The Importance of
Metaphor (Cont'd)
The Metaphor of Change
The Tidal Model acknowledges that the
experience of health and illness is fluid, rather
than stable. In mental health, the factors
associated with a psychiatric crisis, or its more
enduring consequences, can be diverse as well as
cumulative. The Tidal Model assumes that the
only constant is the personal experience of change.
This is hardly a new perspective on human affairs.
As Euripides observed:
"All is change; all yields its place and goes".
It comes as no surprise that Euripides was also
interested in how so-called irrational or abnormal
states of mind were portrayed in Ancient Greece. Not
a lot has changed since his day. His contemporary,
Heraclitus also was aware of the impermanence
of the world, as well as our place within it.
"Nothing is permanent but change."
The genuine reality of everyday human experience is
change, change, and yet more change. The idea that
people could be 'stuck' in states of so-called
madness, or 'mental illness', is a crazy notion.
People change, often like nature or the the seasons,
which grows itself from the leftovers of past.
People often seem to do likewise, using the relics
of their past, to generate new futures. In this
simple appreciation lies the hope of regeneration
and recovery.
However, people can, and very often do, resist
change, which often appears to bring many threats in
its wake. As Andre Gide remarked,:
"Loyalty to the past stops us seeing that tomorrow's joy will come
only if today makes way for it".
Although the Tidal Model is focused on
change, it recognises that change is a
metaphor, and also is impermanent. This leads us
to ask people how they experience change. To
help people grow their awareness of the change
process, which is going on within them, we need to
be curious about the nature of change itself. How do
people change? What is happening within them, around
them, and especially in their relationships with the
world of others?
The Tidal Model acknowledges the critical
importance of metaphor, both as the means of framing
experience, but also for establishing what might
ultimately be called regeneration or
recovery. One of the key metaphors in the Tidal
Model is the idea of 'psychiatric rescue'. When
people experience their greatest human crises they
need a special kind of 'lifesaver' - someone who
will help pull them from the myriad threats inherent
in their present situation. However, this is only
one, important stage, in the Tidal process. After
the 'rescue' comes the detailed examination of how
the person came to find themselves in such
threatening conditions and, more importantly, what
needs to happen NOW ?
Losing Our Minds
The layperson assumes that mental illness involves
some loss of reason — most outrageously when people
appear to lose touch with 'reality'. This notion is
wholly false. However, many professionals subscribe
to a similar concept of true madness and the retreat
from ‘reality’. It seems more appropriate to observe
that some people are more aware than others of
reality. Reality just is for all of us. We
can no more lose touch with reality than we can lose
touch with the air that supports us. We can,
however, lose our awareness of breathing and of air;
hence our panic when we think that we cannot breathe
and have ‘lost’ contact with the air. As people
begin to find the form of words to express something
of their experience, they begin to develop awareness
of where they are situated in the great Reality. As
a result, that awareness releases Reality to begin
to work the change process on and through the
person. All they need to do is to ‘unfold
awareness’. In so doing, they discover that the rest
would come. No mean feat, but an essential one.
By finding an echo of their own voice in that of the
helper, the person begins to make more sense of
their story. It is essentially a case of more sense,
since I believe that the story always made sense.
Perhaps it was just not the kind of sense that would
satisfy most people. For the story of mental
distress often embodies experiences that are
untranslatable, because as soon as the patient
begins to talk about it she starts cutting up —
dismembering
— her reality, or feels
obliged to add or subtract something to make herself
understood. Little wonder that the business of
making themselves understood became such a trial for
so many people. Ideas dismantle the whole of the
person’s experience. As soon as we try to transpose
our vision, sense, intuition of ‘total experience’
of Reality into a story with common concepts, the
whole thing starts to fragment. Words can give us so
much, but can rarely
give us a whole sense of the Reality of our
experience. They only point, crudely. They act as
signposts to that place in our hearts called
Reality. The finger pointing at the moon should not
be confused with the moon itself. Words do have a
great power, but much of that power is illusory.
As Mark Twain observed, ‘It was so cold that if the
thermometer had been an inch longer, we would all
have frozen to death’. This betrays the magic of
words — their inherent ‘as-if-ness’. Anthony de
Mello retold the story of a Finnish farmer who lived
on the border with Russia. When the border was being
redrawn, he was asked by a Russian official whether
he wanted to be in Russia or Finland. Anxious not to
upset them, he said ‘ it has always been my desire
to live in mother Russia, but at my age I wouldn’t
survive another Russian winter’.
Learning From Reality
Many of us live our lives as if our words had such
strange power to change things. In truth, reality
just is, and all our attempts to represent it
are glorious failures. But still we persevere,
trying to make ourselves heard and hoping that in so
doing we shall be understood. Ultimately we come to
the realization that we can no more change ourselves
by changing the words we use than we can change our
handwriting by changing pens. The story of our lives
is really within us, and any change will come from
within; it will be an educational experience, as we
educe the reality of our circumstances.
As our awareness of that core truth grows, we
develop what is often called ‘insight’. Regrettably,
psychiatric professionals talk too much about
insight — We often pretend to know whether or not
people (patients) have become more insightful about
themselves and their lives. I would have to ask the
person to answer that question, since I can never
know another’s insight. Such an abstract ‘thing’ can
only be educed by the person herself. When
people draw out from within themselves (educe) that
realization called ‘unfolded awareness’, they become
their own expert. As people watch themselves, they
grow in awareness, picking up feelings and
sensations, giving them names, cataloguing them for
future reference. Ultimately, they reach a point
where they may believe that they have found a way to
explain it all. Then, and perhaps only then, do they
have to deal with the real villain of the piece —
self-dissatisfaction and self-condemnation; all
those challenges that dislocated them from awareness
of Reality in the first place. They risk believing,
as Sullivan noted, that ‘the self is largely a
verbal edifice
Maybe people learn that language is alive and
growing, and is not permanent. Through that lesson
they unpick the riddle of the change process: that,
as Confucius observed, ‘the one who would be
constant in happiness must constantly change’. They
discover that it is not simply the case that nothing
lasts — that all truths are provisional — but also
that the story is itself in flow. Like the words
used to express it, the story is not a static thing
that can be ‘caught’ in words or phrases, far less
by the terminology of psychiatry and psychobabble.
It is living in every phrase that trips from their
tongue or that is scrawled by their pen.
There is no goal to reach. Reaching, in life, is its
own goal.
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