First published in the Magic Lamp.
The use of metaphor and symbol in the healing process stretches back thousands of years. More recently the Simonton’s, Bernie Siegel and others have made use of metaphor and imagery with patients with cancer and other illnesses.1 And Symbolic Modelling – comprehensively explained in our newly published book, Metaphors in Mind: Transformation through Symbolic Modelling – follows in this tradition.
Symbolic Modelling
There are three features that distinguish Symbolic Modelling from other metaphor/visualisation processes.
First is the reliance on the individual, and only the individual, to use their symptoms to identify a personal, autogenic (self-generated) metaphor for their illness.
Second is a means to question those metaphors. This questioning process was originated by David Grove and is called ‘Clean Language’.
And third, while metaphors are commonly expressed as images, Symbolic Modelling also makes use of other ways people represent their illness or process of healing: body expressions, feelings, sounds, drawings, physical objects, etc.
The use of autogenic metaphor can be particularly useful in:
“functional or stress-related illnesses, those in which no specific micro-organism has been identified as the source of physiological breakdown. This category of disfunction includes such major catastrophic health problems as cardiovascular disease, some forms of cancer, and the so-called auto-immune diseases, as well as those which are less catastrophic, such as gastric ulcer, many allergic conditions, myofacial pain syndromes, migraine, and PMS. It is estimated that 50 to 80 per cent of all physical illnesses requiring medical attention are stress-related or functional in nature”.2
Symptom Description
People often use metaphor spontaneously in conversation to describe their symptoms. Dr. Sheila Stacey says “my patients classically describe pain with metaphors like knotted, squeezing, stabbing or burning. I’ve found patients with cancer use particularly vivid metaphors: ‘it ‘s eating away at me’ or ‘I’m frightened it will spread like wildfire’.”
In addition to the spontaneous use of metaphors to describe their symptoms, client’s can benefit from metaphor elicitation and development techniques. In these cases it is important for the facilitator to use ‘clean’ language so they do not ‘contaminate’ the client’s experience with their own (often unconscious) preferences for certain types of metaphor.
While running a Healthy Language course for a group of nurses who specialised in Multiple Sclerosis, we were told that their patients often had difficulty describing the bizarre nature of their symptoms. We suggested they ask them, ‘And when it’s difficult to describe your symptoms, those symptoms are like what?’. This question invites a patient to use metaphor to describe the qualities and characteristics of their subjective experience of the illness.
When the nurses asked this question, they got responses such as “It’s like ants running all over my body” and “It’s like cheese wire wrapped round my legs.” Further clean questions, such as ‘And is there anything else about that (patient’s metaphor)?’ or ‘And what kind of (patient’s metaphor) is that?”, encouraged the patients to describe these strange sensations in greater detail.3 The nurses were surprised at just how relieved the patients felt when they could explain their symptoms in this way. Some patients said it was the first time they felt someone had really understood what it was like to experience their illness.
Evolving Metaphors
Through Symbolic Modelling the conflict, imbalance, or dis-ease inherent in the client’s metaphor finds its own resolution in unexpected and organic ways. When this happens, the individual usually experiences a corresponding change to their symptoms; sometimes immediately, sometimes in the following days or weeks. Here are two examples.
'Barren Snow Top Mountain'
One dermatologist who makes use of Symbolic Modelling, Dr. Justina Cladatus, reported:
“One of my patients had problems of alopecia areata (bald patches). His initial metaphor for his symptoms was a barren mountain with a white snow top. As the process unfolded he found himself tied to a wall by dark brown ropes in a dark, grey cement room with nothing but a little barred window. His metaphor evolved until he was standing beside a white well situated in a beautiful valley full of yellow flowers and green vegetation. The well was a source of refreshing water. In the meantime, the snow melted, and the mountain became a little hill with trees growing on it. And his hair has started to grow back!”.4
'Bunny Rabbits and Cancer Carrots'
Peter Hettel was diagnosed with cancer of the sinus. Following surgery his cancer returned and so he turned to number of alternative approaches, including NLP. In another example of the individual nature of metaphor, Peter discovered that his white immune cells were like:
“bunny rabbits feasting on fields of orange cancer-carrots, which increased their energy and sex-drive, which made them have sex and make more bunnies who were also hungry to eat more.” One morning he realised to his surprise that he couldn’t find enough carrots for all his rabbits! A few weeks later he literally spat out his tumour. His doctor said “It was like his body had rejected a foreign object, like a transplant rejection, just expelled from his body. I can’t account for it”.5
In Conclusion
It used to be thought that the mind could have no effect on the body. Now even the most traditional medical practitioner acknowledges that mind and body are linked and that changes in one affect the other. It is possible to go even further and to recognise that mind and body are simply different expressions of the same unity, and that all illness is mindbody illness, and that all healing is mindbody healing. Symbolic Modelling, Clean Language and autogenic metaphor form a congruent process for working with mindbody symptoms.6
Notes
1. Simonton OC, Mathews-Simonton S and Creighton JL. Getting Well Again. Bantam, London, 1986.
Siegel BS. Love, Medicine & Miracles. Harper & Row, New York, 1990.
2. Hejmadi AV and Lyall PJ. Autogenic Metaphor Resolution in Bretto C. et al. (eds.) Leaves Before the Wind. Grinder, DeLozier & Associates, Bonny Doon CA, 1991.
3. The remainder of the ‘9 basic clean questions’ are available at: Less is More: The art of Clean Language
4. Personal communication.
5. As reported in Hirshberg C and Barasch MI. Remarkable Recovery. Headline, London, pp 287-293, 1996.
6. When using Symbolic Modelling with the physical manifestation of symptoms, we always recommend clients continue to seek advice from their medical practitioner.
