WEEK 12

Wikipedia states that “a metaphor is a literary figure of speech that describes a subject by asserting that it is, on some point of comparison, the same as another otherwise unrelated object. Metaphor is a type of analogy and is closely related to other rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via association, comparison or resemblance including allegory, hyperbole, and simile”.

We use metaphors every day but never stop to think how they are used to mean entire phrases when telling a story, they are also, in many cases cultural and not universally understood by everyone. Statements like “it’s a cake walk” are understood to say “the task at which you are about to attempt will be very easy.” If the hearer is familiar to the metaphor it is understood as semantic links to other words or phrases.  I use this example because my colleague who is from Ethiopia tells his students how easy a test will be by saying “it’s a walk on a cake” It cracks me up every time.  There again, I just used the metaphor “it cracks me up.” My colleague clearly knows that the phrase means that something is easy but never would have used that phrase in his homeland and had to learn what it meant, I’m sure the first time he heard it he didn’t think someone was going to walk on a cake.  A metaphor I commonly use is “you can’t see the forest for the trees” This means you need to take on what many counselors would call the helicopter view, meaning to see the bigger picture. If the client is so focused on the problem then I use this metaphor to help them understand that they need to look at the situation and see it on a larger scale to fully gain the perspective of the issue.

We use these in counseling every day and our clients use them to explain the situation or event to us in a manner that we can understand how they are seeing the world. I had a client say to me yesterday that the instructor had “ripped his butt” I knew this to mean that the instructor had admonished the student for something, leading me to ask the question “tell me what you did to deserve that?” The student then began telling a “Story” story telling is as old as speech its self, it’s how we learn and how we teach; all the way back to Aristotle there are stories of teaching to help mankind gain wisdom. They are structured retelling of an event or fictional event, they many times contain such things as goals, themes, plans, expectations, solutions and explanations. These are the same things that we as counselors hope to understand from our client as well as convey or instill. All I would have to say to anyone from my generation “remember the ant and the grasshopper” and they would instantly realize that perhaps I perceive that they are being lazy or wasting their time on folly and were going to find their self in a tight situation.