You’re a bubbling volcano, unable to stop your overflowing emotions. How do you cool the red hot lava flows before you say or do something you will regret?
Overview of Guiding Metaphors
NOTE: The introduction is the same for each of the four intensities of the Guiding Metaphors. If you have already read it, you may want to click to skip.
When you’re having emotions, do you talk about containing things? Are you erupting? Are things oozing out of you? Are your emotions overflowing? If so, you’re using container metaphors.
Maybe you see life as an expedition, or you want a tour around something. You want to take a trip down memory lane. You’re going to cruise through that stop sign. You want to explore that idea more. Let’s take a jaunt into the past. These are more vacation kinds of metaphors.
Do you use more meditative metaphors? Have you been stargazing at somebody famous? Are you guided by your imagination? Do you feel the connection toward people? Are you a dreamer?
Hello, my name is Karen, and in this series I help you Locate, Describe & Transform™ the emotions that interfere with you making your best decisions. Your emotions present as images and metaphors. Each week I explore new imagery, always looking at it from four levels of emotional intensity: extreme, high, medium, and low.
This week I’m doing it a bit differently: I’m looking at the concept of guiding metaphors, the words you use without even thinking about it, but that actually guide how you see the world. And those words create images in your mind – and in someone else’s – for how intense your emotions are.
Four Emotion Intensities with Four Guiding Metaphor Images
For example, if you had a smile on your face and were deeply in love, and said you were overflowing with emotions, I wouldn’t come up with this extreme intensity volcano image; however, I might come up with this image if you talked about your overflowing rage.
If we’re in high intensity negotiations, and you said “we’re in for the long haul,” I might interpret that as this image of a caravan crossing the desert. Meanwhile, you might be thinking of fifty truckers driving across the highway. We’re having the same high intensity emotions, but how we describe it is completely different.
For medium intensity emotions, we might be a married couple, and you’re saying you’re bored, we need to explore life more. But what that means to you is some version of this river cruise imagery; what it means to me is standing on top of Mount Kilimanjaro.
For low intensity emotions, you might tell me that I’m a daydreamer. The image that comes to mind for me is the aurora borealis: beautiful; enchanting. The image that comes to mind for you is disconnected and not doing my work!
Guiding Metaphors: Your Words Matter
Now, see how your emotions change when we change the wording. For extreme intensity, I talked about that volcano overflowing. But what if it’s oozing?
For high intensity emotions, is this a caravan or an odyssey? An expedition, or in for the long haul?
That medium intensity river cruise: Is it a tour? A trip? Are you exploring? Is it a jaunt?
And the aurora borealis: Are you dreaming that you’ll get there one day while the stars guiding you? Are you connected to them?
Your emotions present as images and metaphors. If you’re having negative emotions, and you want to transform your emotions, focus on your images.
- Extreme intensity emotions are going to feel wrapped up in your body.
- High intensity emotions, you’re going to be feeling a direct impact.
- Medium intensity emotions, you’ll be starting to feel the pressure.
- Low intensity emotions, you’ll be keeping things at bay.
Overflowing Emotions: Extreme Intensity
For the extreme intensity video, I’m using a volcano. Based on your own emotions, are you bubbling with rage? Overflowing with rage? Have you already erupted, or you’re catching yourself before the eruption? All of this matters when you’re transforming your images.
What you want to do when you’re feeling this much rage, this much emotion, is cool it; it’s all fiery energy.
What you see in the background can help. If your image, when you come up with it, is a volcano with snowy mountains in the background, that’s an easy transformation. You can imagine the ice and cold from that snow actually coming onto you and cooling the hot lava.
Overflowing Emotions Need A Few Transformations
With extreme intensity emotion, there are going to be a few transformations required. The starting place is get yourself somewhere quiet. Close the door and slow your breathing. Focus on two, three, or four deep, slow breaths to calm yourself, and imagine, as you’re calming yourself, that the bubbling coming up out of that volcano actually starts to recede.
Now locate where, in your body, you’re feeling this extreme emotion the most. For me, I’m feeling it in my chest. It’s all fiery and wants to explode.
This image is the description, so now I’m looking for a transformation focused on my chest.
Overflowing Emotions: A Transformation Example
I take a deep breath in, and I imagine the snow from those mountains coming and cooling my chest area. And I just allow the ice cold snow to cool down the fiery anger.
Now for me, I don’t want to imagine myself standing in a snowstorm: I don’t want my feet stuck in the cold or frozen in place. I just want the fiery rage to be cooled down. So I’m keeping the imagery of cooling down just in my chest area, where I’m locating the emotion the strongest.
My emotions are extreme, so they’re not transforming very quickly, but I just keep imagining a snow dump into the top of the volcano, and I’m breathing in and out slowly and deeply as I do this.
Once I get the bubbling up from the volcano calmed down, I want to imagine that snow coming and cooling down the lava paths. I don’t want to imagine that hot lava turning into hard rock; that feels like a negative emotion to me. But I do want it to feel more like a running river.
From Overflowing Emotions To Clear Thinking
My goal here is to get my emotions to a low enough intensity that I can think clearly about my next healthy direction:
- Should I go and talk to people?
- Should I regroup on my own and figure out what I think the next best path is?
- Do I need to transfer my emotions further?
This volcano imagery shifts to something completely different so that I can move myself down to a lower intensity before making my decisions.
You can’t and wouldn’t want to live life without emotions, but you do want to have healthy emotions in balance to help make your best decisions. So if this volcano metaphor speaks to you, ask yourself:
- Are you overflowing?
- Are you oozing?
- Are you about to erupt?
Locate the emotion where you’re feeling it most in your body. Be specific with your description. It might look exactly like this; it might look different. And transform your imagery in the healthiest way possible.
You’ll feel it in your body; you’ll know if it’s a positive or negative transformation. When your body feels relaxed, that’s when you know, even if it’s just in this moment, that you’ll be able to make your healthiest decision.
Guiding Metaphors: Closing
That’s a quick look at the concept of guiding metaphors. You can learn more – there’s a full chapter on them in my book, Emotion Commotion. The key point is that the words you use matter. They tell you what your emotions are, and if they’re positive or negative. If you go to the next step and describe the imagery that those words bring up, you’ll get a lot more insight into your emotions.
You’ll also learn that the same words bring up different imagery and different intensities of emotions for somebody else than they do for you. And that can give you a starting place for better conversations.
I respectfully acknowledge that this video was recorded on the traditional territory of Mi’kmaq people.
For more information on the Locate, Describe & Transform™ – LDT™ – process, go to theEATprogram.com.