Three Clients in Darkness: Finding Transformation Through Metaphor Recently, three separate clients came to me in dark and desperate places. One had just lost her job and described herself as being trapped in a “coffin.” Another, a single mother with a two-month-old baby, was living in a foreign country without a support system. Her life,…
In late December 2006, during a meeting with the president of a small university, I was asked what course I wanted to teach in their Ph.D. Psychology program. While I had curricula prepared, I surprised myself by blurting out, “Metaphor.” The response felt immediate, bypassing thought entirely, as if something spoke through me. I wasn’t…
The French writer Albert Camus wrote, “A man’s life is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover through the detours…those one or two images in whose presence his heart first opened.” Similarly, poet Stanley Kunitz believed that writers are often drawn to key images that captivated them as children, revisiting and reworking these images throughout…
When Logic Fails: How Metaphor Unlocks Creative Solutions Recently, a new client, Alice (not her real name), came to me in a state of financial desperation. The book editing work she had relied on for years had dried up, and she needed to pivot quickly. Her plan? Apply for a project manager position at a…
When I was eight, my third-grade class attended a musical at the local theater. I don’t remember the name of the production, but I vividly recall the scene: actors and actresses dressed in ordinary street clothes, singing their hearts out on a stage designed to look like an everyday town. Gathered around make-shift houses and…
End of content
End of content