March 20, 2024 • 22 mins
In this conversation, Amy and Kevin preview the next session of the Relational Cadre with a discussion of metaphors, memes, and the need to understand each other in order to invite each other into a playful space.
Some resources mentioned in this episode:
"The Selfish Gene" (Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
Empire Carpets commercial (YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLJxCURQVJc
Kilroy Was Here (Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here
Yes Yes No segments (ReplyAll podcast) https://gimletmedia.com/tags/8gu9/yes-yes-no
"Darmok, under 8 minutes" (YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ8_F6jYWv4
Therapy Metaphors (PDF) https://www.getselfhelp.co.uk/docs/Metaphors.pdf
"Harriet interviews RCT scholar Maureen Walker, discussing race, power, & RCT" (website) https://harrietschwartz.com/2020/10/04/harriet-interviews-rct-scholar-maureen-walker-discussing-race-power-rct/
"Loss" - Know Your Meme (website) https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/loss
"Comedy is Tragedy Plus Time" (video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-_Akm40RJQ
When Getting Along Is Not Enough (website) https://maureenwalker.com/race/when-getting-along-is-not-enough/
Cadre is a podcast that explores concepts from Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT), a psychological theory that started with Jean Baker Miller, and grew through collaboration and connection in places like the Stone Center at Wellesley College. RCT is built on the idea that people grow through and towards relationships, and that those relationships shape and are shaped by the cultures we co-create. Culture often creates challenges to connection through inequity and hierarchies.
Each year, the Bloomington Center for Connection selects a guiding theme for monthly small-group discussions of RCT concepts.
Amy Makice is the founder of Bloomington Center for Connection and a licensed psychotherapist based in Bloomington, Indiana. Amy offers individual therapy and parent support for people in the Bloomington area, workshops for parents and caregivers, and training on Relational Cultural theory.
Kevin Makice is a user experience designer and enthusiastic gamer who has been steeping in RCT for three decades.
Theme music created by Vlad Gluschenko ("Positive Thinking" and "Serpantine") and downloaded from Soundcloud through Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.
https://soundcloud.com/vgl9/positive-thinking https://soundcloud.com/vgl9/serpantine https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Music.
(00:19):
The use of metaphor requires that there is some avenue onto it for everybody.
So if you have a metaphor, but the context of that is only something that you
know, that it's like an inside joke or something.
It's right, which probably I do all the time. But yeah, it's only effective
if there's something that somebody can either learn easily or already has an
(00:44):
experience that they can bring into it so they can make sense of it.
And, you know, when we're talking about play, this is often a very,
you know, it's a shared space. It's an imaginary world.
And in order for people to participate in it, there has to be a common language.
And sometimes that language isn't articulated in really clear words or terms.
(01:07):
It's sometimes an experience that you want to enact.
Sometimes it doesn't even have words that helps people come in and make sense
of it together because there's that that shared foundation.
And I always think of the water cooler stuff as a kid. We didn't have water
coolers in school, but he had a well.
(01:27):
But TV was very different back then. We didn't have the internet.
We couldn't download things.
There was a time and a place when a show happened. And if you missed that,
then... You had to wait till summer.
Or beyond that. Sometimes there are some shows that I remember watching in that
era that I have still missed that episode or that we're going back through Star Trek now.
(01:48):
And even Star Trek Next Generation, there are some episodes that I swear I must
not have seen because we only saw it the one time through.
We didn't own DVDs of it. This is like the first time going through the series since it broadcast.
But if you missed that, then all the conversations that people had the next
day, which didn't really worry about spoilers because everybody was on the same schedule.
(02:13):
Right. But you just couldn't join in in the same way or even for like sporting
events and stuff, which are still, you know, moments in time that that's hard
to understand the narrative of what happened without,
you know, experiencing it and bringing it.
Before we get into internet memes and that Star Trek episode,
I wanted to talk about just memes specifically.
(02:35):
So this is a term that was coined by Richard Dawkins.
It was a book called The Selfish Gene, and this is like 1976.
So this is the same time when Gene Baker Miller is starting up and writing her book.
Gosh wow and what he was
trying to convey was that like a
gene that has evolutionary qualities to
(02:56):
it it mutates it has to survive that it becomes something different and something
that withstands all of the biology around it you know ideas do that as well
like the earliest memes were like the kilroy graffiti so you see that picture
and you know you know the context of what that that means.
And for me, where I learned Kilroy was out of Mad Magazine. So I've already
(03:20):
lost all the context that it came from.
But it was something that was recognizable.
I knew enough about it that I could make sense or understand why it was funny
when it showed up in those places.
But it's also things like melodies and other things.
So if I said right now, Now, I know what I'm supposed to do,
(03:45):
but I don't even know what the words are.
I just know that that's what comes next. Yeah, well, that's the Empire commercial.
So the 580-2300 Empire.
And for anybody like me that grew up in the Chicagoland area at that time,
that's going to be with me forever.
And I can do that or I can say Empire. And those are the things that come into mind.
(04:07):
And the one I can think of is the Menards one, actually.
That type of thing predates the internet. But with the internet,
you now had a medium that itself was easy to replicate.
And that's a really critical part of memes in general is that it's not just that you have an idea,
but it's an idea that is propagated and that can be replicated and that people
(04:32):
find interesting enough to be able to mutate intentionally.
And so when we think of Internet memes, we usually think of like those pictures
that are often clips from another media in a show or a movie or web comics are
popular to do as well or news.
And it carries a certain meaning because the people who recognize what that
is are bringing that to the table.
(04:54):
But then what makes it fun to play with is the fact that you're adding something
else. You're putting it in a different context that has similar things happening
there to try to connect those things or make a statement.
Unless you have that sort of hook into what you're looking at,
if you can't recognize that, then they don't make sense.
(05:15):
It's funny because you remember that original meaning, but then there's also
like something unexpected or different included in the meme. Yeah.
In RCT, they talk about rather than like growing to be more independent,
you grow into more complex connections.
And I was thinking of like how if you had to trace like each iteration of some
(05:37):
of the memes that you would see today, it would be super complex.
But the one that our youngest, he told me about three different ones this week,
and he can't remember the one that I really want him to tell me about.
Because that one was the one that I struggled to understand why it was funny.
(05:58):
It just sounded really weird to me. But that's like that segment from Reply
All of me likes so much the yes, yes, no. Yes.
I meant no. You're at no.
For extra reference, people could go listen to the My Racist Friend when Jay
came on and explained TikTok to us. Yes, yes.
(06:21):
Usually the memes are visual, so having that might help understand it.
But if I have no context of it, it doesn't make much sense.
And that's the same thing that you encounter with metaphors and other ways, too.
Again, if you go in and people are talking about these things as if you know
them and you don't, then it creates a barrier to coming in.
(06:43):
There has to be a way to engage in the metaphor by understanding it or learning it.
To bridge that gap. The episode of Star Trek.
So this is Next Generation is the modern series in the 80s and 90s featuring Captain Picard.
So this is Patrick Stewart, Shakespearean actor coming in to play sci-fi thing, which is great.
Basically, the premise is that they brought down to a planet and the translator doesn't work.
(07:08):
And it doesn't work because they only speak in metaphor.
And the metaphors they have are all coming from their culture.
One of them is Dharmak and Jalad at Tanagra.
And, you know, that's all you got. Keep saying Dharmak and Jalad at Tanagra
and saying, do you understand now?
And it takes the whole episode for Picard to realize, oh, these are metaphors. You speak in metaphor.
(07:32):
What could this mean for me? And he has to take his own understanding of what
it means to have two named people there in some place and then through other
metaphors understand that,
you know, that's supposed to represent the two of them coming together at this
place to face something together.
But they have to come and unite. And that's the whole goal of it.
(07:54):
Sometimes when you play it, you know, it's work to be able to get everybody in. To get there. Yeah.
Timba, his arms wide. Yeah.
Shaka when the walls fell. Shaka when the walls fell. And if you don't understand
what that is, that also means you probably have not seen Star Trek.
So why is metaphor important for play?
(08:15):
I think almost all play is metaphor.
Like if you can't engage in metaphor, it's difficult to play.
Like if you can't imagine that this pen is a sword or imagine that that hanging
plant is coming over to choke me.
I don't know why I'm all on the violent play today, but like the floor is lava or the floor is lava.
(08:41):
Then it's not going to be very much fun.
And the shared part is that you have to be able to communicate it to each other.
If it were a literal thing, you either have to bring in lava and put yourself
at risk of destroying all the things around you, or you say,
no, that's not. That game's over.
But in order to communicate that, somebody has to carefully walk on the spaces
(09:06):
and jump as if their life depended on it and maybe touch the lava.
And, oh, it burns, it burns.
You know, there's things that you have to do to sell that and to communicate that.
So even if you didn't know what lava was, you would know that particular maybe
color of square is dangerous. Yes.
When I touch it, I have to pretend I'm in danger.
(09:28):
Actually, I think that's a pretty good connection into what we were talking
about before we started recording about the literary metaphor, like a story. Yeah.
And therapeutic metaphor, they both have a reference. They have to reference something.
The therapeutic has more of a shifting or aim at movement or growth.
(09:53):
When you were saying the floor is lava, I was thinking of being afraid of something.
I don't know what, but the floor is lava would be a great game to play.
That'd be a great thing to do to try to jump across your fear or try to work
together to create some kind of lava-proof bridge.
So in therapy, I mean, the metaphor is really important for talking about something
(10:18):
without talking about it.
Well, you're sort of making it sound like we're avoiding things in therapy, which is not what I mean.
It's hard to talk about something that's really painful.
It's less hard to talk about something that's not the thing but like the thing.
Even more than that. I mean, yes, that's true, the painful things.
(10:40):
But I think in therapy, a lot of times you naturally talk about the painful things.
Those just sort of barf right out. Sometimes what's harder to imagine is the growth.
And so finding a way to take what is painful and weave the story toward growth and empowerment.
(11:03):
And, and that's sort of like the corrective relational experience,
which sounds really heady, but also you can use metaphor to sort of describe
like a corrective experience of successfully crossing the creek without falling in,
you know, doing the thing and getting to your person that you were trying to get to,
or one that gets used a lot would be like letting down your walls,
(11:27):
you know, in a sense of supported vulnerability. So.
Letting down your walls doesn't necessarily sound playful, but I think there
are ways that they can be playful in therapy too.
And like magical wish granting is a really powerful therapeutic tool.
Like, okay, this has happened. All the stuff is great.
Let's look around and see what we see.
(11:50):
Like, I think sometimes we get because of our relational images and the patterns
that we've been carrying with us so long, we get stuck in a way of being,
and it's not necessarily a way that's serving us well.
The use of metaphor and play can help us experiment with shifting those relational images.
(12:13):
Okay, so what if there are some trustworthy people out there?
You know, if your relational image is that there are no trustworthy people, what if there are?
Let's So you can shift and grow some through them. You just mentioned a concept,
so maybe we should get the cards out.
What is relational images? Okay, so relational images, they project the unconscious
(12:38):
expectations we hold for relationships and are shaped by early experiences and cultural forces.
These images usually look like rules or expectations. For example,
if I ask for what I need, I'll be abandoned, or everyone must be happy. They are metaphors.
When I have a relational image, what makes it a relational image is I have some
(13:02):
experience, some context,
and it is a placeholder for that, that I am comparing to the situations and
the people that I encounter to say, is this a match?
Oh my gosh, yeah. Yeah. One of the things about relational images,
when you start to uncover your own,
(13:22):
I want to emphasize that I think this is a lifelong process and anybody who
thinks they've already found all of theirs and understands it all probably has
some more relational images to figure out.
As you start to notice them, a lot of times they'll be like candy-coated relational
image, like the outer layer relational image that is, if I act like myself,
(13:44):
I won't get invited to parties or like, you know, like some kind of middle school
drama type thing that you carry around.
If you go a little bit deeper, it's if I act like myself in this particular
way, I am going to have a humiliating experience in front of the class. And you keep going.
(14:04):
And sometimes you get down to a really core early piece that maybe you hadn't
even connected with this.
Like, Like, if I act like myself, I'll be abandoned, which, you know,
with your grown up mind, you know that you weren't abandoned for acting like yourself.
(14:27):
In this particular case, maybe that caregiver had to go somewhere and then come back.
But it has become like a truth because when you're little, your very survival
depends on grownups around you. So it does feel like life or death.
And when something is happening that feels like life or death and you're putting
(14:49):
it into your memories, it gets put in there a little bit differently.
And so I think it's harder to see. and
that's like those memes that are so
unrecognizable by the time
we see our kids laughing at them and we're
like why is that funny and they're like oh because of this but you have to go
(15:12):
back like eight layers before you can get to the first thing and the first thing
maybe is only funny because it's sort of like this other thing and part of what
makes an internet meme successful is its reuse.
So many people saw it that they can have that shared experience.
But if you weren't there when it happened, you don't have that context.
(15:32):
If you aren't seeing it online in a way that is understandable for you,
you don't have that context.
And it also mutates by adding other memes or other contexts.
So sometimes the memes that
are there that people understand what it is
it's because they followed all the steps to get there
(15:53):
and they can recognize all those parts in it
whereas other people may may struggle with it
and that and that's why that yes yes no is so funny
because they literally with the person who is
the producer who came in and had the
least technical savvy of everybody would have to come in and they would spend
sometimes entire episodes just taking this one picture when some text text apart
(16:17):
and explaining that it's coming from this Philadelphia 76ers player and it's
referencing this other thing over here and the other thing in that part.
Yes. One year we did Geek Camp and had memes as a theme.
Anyway, it's called Loss, and you can Google it, but it's four squares of an
(16:39):
internet comic. The reason the original had an impact is because it had been
a little bit more lighthearted.
And then suddenly there was a more serious one.
And the frames are the first frame is a guy running into the emergency room.
The second frame is a guy like leaning over the intake desk at the emergency
(17:00):
room. The third frame is the guy talking to a doctor with sad faces.
And the fourth frame is the guy standing over a bed, and the other main character
is laying in the bed crying.
And so it's distinct shapes. shapes
the first one i found when i was looking it up today
(17:21):
was just cuts from never
gonna give you up of his hands in the
shapes that the people are in in that comic and
it shouldn't be funny but it really it really so why shouldn't it be funny because
it's just hands oh i i thought you meant because of the original seriousness
(17:44):
of that that's really interesting because i had someone Someone say to me this week, humor is anxiety.
Something is funny because it scares us. If we can make a joke about it,
then it's less scary. Why are you making that face?
I'm making that face because every time somebody tells me what comedy is,
I think of Alan Alton and that Woody Allen thing.
(18:06):
Comedy is tragedy plus time. It's tragedy plus time. That's what makes things funny. Yeah.
The relational image is one of the things that is applicable this week.
Yes. What is another concept that you've identified?
When we open our staff meetings, we ask a silly question.
(18:27):
And I was actually thinking about LaShawn and that meeting.
So I was trying to come up with like some kind of, if you were a garden or,
right? And I wound up with socks.
But it went not just to us talking about like what socks we would be,
But also getting into the model me and the not me that Maureen Walker talks
(18:50):
about and then trying to figure out what our model me sucks are and what our not me sucks are,
which was playing with metaphor.
And because we all had in other staff meetings had these long conversations
about like our model me idea about like who we are as therapists can get in
(19:12):
the way of being a good therapist.
It was fun to take it then and apply it to socks.
I would be warm and comfortable and not full of holes. And not full of holes.
So the model me and not me is part
of disruptive empathy sections in maureen's book
(19:33):
when getting along is not enough model me
is an identity that represents how we want to be seen in the world the model
me is likely to be a fixed and idealized image that counters a companion not
me identity which is capable of doing or saying things about which we should
which we would be embarrassed or ashamed.
(19:54):
What I want to point out is the fixed and idealized. That's why we need play,
because we get fixed and stuck.
So the play would maybe try on the not me.
Yeah, lean into it. I mean, not if it's gonna hurt you or somebody,
but, you know, really exploring, like, how bad would that be?
(20:14):
And sometimes it could get ridiculous. Yes.
So model me and not me. I'm going to point out that two cards are like literal
metaphors, boundaries, because you don't actually build boundaries, right?
And so shifting how you imagine them, which is something we do in RCT,
(20:36):
rather than as like something that you build to keep people from crossing,
instead seeing it as a place where you can meet, which is an RCT way of seeing them.
Or seeing them as something that you state rather than set.
Just those little shifts in how you imagine boundaries. Yeah,
it changes what you have in your mind.
(20:58):
And the other actual metaphor is mud.
Mud. Mud is the mystery, uncertainty, and doubt that we must embrace in order
to move toward real relationship. relationship.
The way that we talk about it when we reference it is messy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
(21:20):
So our next cadre session is coming up on March 24th from one to three Eastern time.
This time we're going to have it just entirely online.
So it's a zoom, but we will be discussing things that we just discussed here,
metaphors and play and these concepts, RCT concepts.
Music.
(21:47):
This episode of Cadre was a production of the Bloomington Center for Connection,
an organization using relational cultural theory to promote social change through connection.
This conversation between Kevin McKeese and Amy McKeese LCSW took place on March
17th, 2024 in Bloomington, Indiana, and was edited for this podcast by Kevin McKeese.
Theme music lovingly sampled from Positive Thinking and Serpentine by Vlad Glushenko.
(22:12):
Follow Bloomington Centre for Connection on Facebook and other social media platforms.
Music.
Music.
(00:19):
The use of metaphor requires that there is some avenue onto it for everybody.
So if you have a metaphor, but the context of that is only something that you
know, that it's like an inside joke or something.
It's right, which probably I do all the time. But yeah, it's only effective
if there's something that somebody can either learn easily or already has an
(00:44):
experience that they can bring into it so they can make sense of it.
And, you know, when we're talking about play, this is often a very,
you know, it's a shared space. It's an imaginary world.
And in order for people to participate in it, there has to be a common language.
And sometimes that language isn't articulated in really clear words or terms.
(01:07):
It's sometimes an experience that you want to enact.
Sometimes it doesn't even have words that helps people come in and make sense
of it together because there's that that shared foundation.
And I always think of the water cooler stuff as a kid. We didn't have water
coolers in school, but he had a well.
(01:27):
But TV was very different back then. We didn't have the internet.
We couldn't download things.
There was a time and a place when a show happened. And if you missed that,
then... You had to wait till summer.
Or beyond that. Sometimes there are some shows that I remember watching in that
era that I have still missed that episode or that we're going back through Star Trek now.
(01:48):
And even Star Trek Next Generation, there are some episodes that I swear I must
not have seen because we only saw it the one time through.
We didn't own DVDs of it. This is like the first time going through the series since it broadcast.
But if you missed that, then all the conversations that people had the next
day, which didn't really worry about spoilers because everybody was on the same schedule.
(02:13):
Right. But you just couldn't join in in the same way or even for like sporting
events and stuff, which are still, you know, moments in time that that's hard
to understand the narrative of what happened without,
you know, experiencing it and bringing it.
Before we get into internet memes and that Star Trek episode,
I wanted to talk about just memes specifically.
(02:35):
So this is a term that was coined by Richard Dawkins.
It was a book called The Selfish Gene, and this is like 1976.
So this is the same time when Gene Baker Miller is starting up and writing her book.
Gosh wow and what he was
trying to convey was that like a
gene that has evolutionary qualities to
(02:56):
it it mutates it has to survive that it becomes something different and something
that withstands all of the biology around it you know ideas do that as well
like the earliest memes were like the kilroy graffiti so you see that picture
and you know you know the context of what that that means.
And for me, where I learned Kilroy was out of Mad Magazine. So I've already
(03:20):
lost all the context that it came from.
But it was something that was recognizable.
I knew enough about it that I could make sense or understand why it was funny
when it showed up in those places.
But it's also things like melodies and other things.
So if I said right now, Now, I know what I'm supposed to do,
(03:45):
but I don't even know what the words are.
I just know that that's what comes next. Yeah, well, that's the Empire commercial.
So the 580-2300 Empire.
And for anybody like me that grew up in the Chicagoland area at that time,
that's going to be with me forever.
And I can do that or I can say Empire. And those are the things that come into mind.
(04:07):
And the one I can think of is the Menards one, actually.
That type of thing predates the internet. But with the internet,
you now had a medium that itself was easy to replicate.
And that's a really critical part of memes in general is that it's not just that you have an idea,
but it's an idea that is propagated and that can be replicated and that people
(04:32):
find interesting enough to be able to mutate intentionally.
And so when we think of Internet memes, we usually think of like those pictures
that are often clips from another media in a show or a movie or web comics are
popular to do as well or news.
And it carries a certain meaning because the people who recognize what that
is are bringing that to the table.
(04:54):
But then what makes it fun to play with is the fact that you're adding something
else. You're putting it in a different context that has similar things happening
there to try to connect those things or make a statement.
Unless you have that sort of hook into what you're looking at,
if you can't recognize that, then they don't make sense.
(05:15):
It's funny because you remember that original meaning, but then there's also
like something unexpected or different included in the meme. Yeah.
In RCT, they talk about rather than like growing to be more independent,
you grow into more complex connections.
And I was thinking of like how if you had to trace like each iteration of some
(05:37):
of the memes that you would see today, it would be super complex.
But the one that our youngest, he told me about three different ones this week,
and he can't remember the one that I really want him to tell me about.
Because that one was the one that I struggled to understand why it was funny.
(05:58):
It just sounded really weird to me. But that's like that segment from Reply
All of me likes so much the yes, yes, no. Yes.
I meant no. You're at no.
For extra reference, people could go listen to the My Racist Friend when Jay
came on and explained TikTok to us. Yes, yes.
(06:21):
Usually the memes are visual, so having that might help understand it.
But if I have no context of it, it doesn't make much sense.
And that's the same thing that you encounter with metaphors and other ways, too.
Again, if you go in and people are talking about these things as if you know
them and you don't, then it creates a barrier to coming in.
(06:43):
There has to be a way to engage in the metaphor by understanding it or learning it.
To bridge that gap. The episode of Star Trek.
So this is Next Generation is the modern series in the 80s and 90s featuring Captain Picard.
So this is Patrick Stewart, Shakespearean actor coming in to play sci-fi thing, which is great.
Basically, the premise is that they brought down to a planet and the translator doesn't work.
(07:08):
And it doesn't work because they only speak in metaphor.
And the metaphors they have are all coming from their culture.
One of them is Dharmak and Jalad at Tanagra.
And, you know, that's all you got. Keep saying Dharmak and Jalad at Tanagra
and saying, do you understand now?
And it takes the whole episode for Picard to realize, oh, these are metaphors. You speak in metaphor.
(07:32):
What could this mean for me? And he has to take his own understanding of what
it means to have two named people there in some place and then through other
metaphors understand that,
you know, that's supposed to represent the two of them coming together at this
place to face something together.
But they have to come and unite. And that's the whole goal of it.
(07:54):
Sometimes when you play it, you know, it's work to be able to get everybody in. To get there. Yeah.
Timba, his arms wide. Yeah.
Shaka when the walls fell. Shaka when the walls fell. And if you don't understand
what that is, that also means you probably have not seen Star Trek.
So why is metaphor important for play?
(08:15):
I think almost all play is metaphor.
Like if you can't engage in metaphor, it's difficult to play.
Like if you can't imagine that this pen is a sword or imagine that that hanging
plant is coming over to choke me.
I don't know why I'm all on the violent play today, but like the floor is lava or the floor is lava.
(08:41):
Then it's not going to be very much fun.
And the shared part is that you have to be able to communicate it to each other.
If it were a literal thing, you either have to bring in lava and put yourself
at risk of destroying all the things around you, or you say,
no, that's not. That game's over.
But in order to communicate that, somebody has to carefully walk on the spaces
(09:06):
and jump as if their life depended on it and maybe touch the lava.
And, oh, it burns, it burns.
You know, there's things that you have to do to sell that and to communicate that.
So even if you didn't know what lava was, you would know that particular maybe
color of square is dangerous. Yes.
When I touch it, I have to pretend I'm in danger.
(09:28):
Actually, I think that's a pretty good connection into what we were talking
about before we started recording about the literary metaphor, like a story. Yeah.
And therapeutic metaphor, they both have a reference. They have to reference something.
The therapeutic has more of a shifting or aim at movement or growth.
(09:53):
When you were saying the floor is lava, I was thinking of being afraid of something.
I don't know what, but the floor is lava would be a great game to play.
That'd be a great thing to do to try to jump across your fear or try to work
together to create some kind of lava-proof bridge.
So in therapy, I mean, the metaphor is really important for talking about something
(10:18):
without talking about it.
Well, you're sort of making it sound like we're avoiding things in therapy, which is not what I mean.
It's hard to talk about something that's really painful.
It's less hard to talk about something that's not the thing but like the thing.
Even more than that. I mean, yes, that's true, the painful things.
(10:40):
But I think in therapy, a lot of times you naturally talk about the painful things.
Those just sort of barf right out. Sometimes what's harder to imagine is the growth.
And so finding a way to take what is painful and weave the story toward growth and empowerment.
(11:03):
And, and that's sort of like the corrective relational experience,
which sounds really heady, but also you can use metaphor to sort of describe
like a corrective experience of successfully crossing the creek without falling in,
you know, doing the thing and getting to your person that you were trying to get to,
or one that gets used a lot would be like letting down your walls,
(11:27):
you know, in a sense of supported vulnerability. So.
Letting down your walls doesn't necessarily sound playful, but I think there
are ways that they can be playful in therapy too.
And like magical wish granting is a really powerful therapeutic tool.
Like, okay, this has happened. All the stuff is great.
Let's look around and see what we see.
(11:50):
Like, I think sometimes we get because of our relational images and the patterns
that we've been carrying with us so long, we get stuck in a way of being,
and it's not necessarily a way that's serving us well.
The use of metaphor and play can help us experiment with shifting those relational images.
(12:13):
Okay, so what if there are some trustworthy people out there?
You know, if your relational image is that there are no trustworthy people, what if there are?
Let's So you can shift and grow some through them. You just mentioned a concept,
so maybe we should get the cards out.
What is relational images? Okay, so relational images, they project the unconscious
(12:38):
expectations we hold for relationships and are shaped by early experiences and cultural forces.
These images usually look like rules or expectations. For example,
if I ask for what I need, I'll be abandoned, or everyone must be happy. They are metaphors.
When I have a relational image, what makes it a relational image is I have some
(13:02):
experience, some context,
and it is a placeholder for that, that I am comparing to the situations and
the people that I encounter to say, is this a match?
Oh my gosh, yeah. Yeah. One of the things about relational images,
when you start to uncover your own,
(13:22):
I want to emphasize that I think this is a lifelong process and anybody who
thinks they've already found all of theirs and understands it all probably has
some more relational images to figure out.
As you start to notice them, a lot of times they'll be like candy-coated relational
image, like the outer layer relational image that is, if I act like myself,
(13:44):
I won't get invited to parties or like, you know, like some kind of middle school
drama type thing that you carry around.
If you go a little bit deeper, it's if I act like myself in this particular
way, I am going to have a humiliating experience in front of the class. And you keep going.
(14:04):
And sometimes you get down to a really core early piece that maybe you hadn't
even connected with this.
Like, Like, if I act like myself, I'll be abandoned, which, you know,
with your grown up mind, you know that you weren't abandoned for acting like yourself.
(14:27):
In this particular case, maybe that caregiver had to go somewhere and then come back.
But it has become like a truth because when you're little, your very survival
depends on grownups around you. So it does feel like life or death.
And when something is happening that feels like life or death and you're putting
(14:49):
it into your memories, it gets put in there a little bit differently.
And so I think it's harder to see. and
that's like those memes that are so
unrecognizable by the time
we see our kids laughing at them and we're
like why is that funny and they're like oh because of this but you have to go
(15:12):
back like eight layers before you can get to the first thing and the first thing
maybe is only funny because it's sort of like this other thing and part of what
makes an internet meme successful is its reuse.
So many people saw it that they can have that shared experience.
But if you weren't there when it happened, you don't have that context.
(15:32):
If you aren't seeing it online in a way that is understandable for you,
you don't have that context.
And it also mutates by adding other memes or other contexts.
So sometimes the memes that
are there that people understand what it is
it's because they followed all the steps to get there
(15:53):
and they can recognize all those parts in it
whereas other people may may struggle with it
and that and that's why that yes yes no is so funny
because they literally with the person who is
the producer who came in and had the
least technical savvy of everybody would have to come in and they would spend
sometimes entire episodes just taking this one picture when some text text apart
(16:17):
and explaining that it's coming from this Philadelphia 76ers player and it's
referencing this other thing over here and the other thing in that part.
Yes. One year we did Geek Camp and had memes as a theme.
Anyway, it's called Loss, and you can Google it, but it's four squares of an
(16:39):
internet comic. The reason the original had an impact is because it had been
a little bit more lighthearted.
And then suddenly there was a more serious one.
And the frames are the first frame is a guy running into the emergency room.
The second frame is a guy like leaning over the intake desk at the emergency
(17:00):
room. The third frame is the guy talking to a doctor with sad faces.
And the fourth frame is the guy standing over a bed, and the other main character
is laying in the bed crying.
And so it's distinct shapes. shapes
the first one i found when i was looking it up today
(17:21):
was just cuts from never
gonna give you up of his hands in the
shapes that the people are in in that comic and
it shouldn't be funny but it really it really so why shouldn't it be funny because
it's just hands oh i i thought you meant because of the original seriousness
(17:44):
of that that's really interesting because i had someone Someone say to me this week, humor is anxiety.
Something is funny because it scares us. If we can make a joke about it,
then it's less scary. Why are you making that face?
I'm making that face because every time somebody tells me what comedy is,
I think of Alan Alton and that Woody Allen thing.
(18:06):
Comedy is tragedy plus time. It's tragedy plus time. That's what makes things funny. Yeah.
The relational image is one of the things that is applicable this week.
Yes. What is another concept that you've identified?
When we open our staff meetings, we ask a silly question.
(18:27):
And I was actually thinking about LaShawn and that meeting.
So I was trying to come up with like some kind of, if you were a garden or,
right? And I wound up with socks.
But it went not just to us talking about like what socks we would be,
But also getting into the model me and the not me that Maureen Walker talks
(18:50):
about and then trying to figure out what our model me sucks are and what our not me sucks are,
which was playing with metaphor.
And because we all had in other staff meetings had these long conversations
about like our model me idea about like who we are as therapists can get in
(19:12):
the way of being a good therapist.
It was fun to take it then and apply it to socks.
I would be warm and comfortable and not full of holes. And not full of holes.
So the model me and not me is part
of disruptive empathy sections in maureen's book
(19:33):
when getting along is not enough model me
is an identity that represents how we want to be seen in the world the model
me is likely to be a fixed and idealized image that counters a companion not
me identity which is capable of doing or saying things about which we should
which we would be embarrassed or ashamed.
(19:54):
What I want to point out is the fixed and idealized. That's why we need play,
because we get fixed and stuck.
So the play would maybe try on the not me.
Yeah, lean into it. I mean, not if it's gonna hurt you or somebody,
but, you know, really exploring, like, how bad would that be?
(20:14):
And sometimes it could get ridiculous. Yes.
So model me and not me. I'm going to point out that two cards are like literal
metaphors, boundaries, because you don't actually build boundaries, right?
And so shifting how you imagine them, which is something we do in RCT,
(20:36):
rather than as like something that you build to keep people from crossing,
instead seeing it as a place where you can meet, which is an RCT way of seeing them.
Or seeing them as something that you state rather than set.
Just those little shifts in how you imagine boundaries. Yeah,
it changes what you have in your mind.
(20:58):
And the other actual metaphor is mud.
Mud. Mud is the mystery, uncertainty, and doubt that we must embrace in order
to move toward real relationship. relationship.
The way that we talk about it when we reference it is messy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
(21:20):
So our next cadre session is coming up on March 24th from one to three Eastern time.
This time we're going to have it just entirely online.
So it's a zoom, but we will be discussing things that we just discussed here,
metaphors and play and these concepts, RCT concepts.
Music.
(21:47):
This episode of Cadre was a production of the Bloomington Center for Connection,
an organization using relational cultural theory to promote social change through connection.
This conversation between Kevin McKeese and Amy McKeese LCSW took place on March
17th, 2024 in Bloomington, Indiana, and was edited for this podcast by Kevin McKeese.
Theme music lovingly sampled from Positive Thinking and Serpentine by Vlad Glushenko.
(22:12):
Follow Bloomington Centre for Connection on Facebook and other social media platforms.
Music.
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