Using Metaphors in Hypnotherapy

What is a Metaphor?

We all use metaphors, either knowingly or otherwise; in everyday speech, for example, someone may be described as ‘light as a feather’ or ‘a hard nut to crack’ or we might describe ourselves as ‘going round in circles’ when we can’t reach an immediate solution to a problem or if people are in trouble we might say that ‘someone will come down on them like a ton of bricks’.

Nor are metaphors unique to the English language: a German native might say ‘Du gehst mir auf den Keks’, meaning ‘You're getting on my biscuit’ or in France, one might say, ‘J'ai perdu le fil de ma pensée’ which translates to ‘I lost the thread of my thought.’

A metaphor is a linguistic aid in which you transfer the property of one concept to another concept. So, there are two things occurring here:

The subject: you don’t talk about this, but it is (actually) about this.

The metaphor: you do talk about this, but it is not about this.

A few chosen words can paint colourful, meaningful pictures that symbolize concerns from your client’s life without even mentioning their problem.

Using Metaphors With Clients

Metaphors are designed to draw a parallel with your client’s experiences and a desired outcome without obviously relating to what their issue is.  In this way the listener will unconsciously apply the solution to their own life, and it then becomes their own solution.

Relating a metaphoric story to your client reduces the possibility of resistance because there is literally nothing to resist.  Your subject won’t know that the story is really about them and it will bypass the conscious thinking mind and become your client’s ‘story’.  

After a while they will even forget where they first heard it.

Therapeutic metaphors are especially useful to use with children as they already have a wonderful imagination and can readily visualize the scenes you describe, extracting meanings behind your story at an unconscious level and applying these to their presenting problem.

Metaphors also appeal to the adult’s inner child, although extra attention will usually need to be taken in the way the metaphor is presented.

For example, with a child you might just ask them to sit back and close their eyes as you tell them a story, interspersing with suggestions of comfort and relaxation whereas with an adult, a story within a story or relating a story you’ve heard from another source or using quotes can often work better.

The metaphor should include rich, sensory description which is specially designed to bring together the representational systems that are outside of your client’s conscious awareness and integrate these with the systems they regularly use.

For example, use descriptions of touch, taste, smell, sight and sound wherever possible.

The representational systems are as follows, together with a brief example of the systems that might be used to describe a day at the coast.

A good starting point is to learn what your client is interested in and use this as a theme for your metaphor or if the child has a favourite game or toy, it can become the central character.

For example, a child with a bedwetting problem might be told a story about a circus character that kept spilling the bucket of water it was assigned to carry but eventually learned how to empty it safely.

Hypnotherapists, (along with many other talking therapists), are likely to hear their clients talking in metaphors throughout our sessions with them. 

Perhaps they are procrastinating by “sitting on the fence”, or they want to learn to manage stress or become defensive when their boss is “looking daggers at them” or they may want to be able to “have their cake and eat it”. 

On the topic of food, interestingly, the metaphor “you are what you eat” is associated with Anthelme-Brillat-Savarin (‘tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are’) and can be traced back as early as 1826, conveying the idea that the food we eat influences our mental physical states.

You can work with metaphors as part of your client’s change process. For example, if they describe feeling as though they are being thrown about on a stormy sea or how they were tossing and turning all night, you could talk to them about a machine that malfunctioned because its owner hadn’t read the manual or a frightened tiger pacing up and down in its cage until eventually being soothed and transferred to a more suitable environment.

Alternatively, if someone describes struggling to stay afloat you could give them an imaginary log to sit on that gently takes them to the side of the river or talk about a boat being anchored in the harbour.

An example of a therapeutic metaphor (and one that hypnotherapists use quite a lot to explain anxiety) is the comparison of anxiety or one’s problems to being like an inflatable ball bobbing around on the water.

If you keep attempting to push the ball under the surface of the water to hide it, it takes a lot of energy to hold the ball there and when you stop pushing it down, the ball bounces back up immediately. 

It takes a lot less energy to simply let the ball float (instead of stopping the problematic thoughts) and let them be there without paying attention or reacting to them. 

This can be a more comforting metaphor than the use of a quicksand metaphor (the more you struggle, the more you sink and the deeper you go).

Another delightful metaphor that adults and children can often relate to is that of a train. 

The train journey can be used for exploring, travelling through life; notice time or events passing as your client goes from station to station.

There are many different applications for this. 

You might also use a forest, perhaps for perspective, such as if you are in the midst of a forest, you only see the trees and what is around you, yet if you step back away from the forest, you get to see the whole scene. 

Alternatively, you can describe the effort of climbing a mountain and being rewarded by the view or a feeling of achievement while noticing the effort and steps that were taken to reach the top.

On scaling the height of the mountain, a client may be directed to look back and see how far they have come and the steps that they took to arrive at their destination.

The metaphor of the rucksack can be great for offloading limiting beliefs, unhelpful thoughts, unwanted behaviours and many other applications. 

You might invite your client to unpack their rucksack to relieve themselves of the weight they were carrying around, or even, from a resource-building perspective, repack their rucksack with lighter, more useful tools. 

They might like to change part of their rucksack or even discard it completely and find a new rucksack, bag or other storage accessory.

Some metaphors for hypnotherapy can require a little more thought, for example, there is a story about a rambler who always threw rose petals down on the ground while walking around.

When asked by another person in his walking club “why do you throw petals on the path” he replied, “it is to keep monsters off the path”. 

When he is told “but there are no monsters on the path”, his reply was “precisely”.

A simpler metaphor is that of the ‘RESET’ control button/switch on a computer or in a control room.

Sometimes, we can become so immersed in one way of responding that it becomes a habit, even when it’s no longer effective. 

By resetting our behaviour, we can develop a healthier, more resourceful way of responding.

Different resources can be used to create effective metaphors.  They may relate to books, poems, quotes, meaningful objects or images, music and even smells and scents.

There are so many ways that you can incorporate metaphors into your therapeutic approaches, work to change unhelpful metaphors that the client already has and offer new, positive and beneficial metaphors. 

By being descriptive, metaphors for hypnotherapy can help engage the client’s imagination and help build rapport and, as these are figurative, there is little for your analytical or literal client to resist.

Overall, they have widespread appeal and application in therapy and are a wonderfully useful tool to consider in your hypnotherapy process.

The following metaphor was used with a client who had a passion for trains and was suffering from asthma; a description of a train journey was used in the visualisation process and the metaphor was reinforced with the following suggestions:

In future, if you should experience a shortness of breath, I’d like you to think of how a train travels along the train lines very smoothly and easily. 

The trains are like the breath, and the tracks like the breathing tubes inside your body. 

When the train travels openly along the track it does so freely without obstacles and when it travels through dark tunnels it breezes through them easily while blowing out its steam and tooting loudly and freely. 

Just like your breath, the train runs smoothly and easily and breezes down its tracks.

Just like your in-breath it glides easily into and out of tunnels, and just like your long out-breath it toots its horn clearly and freely’

Ideally (in the above example) there would be no need to even mention breathing as when a metaphor is delivered correctly the subconscious mind can make the comparison, for example the story of the little boy who cried wolf (Aesop’s Fables: 210) is familiar to most of us and as children, hopefully taught us not to give false alarms to avoid disastrous consequences.