How Does Symbolic Modeling Work?
Why Use Metaphors?
“It’s like I’m hitting my head against a brick wall!”
“I’m up to my eyeballs in work.”
“I want to get out from under all this clutter!”
“I’m happy as a clam.”
“I want to feel more connected to my partner.”
Like all of us, you are a natural metaphor maker. It’s how you make sense of the world—by comparing it to something else you know. It’s how you communicate to others. And it’s how your body and mind have stored your experiences and filed the survival codes you’ve developed over the years to manage in the world.
Sometimes these metaphors stay unchanged in your mind/body. Once they may have served you well, but maybe they no longer do. Yet there they remain—hidden and stuck—silently dictating your behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. Waiting to be unearthed and transformed.
Guided by Symbolic Modeling, you can change your metaphors so you can get unstuck, and true healing and growth can finally begin.
The Symbolic Modeling Process
As your Symbolic Modeling facilitator, I will guide you through a five step process to examine your metaphors with a systematic series of questions, using almost exclusively your exact words. This isn't a conversation, but an exploration of your internal world. You’ll discover you know a lot about your metaphors and what you want to have happen to them--what changes are necessary.
Studies of the brain suggest that experiences and emotions are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain in the form of images and symbols. These may not be readily accessible to the left hemisphere, center of our verbal and problem-solving capabilities. It appears that Symbolic Modeling brings what is stored in the right hemisphere, often subconsciously, into the left hemisphere, into words and consciousness. No longer inaccessible, you can now work with the symbols to address patterns of behavior, beliefs, emotions, etc.
Insight into the sources and meanings of these metaphors does not seem to be necessary for a healing impact. The mind appears to know how to help itself if we just connect the parts.
To facilitate this process, we use Symbolic Modeling, which has three basic components:
Metaphors: These metaphors aren’t created the way you might pick one when writing a poem; instead, you experience them as they already exist in your mind, and you are now discovering them. The images that make up your metaphors relate to one another, and it is in these relationships that the patterns of your behavior, feelings and thoughts are mirrored.
Clean Language: As your Symbolic Modeling facilitator, I use a unique sentence structure, based on your exact words, to ask questions about the images you describe. I focus your attention on their details and their relationships with one another. You’ll notice my speech does not sound like ordinary conversation; it is grammatically awkward and very sparse. This encourages you not to engage cognitively or conversationally with me. I am there to guide your exploration of your metaphors, not to interpret their meanings or add observations or determine what you should do with them. This is very much a client-centered process.
Modeling: Together, we are developing a full picture of your Metaphor Landscape. Through a series of questions, and possibly over a number of sessions, you will collect details about your metaphors that encode your experiences and your responses to those experiences.
Think of building a town for a model train set. It is full of objects that serve a variety of purposes. You might have a train, running on a track, which may split in places. The tracks may go by a bank, a school house, and homes. There may be switch controls that regulate the train’s going and coming. About each of these, there will be added details and purposes. Similarly, you and I are creating a model of your internal metaphors to explore.
In a surprisingly emotional and visceral way, you’ll discover there are things you want to change with these images, and I will help guide you through discovering how that can happen. As changes occur with your metaphors, profound shifts are also felt emotionally, as your mind seems to work through old blocks and create new pathways.
A Mind/Body Technique
A Symbolic Modeling session is truly a mind/body experience. It can be felt in the body ... in profound and surprising ways. This is one reason body workers like shiatsu and acupuncture therapists and energy workers of all sorts find combining Symbolic Modeling with their work so effective: while Symbolic Modeling uses mostly words, and sometimes drawings and moving in space, clients report all sort of things happening inside—and the body workers can feel the shifts too.
It’s not unusual for clients to burp or yawn or cry---all releases of some sort. They describe things moving from the outside in or the inside out: energy, light, perhaps a river or a current of electricity, air, even a Divine presence. Drains are cleared, dams are deconstructed, shields are kept in place but made porous to let in what is safe ... each person’s metaphors have unique characteristics, but often some natural flow is reestablished ... as the body workers confirm.
Different Than Guided Imagery
Other guided imagery approaches suggest metaphors to you, and you are guided as to what to do with them. (“Imagine yourself in a restful place with the sound of soothing water nearby. You walk towards the sound ... your guide gives you a gift to take back with you....”) Though the images and suggestions may be very appealing and appear to be helpful and soothing, your mind/body is not likely to be permanently affected because these are not the metaphors that store your information. If these metaphors remain unchanged, you are likely to relapse back into your old patterns of behaviors, thoughts and feelings.
The Symbolic Modeling process elicits from you your personal metaphors by which your mind and body encoded your experiences and beliefs about what helps you to be safe and thrive. Working to change these metaphors, in the ways you determine they can and should be changed (and you’ll be surprised to find you will know what will and won’t work!), can promote lasting transformation.
Background History
Back in the 1980’s and 90’s, David Grove, a psychotherapist from New Zealand with a background in NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) and Eriksonian Hypnosis, was working with trauma patients, and noticed a pattern. Dealing with memories and issues too painful, too shameful, too frightening, too potentially overwhelming, or simply trying to find words for the indescribable, patients frequently relied on metaphors. Grove began working with the metaphors themselves, without interpreting them and without discussing the “real facts.” He developed what he called Clean Language, a sparse, grammatically awkward, limited number of questions to be asked using the client’s exact words, with the intention of reducing as much as possible the influence of the facilitator’s assumptions and word choice— keeping the facilitator’s language ‘clean.’ With these questions, Grove guided the client in exploring--and changing--his metaphor world.
Penny Tompkins and James Lawley, psychotherapists in England and authors of Metaphors in Mind, took Grove’s work further. To quote David Grove himself, “Just like building blocks of a carbon atom that have been re-combined to form more complex compounds, Penny Tompkins and James Lawley have synthesized elements from a variety of sources such as Neurolinguistic Programming, Clean Language and systems thinking--and added both mass and structure.”(Foreword to Metaphors in Mind, 2000). They have developed a model of the process at work when a client engages with his personal metaphors, and generously share their ideas with others around the world.
Hear a Sample Session
Hear me facilitate a session with Jon Mejia, a radio interviewer, who wants to stick to an exercise program. (Click to listen; right-click or option-click to download)
>> SampleSession-15min.mp3
