carefully and asks questions until she really understands information technology, and so extracts the metaphors so that she tin can use them to her life.
This is a style of making meaning.
Information technology tin can't all be boiled downwardly to analytics, and neurons, and scientific discipline. Part of what feels good virtually being human is feeling a sense of wonder.
Balance and Connection
This may be slightly hard to imagine, but my Trip the light fantastic Therapy teacher at the conference, Kathleen Rea, gave us a powerful exercise. She asked united states to get together with a partner and balance a pen on our index finger, with the partner touching the opposite terminate of the pen with their index finger. In this style, the ii partners cooperate to continue the pen balanced. We were so instructed to "allow the pen to movement where it wish[ed]."
Once my partner and I positioned the pen between our two index fingers, I quietly focused, listening for the shift in mood that would tell me what to practice side by side. Before I had a chance to sense annihilation, I was working frantically to keep upward, moving rapidly around the room, here and there, up high, over the instructor's head, to the left, the right, and in circles over again and again.
Despite my verbal and non-verbal cues to slow downwardly, it seemed my partner needed to move fast while I needed to move slowly. While I'm sure it wasn't her intent, I felt dizzy and unheard. It was a familiar feeling.
All this came upward simply through "following a pen" effectually the room.
Finding Connectedness
Sensing our misattunement, I turned to another group for the side by side exercise. This time, in groups of iii, we were to proceed 2 pens aloft, with the person in the middle holding one pen on each index finger, and collaborating with her two partners. In order to help her focus on the senses, she kept her eyes closed.
I invited my two partners to get in the middle first. For each, I and the third partner were carefully attuned to our "blind" partner – responding to every twitch, rise and autumn, a pure dance forming between us, built-in of the energy between those four fingers.
Watching the wonder on their confront, a smiling half spread, eyes airtight, so attuned, so aware – it was full of dazzler. I wished that I could catch the eye of the other partner, to share even more than in this amazing experience.
When information technology was my turn, I closed my eyes without hesitation, and noted how advisedly my partners responded to my every motility, post-obit me up, down, a trivial frontward, back. I too wanted to fly a fleck, like my first partner, and at present I could. I felt heard. Continued.
I did non know these women'due south names, merely afterward we looked at each other in the eye. Nosotros shared a bond because of this experience.
Beautiful. Meaningful. Trip the light fantastic.
You lot tin imagine how a therapist could use this exercise to aid a customer wait at her dynamics in relationships with others. In the get-go instance, if the client felt "dizzy and unheard," does she find this reflects how she feels in her relationships?
The customer'southward feeling response to the exercise is office of the therapeutic work. Instead of talking about feeling pushed effectually, unheard, and used, she and the therapist have a physical experience of playing out this dynamic, and they can experiment with changing it.
Metaphor can create distance, which makes working on our issues then much less scary and overwhelming, and more fun.
Metaphor is a container.
Information technology creates distance, safety, and meaning.
Doesn't expressive therapy audio like an amazing mode to explore yourself, grow, change old habits, and find more than significant in your life?
Information technology is!
If you are looking to learn more about yourself, grow past trauma, transcend anxiety and low, or you are just sick of traditional therapy, expressive therapy might be for y'all.
Yous tin can discover a local art or expressive therapist through this directory, or you lot tin phone call me to explore how I might assistance yous.
What are the powerful metaphors in your world?
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