The potential to redirect focus and shift internal states constitutes the transformational Alchemy of Metaphor. The unconscious mind embodies powerful potential to transform and/or enhance the metaphors and associated images of the client’s psychic schema. The quiet mind, combined with the evocative and rhythmic language and tools of hypnosis, can produce a shift to more hopeful themes and uplifting interpretations.
Personal metaphors, explored in trance, can become tools to reach beyond the cognitive and tap the unconscious mind’s ability to reframe and restructure the bio-psychosocial-emotional phenomenology of the the single mothers’s perceptual schema.
In this workshop participants will learn and experience the way in which metaphors, and their cousins, simile, analogy, allegory and parable, contain rich sensual imagery that can, gently and poetically, direct attention to perceptions that can shift self-states, and move patients toward changes they desire. When used within the techniques of trance, metaphors drawn from a the story of a single mother’s life stories offer the therapist a power-filled therapeutic tool for anchoring growth in the body-mind with stability and durability that can lead to greater coping strength for the client.
Using brief, simple, and effective techniques, attendees will learn how to can assist the single mother in imagining, and identifying with, new metaphors drawn from her own personal story. This “sympathetic identification” with enhanced or transformed metaphors can lead to increased resilience greater confidence in her parenting, and a more solidly integrated core of Self. The resultant psychosocial-emotional benefit to the mother can produce parallel benefits to her children.