Offering: November 17, 2024

stories, metaphors, emotions

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One of the things I’ve noticed over the years doing various kinds of care work is that by the time someone’s sitting across from me, telling a tale of themselves and their life, it’s one they’ve rehearsed in some way any number of times.

There’s always a degree of what I think of as grace that unfolds when telling something to someone for the very first time—and I use the word grace as theologian Catherine Keller describes it, as a “nonlinear might-not-have-been,¹”—since unique elements of narrative are always enhanced or diminished in relationship with a particular listener.

But still I find, for the most part, people tend to arrive with the nuts and bolts down. If there’s a tension to speak of it’s articulated with previously chosen keywords and metaphors, often repeated over time to the point that they’re taken for granted.

So it’s because of this that I’ve come to think that the purpose of our work together is, at least in part, about exceeding that script, accessing margins for improvisation, and co-creating conditions for the spontaneous narration of those un-storied, atypical details that don’t fit or belong in the usual tellings.

There are a number of ways to go about this², and a couple I lean on a lot.

One is to take thorough notes as I listen. If our time together involves looking at tarot cards, I read the notes aloud before we turn to the pictures. Reading the notes makes way for some preliminary deconstructive work.

As I read, I am asking: What are the binaries, if any, that are being presented here? I might name them as I see them. What words are being said and reiterated? I’ll name those as well. Do I know just what is meant by a word like infuriated or frustrated or grieving? Does the storyteller know? I’ve found that an unusual or unanticipated meaning of a word like anxious can change the whole ground. So I’ll ask about that too, if I can.

A second thing I do is look for what metaphors are being used. Metaphors are something we deploy without noticing a lot of the time. But because metaphors cast shadows and territories that we’re not always aware of, they can be good to attend to as well.

For instance, if I’m telling you I have a hard time with emotion regulation, I might not recognize the way this particular choice of words is shaping the ways I relate to my self and emotional life.

A metaphor won’t do the same thing for everyone, but for me that word regulation puts me in a sort of steel situation; a machine-like imaginary, with gauges and glass. A place of checking levels, ticking boxes, automating, maintaining, adjusting, reporting. 

Shifting gears here—but keeping with machine metaphors, I guess—the first time I ever heard the phrase “emotion regulation” was while working on a book about dialectical behavior therapy at my job in psychology publishing.

In their section on emotion regulation in the DBT Skills Workbook—which came out before my time at the publisher—authors Matthew McKay, Jeffrey Wood and Jeffrey Brantley describe the set of skills they’re about to lay out as something that will help readers cope with “reactions to your primary and secondary emotions in new and more effective ways.” 

The skills—which are taught as part of a comprehensive skills-based program that also includes exercises for distress tolerance, mindfulness, and interpersonal effectiveness—include things like recognizing your emotions, reducing physical and cognitive vulnerability, doing the opposite of emotional urges, and problem solving.

Learning the phrase “emotion regulation” for the first time was life-changing for me. The language was useful almost immediately, even without having done any exercises to develop the skills. And there are many valid critiques of DBT, but The DBT Skills Workbook has nearly ten thousand reviews on Amazon and a 4.5 star rating, which affirms that the book has been helpful to a lot of people.

Still, fourteen years later I’m thinking increasingly critically about what emotions are, how we think and speak about them, and how that thinking shapes our experience.