Working with metaphors is a central technique in systemic counseling and therapy: in organizational and team development, in supervision, in coaching and in couples counseling and last but not least in hypnotherapeutic work.
Working with metaphors is a very visual and stimulating way of helping.
Its purpose is to free people from deadlocked images to give them new landmarks, paths, or solutions. The pictures chosen in metaphors reflect the problem.
Examples of everyday metaphors:
- Build a wall of silence
- Find the needle in the haystack
- Hit the nail on the head
- One person is wearing pink glasses
- Break someone’s heart
- Drowning in a sea of grief
- Fishing in troubled waters
- Laughter is the music of the soul
- The wheels of justice turn slowly
- Words are the weapons with which we wound
To visualize something means to have a pictorial idea of it.
In hypnosis, visualization is an essential tool because displays can be used to call up specific experiences and to transfer them to other situations.
Can all humans visualize?
Close your eyes and imagine an apple now.
Certainly, you can. Look at the apple and describe the form, color, and smell of the apple. Some people can do this so that you see an apple and the inner image is like the outer one.
Others “think” more of the picture.
How perfectly or precisely you can imagine something in hypnosis has no impact on the experience and effectiveness of the results.
Visualization is often just a matter of practice, and hypnotic trance can help you in developing better visualization skills.