Metaphor is not just for poets. We all use metaphor all the time, and research in the social and cognitive sciences shows how metaphorical thinking influences us in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways.
People holding a hot cup of coffee are more likely to describe someone as ‘warm’ than people holding a cold cup of coffee. People sitting on a hard chair are more likely to be ‘tough’ negotiators than people sitting on a soft chair. People who seal their written recollections of a traumatic event in an envelope achieve greater emotional closure than those who do not seal their memories in an envelope. Metaphorical thinking transfers experience from one domain to another—and transforms as it transfers.
Which is why psychiatrist Milton H. Erickson encouraged his clients to carry out “ambiguous-function assignments” to transfer metaphors back into the ‘real’ world. I performed an ambiguous-function assignment after my mother died. My metaphor for my feelings was ‘wallpaper’—the wallpaper of our family home, which symbolized to me everything bland and flimsy about growing up in the American suburbs. But my mother was not like that. I discovered old photographs of her dressed as Mother Earth, wrapped in a bed sheet with a plastic Christmas wreath on her head, and at the front door during her surprise fiftieth birthday bash, gasping in delight as Aunt Peggy outfitted as a drum majorette led a parade of friends and relatives down the middle of our street.
I also discovered a new metaphor for my mother: a 1960s pillbox hat made of bright pink feathers, which now sits on our mantelpiece. If you change your metaphors, you change your mind.
James Geary will be hosting 'Mixing Metaphors and Juggling Aphorisms' at The School of Life on 4 March 2011. For more information and to book click here. To read more from James Geary visit www.jamesgeary.com. His new book 'I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World" is published by Harper.
Don't forget to weed out the sheets & such you don't need! I've found that two sets of sheets per bed and two sets of towels works for my family - one in use and one in storage.
Posted by: Tempur-pedic | December 13, 2012 at 12:22 PM