The Importance of
Metaphor
Saying the Unsayable
Everyday language is peppered with metaphors.
We try to land contracts at work, read
stories of how the police netted some
criminals, both of which must have been pretty
hard, but perhaps not - metaphor comes easily.
Indeed, our eyes light up, when
metaphors ring true. When we are
feeling blue or our plans are pretty hazy
, the last thing we want is someone taking a
dim view of our colourful use of
metaphor.
We use metaphors when we find
it difficult to describe a a 'thing' or an
'experience'. So, we borrow a word or a phrase,
which appears similar to the 'thing' or
'experience', which we are trying to describe.
Medical language is
bursting with metaphors. People are in tip
top condition, then they fall
ill, sink into a coma, or - in mental health
- experience breakdowns. Medicine opted, long
ago, to adopt mechanics as the overarching metaphor
for the human body. So, the heart is a pump,
and the brain is a computer - and in Freud's
day the mind was a hydraulic system.
In 'mental health' people
play mind games and, if your risk being
brainwashed. Even neuroscience is replete with
metaphors. Neurons are said to be firing as
information passes along various neuronal
pathways; electrical impulses cross over
at various synaptic junctions, as people
experience a brain wave or participate in a
brainstorming exercise. All these metaphors
depend on the hardware of the brain; which
help the software of the brain to do its
work. Of course there are no actual
pathways or junctions. We simply could
not discuss the brain without comparing its
activities to other things we actually can see in
the world outside.
Tidal Metaphor
In the Tidal Model we
use metaphors only to describe the theory of
how we function as persons. In Tidal practice
we use only the metaphors that people in care use to
describe their own experience.
It is not easy to describe, in
simple language, what it means to be a person.
Usually, we have to invoke metaphors - saying it is
as if we are like this or like that.
In the Tidal Model we compare life to a
voyage.
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Life is a
voyage, undertaken on
an ocean of experience. All human development, including the experience of
health and illness, involves discoveries made on that oceanic
journey.
At critical points on the life journey, people
may experience storms, where they may fear becoming all washed
up. The ship of life may begin to take in water, and
the person may face the prospect of drowning or becoming
emotionally or psychically shipwrecked - potent
metaphors for the experience of mental or physical illness.
At other times the person may be
boarded by
pirates and robbed of aspects of self-hood - the potent metaphors of the
experience of rape, trauma or abuse.
People who have experienced such human storms
need to be guided to a safe haven, to begin to undertake the necessary
repairs that preface their recovery from the traumas of their journey.
Once the ship of life is made intact again, and the person has regained
their sea legs, the ship may set sail again, aiming to chart the return to
the life course. |
Like most
other life experiences, mental distress is always represented
in metaphor. Regrettably, psychiatry and psychology often deconstructs the
person's metaphors, transforming the richness of the person's story into
the base language of professional jargon.
We have
often felt that we were 'at the end of our tether'. How long, exactly,
that 'tether' might be, we could not say. However, it expresses - almost
perfectly - our sense of being at the end of some reassuring link to
something strong and stable - like a rock or some firm ground. What that
'tether' might be made of, we could not begin to say, but the metaphor
'holds'. It 'connects' us (metaphorically) to something of 'substance'
in our lives.
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