Which comes first?

As we are all systems, I don’t believe you can effect change in a behavior without effecting cognitions and feelings, and visa versa. Who’s to say which comes first? The beauty of the Symbolic Modeling approach is you, as the therapist, don’t have to decide or to know which is the most effective way to help an individual change; you can honor the client’s system’s own knowing–believing the mind/body knows, on some subconscious level, perhaps– what is the best way to heal, in what order, at what pace. It is a process that is client-centered, deeply respectful, and very empowering.

I invite you to come train with a curious, open mind, and see what you discover. There is nothing that says you can’t combine this with other ways of working. There is much here to use, even if you choose to meld it with another technique. You will learn to listen precisely, use a client’s exact words, notice things about a client’s words that may well have passed unnoticed, and work with the problem/remedy/outcome model…for starters.  I am confident you will be excited about this. I have yet to train a mental health professional who was not eager to apply these new skills and ways of thinking.

The director calls the shots

To give you an example, I recently had a client who runs a business. He wants to have his employees work together as an effective team, but two employees aren’t communicating.  Using metaphors and Clean Language questions, I facilitate his exploration of the situation. The client first discovers “knots around his middle”. Such in-the-body metaphors can pop up unexpectedly; what does this have to do with the employees?  More on that later.

My client’s next metaphor is that, as a leader, he is like a coach of a sports team, sharing values and goals with the team members. But further exploration reveals a fundamental problem: a sports coach is an expert in the sport. But this business man is not an expert in marketing or sales or human resources, etc.  He realizes this is the crux of his dilemma: how can he make decisions when he doesn’t have the expertise?

So I ask, “What kind of coach is a coach with an effective team when he’s not an expert?” Client’s answer: a film director.  A director has the overall vision and determines the direction ‘team members’ will take, but he’s not an expert in acting, lighting, sound, set design, etc.  Still, he makes the decisions, and he is free to be creative.  It turns out that creativity is an important part of this client’s vision, and one he hadn’t considered before the session. And this is not unusual—discovering a new dimension that linear, logical analysis might never have uncovered.

And so, after one session, my client has an empowering metaphor for his role in building an effective team.  And the knots? The client sees them as limiting creativity and possibilities, tied up as he was by his belief that he had to let the experts decide what to do in their respective areas.  But insight alone as to what they might be about is not enough, in this case, to remove the knots. The client senses they serve a purpose, too. More to explore in another session…

Do you have a question? Whether you’re new to Symbolic Modeling and Clean Language, or use them in your work and are wondering what you might do with a client when….Ask  gina@miningyourmetaphors.com.

Lonni’s illness has basically destroyed her working memory. She remembers her mother, her sister, a few old friends, and little else. She can retain new information for no more than a matter of seconds.  While she can read words, she quickly loses the context, and trying to follow ideas from one sentence to the next is futile. Yet she can read music, and still remembers how to play the viola. Surprisingly, her language is intact. Her personality and her sense of humor are the same, though she remembers very little about her own history.  I watched a fascinating video of a conversation with her, when, given the slightest of prompts about 9/11, she was able to retrieve some details about the event: that it was about a big building in NYC, that it was sad, that there was an explosion, a declaration of war.

As tragic as brain damage is for a victim, for brain researchers, it offers a special opportunity to study how the brain works.  Her story raises fascinating questions about the nature of mind and memory.  About what is lost and what might only be consciously inaccessible. About what is knowledge and what is a skill. About just what one’s personality is; is it or isn’t it dependent on the memories that we imagine helped shape it? To what degree is the subconscious intact and functioning when the physical and conscious mind is damaged?  And what role might word-making and art-making have in neuroplasticity, in laying new neural pathways in the brain to areas we may not suspect capable of playing a role in a particular ability to compensate for ones lost?

The Walters exhibit shows the many stages of Lonni Sue’s drawings over the last three years, incorporating her obsession with word puzzles, theoretically an instinctive urge to heal using what skills she has retained and the power of images on paper to extend the time she can hold onto an idea that would otherwise slip away like water through her hands. Representational art-making is always metaphor-making (“It’s like this in my perception”), and to make art is to tap into the storehouse of metaphors in the brain. I was left pondering what further role her metaphors may play in Lonni Sue’s healing.

You can read more about Lonni Sue Johnson, an Artist’s Journey through Amnesia, on her website.

What it is about her story that peaks your curiosity?

Hanging in there through tough times

While metaphors aren’t likely to cause employers to start hiring again (actually, they could…but that’s a subject for another blog), you can help clients develop vivid metaphors  for an inner state or way of feeling to feel more resourceful and more hopeful now.   If  your client can summon more optimism, feel more in control, or find strength to face a storm, s/he will reduce the flow of stress hormones in his/her body, a benefit in multiple ways, and have more energy to devote to problem-solving… and joyful living.

You can take these four simple steps to discover and strengthen a supporting inner resource:

1. Ask your client to recall another time when s/he felted stressed about a challenge. What personal quality or characteristic(s)  did s/he use to cope? It might, for example, have been courage, an ability to stay calm, or stubbornness.
2. Get a metaphor for that quality with a simple question. If the client says, “Well, I guess I was brave,”  you ask, “If you were to draw a picture of that brave, what would it look like?” Invite your client to actually draw it or just describe it aloud.  Perhaps s/he would draw a surfer riding a huge wave or a lion tamer with a whip and chair, controlling a roaring lion.
3. Help your client get a vividly detailed picture of this resource by asking these simple questions about what s/he describes.  Use only the exact words/short phrases s/he uses!  The point is to get your client more familiar with and to strengthen his/her own resource, not to make suggestions about what you think would be helpful–and that includes adding or changing even small details!

• Is there anything else about that [client's word]?
• What kind of [client's word or phrase] is that?
• Where inside is that [resource word]?

Examples: Is there anything else about that “surfer”? What kind of “riding” is that “riding”? Where inside is that “brave”?

Keep on asking  ”what kind of…”  and “anything else about….” questions until your client has a well-developed metaphor, full of sensory details.

4.  Encourage your client to return to this image–located right in his/her body now–whenever s/he want to feel that resourceful way again.

This is a simple demonstration  of how it is to work with Clean Language and Symbolic Modeling! For more details, see my Mining Your Metaphors website. We’ve a training starting July 5, 2012!

And if you try this exercise with a client, let us know how it goes!

Perhaps it is because these “personal ecosystems” appear repeatedly with my clients that two words caught my attention as I was thumbing through a permaculture gardening book recently. The terms ecotone and edge effect are new to me.  An ecotone* is a transition area—a place between two plant communities, for example, the area between a meadow and a forest. Ecotones may be distinct lines, such as one created by a farmer on a mower, or they may be broader areas, such as many mountain slopes or wetlands.

Often these transitional areas have species of flora and fauna common to the ecosystems of either side, as well as additional ones that thrive in neither of the other two. It is this characteristic that is described as the edge effect*: the tendency of such an area to have a greater diversity of species than exist in either of its bordering communities.

Clients’ metaphor landscapes demonstrate an edge effect, too.  It is in those moments on a metaphoric bank, just before a client wades into a river, or goes through a gate or leaps onto a boat, when the client faces some significant, even transformative, change. Here on the threshold, the client may know things not only about the two worlds, the one behind and the one ahead, but also about things which are found in neither worlds, but which are crucial for staying a new course.

Symbolically, the space between worlds may be a single step, like through a doorway, or it may involve numerous smaller steps, like a bridge or a hallway. Sometimes the distance is measured in time as well, as in a journey on a boat between two ports. However wide or narrower the space, however long or short the time spent there, it is a space that holds information unique to this overlapping of world views.

To think of these terms ecotone and the edge effect as metaphors is a wonderful way to describe the significance and potential this “in-between” time or space holds.  They are good reminders for therapists or coaches not to rush clients heedlessly through such spaces, but to explore them for their potential riches.

These spaces in a metaphor landscape are not always comfortable places to be. How appropriate then, that the word ecotone comes from eco- and the Greek word tonos, meaning tension. To move from one way of being to another may require significant preparations for readiness and a rallying of resources.  The steps before the shift can seem hair-splittingly small. It’s easy to gloss over a client’s statement as a common turn of phrase when s/he says  “I want to be able to start to change,” but notice: there is a want, an ability to start, a starting, all before s/he gets to the changing!  Each step may involve consequences to explore, a decision to act, and courage to be mustered to step away from the known and into the unknown.  All the more reason to pause at such choice points to learn more about resources and resolve, about the process needed for change.

Often clients come for help when they are living in a broad “ecotone”, in a space between the two worlds or ways of being.  As we explore both where they may be stuck and where they want to go, these new metaphors will remind me to consider “the edge effect.”

-excerpt from Gina’s new  manual for her advanced training course: Readying Your Clients for Change with Clean Language and Symbolic Modeling

*Definitions taken from wikipedia.org entries for ecotone and edge effect

Michaela Mahady suggests in her book, Welcoming Home, that inviting houses are ones that speak to us with forms we can relate to, and what we are seeking are spaces that make us feel protected and safe.  “When we see a reflection of our human form, whether in a house, a care or a chair, we have a visceral understanding of it.”

You might also say the houses are offering an appealing metaphor.

Consider how often we identify parts of objects around us by the names of our various body parts. Needles have eyes, clocks have faces and hands, tables have heads, feet and legs, pitchers have necks, shoulders and feet.  Nor do we stop at man-made objects: mountain ranges have spines and beaches have heads, as does cabbage. Corn has ears and valleys have bosoms!  We turn to that which we know best—our own bodies—to capture some essence of an object and our experience of it.

“Certain houses that imitate our body form, they draw us in and make us feel more friendly,” Mahady says.   That’s certainly true for my house. A  U-shaped  rancher, its short ends, like a pair of arms, embrace part of the back yard. Along with a fence and landscaping, they create a sheltered and private feel.  Include the water element of a pool, and perhaps it’s not surprising that visitors often choose the same metaphor to describe it: it’s an oasis, they say.  An inviting place of nurturance, relief, even rescue.

As you drive around this spring noticing the For Sale signs, you might play at asking which houses seem homey and inviting to you…and ask yourself why they feel that way.  Is there a metaphor for sale? I’d love to hear what you discover.

And if you think of other examples of objects whose parts we identify with body parts—share them here!

We get so many of our metaphors for love from love songs—and often they focus on the pain of unrequited or lost love. Writing or listening to songs about such pain may be cathartic, a step in the healing process, but have you considered the collateral damage: our own optimism and expectations about love?

I came across a quote from High Fidelity by Nick Hornby recently that put a new spin for me on the power of our metaphors. “People worry about kids playing with guns and teenagers watching violent video games; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands—literally thousands—of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”

And it’s not just kids; we all listen to these songs. They flood the radio stations. The best singers croon them. They are poignant, often beautiful , and we can all relate. But is it the air we want to breathe? With music pumping through our radios and earphones daily, what’s meant to be a step in a healing process has become the environment we live in.

Why is it that we ‘fall’ in love? That sounds like it hurts! Why are we ‘love-sick’?  Even our metaphors about the ‘blind’ first stage of love sound dire! It only gets worse as hearts break, they get holes in them, and we’re told we can’t live with the pain and that ‘you’re nobody ‘til somebody loves you.’

So, if we don’t want to encourage a culture of equating lost love or having no romantic partner with utter devastation, what kind of attitudes might we foster instead?

There are, of course, many songs about how wonderful love is. And some empowering songs about not wallowing in lost love’s misery, the sort that promote a “I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair” or “I will survive” attitude; they offer messages about resilience.

We can be careful about what we tell our children and, especially our teenagers, as they begin to wade into the waters of romantic love. Yes, rejection hurts, but after some period of grieving, it’s good to take stock of what you’ve learned about yourself, about relationships, about what’s a good fit for you, and move on. And they need to hear that you’re not defined by your love status nor is your life in limbo when you’re not paired up.

Can we celebrate friendship as well as lovers?  Is there a saint for friends? A special friends day?? Perhaps this Valentine’s Day season, we just need to be more conscious of balancing the messages we take to heart, and be sure we’re ‘looking for love in all the right places’: all around us.

Figuring out the cultural parameters starts at an early age. Little girls and boys establish close same-sex friendships, and hug each other and hold hands. But that changes pretty quickly for the boys. My own experience teaching third graders in the 1990’s showed me that. These eight year old boys didn’t really know what being a homosexual meant, but they knew to call a boy ‘a girl’ or call him ‘gay’ was a clever jab. They wouldn’t have been caught dead holding hands, and a lack of interest in playing roughhouse sports was somewhat suspect. Interestingly, they didn’t tease when a classmate cried, if the cause seemed reasonable. But it was clear they were refining…and narrowing… their ideas of what manly behavior was. They were determining what feelings they would allow themselves to acknowledge (even to themselves), and how they could express them without begin ridiculed by the other boys.

Is it any wonder that women often complain men don’t have the relationship skills needed for true intimacy? Men squelch the opportunities to develop the skills even before the onset of puberty! Ultimately, we all pay a price for our culture’s homophobia, gay men, straight men and the women in their lives, when males of any age fear being perceived as homosexual and restrict themselves from truly connecting with other males.

But I think change is in the air, evident in the increasing popular use of the term bromance, which refers to a close, non-sexual relationship between two or more men. It’s the male version of what the four women characters in TV’s Sex and the City portrayed—very close, clearly heterosexual friendships. They were unashamedly as important to one another as their dating/marriage partners. For male examples, think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Ben Affleck and Matt Damon; Ross, Joey and Chandler of Friends; Jaime Dimon and Barack Obama (oh, but the mags say this last one is over!) The term bromance is mainstream now, increasingly the topic of TV series, movies and magazine speculations. It seems it’s becoming acceptable for men to describe their relationships as being more than between friends who hang out and ‘do stuff’ together. It’s not that these relationships haven’t always existed for some men; it’s that they’re being labeled, celebrated and, thus, encouraged.

It’s an interesting term, bromance, with deliberate manly connotations. Coined by editor Dave Carnie in the 1990s to describe the relationships between skateboarders who’d bonded over their boards, the term’s prefix bro- conjures images of the uber-male, the last one might suspect of being gay, the first one might suspect of being homophobic. Among friends, the term is used teasingly; it’s not meant to be demeaning or offensive. And hidden beneath the laughter is the acknowledgment that these men are best friends who truly love each other.

As homosexuality becomes increasingly accepted and there is less fear of being perceived as gay, men are more open to deepening their friendships with other men and publically acknowledging their feelings. As men are getting married later and the strained economy encourages sharing living quarters, men are nurturing these relationships later into their adults lives.

We all can benefit from bromances. The world is a better place when more of the people in it have all kinds of love in their lives and build the skills to nurture caring relationships. And the day may come again when we don’t have to describe such feelings using a slightly joking term, just in case someone mistakes our meaning.

Yes, bromance is in the air. Now if the U.S. Senate would just catch up with the TV networks and People magazine!

References:
For a super-short history of the rise of the fear of feminism in the 20th century and more, read Jonathan Zimmerman’s article, “Homophobia doesn’t just hurt gays” 

For a description and background on the term: bromance

Check out this comedic YouTube to get a feel for the combination of teasing and closeness the term bromance suggests to teenagers.

If you don’t believe the term bromance is prevalent, try Googling “bromance, politician” or “bromance, actor”!

I think most of us would readily admit there are subconscious factors at work influencing our choices. Our past experiences have given us a vast repository of information that informs our logic. And we have personal preferences we develop from those experiences, whether we consciously recall them or not.

But what I’m curious about today is the choices we make that are not informed by our logic or those idiosyncratic experiences singular to each of us. They are the choices that are influenced by things of which we may quite unaware, and that influence all of us in similar ways.

I’ve been reading Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The authors do a fascinating job looking at how we present or frame choices for people predictably affects their behavior. Diners in a cafeteria, for example, more often choose food that’s near the front line and at eye level. The book’s examples get increasingly complex, dealing with everything from pensions and health insurance to encouraging energy efficiency. How we’re presented with choices is every bit as important as what the choices are; we can be ‘nudged.’

Other things I’ve been reading lately show that subconscious influences on our choices don’t stop there. Researchers at the University of Toronto Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli* ran two experiments. They found that people who are socially isolated reported feeling cold (as determined by their assessment of the room’s temperature.) In the second experiment, they offered socially-isolated subjects a choice of warm or cold drinks and food, and found they preferred warm food (presumably, to warm up.)

There’s certainly plenty of evidence in our language that supports this sensory/social association. We commonly use metaphorical expressions like “being left out in the cold”, “getting the cold shoulder” or describing a person as “cold-hearted”—all examples of being rejected or identifying a person as unfriendly. Contrarily, we use phrases like “a warm and friendly person”, a person or idea getting a “warm reception”, and seeing something positive as “warming my heart.”

The same is true for connecting other sensory experiences and our more abstract experiences. We talk, for example, about the sweet smell of success, the betrayal that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. We might talk about the rough road ahead or declare it’s all smooth sailing from here. A heavy topic of conversation is one that is to be taken seriously, while keeping the conversation light means the conversation should be superficial and pleasant.

So we don’t just use our senses to navigate our way in the physical world. Since conception, they’ve been helping to create a personal dictionary that we refer to, consciously and subconsciously, when we seek words or images to describe a feeling or experience. We make sense of a new experience by comparing it to something we’ve already experienced, and we encode it, with all its sensory/physical nuances, with a metaphor found in that personal ‘dictionary.’ Then we use these stored metaphors as part of our processing of every living moment.

Interestingly, Zhong and Leonardelli found it didn’t matter if the social isolating of their subjects was occurring in the room or simply being recalled. It seems once the association has been catalogued by the mind/body, the physical associations are part of the response.

Sounds good, right? Kind of impressed with our cleverness, yes? So creative and efficient! But there are pitfalls. You’re probably familiar with something like this scenario: you happened to be eating cherries just before you came down with a stomach bug. Now you can’t stand even the smell of cherries, though logically you know there was no causal connection.

In regards to social experiences, the problem with our sensory/social associations is we’re too quick apply them in reverse. Researchers have found that if we go into a cold room, we are more likely to perceive a person we meet there as unfriendly. If we are holding a warm cup of coffee, we’re more apt to perceive the person we meet as friendly.** We infer that heavy objects are more important, and subjects were more rigid in negotiations when influenced by hard objects.*** So, we don’t always reach accurate conclusions when we let those associations color our assumptions. But, as we’re not aware of the influence, we don’t question our reactions, checking them against more logical input.

What an intriguing thought: how much of what we judge to be true about the world, about others, about our situations and experiences, is influenced by these erroneous, subconscious associations we’re making? It gives a whole new level of challenge to avoiding assumptions!

Curious for more details ? References:

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (Penguin, 2009)

*Cold and Lonely: Does Social Exclusion Literally Feel Cold?, Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Univ. of Toronto, Psychological Science, 15 September, 2008 . Click here for a  concise review of the experiments and results.

**Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth, Lawrence E. Williams and John A. Bragh, Science 24 October, 2008, vol.322

***Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions, Joshua M. Ackerman, Christopher C. Nocera, John A. Bargh, Science 25 June, 2010, vol.328

I’ve been reading Micheal Gladwell’s Outliers. In Chapter Nine, Gladwell briefly relays the history of the development of the public education system in America. Early on, basic literacy was considered essential, as informed citizens are necessary for a democracy to thrive. But what, exactly, should educating our children entail? Gladwell cites a number of sources that indicate nineteenth century educators were considering not just economic concerns, but that too much study could lead to an over-stimulated mind and mental disorders. Saturday classes were cut, and long school days and short vacations were adjusted to give students more rest.

Gladwell concludes that the metaphor being applied was that “effort must be balanced by rest”—just as fields rest in winter, and may need to lie fallow for a season to recoup. “We formulate new ideas by analogy, working from what we know toward what we don’t know, and what reformers knew were the rhythms of the agricultural seasons.” (p.254) Gladwell draws a contrast to the parts of Asia dominated by rice paddy agriculture and its rhythms. Planting two or three crops a year, rice farmers had no prolonged periods of rest. Nutrient-rich water used for irrigation enriches the soil, so the more it is cultivated, the better for the soil—unlike wheat or cotton crops. There developed, then, no guiding metaphor that suggests rest is good for the growing mind—and Japanese children, for example, go to school 243 days per year compared with 180 days for American children!

What Gladwell gives us is an example of the way metaphors can structure our thinking. A growing child is like a cultivated field, we think. Sic, what we know about cultivating crops can be applied to children. Utterly subconsciously, we can come to such conclusions, and they can limit our ideas about what might be possible or undermine our willingness to be open to new ways of doing things.

It’s precisely this sort of metaphorical sub-structure that can emerge with a Symbolic Modeling session. When I think about “effort must be balanced by rest”, I notice the implied metaphor in the word “balanced”. It’s a word that comes up frequently in client sessions, usually as something the client wants more of. My clients are far more likely to have an underlying belief that they are allowed to rest only when sick or completely exhausted than to think they rest too much. So, who is doing the allowing to rest, or not allowing, as the case may be? “Ah, interesting question,” the client usually replies. And then we are off, hunting for the guiding metaphor!