Clients often come to therapy because of negative associations and patterns (negative metaphors). But in my own work, I find it helpful to go deeper… into a client’s innate positive (rather than negative) metaphoric associations. Fifty years of outstanding research by George Lakoff and others has demonstrated how metaphors form the basis of our cognition, [ Read more … ]
george lakoff
Opening doors
A new client whom I’ll call Alice came to me recently in a desperate financial situation. The work she’d been doing as a book editor had dried up over the past year, and she needed to find some other work quickly. She had decided to apply for a position as Project Manager at a non-profit. [ Read more … ]
Guidance and clarity usually arrive as a metaphor
Many years ago I starting giving intuitive readings to my friends and family. My readings were not prediction or fortune telling–they were deeper than that. I read the metaphors–the images–that I saw ‘under the surface’ of whatever situation they were dealing with. Although people loved my readings and were always asking me for them, I [ Read more … ]
Metaphor is the new critical thinking
Sometimes I get the coolest emails from people. One in particular, from someone named Eileen, has been sitting in my inbox for two months. It’s given me so much food for thought that I haven’t been able to file it away. The subject line of the email is: “as if…metaphor is the new critical thinking?” [ Read more … ]
Do you have a guiding image?
I had a disagreement with an old friend recently about whether the images and metaphors that show up in our subconscious are “real.” I believe, just like with dreams, that when images and metaphors show up in our lives, they have something to teach us and I don’t think my friend would argue with that. [ Read more … ]