Welcome to my blog! As a lifelong learner and passionate clinician, I am always learning and grappling with new concepts and ideas in my field, and also constantly growing as a therapist and healer. Here, I’ll provide updates, thoughts, and insights from my clinical work (with no identifying client information of course) and other sources. I hope this blog is a way for you to get to know me better and also find new ideas and ways of thinking about things.
In my therapeutic work, I often use metaphors and stories to illustrate the ideas my clients and I are working on. I find metaphors to be a great way to conceptualize and play with ideas, and my clients find them accessible and memorable. The human mind is a storytelling machine, always looking to fit narratives onto events and find meaning, so much so that we are capable of finding it where none exists, as in finding shapes in clouds.
Though the meanings can sometimes be arbitrary, often there is a deeper level of understanding that becomes available through the use of metaphor. They help us build empathy and take perspectives of other people in the story, and give us enough distance to see our problems clearly. I often come up with metaphors on the spot and develop them with the client to fit the whole situation, but I also use classic stories where applicable and also invite clients to come up with their own. In this blog I’ll share some of my favorite metaphors that have helped clients make sense of complex or thorny problems. I hope you find them helpful, interesting, and enjoyable.