Ruby drops onto the couch, sighs as if she had been holding her breath for three days. Although only 43, fatigue traces the lines on her face, despair shades her complexion. Her vitality spent, she has barely made it to our session.
With two young children and a busy career, Ruby is constantly on the run. The bustle starts at 6am, an hour before her children wake up. She rises, showers, dresses, puts on make-up, prepares breakfast and lunch for her kids. Her husband helps with the morning routine, but they often find themselves short-handed. The kids dawdle at the table, refuse to don their coats for school. After some struggle, she manages to herd the kids to the car. She drops off them off at school and rushes off to work. The days are long, and hectic. In the afternoon, she picks up her kids, hurries home to make dinner. She and her husband take turns reading to their kids and helping them with homework. After the kids are in bed, Ruby drives over to her elderly parents’ home. Her dad recently started using an oxygen tank to help him breathe. She cleans up her parents’ kitchen and replaces an oxygen tank for her dad. Returning from her parents’ place, she stops by the market to pick up groceries for the next few day. She rushes through the door minutes before the store closes for the evening. The house is quiet and dark when she finally returns home at 10:15pm. The dishes are piled high. Her feet hurt, and her back is sore. She collapses on the couch, takes out her phone and scrolls through Instagram. An hour later, she falls asleep.
Ruby is a fictional character, but her story should be familiar to many. Stretched thin between family and career, many people struggle to meet the demands of life. Raising kids is onerous enough; taking care of elderly parents further taxes one’s time and energy. The affordability crisis adds financial stress to households already under strain. People often feel overwhelmed; their days are bled of colour and vitality. Life can seem unlivable, punishing in its rigidity, and utterly merciless.
In the throes of these arduous years, people come to counselling in search of relief. They want coping techniques that can soften the stringency of this life stage. The obvious recourse –though important and necessary– seems trite and inadequate: prioritize self-care; go to the gym, make time for relaxation. Clients already know that they need self-care, but their circumstances militate against it. The impossibility of me-time is the very source of oppression. They cannot forego care-giving duties, nor can they relinquish their careers due to financial obligations. They are pressed from all sides, and the walls do not budge. In the grip of scathing demands, they grope desperately for anything that might carry them through. Some turn to alcohol and recreational drugs. Others try retail therapy. Many retreat into the screen hoping to find relief. However, the slop and dross of social media further dissipate their minds and sap their energy.
What can counselling therapy offer to those facing grinding situations? When external conditions are immovable, the only remaining possibility lies in changing one’s internal composure. How I hold myself in the melee, how I relate to my stress, shapes my experience of turmoil. The terms of challenge are not negotiable, but how I meet those terms are entirely within my remit. Everyone suffers, but how we suffer is entirely up to us.
To comport ourselves differently amid life’s difficulties, I suggest that we examine the ways that we speak about our experience. How we speak is more than a matter of words. On the one hand, language conveys experience; on the other, language also constructs experience. What we say becomes what we see and feel. There are fundamental metaphors that determine our way of understanding the world. For example, to look forward and to look back is to peer into the future or review something from the past. The metaphor posits time as space, something set along a linear axis, with something that lies ahead and something that sits behind. We also use money as a metaphor for time. She spends her time at the gym, and don’t squander your days! both posit time as quantifiable units, something utilized or wasted in the same way that one uses money. If money is a metaphor for time, then we will experience time in the same way that we experience money. Time seems scarce and precious, something to be managed and distributed. The metaphors we use determine our experience of those things.
“I feel inundated by responsibility!” someone might say. “I’m barely keeping my head above water,” someone else protests. The metaphor of a flood conveys powerlessness and despair. If life is a flood, then we are entirely at the mercy of the torrent, our agency is feeble against the awesome waters. Further, a flood implies the threat of drowning. Every breath is frantic, bloodshot with fear. If life is a flood, then we are hapless victims, desperate and impotent in the raging waters.
Suppose that we opt for a different metaphor. Might we hunker down against a passing storm? The demands of circumstance may not change, but to reframe this adversity as a storm likely changes the attitudes and valences that underwrite our experience. Where there was desperation, now there is tenacity; where there was panic, now there is patience and hope. In a flood, we swim against the waves and fight for life – there is little room for anything else. In a storm, we find safe shelter and endure the squall, knowing that every storm passes, that blue skies awaits at dawn. If life’s difficulties are indeed a tempest, we are left with choices regarding how we will comport ourselves amid the bluster. Can we remain still and steady like a mountain immovable? Can we sway with the wind while remaining rooted and upright like a mighty tree? These images supply us with exemplars which can alter our experience of adversity.
In my view, there are metaphors that limit our imagination and constrain our ability to meet the demands of life. These metaphors circulate in our culture and have become invisible by their pervasiveness. They obscure our view, impair our agency, and render us feeble.
Take “trigger” as an example. “I was triggered by the discussion” or “The images are extremely triggering.” “Trigger” operates on the idea of a weapon that is set off by external sources. People who are triggered by their surroundings, are live weapon that can be provoked into firing. The metaphor renders us devoid of agency; external circumstances determine the damage we inflict. The metaphor relegates responsibility and agency to sources external to ourselves. People are prone to justify the harm they inflict by pointing to circumstances that “trigger” their reactions.
A better alternative might be “activated.” When I am activated, something in me is put into motion, a latent instinct has become operative. I might feel my temperature rising, my frustration begin to boil. However, I have not yet become a liability to those around me. Being activated is different from being triggered; the former implies an external influence that does not induced a full reaction, the latter implies an involuntary response that wreaks havoc as a consequence. We can be activated without losing our agency and composure. To be triggered is to be passive and inert.
A good metaphor is both restorative and empowering. Wholesome lives are built on wholesome metaphors. We return to them without fail, and in time they become fixtures in our language, our worldview, our very selves. To discover new horizons is to meet the edge of possibility. To set sail is to answer the call of adventure. The metaphor of life as a journey casts us in the role of hearty sojourners, wizened by the road, open to the offerings of the world. We don’t know what lies ahead, but we know it will be a seminal part of the experience. Shakespeare’s “All the world is a stage” is equally compelling. We are like actors and actresses who play out our drama under the limelight, but must at some point leave stage and vanish into the dark. Shortly before his death, the Buddha advised his followers to “be a lamp unto yourselves.” The metaphor of illumination from within instills trust in our own wisdom and discernment. A light in a sea of darkness helps to comfort us amid the uncertainties of life.
When the challenges of leaves us in bind, when we feel stuck between a rock and hard place, when we are at the end of the rope, try choosing a different metaphor to encapsulate the experience. New images can refresh the imagination. A novel analogy can supply fresh insights. When we reframe our language, we reframe our experience. When nothing in our lives will budge, the choice of a more adaptive metaphor provides an avenue for movement.