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Boosting healing with metaphor |
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by Judy Rees, first published in ICM Journal, December 2007
The use of metaphor has a long tradition in the healing arts. It’s a natural way to describe illness, health and healing: so natural, in fact, that we rarely notice it. Nobody is surprised to hear phrases like ‘fighting infection’, ‘pain killers’ or ‘heart attack’. It can take few minutes to realise that these phrases are metaphorical – that they refer to one thing (physical illness) in terms of another (a violent incident).
Many complementary approaches make extensive use of metaphor, acknowledging that the metaphors the client uses to think about themselves and their condition can have a powerful influence on the outcome. And metaphor is at the heart of the commonplace distinction between conventional and complementary approaches: ‘the body is a relatively simple machine’ versus ‘the body is a highly complex system which can be influenced in many ways’.
Recent research in cognitive linguistics has revealed that metaphor is absolutely central to the way human beings think: that metaphoric language is a side-effect of metaphoric thought. It’s as if we cannot think of abstract ‘things’ like illness or health directly, but have to think of them in terms of more tangible things, such as a fight.
And there’s another fascinating feature of metaphor: it seems to form a bridge between a person’s conscious, thinking mind and their unconscious system. Just as we rarely consciously choose the words we use in our native language, we rarely consciously choose the metaphors we use in our thinking. And, just as we’re largely unaware of the metaphors embedded in our speech (around four metaphors a minute), we’re largely unaware of the metaphors behind our thoughts.
Clean Language is a way of helping a client to use this bridge, to bring their unconscious metaphors into the light to aid physical and emotional healing. At one level it’s shockingly simple – a method of questioning and listening which uses the client’s own words and gestures as far as possible, reflected back to them unchanged. And it’s also highly sophisticated, requiring exquisite attention from the facilitator to achieve dramatic, long-lasting change quickly.
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