The Importance of Metaphor
We should never underestimate the importance of metaphor in
ordinary, everyday communication. We use metaphors when we find it
difficult to describe a a 'thing' or an 'experience'. So, we borrow
a word or a phrase, which appears similar to the 'thing' or
'experience', we are trying to describe.
Everyday language is
peppered
with metaphors. We
try to land
contracts at work or read about the
police netting some criminals. Metaphor comes
easily. Indeed, our eyes light up,
when metaphors
ring true. When we are feeling
blue
or our plans are pretty hazy , the last thing we
want is someone taking a dim
view of our colourful
use of metaphor.
Medical language too is
bursting
with metaphors.
People are in tip top condition, then they
fall ill,
sink into a coma, or - in mental
health - experience breakdowns. Medicine opted,
long ago, to adopt mechanics as the overarching metaphor for the
human body. So, the heart is a pump, and the brain
is a computer
- and in Freud's day the mind was a
hydraulic system.
In the psychiatric or mental health field
some people are described as playing mind games and
others risk being brainwashed. Even neuroscience is
replete with metaphors. Neurons are said to be
firing
as information passes along various neuronal
pathways; electrical impulses cross over at various
synaptic junctions, as people experience a
brain wave or participate in a
brainstorming
exercise. All these metaphors depend on the
hardware of the brain; which help the
software
of the mind to do its work. Of course there are no actual pathways
or junctions; hardware or software. We simply could not discuss the
brain without comparing its activities to other things we can see
at work in the world outside.
The Tidal Metaphor
In the
Tidal Model we use metaphors only to
describe the theory of how we function as persons. In Tidal
practice we use only the metaphors that people themselves use
to describe their own experience.
It is not easy to describe,
in simple language, what it means to be a person. Usually, we have
to invoke metaphors - saying it is 'as if' we are like this
or like that. In the Tidal Model we compare life to
a voyage.
"Life is a voyage, undertaken on an ocean of
experience. All human development - including the experience of
health and illness - involves discoveries made on that oceanic
journey.
The body represents the ship of life and the person is
the captain.
At critical points on the voyage, people may experience
storms, where they may fear becoming all washed up. The ship of life
may begin to take in water, and the person may face the prospect of
drowning or becoming emotionally or psychically shipwrecked. All
these are potent metaphors for the experience of mental or physical
distress and difficulty.
At other times the person may be
boarded by pirates and robbed of aspects of self-hood - the potent
metaphors of the experience of rape, trauma or abuse.
People
who have experienced such human storms need to be guided to a safe
haven, to undertake the necessary repairs that preface their
recovery from the traumas of their voyage. Once the ship of life is
made intact again, and the person has regained their sea legs, the
ship may set sail again, aiming to chart the return to the life
course".
Of course, there is no actual 'voyage' but it is
'as if' we are on just such a voyage.
Psychiatry, madness and mental illness
Like most other life experiences, emotional distress is
always represented in metaphors, ranging from being
'heartbroken' to being 'out of our minds'.
Regrettably, psychiatry and psychology often takes apart the
person's metaphors, transforming the richness of this 'heartfelt'
story into professional jargon.
We have often felt that we
were 'at the end of our tether'. How long, exactly,
that 'tether' might be, we could not say. However,
it expresses, perfectly, our sense of of some reassuring link to
something strong and stable - like a rock or some firm ground. What
that 'tether' might be made of, we could not begin to say, but the
metaphor 'holds'. It 'connects' us (metaphorically)
to something of 'substance' in our lives
Writers
and poets with experience of emotional distress, have given us a
rich catalogue of metaphors to represent such common human problems.
Here we offer two important examples.
Sally Clay ( See
Sally Clay.net)
has written many
powerful essays and poems, all of which represent the 'unsayable'
nature of the 'problems in living' she has experienced. We were
honoured that Sally agreed to write a foreword to our book - "The
Tidal Model: A guide for mental health professionals". (See
Publications)
Sally has had experience of problems in living for over four
decades. She recognises that although some people do appear to
recover, for her recovery is a process, not a place. What she has
been 'doing' to heal the various human hurts that she has
experienced, and that were inflicted upon her, is possibly even more
complex and challenging than entertaining the notion of recovery.
One of Sally's powerful accounts of her struggle with madness
can be found in the book "From
the Ashes of experience: Reflections on madness, recovery and growth".
In her chapter, entitled, 'Madness and Reality', Sally
examined her experience of being put in hospital, repeatedly,
'psychosis', and described how she came to understand what had
happened to her and what it meant.
"Jacob named the
place of his struggle Peniel, which means 'face of God'. I too have
seen God face to face, and I want to remember my Peniel. I really do
not want to be called recovered. from the experience of madness I
received a wound that changed my life. It enabled me to help others
and to know myself. I am proud to have struggled with God and with
the mental health system. I have not recovered. I have overcome"
.
Janet Frame was one of
New Zealand's greatest writers whosew work was introduced to a wider
audience by Jane Campion's film -
An Angel at My Table
- which was based on Janet Frame's autobiography.
Janet
Frame's writing is informed by many distressing life experiences,
including her own descent into what, at the time, was seen as
madness. This resulted in almost a decade spent in various mental
hospitals. She experienced the death of a brother at birth, another
brother disabled by epilepsy, and two sisters who died of heart
failure while swimming, an uncle who cut his throat and a cousin who
shot his lover, his lover's parents and then himself.
Janet
Frame described feeling propelled into a territory that resembled "where
the dying spend their time before death". She added that those
who return alive from such a place bring back a point of view "equal
in its rapture and chilling exposure to the neighbourhood of the
gods and the goddesses". Her book,
Faces in the Water, is a fictionalised account of ten years
spent in a New Zealand psychiatric hospital. Clearly, the book drew
on Janet Frame's own experience:
"I was put in hospital because a great gap opened in the
ice floe between myself and the other people whom I watched, with
their world, drifting away through a violet-coloured sea where
hammer-head sharks in tropical ease swam side by side with the seals
and the polar bears. I was alone on the ice. A blizzard came and I
grew numb and wanted to lie down and sleep and I would have done so
had the strangers arrived with scissors and cloth bags filled with
lice and red-labelled bottles of poison, and other dangers...And the
strangers, without speaking, put up circular calico tents and camped
with me, surrounding me with their merchandise of peril".
The metaphors used by Janet Frame suggest the essence of the
Tidal Model: the journey in and out of 'madness' is
a fraught one, where things rarely are (exactly) what they seem. As
a result, the journey can be all the more perilous for that fact.
The professional helper - whether therapist, nurse, doctor or
social support - can learn much about the nature and meaning of
human distress and difficulty from the person who owns the story of
that distress. First, however, we must acknowledge the importance of
the metaphors. Without an appreciation of the metaphorical nature of
reality, there can be no story, and perhaps no real chance of
recovery.
The Metaphor of Change
The Tidal Model acknowledges that the experience of health and illness is fluid, rather than stable. Most people take their 'health' for granted. Only when they feel different do they realise that 'health' may not be present - and so they feel 'ill'. Indeed, all medical diagnoses of 'illness' or 'disorder' involve change.
The Tidal Model assumes that the only constant is the personal experience of change. This is hardly a new perspective on human affairs. Two and a half thousand years ago Euripides observed: "All is change; all yields its place and goes". In the Tidal Model we believe it is important to remember that 'nothing lasts'. Heraclitus also was aware of the impermanence of the world, as well as our place within it. He said that "nothing is permanent but change" and, as a result, "we cannot step in the same river twice"
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".
Because we recognise that change itself is never permanent we believe it is important to ask people about their experience of change. How do people change? What is happening within them, around them, and especially in their relationships with the world of others?
Since change is the only constant we must continually ask the person "what needs to be done now?" "What should we do next?"
