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.
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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