metaphor therapy - as relevant as ever?

[caitlinwalker]

We're holding a good oldfashioned healing retreat in August: asking what would you like to have happen, eliciting metaphors, inner child work, self-modelling and mapping.

We're hoping to have David's Jesse video reformatted into DVD and available for sale, proceeds to the family Trust.

I'm interested in taking another look at the different areas of David's work and noticing what is valuable in its own right and what was improved as he went along.

What do you think are some of the benefits of the earlier metaphor work that aren't available in the later systems approach?

[phil]

Well, given the kinds of thing that I tend to post on here, you may not be surprised to read that what I missed in his recent work was his interest in the client's language itself.

To me, when he got into space and small-world networks, he moved away from the client's metaphors and language, appearing first of all more interested in how individuals structured their experience spatially and latterly more in his own broader model of how we 'all' may structure our experience. Not that that was a bad thing - something had to give and I think it was language that ended up on a back burner.

Phil

[Corrie van Wijk]

I don't think David sacrified language (he would still notice any peculiarities or have you consult a dictionary), I guess he just broadened the field by investigating other aspects as well.

I do think Metaphor has a value in it's own right: for any conscious process language and symbols are essential. By mapping out your experience, you can take a close look at it, make sense of it and come to terms with it.

The systems approach is in here also: it is an intrapsychic scape.

[webmaven]

I'm glad to hear that some people are still using good, old-fashioned metaphor therapy.

I think what I see missing in David's later work was the very careful cataloguing of an individual's experience (and the healing within the matrix) that happened with metaphor work--as Phil said, attending to an individual's language and working within that language.

Maybe it was a function of time (he was only one person, after all, and metaphor work is very time-consuming, exhausting, and labor-intensive for the faciliator as well as the client). Maybe it was because he realized you don't have to completely map out the content if you can really understand the structure of a client's experience; if you change the structure of the experience, you change the experience, as David said. The focus on structure (and avoiding getting into the content of the client's experience) is what his later work is all about, it seems.

But there may be more to it, especially the Clean Worlds stuff, that's worth considering and using in tandem with GMT. I don't know enough about it to say.

webmaven

[Steve Saunders]

Once I asked David if maybe metaphor modelling was no longer necessary. He then used the next client's session to show how metaphor combined with emergence.

I echo Corrie that David still paid attention to the linguistics - very much so, but he stopped manipulating them through changing them to metaphor - instead he was working with the system that held the metaphor landscapes in place. So he used the linguistics as gateways, heiroglyphics as a gateway. He scaled the words to sentences to paragraphs to pages to books to the child holding the book, or words to letters to letter to space to world within.

[webmaven]

"Once I asked David if maybe metaphor modelling was no longer necessary. He then used the next client's session to show how metaphor combined with emergence.

I echo Corrie that David still paid attention to the linguistics - very much so, but he stopped manipulating them through changing them to metaphor - instead he was working with the system that held the metaphor landscapes in place. So he used the linguistics as gateways, heiroglyphics as a gateway. He scaled the words to sentences to paragraphs to pages to books to the child holding the book, or words to letters to letter to space to world within."

Steven,

Thank you for your post! I have been looking for just this kind of concise, holistic description of how David's earlier work (GMT) fits with his newest stuff, and I am very pleased to see that it does fit in (for awhile I was afraid he had abandoned all of that careful, methodical work he did in the early days).

To be able to use the linguistics as a pathway/gateway to the overarching structure of a person's experience by scaling out and/or scaling in is pure genius. So that's the "Alice in Wonderland" metaphor you referred to in another post (into the rabbit hole, eh?). Very cool stuff!

Somehow the way you articulated it here makes sense to me. Thank you for that.

webmaven