Your thoughts are tangled. You tell yourself to just get a grip, but you can’t clear a path in your mind. To regain clarity, focus on your imagery.
Overview of the "Get A Grip" Metaphor
NOTE: The introduction is the same for each of the four intensities of the Get A Grip Metaphor. If you have already read it, you may want to click to skip.
Your head is in your hands. Your eyes are staring off into space. You’re turning your energy inward. And you’re telling yourself to get a grip.
We often say this phrase when we’re trying to get control of our emotions, when we’re about to be overwhelmed, often in a negative way. But what does that metaphor actually look like to you? Because if you want to transform the emotion, then you want to focus on the imagery that that phrase brings up.
Yes. You also want to focus on your body language. If you’re slouched over, you want to get yourself to sit up straighter. If your hands are on your head, you want to bring them down to your lap and focus on your breathing. And if your eyes are staring out but you’re not really seeing anything, possibly because your head is just spinning with thoughts – often negative thoughts or fear thoughts – then you want to give yourself something positive to focus on.
But within all of that, the one thing you can focus on is your metaphor. When you’re telling yourself to get a grip, what does that imagery bring up for you?
Hello, my name is Karen, and this series grows out of my book, Emotion Commotion, and The EAT Program™. In these videos, I help you Locate, Describe & Transform™ the emotions that interfere with you making your best decisions.
Your emotions present as images and metaphors, so each week I explore new imagery, always looking at it from four levels of emotional intensity: extreme, high, medium, and low.
Your imagery might look very different from what I choose, but you can still walk through the process, as I do, to transform your own emotions. This week we’re working with the metaphor, get a grip.
Four Emotion Intensities with Four "Get A Grip" Metaphor Images
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The extreme intensity video I’ve chosen is a person with fists clenched and punching a human shaped dummy bag.
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For high intensity, I’ve chosen a mechanical grip that grabs onto massive rocks at a construction site.
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For medium intensity, I’ve chosen somebody who’s climbing a rope and using their hands to grip, to climb.
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And for low intensity, I’ve chosen butterflies who are gripping to flowers.
Just Get A Grip: High Intensity Emotions
The extreme intensity video focused on a need to relax your grip; the high intensity video speaks more to trying to grab on to something, to get a grip on an idea or on a situation. So instead of trying to release and relax, you’re trying to grasp, but not too tightly, not too soon.
So in this instance, I’m using a video that’s in a quarry with a mechanical arm trying to grasp on to a rock, but you may have played a game at one of those arcades where you’re trying to hook a stuffed toy, and it really is about finessing. It’s not about just going in as hard as you can and grabbing on to it; it’s about being very gentle and properly positioned to be able to get that grip.
So the stress in this high intensity video that I’ve chosen is probably more related to an overthinking situation, a trying too hard situation, than it is to an anger or a fear reaction: You have a lot of ideas in your head; you’re not sure of which direction to go; you’re telling yourself to get a grip.
Just Get A Grip: Clear The Debris
Close your eyes. Imagine those ideas as a variety of boulders, and imagine this mechanical arm coming down very slowly and pulling the idea out.
If you feel that the idea that you want or the direction that you need to go in is buried under other rocks, then imagine that the mechanical arm
- grips one rock
- moves it to the side
- drops it
- comes back
and just keeps doing that, back and forth, removing them until that idea that you want, that you need to get a grip on, is revealed.
When I close my eyes and imagine that, I can very clearly see the particular idea or direction: I can see that one rock. So I’m focused on that and clearing the field to be able to grip onto that particular rock. That rock represents something. Even if I don’t know what it represents at this moment, I know it’s the one I need to focus on.
Just Get A Grip: The Reveal
Once I grip that rock and pull it up, I imagine putting it on a platform and allowing it to reveal itself to me. So if it’s an idea, if it’s a direction, if it’s a next step, I now have it clearly in front of me, and I’ll be going to my next metaphor to try and reveal it.
- Am I getting a hammer and a chisel and cutting it open?
- Am I getting a saw and cutting it open?
- Is it just going to dissolve so that I can see what the idea is?
Just Get A Grip: Focus On The Metaphor, Not The Pep Talk
Or in your case, you might already know what the idea was, and you just had to be able to get it out from being buried. If that’s the case, then this is how it might have worked for you:
You’re stressing because there’s too much going on in your brain, and you can’t get a grip on that one idea or direction you’re supposed to go in. You’ve said the phrase, get a grip, “Come on, just get a grip. I got to get this done. I got to do this. I got to figure this out.”
Use this kind of imagery to grip on and remove all of the excess ideas, to target that one that you know that you need to follow.
Get A Grip: Closing
We’ve just explored the Get A Grip metaphor through four intensities, from four different angles:
- The extreme intensity video focused on an extreme amount of anger or rage, a negative emotion that wanted to act out toward others.
- The high intensity emotions focused on overthinking – the stress of overthinking – and needing to find clarity, and getting a grip on all of the thoughts.
- The medium intensity emotion was about getting a grip on the positive emotions, and not letting them take over, where you end up failing at something that you were really primed to succeed at.
- And the Low Intensity Emotion video focused on a gentle grasp and balance to be able to take flight.
I respectfully acknowledge that this video was recorded on the traditional territory of Mi’kmaq people.
For more information on transforming negative emotions with the Locate, Describe & Transform™ process, check out theEATprogram.com.