From Psychology Today written by Justin Karter: “Clinical work often brings you to the edge of language. A person tries to render panic, the felt thickness of depression, or the altered texture of the world after loss or violence. Sometimes words pour out. Sometimes they fail. The experience remains, pressing at the edges of the conversation, not yet submitted to our terms. Much of human life is like this, ineffable and hard to quantify. When we run up against these limits of everyday language, we reach for metaphors; we become poets.
In psychotherapy, we understand that metaphorical language doesn’t just describe and convey inert information; it brings experience into a form that we can then try on for fit. Capacious metaphors offer us room to grow, but if we over-fit our metaphors, we can get stuck in them.
Consider a patient who describes intrusive thoughts through the language of having ‘a broken brain’ and, perhaps as a result, focuses on pushing them away or avoiding them. If we can move toward a metaphor like ‘a film reel that keeps sticking,’ it opens up some room to pause a frame or splice a scene.”
