Words and Reality

Along the winding road of my career – first as a pastoral counselor, then as a community counselor, and now as a career counselor working with college students – I have developed a particular skill of deep listening that I call “listening in.”

Of course, counselors of all types need to listen to their clients, help them compose a story that makes sense of their experience, identify opportunities for positive change, construct a strategy that anchors their desire for change to specific actions or practices, and then support the client’s efforts in the desired direction as they establish themselves in healthier, more productive habits.

It took some time for me to become meta-aware of something I was doing as I listened to my clients.

As they shared their thoughts and feelings, certain themes began to become ‘visible’ to me, like an emerging pattern from the words they used to describe their situation in life. Remarkably early in their story, I would get a clear picture of how they saw themselves and the world around them. This picture became an incredibly useful diagnostic tool for discerning what was really going on with my client, along with what forces and conditions were conspiring to keep them from seeing a way through.

These themes or emerging patterns that formed from the words my clients were using to describe themselves and their situation in life were wordwebs that functioned as mental lenses, emotional filters, and cognitive frames for perceiving their reality. But really, or phenomenologically, the “reality” they were perceiving and reacting to was a construct of these subtle interpretive distinctions.

The words my clients chose in composing their story resonated together across a web of associations, and this resonance coalesced in an image that jumped out to me like an epiphany.

From one counseling session to the next, and across all my clients in the different settings of my professional role – congregation, community, and college – one of two images would appear to me: a BOX or a PATH. In a counseling session, an individual would gradually reveal their image to me by the words they used to describe their situation and talk about themselves, confessing their beliefs, doubts, and feelings.

Listening for this image, watching for it to appear, is what I call “listening in.”

Another name for a word-image is metaphor, which is a foundational element in the structure of language. Metaphors “carry” (-phorein) the mind “across” (meta-) the threshold between ineffable mystery and articulate meaning, from spontaneous experience to mediated knowledge, from intuition to concept, from feeling to thought.

Some metaphors have served as ancient archetypes of cultural mythology, setting the collective prevailing mood of a people and shaping their transgenerational way of life. On the personal level, a metaphor can operate in a similar archetypal fashion, refracting reality through its lens and pulling our thoughts and beliefs into alignment with its organizing theme.

The illustration above presents the metaphors of BOX and PATH side by side, with their respective wordwebs. In the interest of making this topic more personal, let’s remove the curtain separating my clients “over there” from you and me “over here.”

The psychological fact is that we all tend to picture ourselves in life according to an archetypal metaphor, either a BOX or a PATH.

Now, it could be that we take up one or the other at a random moment in time, during a critical period in our life, or as the dominant outlook of a decades-long worldview. We may have toggled between metaphors numerous times, switching back and forth as we made sense of things.

Sometimes, reality can seem like a BOX. We feel stuck where we are, trapped in something we can’t see out of. We think of ourselves as a hostage, a captive, a prisoner, or a victim, perhaps unseen and unloved. Our thoughts and words articulate a web of meaning that seems to offer just two options: take control or give up. What else can you do inside a box?

A problem with this way of thinking lies in how it only reinforces the belief that our circumstances determine our future. Consequently, we must either rise above them, hold them off as best we can, or succumb to their rigid boundaries.

When we are in this mental compactor, we find our thoughts migrating toward, getting snagged, and quickly tangled up in a wordweb that shapes reality to our judgments.*

At other times, reality is a PATH. Rather than feeling stuck in a corner, we see ourselves rounding the bend toward some new adventure. We think of ourselves as a seeker, an explorer, a pathfinder, or a creator, whether or not our progress is noted by others. Our thoughts and words articulate a web of meaning that seems to expand to larger horizons as we go. We have choice, agency, a sense of purpose, and life is a journey where a wrong turn is merely a detour on the way to our goal – or something even better.

And along the way there are delights and curiosities, as well as challenges and opportunities for further discovery and growth. Here too, we find our thoughts resonating in a wordweb, but in this case our vision is elevated and excitement builds for what’s ahead – also shaping reality to our judgments.

A question that should be coming to mind is, “So which is it? Is reality a BOX or a PATH?” The answer is, Yes: either one, depending on the cognitive frame, emotional filter, and mental lens we are using to construct our perception of things.

Our frame, filter, and lens are generated from the metaphorical matrix (wordweb) that determines how we see reality, which is to say, what reality is for us.

Back to my work as a counselor. After inviting a client to help me understand what brought them to me, I would “listen-in” on the words and phrases they used in composing their story. If a BOX started to emerge from the pattern, I would reflect back and confirm their experience of feeling stuck, trapped, or closed in. As they felt understood, I would gradually introduce other words and phrases with PATH associations.

My therapeutic objective was to help my client start adopting the PATH metaphor and its wordweb as a more effective way of regarding their present situation.

In most cases, it wasn’t long before this metaphor of life and their place in it began to open up a PATH of creative change and renewed purpose.

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* I need to make the point that words associated with the BOX metaphor are not inherently negative or inhibiting. Routine, for example, can be a healthy channel of artistic, athletic, meditative, and productive activity. Control is conducive to happiness when applied to the right things and at the right time. Security is basic to our physical and emotional wellbeing. Similarly for the rest.

However, when we feel stuck in our situation, these same words can be clues to the source of our suffering, as well as obsessions that lock us in.