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What are your Life Metaphors?
Written by Leonard Holmes, Ph.D.
On the television show Ally McBeal the characters had theme songs. The songs were supposed to reflect how they lived their lives, or maybe how they would have liked to live their lives. Most of us don't have theme songs, but we often have metaphors for our lives that either help us or hinder us.
Some people see life as a battle. Every encounter is a struggle, and if they don't win, they feel like they have lost. Others view life as an adventure. A new day brings new opportunities to explore. If something goes badly today, there's always tomorrow.
How do these metaphors develop? As children we begin to understand and organize the world. If we think of the brain as a filing cabinet, then childhood is when we open the files and label them. We often spend the rest of our lives putting new material in these old files. If childhood was healthy, then we may have a pretty good filing system. If it was a struggle, then we often see struggles for the rest of our life.
What are your metaphors? This is not usually obvious. We have to stand back a long way to see patterns like this in our lives. A few examples:
A Battle - Everything is a competition or a struggle. We are always either winning or losing.
A Garden - Relationships are cultivated like flowers or vegetables. We see things as growing, flowering, producing.
Each day, we are bombarded with options — at the local coffee shop, at work, in stores or on the TV at home. Do you want a double-shot soy latte, a caramel macchiato or simply a tall house coffee for your morning pick-me-up? Having choices is typically thought of as a good thing. Maybe not, say researchers who found we are more fatigued and less productive when faced with a plethora of choices.
Researchers from several universities have determined that even though humans' ability to weigh choices is remarkably advantageous, it can also come with some serious liabilities. People faced with numerous choices, whether good or bad, find it difficult to stay focused enough to complete projects, handle daily tasks or even take their medicine.
These findings appear in the April issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association.
