Letter 9: Metaphor

My hype song when I think about graduating or prepping for grad my party.

Hello to you all,

I hope everyone is being creative and taking care of your health. I graduate tomorrow !!! I’m currently with my friends at the Library playing Mudae, talking about The Beatles, graduating at a Alien Ant Farm concert since they are on tour right now and being ashamed of certain actions. Days at the library with my friends will be an engraved memory, I would have never thought that I would be friends with them nor have a discord server with da gang. Cracking jokes about anything, we were just talking about how they make my life better than we tried to do a group high five but we were too lazy to come up our seats so our high five look a minute but we finally did the group high five. #funnymoment #hangingoutwithdagang There is this saying that says, “You haven’t met all the people you will love” this is true, you are never alone, keep walking and you will meet new people that will lead you to your path or give you happiness through the friendships.

Letter 9: Metaphor is about Mary Pipher using metaphors during her sessions. She believes that using metaphors to discuss the importance of allowing oneself to experience their feelings. Pipher brings in the meaning of Spring. A season where hope, birth, and the return of joy can transcend into our lives. Not just poets but people are metaphor generating humans. She gives some examples from her family like her dad says about rich people is, “Prosperous as Baptist bootleg-ers” or her Aunt Margaret calls television, “Manure garnished with parsley” I kind of chuckled about the metaphor her Aunt uses to describe television. I asked my friend Joey what metaphor he uses and he says, “Our bias is like colored glasses. We use glasses (our bias) to make sense of the world since we’re all blind to what objective truth is. The problem with this is that the lenses are colored, so we’re not able to see the full picture. If we want to see the true color of things, we have to take off our glasses, but that makes it harder to see at the same time. It’s impossible to be unbiased in something, but we can try by choosing when we want to see the color of things or the shape of things.” Life can be compared to a book, a dance, a journey, a day, a pop quiz, a song, nature, an experience, etc. Pipher says that a good therapist keeps a toolbox filled with well-used metaphors for have their clients thinking and view their problems in a new perspective.

She believes that life is not best described with sports or wars, using too much comparison can distort our worldviews. They describe life as competitive, violent, and making everything about winning or losing. It is not the main focus on how this world is or should be.

Mrs. Pipher has used the metaphor of a cut finger to talk about the importance of letting yourself feel your emotions. She should talk to a middle-aged banker ashamed of his tears, “If you cut your finger it bleeds. You may not like blood, but it is the way healthy bodies deal with wounds.” Or when a high achieving but unhappy professor, she would probably say, “You can get all the A’s and still flunk life.” She had a client that was making half a million dollars a year but facing an angry family and sullen employees, so she used a line by Lily Tomlin’s, “You can win a the rat race and still a rat.”

Each client that she interacted with had their own metaphor relating to their personal life or the problem they were facing. She told a factory worker who lives with her brain damaged father, “You are a flower in the desert. You only need a little rain to blossom into all your beauty. You are strong and self-reliant, but rain would help.” She wants her to know that she needs support from others to get through the challenging days of seeing her father be helpless and always having to be a caregiver in her own home. She would tell a client that was about to make a mistake, “If you jump off that cliff I’ll stay in contact. We can have some great talks as you fall, but I can’t stop from you crashing and burning at the bottom of they valley.” — geeeee that hit harddddddd, when I read that I felt like I was being put in check. Only I can make the decisions, own up to my actions, and be grateful that I still have a friend that wants to be around the chaos i’ve created.

Though metaphors are a useful tool, sometimes they don’t always end up at the finish line. Mrs. Pipher had a concrete thinker, she compared life to a journey. He responded by saying, “I can’t afford a vacation this year.” People whom English isn’t their first language can get easily lost with metaphors. As simple as “life is a bed of roses” it can be misleading and can ask if Americans feel on flowers.

Some of Mrs. Pihper’s metaphors are hokey or trite, but she likes to say that the best metaphors are like pebbles whose rough spots smooth down over the years. They grow rounder and more simply true.

Laura had a client that had a dream of him canoeing, then he got pulled underwater by a shark that held the towline in his teeth. She was able to analyze the dream and what has been stressing him out. Mary says that it could potentially be an extended metaphor. The client is experiencing a rough patch and his little boat is about to be pulled under in spite of his efforts to paddle. Metaphorically, he is cornered by sharks. With this issue we can say to the client, “You are managing to out-swim the sharks” or “You see an island up ahead.”

Dream can often provide economical metaphors. Although Mary is not a expert in dream work, she still encourages her clients to talk about the characters in their dream and what real-life events come to mind when they are describing their feelings. Words spoken in dream are often deeply symbolic and she suggest clients to say them aloud and interpret them for her.

There was a English major in her late twenties that couldn’t find work or friends that were long lasting. She kept having the same dream about how she couldn’t walk. In some of her dreams there would be floors covered in oil or glue. Other times, her legs were made of rubber or they were paralyzed. Sometimes she wore iron boots or her feet were tied to a rock and. Often she would scream and shout, “I CAN’T WALK, I CAN’T WALK.” Natalie was able to find her path, her dreams reflected that progress. As Mary says, “they were yardsticks for the distance she was moving toward her goals.”

Arthur was a client that was chronically ineffective with an ever-growing pile of unpaid bills, parking tickets and unanswered letters. He would get fired, can not keep a romantic relationship and car keys. He passed through life by pondering decisions too long or not all all. Opportunities would pass him by like a leaf passing through the river. Arthur described himself as “a man with no hands.” Mrs. Pipher assigned some homework for arthur and told him to keep record of every time this week he used his hands.

Seven-year-old Martha was a victim to sexual abuse in her family, she called herself a broken teddy bear. She said, “My stuffing as fallen out. I’m dirty and no one wants me.”

I will know that metaphors are working when my client embellish them to describe their own experience. By the end of each therapy session, they can be metaphorical. Those Mary’s clients she can ask, “Did you work with your hands with week?” Her clients can say, “I had a dream of walking.” or “My teddy bear has new friends.”

Families often picks objects to represent them. The way these familiar items are treated is the same way families treat themselves. Mary had a neighbor that had a old cocker spaniel that was half-blind, lame and annoying. He was loved, coddled, and was spoken about very often because he is who all family members love in common. Foods such as chile rellenos and cookies and cream cheesecake are often metaphors for love. Mary saw a lady carrying a angel cake as she was boarding the plane with chocolate frosting. She held it on her lap the whole time which they flew across the country. She told her, “This cake was baked with love.”

One time, Mary saw a family who talked about all issues such as love, control, and distance—in terms of cars. They spent hours talking about who could drive which car where. She wanted to shout, “Could you talk about something besides who washed the car on Sunday? Can you debate anything else but your son’s speeding?” Then it hit her, they were talking about who drove what to work or who bought gas because it meant who had the power, responsibility and who was able to share. When she addressed this matter, she gave the family a new perspective to solve their family issues.

When a straightforward language starts arguments or when language cannot touch what’s most important, we can use metaphors to fill in those gaps. They possess a fill-in-the-blank motion that allows for more creative responses.

As with all power tools, metaphors must be used carefully. I have to make sure they have the effect of lightening my clients’ loads and making problems more manageable. I can’t make harsh remarks by an in-law to murder, as Mrs. Pipher says, “compare it to a pebble in a sock.” She tells Laura to keep metaphors fresh, dead words small bad. To watch out and don’t use them too many times, one time Mary used, “when you cut your fingers it bleeds.” too many times with a client and she flashed her look of impatience.

Mary never read about having metaphors when she was graduate school but as the years go by she has found them to be indispensable tools. Her advice to young therapist is to look for our clients’ metaphors and generate some of my own. My homework is to generate some of my own metaphors a day. We can use poets for some more exquisite metaphors and create a meaningful sentence for our clients to find a silver lining with whatever is causing them unhappiness.

Mary ends the letter with her looking at the melting snow from her study room window. Her crocuses shimmer purple, yellow and lavender against the snow. Her eyes crave the daffodils’ first salute. Flowers pushing through the snow which answers Einstein’s important question, “Is the universe a friendly place or not?”