metaphors for healing

march 5 | weekly warm-up

For this exercise, think about your memories, experiences, relationships, and observations in terms of metaphor. You can use the suggested words below, and choose which words you could use as a metaphor for some aspect of your life. (You can also come up with your own metaphor.) Do a freestyle write based on this connection and see where it goes. Extend the metaphor as far as you can.

Suggestions: Dance, Fire, Murder, Water, Storm, Building, Dress, Car, Cooking, Birth, Poison, Tree, Road, House

Life Topics: Family, Friendships, Relationships, Writing, Career, Failure, Success, Loneliness, Desire, Hunger,

Examples:

My career is a river…

My family is a tree with roots, a sturdy trunk and branches…

Our friendship was a storm…

His love was poison…

A metaphor is when we use an object or concept to represent something else. There is also healing value in using metaphor as a creative tool for processing experiences through writing.

First. Let’s look at it from a self-healing perspective.

Dr. Phil Hammond, a British physician has said, “The use of metaphorical language in health care is increasingly accepted as a powerful aid to healing. The transformative power of the right metaphor, long exploited in poetry, politics and marketing, is increasingly recognised in health care, coaching and therapy, engaging the unconscious to activate self-healing, reclaim optimism and fuel the imagination with the energy necessary to attain the desired goals.”

Further, David Grove was a counseling psychologist whose Metaphors for Healing research resulted in “a form of metaphor therapy he called Clean Language to explore the complex world of the clients’ troubled inner experiences without having to directly confront traumas through re-telling—and re-living—them. Without having to interpret the metaphors, clients were able to heal, to reprocess, and rebalance.”

Without even going deep into the research, you can connect the idea that using metaphor provides a certain distance that makes the person feel safer in their recalling and storytelling.

Second. As writers, metaphors provide a way to describe (show) an experience or concept in a way that activates your imagination and creates an easy access point for the reader.

As I was preparing this, I remembered an old blog post where I wrote about my natural hair like it was a lover I’d taken as I grew out the relaxer that I’d used for years to chemically straighten my hair. The process ran parallel to the self-discovery process I was going through at the time. I wrote this in 2009!! And I remember how the metaphor helped me express what I was experiencing.

If you can find a metaphor that you are quite familiar with, it will make it even easier to use this tactic. For example, if you’re a chef, you might compare something new in your life like becoming a parent to cooking. If you’re a dancer, you might compare losing your virginity to learning choreography for a new dance. You can check out my example below, and explore this exercise for yourself this week!

“I must confess. I have taken a lover. We are still in the honeymoon phase of our affair, so forgive me if I gush about my lover shamelessly. I have fallen head over heels, and I never thought I’d be here. It started with a crush on my new growth. I could tell I was falling hard for it, but as we so often do in new relationships, I doubted that things would work out between us. As it continued to grow, the more we saw each other, the deeper I fell in love. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, touching it, and envisioning our future together. I knew I was hooked when we would have a disagreement and I no longer felt that our relationship was being threatened. On the contrary, bad hair days brought us closer because I was learning, by trial and error, how to bring the best out of it. One day, I threw away the perm box in the closet that I had kept on standby…just in case. Finally, I knew that no matter what came our way, we could work it out and be strong together.”