Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Beyond the Trip, a psychedelic therapy podcast with me, Dr. Esme Dark. During this podcast, I'll be bringing you conversations with thought leaders and other inspiring humans, exploring a wide variety of themes relating to the use of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in the healing of human distress.
Speaker: Whether you're an aspiring therapist, already a therapist, or just simply interested in the emerging field of psychedelic therapy, then this podcast is for you. Join me for a journey into the psychedelic world.
Speaker: Before we get started, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the unceded land on which this podcast is recorded, the Wadawurrung people. I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.
Speaker: And I extend that respect any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today. Hi everybody ah welcome to this episode of Beyond the Trip where I'm joined by Campbell Townsend who is one of my dyad partners and co-therapists at both the clinic space that I worked at and also on some of the clinical psychedelic research trials that we've both worked on.
Speaker: Campbell Townsend is a clinical psychologist and a senior research consultant at Monash University's Clinical Psychedelic Lab, where he worked as a trial therapist on the psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for generalized anxiety disorder trial.
Speaker: He is trained in MDMA assisted psychotherapy with MAPS and he's been practicing at one of Australia's first private psychedelic assisted therapy clinics. Campbell is also the co-director of a thriving private practice in the central Victorian gold fields and he's a board approved supervisor.
Speaker: He's also a certified Gottman therapist and trainer for professionals in this method. He's a real passion and skill for helping couples heal through immersive marathon therapy.
Speaker: In this episode, we talk about something that we're both really passionate about, which is how we can deepen psychedelic assisted therapy using somatics and metaphors. This is a conversation that developed during our work together, and we'll be sharing more about this with you all our upcoming online workshop in November this year.
Speaker: So please head on over to my website to sign up for this. In this podcast, we talk about playfulness and revelry in therapy and how metaphors can act as bridges in the therapy room.
Speaker: The importance of staying curious and working with the client's use and understanding of metaphor. And we also talk about somatic approaches to this work. We share some really interesting studies about neuroscience and how this relates to metaphor.
Speaker: We realized about 20 minutes in that we didn't exactly define metaphor as fully as we might have liked at the very beginning of this podcast. So I thought I might give you a little bit more of an introduction to it here.
Speaker: When we use the word metaphor, we're casting a wide net. We're really meaning any kind of figurative language. So language that's used in a non-literal way to convey meaning beyond the surface level of the words.
Speaker: That might be poetry, which we talk about on the podcast. It could be fairy tales or myths. It could be similes or analogies or any other kinds of ways in which language is used to convey a meaning different to the words themselves.
Speaker: So with that little bit of definition out the way, let's get into the episode. I really hope you enjoy this podcast episode. We had a lot of fun making it and we look forward to sharing more with you in our upcoming workshop in November this year. Hi, Campbell. Welcome to Beyond the Trip.
Speaker: It's so wonderful to have you here sharing the space with me today. Thank you so much for making the time to do that. Thanks for having me as me, I'm excited to be here and get into it.
Speaker: Yeah. So, you know, I know it feels really timely that we would be having this conversation. And prior to the episode, I was just thinking about how you and i know each other in our journey together in this work and realized that it started in pretty...
Speaker: in a pretty big way, really, that we were a dyad working together on but trial at the clinical psychedelic lab at Monash that I've spoken a bit about in prior episodes of this podcast where we were really, really fortunate to be able to have as therapists our self-experience, weren't we, of the shortened version of the psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy that we were going to be providing to people on the bigger trial.
Speaker: And we were the first diet pairing to take one of our colleagues through that study, which was quite a few years ago now. It was. What an honor, hey, that you and i we got to take the lovely David, of course, through his therapeutic journey.
Speaker: But, you know, we didn't really know each other very well. And there we were being co-eys, co-therapists, and diet partners to together. like Yeah, absolutely. And I remember feeling actually really comfortable with you straight away and really enjoyed that process. And then, you know,
Speaker: A few years later, we were working, there was the big thing that happened where the medicines were rescheduled and now in Australia, obviously we're able to to use clinical patch out in the community. So it's like assisted p psychotherapy in the community.
Speaker: And we were working together i'm at one of the first clinics to do that in in Melbourne. And I can remember, you know, the idea for this conversation ah this topic really began during our conversations then when we were trying to think about how we would really encapsulate, explain what you and I were doing in our dyadic work together because...
Speaker: there was, you know it's a little bit different, isn't it, with each dyad partner and the way that you work. And we really realized that bringing this idea of somatic psychotherapy together with metaphor and using it to kind of deepen the psychodiagnosis, it's like a therapy process was a really great way for us to talk about what we were doing.
Speaker: Absolutely. It was a real kind of, it came from a real, this this talking about semantics and metaphor really came out of kind of a deep analysis of like, what are we actually doing in the room, Esme?
Speaker: You know, we're getting some pretty good outcomes, right? and You know, not every time, of course, but but a lot of the time. And it's like, what are we actually doing in the room, both together and individually, that makes this, you know, hope a pretty powerful experience for our clients.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, know, I think we were kind of obviously having lots of debriefing conversations around our client work, which is a super important part of this process. And then, but you know, thinking more and more about how to talk about what we're doing. I guess one of the whole reasons for this podcast, which is about psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, particularly with the focus on the therapy, is to kind of bring more awareness to these these ideas and to what we're actually doing in the room with our clients. And so,
Speaker: You know, it feels really great to have you here as someone who I've worked with really closely to talk about what we have been doing. And it kind of came up, you know we were lucky enough, weren't we, to be invited to speak and do ah a workshop at a conference in Australia a few months ago. And so we were really pulling together all of our ideas for that workshop. And so it feels very natural to have you here to talk about it on the podcast as well. Thanks.
Speaker: Thanks for having me. it was It was so much fun getting ready for that conference and and presenting that with you. And yeah, I'm hoping we can share some of the kind of insights and gems from that with your listeners.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. And do you want to start Campbell with kind of explaining a little bit about for you, why metaphor is something that's so important? Cause I know that your journey around thinking about metaphor and therapy has not just been about in psychedelics. So maybe you could kind of explain a bit about, you know, how you've been thinking about this and your other work as well and how it then fed into this.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Esme. I suppose my journey with metaphor is i was and still am a very passionate acceptance and commitment therapy therapist.
Speaker: I use ACT a lot and ACT rests really heavily on metaphor. as a way to broach from the unknown to the known, to take something from what we know, what we don't know rather, to what we know.
Speaker: And so I guess I was just so influenced by And act, you know, it doesn't just use verbal metaphors, it uses a lot of physical metaphors, a lot of, you know, acting things out and experiential exercises and all that stuff.
Speaker: I guess I came from that world. And then what really delighted me and what really struck me about working with Kat was that, you know, the plethora of metaphors that just presented themselves all the time, you know, it's like really...
Speaker: the the language of metaphor is so yeah they' sorry the language of psychedelics is metaphor you know it's symbol it's metaphor it's image it's it's and of course what we'll get into feeling and so it was kind of like hang on it's all it's all here it's all here we need to learn how to kind of grab hold of this as best we can in order to kind of deeply understand and get a felt sense of these pat experiences.
Speaker: I think we really need to learn to speak the language of metaphor, of image, of somatic experiences. So, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, and I think, you know, yeah but you and I have sat in the room now with a lot of people through their dosing experience. We've done the preparation, we've we've sat with them in the integration and it really does feel like this is the way in a psychedelic talks to a person, if you like, or communicates with them or...
Speaker: is is through the language of metaphor and also of somatics. And so for me, i guess, you as listeners will know, like i'm I'm a clinical psychologist, but also trained in somatic psychotherapy.
Speaker: And i've I felt like when I was doing the psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, it was feeling really important to help people to get to know their bodies, to get to know how their emotions show up in their bodies, to get to know how their bodies hold all of their experiences, not just their difficult experiences, of course, but positive experiences as well. And you know There's a lot of talk out there and the body keeping the score of trauma, which is very important and a huge part of our work, but that's not the whole story. The body keeps the score of positive resourcing experiences as well, doesn't it? And so i feel like one of the things i often do with people early on is ask them me like where they feel different emotions in their body, how things might show up.
Speaker: And, you know, for some people it's quite easy. Some people it's very obvious. They can really feel a lot, but for other people, that's quite tricky, right? Like there's a, there's a, I was at a workshop on the weekend, last weekend, we were talking about kind of the cultural theme of disembodiment that we kind of really encouraged to be in our heads mainly and that, that we miss so much.
Speaker: Yeah. There's more I could say, but I'll pause there for a moment and see if you want to add anything to that. I want to add a couple of things to that. The first thing is you know, what I was really struck by working with you was just how you do tune in to the body, to your own and to our clients' bodies so profoundly. And I do have to share this. i was i was working with an ex-client of ours just last week doing some individual therapy. This is a client that we've done like a nine-month program with.
Speaker: And this, this, this person, they started to get quite emotional. And I said, all right, I'm going to do an Esme on you.
Speaker: Yeah. Because this this guy, right, he knew that, you know, in in our diadic work, you were so good at grounding him in his in his body.
Speaker: And so when I said to him, I'm going to do an Esme on you now, and I said something like, okay, so let's slow it down, notice what's going on. But he knew exactly what I meant because you'd done all that beautiful work with him, you know, for that nine-month process. but I haven't actually shared that with you, so...
Speaker: I love that. Thanks. It's great. But the the other thing I want to say about this, right, is i don't know if you've noticed this, Esme, but what I've noticed, you know, as this in this sort of new era of the psychedelic renaissance or whatever we want to call it, you know, as this this sort of story so many times about how Humphrey Osmond, he developed this term, the psychedelic, and it means mind manifesting. yeah know I've heard this so many times, mind manifesting.
Speaker: But if you actually follow the the the trail of language to its roots, that Greek word psyche actually refers to something like salt, right? Yeah. And delos actually means to reveal or to make manifest. So psychedelic literally means soul revealing, right? Not not mind manifesting, soul revealing or soul manifesting. And I read i think that that's a...
Speaker: a really important distinction that sets our compass squarely in the domain of the body, squarely in the domain of emotions, of feelings, and and not just in the mind.
Speaker: And I've noticed just recently, and you know, I listen to a lot of podcasts and I read a lot of stuff, I've actually noticed that people have started to change, go from mind manifesting to to soul revealing. And I think that that speaks to the wisdom and the growth of this you new psychedelic renaissance that we have to pay more attention to the body if we want to do this work well. And if we want to help people go deep and we if we want to help them make sense of these incredible and, you know, experiences that happen.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I think it's really interesting i that that that it went into mind manifesting first, that it got kind of reduced into that.
Speaker: And now it's shifting, right? And I've got Simon Yuggler's book right next to me, which is Psychedelics and the Soul, which is a new book. And I'll put that in the show notes because I think it's a really amazing book that talks a lot about kind of metaphor, but also myth and importance of myth.
Speaker: And the importance of psychosomatics connecting people into that soul place. I think it is shifting and changing, but it's, you know, it's still, it's still not easy for a lot of people, right. To be in the body for lots and lots of reasons.
Speaker: Absolutely. And something that we've spoken a lot about, Esme, is that, you know, like people have asked like, why metaphor and somatics? Like what's the connection there? Like, what is this? You know, we, you know, we really say that the metaphor, ah bridge to get to the somatic experience.
Speaker: If we can really expand and, and open up and explore and be curious and unpack clients, metaphors that reveal themselves.
Speaker: on their psychedelic journeys, there's often a lot of kind of emotions that are, that it can be found there. And again and again and again, we found this, haven't we, that, you know, clients might present like, ah you know, oh yeah. And then there was an image of me and this happened and they're like, okay, okay, let's slow it down. And then the more we slowed that metaphor down and asked more about it. And so i and what what happened then? Yeah.
Speaker: And what was that like laying on the ground like that? and And the the more we do that, suddenly then the emotions come. Yes. So emotions are the bru sorry metaphors can be a bridge to a deeper felt sense.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. And I think yeah something that I have said said to you before when we've been talking about this is it feels like You know, there's a few different ways in which, and maybe we can get into this a little bit, we might draw on metaphor and semantics together with our clients and, you know,
Speaker: But when someone's describing a dosing experience, you know, you and I have worked mainly with psilocybin, assisted psychotherapy. They're talking about all of these images, all of these metaphors that the medicine has spoken to them.
Speaker: And so much can happen in like, um ah you know, ah six to eight hours of dosing. And there's a lot of information there and using like pulling out the metaphors and allowing them to use those can actually be a really beautiful way of kind of encapsulating a lot of really complex information that people can stay close to, can help in integration, can remember, but the body also gives us a place to keep it.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. and Absolutely. feel Yeah. I feel like, you know, something I shared before, like an experience I had where I really felt like I was birthing in my self-experience as part of the the trial at Monash. And it was a physical pain. I mean, it actually started with a physical pain in my stomach.
Speaker: And I thought, I sat up for a bit and chatted to my therapists and kind of also wanted to avoid it a bit. And they supported me to go back into the pain. And then what came out of the pain was this image of birthing.
Speaker: And I felt the sense of birthing. And it's something that a lot of people experience or have spoken about too, within psychedelics. And you know i was birthing and nature was kind of moving out of my body and I was surrounded by the women in my family.
Speaker: which is ah huge thing to unpick and to sit with, but and it has many different layers. And that metaphorical image has stayed with me and has been unfolding for years, you know, over, this was several years ago now, and I feel like I'm still very close to it, I can still feel it in my body and I can use that to kind of connect in to that image and that memory and all of the things that that means to me, which are probably too numerous to get into fully here, but there's a lot of different meanings that that one image has for me.
Speaker: yeah It's such a beautiful story and it reminds me of something i read in some poem a long time ago and I can't find this poem, but it was something like, you know, every traveler needs a bag to to to to hold their precious stones and shells and gems and the things they find along the way.
Speaker: And, you know, when I hear that story, it's like you had these gems of understanding or wisdom or appreciation or something. You had these gems and your body was the place you stored them.
Speaker: You know, your body has held on to those metaphoric pieces. so and And, yeah, this is, this is again, this is this is how our psyche speaks to us in image.
Speaker: in metaphor and we really if we want to help our clients deeply understand themselves i think we need to have one foot in in in one world of the of the of the metaphoric the figurative the the mythic whatever you want to call it and then one were one one foot over here in in like the what where when But I think we really need to be able to exist in both worlds. But the thing about thinking kind of metaphorically or ah working metaphorically and symbolically, we do have to get really...
Speaker: comfortable with the unknown. We really have to be, get really comfortable with like not knowing what this image means or not knowing for us or for our clients. But the job is not to understand necessarily or the job is not to, you know, to yeah, to understand it completely.
Speaker: The job is to be deeply curious to see what it can tell us. Yes, absolutely. And You know, I'm going to try and explain something that I've tried to explain before and I'm not sure you have to tell me if it makes sense to you. Sometimes I think people don't know what I'm about.
Speaker: I'll let you know. Yes. Fair, right. So I... i So take us back a while and this will, but I'll get to what we're talking about here. Like I did my doctoral research in looking at people's explanatory models, which meant i interviewed a whole bunch of people about the different ways that they made sense of their experiences in the first episode of psychosis.
Speaker: So kind of relating into that hearing voices, literature that's around kind of different approaches, different ways of understanding, different ways of making sense. And Mapa, I was looking more into the kind of unusual belief space at the time.
Speaker: Anyway, so that that when I think about that work and I think about this work, I think it's really important to stay within somebody's explanatory model, the way that they understand the metaphor.
Speaker: And I often think about that research project, which was a really long time ago now, but it taught me a lot about staying with someone's understanding and being curious, even if it doesn't really make total sense to me, even if I don't have the same, because we never have exactly the same understanding of the world as the people around us, even if we think we do.
Speaker: not it's that's That's a fallacy, right? not true. So sitting with our clients and asking, what does it mean to you? How does it feel in your body? And those are things that feel really important to me. Oh, you know, what I guess you're getting at is that those, the meanings behind those images or those stories or those metaphors or their experiences, they are crafted, you know, by that individual, by the beholder.
Speaker: And as a therapist and a guide, we can help them see it more clearly, right? But our job is not to determine what comes into the frame. That's not our job to impose our meaning upon it. Our job is not to to put our own structures of seeing the world upon their image.
Speaker: Our job is to kind of get out of the way, you know, to get the hell out of the way and provide the conditions of of curiosity and safety and deep resonance and presence so that person can be curious about themselves.
Speaker: Yes, exactly. Yeah. yeah I think so. And just as an aside, i didn't know that you did your your research on psychosis because I also did my master's research on psychosis. So there you go.
Speaker: There you go. Learning things. I know it feels like a very long time ago, but in some ways, I think, you know, there's been themes around kind of being curious and working within the explanatory models that have you know I guess kind of taking my understanding of the medical model and my understanding of clinical psychology and p psychotherapy, but then taking it also to one side and really working with the person in front of me has been theme throughout my whole career, really.
Speaker: That's died there, I think. Absolutely. and And, you know, that really that really kind of reminds me of a big sort of feeling I get around our work is is around this idea of play, right? Yes.
Speaker: And how, so I'd love you to speak to that, but i'll just to quickly say that what I think metaphor adds to that is metaphor does invite us to play. Yeah. metaphor is inherently kind of playful, you know, as an idea, it's like linguistically it's playful and it's in practice if we're exploring metaphor, it's kind of playful. Cause again, we're in the unknown. We're not sure we're just, you know, with another person, not necessarily with an agenda, just like, let's try and deeply understand this together.
Speaker: And so when we've been talking about metaphor, this thing about say has kind of kept coming up. So I don't know, could you speak to that at all, the playful shit? Yeah, i I feel like, you know, i i feel like for me, the idea of drawing on playfulness as a concept in therapy is something that I've been working with for quite a while now. And I have a group program that I once or twice a year called Embodying Playfulness,
Speaker: which is really based on those ideas of using the body to soak up resources. So using a lot of what we know about somatic psychotherapy to help the body connect into resources relating to play and also helping people get a little bit out of the box that they have towards that out of the way, because of course there's a lot of those.
Speaker: But I feel like the idea of but a metaphor is so important. And I remember when we were first talking about this, we realized that actually that idea of playfulness is something we're both using a lot with our clients in a different, slightly different ways to each other.
Speaker: But that became the kind of almost the bridge between the metaphor and the somatics for us. And I think, you know, I was speaking a little bit about it earlier that This idea that we're connecting in bodying resources and connecting in the resources that maybe the psychogenic dosing or the therapy kind of provides people with into a place in their body so that they are having a whole body experience of that.
Speaker: title Totally, like totally, totally. Whole body experience. I'm wondering if it would be a good time to to to kind of dive into that a little bit more and talk about some research into how the kind of metaphor can can kind of activate that felt sense.
Speaker: That's a great idea. And maybe we can also flow into some examples of how we might do this or what we mean a little bit more as well from client work after that. Yeah, cool. Okay. Well, maybe what I'll do actually, I'll go back a step and even, and even you know, maybe sort of define metaphor a bit clearly. Here we are 25 minutes into a podcast on metaphor. We probably should define it.
Speaker: So I guess, yeah and so what do we mean by by a metaphor? I guess it's to talk about one thing. using something else right it's using a metaphor is a way of going from the the unknown to the node so as we said it kind of works like a bridge and it takes something unclear something abstract unfamiliar and to connect it something we really know and understand and the thing about that it's so fast it's instinctive it's effortless and the moment we hear it we get it we don't have to analyze it we kind of like
Speaker: feel it, right? And the the kind of moment that comes to mind is when my Pilates instructor said to me, she gave me a little spiky ball and she said, put it under your foot.
Speaker: And she said, now Campbell, I want your foot to be like warm spaghetti over the ball. I knew instantly what she meant because I'm very intimate with warm spaghetti. I know I've had many experiences of warm spaghetti in my life, but I've never had an experience of a spiky ball under my foot.
Speaker: But by her using that metaphor, I was able to bridge that gap in an instant. There it was. I knew what I had to do. And yeah, right.
Speaker: And you want to say something about that? Yeah, I just was just and having a little giggle to myself because we're recording close to lunchtime and yet again, when you said this, I'd feel hungry, right?
Speaker: yeah I can't stop thinking about eating spaghetti. And that's another way that the body gets involved with this process. like Even just that word, and I have lots of delicious associations with warm spaghetti, so now I feel like having lunch.
Speaker: Right. So you can't turn it off, right? You can't turn that off. And so, you know, this spring this comes to something that I'm really passionate about, right? Which is if we want to be effective as therapists, if we want to be the best therapist that we can be, then when we speak, we want...
Speaker: it to matter. You know, we want people to kind of pay attention when we speak. And obviously we, we, we want to be listening more, but when we do choose to speak, we want it to matter.
Speaker: If we want to speak less, we want it to matter when we do speak. And one way of, of, of getting clients attention and keeping clients attention is to use metaphor, to use sort of symbolic or or metaphoric language that brings the emotion into it as well, right?
Speaker: Because when I use these kind of non-literal ways of speaking, your body goes, you know, your body feels stuff. and And we know this, right? I'll get into that that that research that I was i was referencing. Right.
Speaker: They did some beautiful studies in England on this where they got people basically in MRI scanners and then they spoke to them and they just measured what happens in their brain when they said different things to them. Sorry, fMRI studies.
Speaker: And in one in one study... they They just said the word Juliet is beautiful. And they looked at what happened in the brain.
Speaker: And in the other condition, they said, it is the East and Juliet is the sun. Obviously, this is from Shakespeare.
Speaker: And what did they find? Well, something really different happened in the brain. When the participants were exposed to it is the East and Juliet is the Sun, those brains, ah their visual areas lit up, emotional centers lit up, sensory pathways.
Speaker: So Shakespeare's language actually engaged both hemispheres of the brain, moving from the prefrontal cortex into the midbrain, the limbic system, which are all involved in sort of deep emotional and sensory experiences.
Speaker: So this is pretty profound. We've just gone from Juliet is beautiful, where sort of not much happened in the brain, to it is the East and Juliet is the sun. But you your kind of brain and body has to do so much more work to kind of make sense of this, to kind of what's going on. So it's almost like...
Speaker: It's doing work in you, right? It's almost like that little little statement, it is the yeast and Juliet is the sun. It's working kind of, your unconscious is kind of chewing on it, right? It's kind of trying to metabolize, it's trying to work on it. So it's doing work on you And so as therapists, right, we can we can grab hold of this and we can just in choosing our language, you know, carefully, we can make it so much more profound and experience for our clients.
Speaker: And the other the other one I wanted to mention was same deal, ephemerized studies. And this time, two conditions. In one conditions, they they they heard, i had a bad day.
Speaker: And in the second one, I had a rough day. So they mean the same thing, right? But which one do you feel more, right? And so most people instinctively respond to the second one, but the why is that? Well,
Speaker: When we hear, I had a bad day, our brains process that really literally the way we process any ordinary language. But when we hear, I have a rough day, again, like the Shakespeare example, our somatosensory cortex lights up, and that's the part of our brain responsible for touch, for texture, for physical sensation.
Speaker: So in other words, even though no one actually touched anything, right? The brain responded as as if it had. So the metaphor triggered a felt sense.
Speaker: It actually activated a body experience rather than an abstract meaning. Now, I think that that is so cool, right? It's so interesting. I love that. Did you want to say anything about that?
Speaker: Or, you know. Oh, as long as I could say about that, my inner Shakespeare nerd is really just still enjoying just thinking about that phrase from the first one. But yeah, I think it makes so much sense that that I then got hungry, right? The sensory major cortex, it blows my mind. It's such a fascinating area of the brain and the way that it kind of lights up. And obviously something was going on for me when you said warm spaghetti that just kind of made something happen in my body, right? And so this research really explains that, I think.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. it's It's unconscious. We can't control it And it gets to something we should really speak to in a big way at some stage, which is that that it it then allows that information to flow past our defenses.
Speaker: But yeah, that's ah that's a big topic. So we can get into that in a moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so. And I think, yeah, I think i think it's it's just that research is so fascinating. And there's research around the psychedelic use as well, isn't there? that Do you want to speak to that?
Speaker: Research around the psychedelic use, as in the fact, oh, right. Yeah, yeah. So what what we know, right, is... that we use a lot of metaphor in everyday life.
Speaker: Like we use, yes we use like, it's like one in 10th sometimes. Yeah. One in 10th. Some researchers say one 10th, one, one in every 10 words is metaphor. But then when we get into therapy, just like normal therapy, that number goes up, right?
Speaker: We use, you know, twice as much metaphor again. And why is that? Why why are we using, why are we as clients using more metaphor when we go to therapy?
Speaker: Well, what I think it's about is we're trying to make sense of all these ineffable emotional experiences that are happening inside of us. Because of course, sensations, emotions, and feelings, we can't see them.
Speaker: We can't kind of touch them. So we need to rely on something that we do know. So something concrete, some concrete metaphor to make sense of this internal world.
Speaker: So it makes sense that you in the therapy environment, when we're you know doing a lot of deep introspection and trying to understand our internal landscape, we're relying a lot on metaphor.
Speaker: There's a normal therapy. but then But then, yeah, then we get to pad to psychedelic system to therapy. And I think there's two stories playing out here.
Speaker: Well, we we all know how ineffable a lot of these experiences are, how difficult they are to make sense of and understand and comprehend. So, yeah, I think that that makes sense that we're going to use a whole lot of metaphor to try and make sense of that. But I think that's really only a tiny bit of the story.
Speaker: And this links to what we were saying before. i think that metaphor, image, symbolism, and this is all example of metaphor, right?
Speaker: It really is the language. of therapy it really is it is it is the language of the unconscious it is the it is you know let's go to something that we all do a lot of what is dreaming you know dreaming is images it's metaphors it's experiences i've got to actually no you go Well, I don't know. i don't want to take you off your point, but I was actually going to read a few examples from the psychedelic assisted therapy work of of people kind of coming up with metaphors relating to their experience.
Speaker: Does that fit now? Should we do that? Go do it. Great idea. Because, you know, when I was thinking about this topic and I started to think back to my own experience and the self-experience, but also...
Speaker: the clients that we've worked with or that I've worked with on the trial, they were just, I just had, was having a look and they were jumping off the page at me. There were so many.
Speaker: There were so many that I could have spoken about, but there were some really beautiful ones that I just thought i might read out. Please. And... One was, I saw a woman shaped like a pillar.
Speaker: I was the pillar, holding everything together, connecting the ceiling to the ground. I looked like I was made of diamonds with darkness swirling around me.
Speaker: I felt like this woman was me, the core of me that was keeping everything safe and holding it all together, both the dark and the light. And that is a tiny description of a much larger description, right?
Speaker: And so there's so much in statement and so many different layers that we were able to draw on in the therapy. You know, the seams around dark and light and the kind of way in which they are both together in this.
Speaker: And the idea of the pillar, which we used and drew on and in the, you know, integration, that idea of strength and feeling the pillar of strength. So that's a very common metaphor that we hear all the time. Right.
Speaker: And that there was something really important and that that image that that that could then be a place that that person went to to help them remember so many different layers of their experience.
Speaker: I mean, what what a gift that your your client is giving you there, but it's it's it's a trailhead, right? That's the way I see that. This is like they're giving you a trailhead and you can choose to walk right past it and go, oh, that's all very interesting.
Speaker: And now let's talk about this or let's go down that trail. and I'm wondering about that pillar, you know, is it, does it have solid foundations? Is it, is it straining under the weight? What's it like straining under the weight? Does it feel like ah it can hold it or is it in jeopardy of falling? I don't know, but I want to know.
Speaker: if This is the trailhead that we can choose to walk down hand in hand. We don't know where we're going, but let's, let's help our client feel safe enough to go there alongside with the safety of us next to Yes, exactly. And, you know, also that idea of diamonds, you know, being made of diamonds and diamonds are something really beautiful that is made from a lot of intense pressure, right?
Speaker: And so there was, you know, there's there's a lot there as well. ah but But I think it's about what you were just doing then was so beautiful, just asking curious questions about what it was like for that person.
Speaker: And they would have been able to give you so much more information, right? Yeah. You know, something you just said made me really think about how careful we have to be. You know, diamonds are beautiful. Oh, well, I don't know. Like, what do what does diamonds mean to this client?
Speaker: You know, do they mean beauty or do they mean being controlled? I don't know. Like, they could mean anything. That's right. That's right. So we constantly need to check.
Speaker: We constantly need to check our own assumptions. and and and stay as close to the client as we can again we we just you know we we really want to explore what's in the image but not decide what's in the frame that's really important yeah like i it is isn't it and i think you know, like staying alongside the client, being curious.
Speaker: And, you know, something that I often do is i I'll track my own body and notice how ah it's feeling. And I, you know, might use some information from my body to be curious, but it's always open-ended. It's like, I'm i'm feeling this in here, in my gut. Like, I don't know, does that resonate for you? Or do you feel anything like that? Or does that feel familiar to you?
Speaker: and I might, you know, I certainly might kind of draw on images that come up that If I'm talking with someone and they're sharing something and I have a lot of images coming in my own mind, I might be curious, but it's always like, I'm just wondering if this means anything or um I keep thinking this or I keep feeling this, this this emotion that's really kind of feels very strong for me.
Speaker: I would definitely be very curious about that, but I wouldn't say that this must be important to you. People can discount it. i That's always really important that just working together with the person and not kind of coming with a particular agenda.
Speaker: Yeah. Look, I've got so much to say about that, but just to just to just flag, just flag and not go into that. You and I, as me, we actually developed a unique kind of model that looks at how to how to capture the energy of the emotion, sorry, of the metaphors that you see in your in your clients, but also how to harness the metaphors that arise in you.
Speaker: and And this is something, you know, we've developed kind of a ah unique way of kind of of developing this skill that to look within your client and the look within yourself.
Speaker: And maybe we can briefly kind mention that later. ah But it it makes me think i listen to a lot of Jungian therapists and there's ah there's a concept from that world that I really like, which is if we want to really stay in that really curious, really open place with our clients, they call it kind of a state of reverie.
Speaker: And that reverie is kind of like trump and almost trying to tell our thinking mind to kind of, you know, take a holiday and just kind of feel with or feel into our clients.
Speaker: And i heard one Jungian therapist even discuss it, sorry, talk about it as like almost like having a blood alcohol limit of 0.05, you know, just sort of that sense of kind of like, you know, I'm just so really here feeling with,
Speaker: Not suggesting we get drunk with our clients, just making that really clear. This is a metaphor. Yes, exactly. But it's it's talking about what that makes me think is like it's talking about being outside of the kind of real rational thinking mind, the cognitive mind.
Speaker: And to be in, you know, for me, that idea of reverie also relates to idea of playfulness. getting into that state of play a little bit with our clients to help them to kind of to to drop into something a little bit more based on feeling, maybe closer to the soul.
Speaker: And, you know, ah quick note on Jung, like I remember that was one of the first, or I think it was, ah i actually don't remember exactly which book it was, but one of the very first books on psychology I decided to read when I was 18 and I was wanting to study psychology it was about Carl Jung.
Speaker: And I don't know but I was really drawn to it. Didn't understand a lot of it because, you know, I was 18 and hadn't really studied psychology yet properly. But I was fascinated and drawn to it. And then many years later, it feels almost like it's come full circle and become something that I'm now really curious about and really interested in again, in this work.
Speaker: Although absolutely not an expert in is his his theory, I do find myself really drawing and reading a lot more about his ideas now. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Ismene, would it be okay if if I share a very brief poem that for me really captures this idea of staying out of that expert role, checking our own assumptions, staying in that place of curiosity alongside revelry?
Speaker: And it's a poem that I've drawn a lot of inspiration from over the last couple of years. And yeah, would it be okay if I read that now? I'd love that. All right.
Speaker: So the poem is called The Place Where We Are Right by Yehuda Amachai. And here it is. From the place where we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring.
Speaker: The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard. But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plough, and a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.
Speaker: so see that really helps me that poem really helps me in and i come back to it so many times in therapy when i think i know what's happening for a client i check myself i remind myself of that poem and i go stay curious stay open yeah yeah And of course that poem relies on metaphor.
Speaker: That poem is metaphor. Yeah. what Does anything show up you in hearing that? I think that what shows up for me, there's a lot of things, but like the idea of like being outside of the knowing is much more generative.
Speaker: Like there's much more that can grow from that place. I think that's what it brings up for me and and I could go into a big wide lens of how amazing would it be if we in the world, if more people really were stayed curious as opposed to being really polarised and all those things. Like it kind of makes me go a bit wide lens systemic political as well, but I won't do that on this particular podcast right now too much. But I think that there's a lot that could be learnt from a lot of the words in that poem.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But do don't you find it interesting that, that we could have also just sort of said, you know, we could have used really symbolic, non figurative, non metaphoric language to say, you know, don't assume you are right.
Speaker: Stay curious. these kinds of things, but they wouldn't have landed in my body the way that that poem lands in my body. Like that poem that poem is like stuck.
Speaker: Like it's just wedged in there somewhere and it's not going anywhere. And I think that that that really is the work of metaphor. It suggests itself to our psyche, to our unconscious, and it does work in us. And I've said that a few times, but I think it's really important. The work of metaphor is to do work in us. It influences us. It undoes something. It makes something stronger.
Speaker: It makes something weaker, it provokes a question. It makes you look at something you thought you knew in a new way because you're making a connection. Like that's pretty cool.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Really, really cool. And, and, you know, something that I've just been thinking as as we're talking about of this is that if you think about Indigenous stories or and you know myths or folk tales, there's so much information that can get conveyed in a short poem or story that is so layered. And I feel like psychedelic experience is...
Speaker: are similar, you know, like that I shared that around the brief, a short part of my own experience of birthing Elliot. And there's so much information that's come from that that I feel is still coming from that.
Speaker: Yeah. And I think it's really powerful. can i Can I speak to that, Esme? Yes. This is something that i i I really, I think, is so unique about the psychedelic experience and metaphor is that the power, I think, of a psychedelic experience is it actually gives us kind of a virtual reality space in which to have these experiences that are so outside the ordinary.
Speaker: So we can enter this, this, you know, this virtual reality space where we can heal from trauma or we could,
Speaker: be touched by a God, or we could fight a demon, or we could go back into some kind of abuse or traumatic situation and we could relive it in a different way.
Speaker: Right? Or choose your example, right? Like we can have these experiences that are not real, but they're almost more real than real.
Speaker: And like we can go on the hero's journey in those experiences and we can fight the demon, we can heal the trauma, we can rewrite the story of our life. We can do all these things in the safety of a therapy couch Without real risk of being eaten by a demon or, you know dissolved by the hand of God or whatever it is, we can do have all these heroic and difficult and painful experiences very safely and yet come out the other side.
Speaker: holding onto these experiences and maybe new insights or learnings about ourself that are going to help us move forward, like in your birthing experience, right?
Speaker: You didn't actually give birth, I'm imagining, in that moment, but you had a yeah had a virtual reality experience of giving birth, right? Yeah. And, you know, i felt it in my body, in all of the cells of my body and all the muscles, you know, and don I hear that so often, like so often clients will come out of ah dosing experience and we'll be in the integration space and we'll be working it all through and whatever insights has come up for them, they'll say, yeah, kind of, I guess in some ways I could have got that in a different way maybe, but I wouldn't have felt it.
Speaker: And they often touch their body, don't they? I would have felt it in the same way. And I, now that they've had that, what you, I like that, like terminology up to like almost like a virtual reality of this experience and they store it in their body. They hold it in their body, which is where the somatic piece is important because that's just what people experience a lot.
Speaker: Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, I'm going to draw on just a tiny little bit of of one huge psychedelic experience I had where I spent, oh gosh, it must've been about six to seven hours where I was dying.
Speaker: And and i genuinely thought that I was dying. There was nothing that anyone could have told me that would have convinced me that I was not dying. And I remember I was crying so much, there was my face was completely sopping wet with tears, but every time I opened my eyes, i saw that I saw it as blood and there was blood all over my face and hands.
Speaker: And so I died. died, right? i i I died in that experience. ah died in that experience And what we know from people who actually in real life go through near-death experiences is they often have profound new lease on life.
Speaker: right? They quit their jobs and they, you know, they they do these amazing things and that they treat their people in their life differently. But how cool is it that, so I might say that some things happened to me after that experience that would not have happened otherwise. I actually,
Speaker: Some really big colossal changes in my body and my felt sense occurred after dying that still have ripple effects many years later.
Speaker: But how cool is it that I didn't have to actually die to get that experience, right? My body was totally fine, even though I thought it was bleeding, it wasn't. And yet I got all the benefits of a near-death experience.
Speaker: without dying and I think that's murder I think that's miraculous I think that's remarkable yes yes I know I think and that you felt it in your body you know like you're and it's continued to unfold over such a long period of time you know it's amazing it sounds like pretty scary was it really scary at the time Esme, it was so terrifying. It was, the fear was so profound.
Speaker: The grief was so profound. yeah And it was exactly what I needed. It was exactly what I needed. It's the in the in and the through, right, that we talk about so much in this work. It's like to feel those really challenging experiences and to lead into such in a terrifying experience, but what came out was...
Speaker: something really beautiful afterwards. Absolutely. like Absolutely. Yeah. It's like the the medicine or the experience of psychedelic knows how to sneak through the defenses to help like me to help us.
Speaker: Yeah. To help us to kind of work with things that we need to in a way that gets to the core more easily. then if we were you know and I guess that's part of what psych psychotherapy is all about.
Speaker: And I'm wondering if we might talk a little bit now about the process that we created. just in like We're not going to go into loads and loads of detail here. We don't have time to... go into all that, all of the details on this podcast, but I think it would be good because something that was felt important when we were talking, I think, was to really step out and develop this process to help people to work with metaphor and somatics in their practice every day.
Speaker: And we're hoping to run a workshop in the in the coming months around this, which will be available for people. And be more information coming out about that soon. And we'll put a link in the show notes so that people can join the mailing list. And then as soon as that workshop is announced, you can get some more information about it.
Speaker: Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. Where do you want to go with that? Well, I guess I i was just thought it would be useful just to say that we when we were developing this workshop and the workshop we did at the conference and when were talking about our work together, that we kind of developed a process to help people to really understand how we have been using and metaphor with our clients and somatics. And so...
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know. You can share whatever you would like. I don't think we should go into the whole thing, but just whatever feels right. So I guess i guess the the purpose of our model that we kind of developed was to really help you with your psychedelic assisted therapy clients. Yeah.
Speaker: to help give you way really paying more attention to and having a metaphoric lens and a somatic lens so you know as we kind of spoke about before there's you know a set of tools that we could get really curious about about trying to find that, that the kind of metaphors that come to you from the client.
Speaker: And then what do you do with that? Right. You then you want to, as Esme, as you said, we want to then locate those metaphors in the body somewhere. And then the other piece is, as we spoke about before, was we want to get really good at trying to notice the kind of symbols or metaphors or experiences or somatics that come up within us when we are sitting with another person, because that's a wealth of important information that we yeah we really want to pay attention to it.
Speaker: And then we also, in that model, we talk about ways to kind of kind of weave this throughout the whole therapeutic process from, I'm talking if this is a nine-month process, like what we were doing, Ismi, how to make sure that we're weaving this work from start to finish.
Speaker: do Anything you want to add to the that or anything that I've missed? or Yeah, I think, I guess one of the things that we, that I really valued about working with you and kind learning how to work more intentionally with metaphor is like having metaphorical ears open throughout the therapy and to kind of, and and really, you know, thinking about how to how how to find the metaphor, but also then to hold it, you can you know, writing it down in the notes and working with that same metaphor over a number of sessions.
Speaker: can be really helpful and it might be something that the client's bought or it might be something that you suggest that lands for the client as well. And I think, you know, I found that the so kind of model that we've developed really helpful in just kind of really thinking through the steps of the how to actually do this in the room.
Speaker: It's really practical and It gives, you know, and and also it's it's it's practical, there's steps involved, but it gives people, there's an openness within it that allows people to be creative, which of course is kind of the underpinnings of this whole process. It's not something that we say you have to do exactly X, y or Z. It's just, this is the process which we find really beneficial and that's helped both our clients. And actually I found it really helpful in thinking about doing work with my own psychedelic experiences as well.
Speaker: Totally. And can I add to that, Asmeet, you know, to to end this on ah on a bit of a metaphor, you know, a plumber, right? A really good plumber knows how to use their tools.
Speaker: They're experts at the the plumbing, the tools that they use to do their plumbing stuff. Can you tell that I'm not a plumber right now? but But us as therapists, right, our tools are predominantly verbal tools.
Speaker: They are the words that we use. And here's the thing, every single therapist or indeed person listening to this podcast uses metaphors and probably captures their clients' metaphors. I have no doubt that that that you're all doing this, right?
Speaker: But my aim, our aim in this workshop is to help you be expert at those verbal tools. So you're not just sort of casually in a metaphor, you know why you're in that metaphor, what the aim is. Not that you know where it's going to go, you know, again, but you know that the process is to deeply understand and be curious and attach to the body, in era all that. So...
Speaker: Yeah, we want to get really good at the verbal tools ah at our disposal. And that's what I hope that this will give folk out there. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's that also it's using the verbal tools and then bringing in the body as well, right, and kind of connecting, which is what we've been talking about this whole episode. It's like using metaphor and taking people into their body. And, you know, we're planning to do one-day workshop online, which is going to be available to people all over who can come and join us and really have some practical opportunities to really get kind of playful with their own metaphors. And we'll have a bunch of, we'll share some thoughts, but we'll also do a lot of kind of experiential activities where people will be working with their own material and and learning how to use our process.
Speaker: So more information will be coming through about that soon. And I'll put, if you're interested in that, just hop on over to my workshop, wait, there's add yourself to the list and you'll be the first to know when we release dates.
Speaker: Beautiful. I feel like I could keep going with this conversation for ages, but I might feel it the time. Campbell, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you feel like we should really say or bring out before we finish today?
Speaker: Maybe just one final thing, which is something that I think about almost every day that I'm doing pat work. And that is how can i find new ways every day to take myself out of that expert role?
Speaker: Yeah. That's what my role is I see in this work is How can come alongside my clients and take myself out of the expert role? I read a book when I was very young in my 18, 19 called, If You See the Buddha on the Road, Then Kill Him.
Speaker: And that book is dedicated to taking yourself out of the expert role because and if you have Buddha, you have disciple and then you have hierarchy, right? I'll just leave you that. That's something that helps me stay in this curious, open and playful space.
Speaker: But I think if we are holding on to our off defenses, if we are defend heavily defended and not comfortable in that unknown or not comfortable being not an expert, then I think we're doing disservice to our clients.
Speaker: Yes, I so agree with you. i think that can be true in all therapeutic work and it feels particularly important in PAT to me. It does. Because we know it's such a humbling experience doing this work and watching people show up to meet with the really challenging, sometimes really challenging places within themselves or to help them connect into their own soul. And it can be really intense for people and they do it. They show up and they're so courageous.
Speaker: And I think this work is much more about being alongside and staying curious. Not to say that we don't draw on our tools, of course, like the plumbers that you spoke about, but that we do our best to get out of the way and help them find ways to maybe get out their own way as well.
Speaker: I love that. Tools to help them get out of their own way. All right. Well. That's a beautiful metaphor to finish on, Esme. It is, right?
Speaker: Thank you so much, Cavill. It's been an absolute pleasure as always. And yeah, there's lots of resources about this particular topic. So we'll put a few links to other podcasts and books in the show notes so that you can have a have a deep dive into the world of metaphor and psychotherapy. It's a fascinating space. Thanks, Esme.
Speaker: Thank you. Thanks for listening. If you're interested in following along on the journey with me, check out my Instagram or website details listed in the show notes.
Speaker: And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and share this podcast to help get this important conversation out to more listeners.
