Use of life metaphors in counseling and psychotherapy

I work a lot with metaphors and many of my clients are gay and lesbian. The approach I use in counseling and psychotherapy is based on the principle that we interpret and make sense of life through the stories we tell ourselves and others. These stories about the events and experiences of our lives use metaphors.

The journey metaphor (life as journey) is very common in guidance work, as are pedagogical metaphors (life as learning). But rather than make up the metaphors myself, I’m interested in the metaphors that people bring to the counseling session. As a therapist, I don’t do interpretations, but I help people to make their own interpretations.

For example, suppose I meet with a client who talks about not being able to find any fulfillment in life. He has been looking for satisfaction for a long time. He knows he exists because he knows other gay men who seem to have found him, but as a child he was always told that satisfaction came from having a family and finding a loving partner. He has not been able to find satisfaction and many times he has thought about giving up (abandonment took the form of suicidal thoughts), but something leads him to keep chasing him.

This story could be seen as a kind of metaphor for the search: the search for satisfaction. In telling me the story of this quest, he uses words like ‘find’, ‘seek’, ‘existence’, ‘give up’ and ‘pursue’. So I can take this metaphor and start using it with him, using his own language and interpretation of his life events and experiences to find new clues, signs, etc. to explore the origins of this quest with him. Search metaphors are not uncommon, of course, and we see them regularly in movies like The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings, etc.

Someone else might come to me with a ‘not knowing how to make friends’ problem. So there is a metaphor here in the ‘making’. This person has “almost given up” because he requires “too much effort” and “has nothing to do with it.” When I ask him what he’s heard about making friends, he tells me that he understands that it takes ‘Time, Trust and Effort’. And from his experience, he’s already decided that it’s quite ‘difficult to build on one-night stands’ or ‘random hookups’ because it can all ‘fall apart’ too easily.

This sounds like a construction metaphor to me. I can follow this up with him by asking him about plans and dreams of what kind of friendships he wants to build. Are they large buildings or cozy hideouts? If random connections don’t seem to work, what kind of bases might work? What is the cement of friendship? What are the building blocks? Do you know of a ‘finished product’ or ‘work in progress’ that you can get ideas from?

I find the metaphors really stimulating. First of all, I don’t invent them, others do, but I can help develop the preferred story and plots. Metaphors also speak to people’s hopes, beliefs, commitments, and values. And hearing about it is just as important as hearing the story of the problem.