2015
Unbinding through
metaphor by Dr Elizabeth
McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
In 1997 I was in Nanjing in China to give a paper at a
conference on aging in the 21st century, and to do a special
acupuncture course. We had a holiday as well, travelling
outside Nanjing to Wuxi and Shanghai, which was wonderful. It was autumn and
the trees were changing colour. Mists rose across the valleys and over the
great Yangtze River and settled in the little hollows between houses. I noticed
that some of the little trees in the parks and along the streets were bound in
rope, apparently to shape them so as to represent the perfection of Tao (which
is supposedly a philosophy of change). It struck me then, as it does every time
I think about it, that forcing nature to follow our conception of nature’s way
is nonsense. Nature does her thing, whether or not it fits with how we
philosophize her to be.
Binding young trees is akin to binding women’s feet and
though the latter is no longer seen as legitimate practice, the former is
accepted blindly. This got me thinking, what else do we accept blindly and turn
into an artefact that goes against nature? Millions of things go against
nature, where the principle is antithetical to change. Our very capacity for
making our lives miserable is one of them. Addictions, bad habits, anxiety and
feelings of hopelessness are bound up states, needing to be unbound.
Metaphor, by its very nature, unbinds when given the chance
to. The etymology of metaphor is interesting. From the Greek, meta-forein means “to bring beyond”, to express something that is
“beyond” an immediate logical understanding on the emotional and imaginative
dimension. It is a figure of speech which makes an implicit, implied
or hidden comparison between two things or objects that are not apparently
similar at all, but which have some characteristics common between them.
Metaphor takes us beyond mere words to an understanding
beyond the beyond. It is like a door opening to a different level of being,
health and hope. This is a literal truth.
Metaphors change the way our brains
work. Neurological studies in recent years have shown that when an imaginative
image is evoked the part of the brain getting a sense of the image is sparked.
For example, take the metaphor, “the woman had a velvety voice” and the brain’s
sensory cortex is roused, but to the words, “the woman had a nice voice,” there
is no special activity there. To the words, “wine dark sea” the part of the
brain concerned with taste and smell are activated, but “the sea was deep”
doesn’t. The metaphorical phrase, “hacking like an old steam train” (as long
time smokers tend to do) kicks off the auditory centres of the brain. “Hanging
by the skin of its teeth,” evokes the proprioceptive receptors in the brain
(responsible for allowing us to know the sense of our body in space), whereas
“nearly falling off” doesn’t. And
so on. These are mere words on a page, mere black lines and dots and lots of
white space, but nevertheless evoke so much more. The capacity of humans to
experience way beyond the immediate is extraordinary, an extraordinariness that
can take us much further than we sometimes think.
So metaphors not only beautifully
lubricate our engagement with thoughts, ideas and a capacity to share
experiences, they also embody that engagement for us in order to know the
meaning of something with our whole selves, and, further allow us to let go of
preconceived ideas about ourselves, and let change happen.
Knowing something beyond the mere
bone-bare description of them is why metaphors are an extremely effective tool
in psychotherapy and, more particularly, in clinical hypnotherapy. In the state
of hypnosis, which is a relaxed yet focussed one, the mind is open to
experience, or not (and the choice is always with the client), the shifting
perceptions that effectively undo the fixed ideas the person has about
themselves. A lot of psychological problems and pain syndromes are iterative,
in the sense that the person experiencing
them feels that the problems are just going over and over and over in
their heads. Using metaphor, that takes the mind and experiencing body beyond
the logical space that the problem occupies into a landscape of multiple
possibilities frees the person wonderfully. Thus the artfulness of metaphor has
a splendid healing capacity.
The Tao of the human landscape can be fluid, flexible,
adaptive and open to whatever life throws up: unbound and rather exciting.
