Metaphoric Trust: How We All Can Understand Healing
This is a note I wrote on my phone several weeks ago in the middle of the night:
There is a part of me that screams and cries, usually at night when things are all quiet.
I truly feel like the world is closing in on me.
That all of my decisions throughout my entire life have led me to despair and true loneliness in this moment.
I weep and snarl on the inside, hoping and also knowing that this will not last until the morning.
It's never been helpful to refer to these experiences as literal - that feels dire, inaccessible, perhaps daunting.
The two panic attacks I’ve experienced in my life both occurred in the dead of night - a pattern presented as a call to listen.
The best way I've come to relate to these screams and cries are as a separate, yet connected part. A representative entity of my experience in that moment.
Communicating Our Deeper Essence
Whether we use IFS, Somatics, EMDR, or we enhance our consciousness with psychedelic medicine, we are exploring an ever changing world of parts, dimensions, aspects of an ever changing self that is forming together in real time second to second.
A ballad of context, genetic, hormonal, and perhaps spiritual factors acting on and within us - generating what on one level is our emotional state, mood, disposition, and cognition.
And on another level…
Is our spirit’s imprint, our cosmic iteration, our natural cyclic cadence, our ancestral passage.
Perhaps simply put: Our deeper essence
We all know what this can mean to us.
From the hardcore psychonauts to the straight laced conformist.
What it means to be human is to continue to scratch the surface of what Meaning is, what Happiness can be, and what the purpose of our conscious abilities are.
All of this cannot be acknowledged, explored, or leveraged as an asset - our greatest asset - without Metaphoric Trust.
What Is Metaphoric Trust
The idea of Metaphoric Trust is something I think can bridge the gap around the healing narrative and increase the adoption of trauma-informed concepts in society.
In working with trauma therapists, we tend to cover very sophisticated and sensitive areas of the mind and body, theorizing and grasping for certainty within a highly abstract healing process.
The default in art, culture, and human expression requires a flow, a translation from what is thought into what is felt.
What has been the calling of a lifetime in this work has been the opposite: Translating what is felt into what is thought.
The business version of this practice could be called marketing.
To try to ‘market’ healing is the easiest way to distill this direction.
A defining part of my personal and professional life has been how to connect different disciplines. Finding parallels between two seemingly different schools of thought, practices, and worlds. The only requirement being respectful communication and presence.
Healing culture, for many, can be inaccessible, slippery, unfalsifiable, unscientific, and even nefarious and predatory.
Communicating the nuances and difficulties that are required of real, tangible healing can be met with distrust. Simplifying, normalizing, yet respecting the intricate nature of the self-healer in all of us is where Metaphoric Trust attempts to operate.
In sum, Metaphor Trust can be likened to a theme that appears in many trauma-informed healing methods:
Healing occurs when the individual is able to trust in the non-literal representation of inner events.
Symbols, meaning, metaphors are what speak most meaningfully to us. Shifting perspective outside the one-person player, examining our world as a sum of meaningful actors and events, exhibiting self-empathy in this process, and, above all, trusting that these metaphors are both you and not you.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) relies on the trust of construction of inner parts, highlighting and navigating their protective, loving, and innocent natures.
Somatics relies on the relationship to the body, assuming its role as vessel-like which we can show kindness and empathy in a separate manner from the ‘self’.
EMDR relies on the recall and symbolism of prior life events, often asking clients to envision their younger selves in the room, creating a moment of compassion created out of imaginative representation.
Psychedelic medicine induces heightened states where individuals can create and witness an infinite amount of metaphors, symbols, and meanings that reinforce self-healing - often through visuals, ancestral interactions, and other channels.
But perhaps the most applicable example of Metaphoric Trust does not require a trauma-informed modality or altered state of consciousness.
It is our relationship to Nature.
The Flowing River
Nature is our greatest teacher.
Notice closely its unforgiving, beautiful and cyclic nature and I'd imagine you'd feel resonance in your bones and in your story.
Are we a flowing river?
In what ways are we truly different?
A constant stream of change, carrying with it woodland debris, serving as a habitat and vessel of many other organisms, a source of life and interconnected beauty.
While we may not literally be the river.
We can, however, feel so deeply that river represents us.
I would ask you to close your eyes and imagine the last experience you had witnessing flowing water. Replicate the sounds, the crisp air, and envision the colors.
These sensations elicit more from us, we are not merely replaying a video cassette in our heads. I'd wager they elicit emotions in certain parts of the body, perhaps in the pit of your stomach or the top of your chest.
I'm sure if you really tried and concentrated, really honed in on all the beauty this river had to offer, you'd start to cry.
My question here is:
Why is that?
And what is that?
How could this scene of nature bring us to tears?
How can this touch us with such accuracy?
There is a connection we have to the river. We are placing imagined meaning and sentiment onto this scene of beauty - allowing parts that resemble this natural instance to rise to the surface in us.
The connection, the trust we are allowing this river to have to represent us for a brief moment, to see ourselves and feel validated by an external source or entity is extremely moving and can be our superpower.