Monthly Archives: May 2016

Using Metaphors to Visualize Problems is Like a Massage for Your Brain

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“Jealousy feels like everybody in the world getting ice cream brought to them on the couch and you get none” – Olivia, age 7

Writing teachers must be doing an incredible job.  The young people I see in therapy are masters of descriptive metaphor when it comes to describing the challenges they face in life and in how they might overcome them.

brain-massageRecent brain research has uncovered some of the potential healing benefits of thinking in metaphor.  A 2008 study found that the sensory areas of the brain are activated when we hear a metaphor.  Imagining yourself to be as ‘cool as a cucumber’ might send soothing signals to your brain in a stressful situation.  Metaphors can bridge the mind/body gap, allowing us to understand our experiences and connect to our physical sensations, which can help us reduce stress.

Therapists have long understood the benefits of metaphor in helping clients shift perspective and unlock old ways of thinking. Metaphors can help a therapist and client visualize a problem more clearly and envision new solutions that might be difficult to imagine when one is focused on the immediate context and detail.

Olivia struggles with sharing her mother’s attention with her twin brother.  Her comment above allowed us to talk about her feelings in a way that was removed enough from the anger she felt towards him that she could contemplate different possible ways of dealing with them.

ME: And who brings the ice cream to everyone else?

HER: The mothers!

ME: And what do you want to tell all those mothers?

HER: I want some ice cream too!!

ME: And what happens if you get some ice cream?

HER: I’m not so mad at the rest of them and it’s fair.

From here, we were able to talk more about how it felt when her brother was getting more attention than she was and she was able to feel a sense of control and calm that wasn’t accessible to her when she was angry at her brother.

Children aren’t the only ones who can benefit from visualizing through metaphor.  Jarvis is a self-described worrier.  

“I’m always focused on the worst possible outcome.  I can’t even enjoy a night out because I’m thinking about what it will be like if things don’t go well.”

“Sounds like you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“Yes that! Exactly”

“Maybe there’s only one shoe.”

I asked Jarvis to picture one shoe hanging above the floor.  Then I asked him to see it fall to the ground and to imagine looking up again to see no other shoe.  “What is it like to know there isn’t a second one waiting to fall?” I asked.  He told me he felt he could keep his eyes focused forward.  He said he felt his chest loosen and his shoulders relax a bit.  His homework would be to call up the image of the shoe whenever he started to imagine what might go wrong and see if that helped him stay a little more focused on the present. Two weeks later, he reported being much more able to enjoy himself, though sometimes he confessed to imagining the second shoe.

Think of a problem you are currently facing.  How might you use metaphor to describe it?  What metaphors are you already using and not aware of (Are you painted into a corner? Are you walking on a tightrope?) Rather than focus on the details of your problem, imagine the metaphor as literal.  Can you see yourself holding an umbrella to balance you across the high wire or finding a creative way across the painted floor?

Creating a visual picture can help you become more flexible in dealing with challenges and may reduce the physical symptoms of anxiety and stress you’ve been experiencing.

 

Cultivating a Garden Where our Needs are Met

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As a novice gardener on a spiritual quest to grow the reddest tomatoes, the spiciest peppers, and the sweetest melons, I sought out learning in all different places: books, videos, and especially from other more seasoned farmers. Gardeners and farmers

Cutaway sequence of a plant growing in dirt, roots showing, against a white background.

are some of the most generous folks you will encounter, always willing to offer their creative input and often giving away their treasured secrets to crop brilliance. 

Through all the feedback, I found a common thread tying all this valuable insight together. The most successful growers are all fanatical about their soil. Ensuring the right balance of nutrients, proportioned by their unique formulas, was the focus of their attention. It all came down to the stuff I got yelled at for tracking in the house.

At first I found every imaginable ingredient available through the internet including glacial rock dust and exotic alfalfa. My tendency to go a bit overboard when I like something certainly showed up in my new exotic garden. I wasn’t certain if it had the effect I wanted but I felt accomplished for my bold steps. I tend to repeat this impulse when cooking which is why my kids have learned to watch me carefully so I’m not throwing in too many exotic ingredients.

If you are intrinsically scientific by nature, you will appreciate the idea that the three most notable elements of soil fertility are magnesium, potassium, and nitrogen. If you are a more creative type, consider the phrase, brown plus green makes black gold. Mixing what may seem like waste product together (grass clippings & fallen leaves) can be the base for a nutrient rich soil.

Soil, the fertile ground from which life springs forth, can easily produce large plants with very little fruit, small plants with an abundance of weak, disease-prone

fruit, or a hundred and one other permutations of variable yields we scratch our heads in confusion about. How can the people who are scientific with their methods and the people who are freestyling, still come up with the same results?

We might look at human growth through a similar lens. Instead of soil composition, sunlight, and water, human growth is fertilized by less tangible elements such as volition, value, and meaning. For maximum growth, we must first identify needs we have and then be able to recognize the degree to which these things exist in us, which in some part is based on life experiences. For example, if we grew up without supportive control, our need for control as an adult may seem greater.

Once we are aware of our needs, we weigh out what attempting to meet these needs may cost us in risk.Negotiation, which consists of risk-taking, receptivity, insight, and compromise, is a building block for our fertile soil- the basis of how we work to get our needs met. We create alliances in our lives that help us to attain our basic needs, with people we feel safe enough to negotiate with. We tend to move away from people whom we have difficulty feeling safe enough to negotiate with, believing they may be too challenging to justify the risk/ reward.

 Thus, we stay engaged with those we can more easily get needs met from at a risk level we are comfortable with, resulting in only basic and mid-level needs being met. Gardeners will tell you that cross-pollination is necessary to increase a crop’s resilience. As it’s the more challenging (thorny?) people who tend to hold information needed for our higher order needs such as fulfillment, we require a higher threshold for discomfort to do this type of work. This is the case because we learn at a deeper level when outside our comfort zone.

As we tend toward a survivalist mentality, concerned more with our basic needs and less on giving back to sustain a healthy ecosystem, we and our environment become depleted. Instead of crop rotation and experimenting with new plants, we rely on the same formula that proved successful in the past. We can’t figure out why it’s not producing in the same way and we surely aren’t learning what jackfruit and rhubarb is all about.

As a global ecosystem, we have done a poor job or maintaining the balance between what we take from the earth and what we give back. Our oceans are likely ruined beyond repair while people somehow still debate the efficacy of global warming. Our soil is being depleted at an alarming rate with the catalyst of pesticides and animal waste beyond anybody’s wildest imaginations. Perhaps, before we can become more intentional about creating a balanced global ecosystem, we need to learn to cultivate our personal gardens, balancing comfort with challenge, seeking personal fulfillment and strengthening our connections with others.

As we find peace and fulfillment on each of the three planes, self in relation to self, self in relation to others, and self in relation to the world, we find greater meaning and purpose in our lives and our gardens can flourish.

Are you investing your energy wisely in relationships and life?

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pigThe amount of energy we spend versus how much we generate is a simple way of appreciating our sense of fulfillment in life. We can look at this measurement on a large scale, a year for instance, or at the micro level of a more routine encounter with another person.

The quality and value of our relationships with others  is determined by the sum of a collection of exchanges or interactions.  Every exchange includes both inputs and outputs of energy. If we drill down deeper, we may understand why we value a relationship the way we do by assessing the quality and quantity of what we give and receive, and how well we are able to make adjustments to this balance.

Making adjustments means figuring out how to adapt the relationship to work for us better and hopefully negotiate with the other to do the same.  The ingredients of a fulfilling relationship include passion, vulnerability, ownership (of thoughts, feelings, actions) curiosity and energy. The greater the quality and quantity of these ingredients, the greater our emotional investment will be. However, the greater our investment, the greater the risk, because what we put in may not match what we get by the other person. 

Investment always involves a risk.

Financial planners will tell us that the reward for taking on risk is the potential for a greater investment return long term. We balance our risk taking with protectiveness. Exercising caution in relationships, being wise about how and when to invest further, helps us manage our fear of risk. Similar to the types of stocks we chose or whether we put our money into a savings account, fulfillment in life and relationships is determined in large part by our willingness to lose and our desire to gain.

Wise investors in emotional intimacy consider needs (love and belonging), coping skills (internal and external resources), and how much unpleasantness we can tolerate in the short and long terms) when determining how much energy to put up in hopes of a pay-off.

There are no sure bets, but the more we know about the resources we have to give and how and when to protect them, the more likely we are to cash in on our deepest relationship rewards.