METAPHORICAL THINKING

You think metaphorically. You may or may not realize it, but you do. Actually you do much more metaphorical thinking than you do literal thinking. In fact, it is amazing how little literal thinking plays in our lives. What explains all of the metaphorical thinking that we do? Learning.

We mostly use metaphors for the purpose of learning and understanding. So when you do experience and/or understand one thing, it is tempting to think of other things in terms of something else that you understand. In understanding anything, we always begin by asking, “What is X?” The next most frequent question is, “What is X like?”

When I originally studied resilience, the word itself gave me a metaphor which I used to explain it. The word literally refers to “return to its original form.” When you have a set-back, then resilience is “bouncing back” (returning) from that set-back or knock down. The image that comes to mind is that of a person falling or down on the ground and then bouncing back as a ball might bounce back.

More recently I put together the book on resilience and I used another metaphor in the title, Resilience: Being the Phoenix. I used a picture of the ancient Egyptian bird, the Phoenix rising from the flames of a fire. What is resilience? It is a rising up again even from the destructive nature of fire, up from the ashes to live and thrive again.

What is it like? enables us to use things that we know to more fully understand something we do not know. Or perhaps we know it, but a new metaphor helps us to understand it in a new way. In this, the more metaphors that we have for something, the more perspectives we can bring to a subject and with multiple perspectives— more wisdom.

The challenge, however, is that no metaphor is perfect. No metaphor can completely give us an exhaustive understanding of a subject. In fact, every metaphor is far from perfect. Actually, with every metaphor there are all sorts of limitations— places where the metaphor breaks down and where the subject is not like the metaphor. What’s also fascinating about this is that we humans seem so quickly to forget this, yet when we do, we begin to engage in fallacious thinking that deceives us.

That’s especially true with any metaphor that has been used for a long time. The longer it has been used, the more often we refer to it, and ironically, the more it relates in multiple ways to the subject, the more we forget that it is a metaphor. We begin to think it is literal and actual. This happens regularly with models. Whether they are models of physics, psychology, human nature, social organizations, etc., familiarity and over-use can deceive us. We then forget, it is just a

way of talking and thinking about things, it is not real.

A metaphor in physics that was popular in the twentieth century was that atoms and electrons and other sub-atomic particles are like a miniature solar system. The nucleus is like the sun and the electrons are like planets that circle it. Today we know that that metaphorical picture is not accurate at all. In psychology, John Lock introduced the metaphor of a child being born as a blank slate. Today the cognitive sciences and neuroscience has led us to recognize the falsehood of that image.

When we ask, “What is it like?” the best answer will always be, “In some ways it is like A and in some ways it is like B, and yet neither of these comparisons are complete.”

NLP is like a computer program, with our linguistics we program our neurology. Learning NLP is like learning how to drive your own bus; it’s like stepping up into the driver’s seat and taking control. NLP is like finding the ingredients of the recipe for the subjective experience that you want to have. Now you’re the chef and the world is your smorgasbord.

You think metaphorically to a great extent because that’s how thinking and learning works. What you already know cannot but help influence what you are seeking to understand. Yet because this comparison process can and does occur unconsciously, you and I are both in danger of letting false comparisons in our reasoning apart from our awareness. That’s when it can become dangerous to your well-being. So one the skills with metaphors, in being a metaphorian, is making them conscious.