The Metaphoric Structures of Difficulties & Desires
For The Model Magazine 2005, By Charles Faulkner
The Metaphoric Structures of Difficulties & Desires
The writer John Berger in an essay entitled "Lost off Cape Wrath," recounts a dream he had of a land in which a decree was passed that made every word, uttered or thought, into the actual object. This applied to all words - nouns, verbs, adverbs, and the rest. Because everything could be seen, there was great clarity of communication in the land, though after while it became rather overcrowded. So the people who lived there began to tentatively test what would happen if some of the words remained symbols. As a result of the decree having been enforced for so long, they made the unexpected discovery. The objects began to speak. Later, Berger admitted that he thought that the country of his dream was the world of literature. I think it is the world of everyone's imagination.
Each of us has an inner landscape of our imagination. Rather than the information of our minds being distributed across the surface of a hard drive, we experience our memories as having certain mental locations. The people, buildings, actions and even emotions occupy their particular and familiar places in our minds' eye, ear and body. "I'm in a certain state of mind." "Let's put that behind us and get to what's right under our noses." "That's beyond belief." These places and positions are individual and distinct to us, though through the use of familiar words, we come to believe our inner landscape is somehow similar to others. And in some real sense, it is, as we have taken our shared outer world and made it each of our individual inner ones.
A couple of decades back, the Canadian NLP Trainers Deanna Sager and Chris Dunkle, would set up a what appeared to be a door frame with a piece of plastic wrap stretched across the middle. They would proceed to elicit a trainee's goal and have him or her draw the goal or a symbol of it on a piece of paper. Then they would place the trainee on one side of plastic wrap obstructed door frame and the goal on the other. Allowing a moment for the trainee to absorb the situation, they would indicate that the trainee go for his or her goal. In this bare, minimalist form, the individual trainee's goal achievement strategy was often revealed. Each ordinary action / reaction to the situation revealed itself as a highly symbolic metaphor of the trainee's movement through life; whether these were hesitation, asking permission, avoidance, confrontation, or celebration. As I used this exercise with groups, I became increasing intrigued at the different ways in which people would respond to "the barrier." That they acted like they had to.
One way to make sense of this is that our inner landscape is created of our outer world. That it reflects the features most familiar to us in an iconic or at least simplified form. As Richard Bandler has noticed, most peoples inner worlds of experience are considerably less rich than their outer world. The plastic obstructed the door frame and goal picture create even a greater simplication: here, there, and a block on the pathway to there. In this symbolic, pattern revealing form, the paths of habit and the paths not taken become much easier to see. For instance, throughout my NLP Practitioner training, we were taught techniques for overcoming stuck states. As I was very interested in learning and applying these skills, I cooperatively came up with various difficulties for my fellow trainees to "unstuck". Though if the truth be known, I've never really thought of myself as getting stuck or being stuck. When Anthony Robbins started breaking boards, and walking over hot coals, all the while talking about "breakthroughs," I found this more familiar. What then "struck" me (so to speak) about these contrasting metaphors, and the others that were beginning to form in my mind, was the profoundly different worlds they implied. It appeared to me that the choice of words used to describe difficulties or desires; stuck, breakthrough and the rest, said a lot more about mental maps and inner landscapes of the seminar leader than it did about the individual clients'.
As John Berger notes in the same essay, "One does not look through writing on to reality ¬- as though a clean or dirty window-pane. Words are never transparent. They create their own space, the space of experience." If you think life is filled with barriers that need to be broken through, then you will use your creativity and tenacity and the rest to muster the resources to do that. If your inner world is constantly stuck, you will gather your resources to get moving in a direction, any direction, and the sooner and faster, the better.
The Metaphoric Structures of Difficulties and Desires
In the middle of a demonstration of some advanced work, I asked the participant center stage with me what she wanted. Her answer was, "I want to matter." At that moment, I was struck by the literalness of the metaphor she had offered me. She wanted to [be] matter - that is, to be seen and responded to as real as anything else with its own place in the universe. After that weekend, I began working with clients in terms of the metaphors contained in their first phrases to me.
Some Typical Metaphoric Formulations of Difficulties & Desires
The word "difficulties" is used instead of "problems", in as much as a "problem" is clearly a metaphor. Since elementary school, we have done math problems, word problems and have solved many large and small life problems. This metaphor clearly implies that for each problem there is a single and correct solution. This is something we all learned in our school days and most of us still follow today. After all, when you find a solution to a problem at work these days, do you go on and find at least two more, just in case one of them might be better? Unlikely. A problem has a solution.
The Problem/Solution pairing also points out the way a metaphor defines a situation. Whatever solution is finally implemented, it will necessarily be defined by the problem. Possibilities encompassing a larger scope than the problem are unlikely to be considered. This could be called "The Problem-Solution Problem," or the "Error-Correction Error". The only possible solutions will be those defined by the problem.
The other pairs of difficulties and desires can also be seen as having similar constraints around their metaphoric formulations. For example, someone behind will want to get ahead, someone who feels blocked with most likely seek to breakthrough, while someone who is in trouble will seek to get out. Even when they initially pay attention to the positive side, for example: being up, or staying focused or another desire side choice, these are still half of a pair within the specific metaphor.
These pairs of opposites can been seen as illustrating each side of the NLP Meta-Program Motivation Direction. An individual's attention may be more habituated to what to move Away From or what to move Toward, and it will still be within a metaphoric formulation.
Paths: The Metaphoric Structure of Goals
These metaphoric formulations can also be laid out as if they indicated points along a passage from a beginning to an end. The physical analogy is simply getting from here to there. In terms of life experience, this is the metaphor of the journey. It begins with a departure, proceeds through numerable intermediate locations and finally arrives at a destination. It is also the basis of story structure with its beginning, middle and end. As an inner landscape, the metaphor may, and probably should, be taken as a complete description. Among the variables to be carefully considered are the actual locations of the here and there. The distance between them is certainly of important, as is the direction of the journey and the speed with which one travels. Making the analogy complete, one could survey what environmental impediments might affect the progress of an actual physical journey and then seek the metaphoric equivalence. These impediments would include: the already acknowledged blocks, the kinds of the terrain, any burdens the travelers might be carrying with them, any counterforces resisting the journey or journeyers headed in the opposite direction, and fially, how much energy the travelers have for their journey. A number of these could be display in the following way:
Physically Relating the Difficulties and Desires Along a Path
There appear to be as many as twenty of these metaphors for difficulties and desires, and yet most people use less than a handful of them. Further more, among the ones they do use, there appears to be at least one that they often refer to that doesn't serve them. Take the example of someone who often feels blocked. On the positive side, he seeks to breakthrough. Only, he never does, at least not in any permanent sense. What happens is he finds himself getting blocked again and again with an occasional heroic breakthrough. It is in this sense that I mean the metaphor doesn't serve him. It doesn't provide him with a model of experience that encourages action, responsibility, and well-being. Most interesting, if we were to approach him with the idea that this formulation is not useful, he likely insist that this is the way things are. He would probably not respond positively to the idea that he needed to get back on track or unstuck. If we pressed, he would likely insist he was on track and not stuck, but rather blocked, and herein is revealed the importance of the metaphoric formulation.
To make sense of anything in the world, we need to make sense of it in terms of our lived experience. Life is filled with great (and small) difficulties as well as small and great desires. How we think of them is much more of an inner experience than an outer one. To return to the example of being blocked, staying face-to-face with the block and insisting on confronting it could, after awhile, look like a very stuck position. Let more time pass, and the person will undoubtedly be behind relative to his original schedule, but ask him about it and he will tell you, he is blocked. Any of the difficulty metaphors are possible, but the one foregrounded by him is blocked. This is most familiar to him and therefore most real, to him. He will seek to use NLP or another transformational technique of to seek to overcome his block. If he does, then he is that much more likely to use the same metaphoric formulation (and transformational technique) on even bigger difficulties. The more he succeeds with a particular metaphoric formulation, whether it's a breakthrough technology, a propulsion system, a problem-solving approach, or a paradigm shift, the more he will use it. As the hammer appears to work for more and more things, the world becomes more and more a nail. And if he doesn't succeed, he is that much more likely to seek a more powerful transformational technique to effect a change within his current metaphor, rather than a new or different metaphor for his difficulty.
You can verify these observations in your own experience by bringing to mind an everyday difficulty that is current and real for you. Take a moment to write it down. Describe in your own words how it's a difficulty. Or, if it's your preference, describe a desire, something you want. in your everyday experience. Again, notice the metaphoric language you use. Now, consider whether this a familiar or recurring way you have of thinking of your difficulties or desires? Does the metaphoric language fit for other difficulties or desires in your life? When you have answered these questions, you might ask yourself; How effective has this metaphoric formulation been? Another way to ask the question is to notice whether or not you are always seeking the ultimate technique; the breakthrough that will put you over the top, get you out of that state permanently and free you to focus fully on your future. A digital yes/no, on/off orientation can alert you that you may have a limited model for change. For example, if you were behind, it's reasonable to think you would want to catch up. A heroic effort might catch you up, but it everyday efforts that will keep you there. Maintenance is not a paradigm-shattering breakthrough. It's just something you do. Getting ahead is even more effort as it requires doing all the maintenance and then still having time left over to think of what might come next. An unlikely state of affairs for someone initially behind.
On the other hand, there are certain metaphoric formulations that are easy for you. Perhaps you never get stuck, or always stay on track. You may not even think of them as important metaphoric formulations since they don't require effort and lack attendant drama. Remember a time one of these was prominent in your experience. As it comes to mind, hold it there in whatever way this request makes sense, and with it in mind, relive your original difficulty situation. When you have completed this, notice how the addition of this experience has affected your choices and number of possibilities you experience in that situation now. It's very likely you now have more freedom of metaphoric formulation and therefore more freedom of movement in that situation.
This multiple metaphor approach is the complete opposite of an ultimate technique orientation. Instead of seeking the single, most powerful approach, I'm suggesting we will be better off when we are able to access numerous different ways of metaphorically formulating what it is we want to accomplish, and by having more choices of how to think about it, we will have more ease in accomplishing it. This simply restates an original premise of Neuro-Linguistic Programming: If what you are doing isn't working, do something else. Do anything else.
This may be a disappointment to some who want a powerful mythic change from a master magician that transforms their very existence and I understand this. As a student of psychotherapies during the 60s period in American history and politics, I read with some disappoint that Sigmund Freud had set for himself the goal in therapy to turn neurosis into ordinary unhappiness. I thought, based on my wide experience of life at the age of twenty, this was an insufficiently grand goal for such a man regarded as so great. It is only years later that it has struck me that ordinary unhappiness is easy to change. Any number of simple interventions and easily available life experiences will do. It is completely human to deal with it.
Charles Faulkner is an internationally recognized NLP trainer and modeler. He is the author or co-author of 10 titles including the ground-breaking Metaphors of Identity (1991), the popular book and audio program NLP: The New Technology of Achievement (1994), and the NLP training and coaching game Trimurti (2001). His modelling of futures traders is featured in numerous books - famously, The New Market Wizards. Recently married to a UK citizen, he divides his time between the US and the UK, between research and training, and between family and friends. This article is an excerpt from his forthcoming The Cognitive Unconscious - How Metaphors Shape Our Meaning.
For more on Charles work go to www.influentialcommunications.com.
