When people try to describe emotional experiences, they often reach for imagery.
“I feel like I’m carrying something heavy.”
“It’s like I’m stuck in a storm.”
“My mind won’t stop racing.”
Metaphors are not accidental. They are one of the primary ways human beings translate complex internal experiences into language. In therapeutic settings, this natural tendency becomes clinically meaningful.
Research on embodied metaphors suggests that describing emotions using sensory-based imagery, such as weight, temperature, movement, or spatial qualities, can increase emotional clarity and insight (Hicks et al., 2026). Rather than simply labeling an emotion, metaphor allows individuals to organize and externalize the experience. This shift can make overwhelming feelings more accessible and easier to reflect upon.
Metaphor, in a sense, functions as more than creative expression. It becomes a bridge between the felt experience and conscious understanding.
Why Metaphors Support Emotional Processing
Emotions can be difficult to articulate. Metaphors help give them structure.
In a qualitative study examining the use of embodied metaphors, participants reported that sensory imagery allowed them to tell more complete emotional stories and gain perspective on difficult experiences (Hicks et al., 2026). Importantly, metaphors appeared to create psychological distance, not detachment, but enough separation to enable reflection rather than immersion.
This distance can be especially helpful in therapeutic contexts. Instead of being consumed by an experience, a person can observe, describe, and explore it.
The same research also found that metaphors are most effective when they align with an individual’s natural sensory strengths (Hicks et al., 2026). Some people experience visually, others somatically. Therapy, therefore, uses metaphor collaboratively, ensuring that the imagery resonates rather than feels imposed.
Play Therapy: Imagination as a Mechanism of Healing
In work with children, metaphor and imagination are central.
Children do not typically process trauma through abstract verbal explanation. Instead, they communicate symbolically, through play, characters and narrative. Research in child trauma treatment indicates that imagination is not merely expressive but developmentally and therapeutically significant (Haen, 2020).
Pretend play provides what researchers describe as an “as if” space, an intermediate zone between reality and imagination where difficult themes can be explored safely (Haen, 2020). Within this space, children can experiment with roles, rehearse responses, and symbolically represent experiences that would otherwise feel overwhelming.
However, trauma can restrict this imaginative capacity. Rather than dynamic storytelling, play may become repetitive and rigid, reenacting distressing themes without resolution (Haen, 2020). Therapeutic intervention supports a shift from fixed reenactment toward moving from helpless character to helper; they may begin to experience increased agency and mastery (Haen, 2020)
In this context, metaphor restores possibility.
Psychodynamic Approaches: Metaphor as Emotional Meaning
Adults, like children, often express emotional realities through symbolic language.
Statements such as “I feel invisible” or “I’m walking on eggshells” are not simply figures of speech. They encapsulate relational and emotional patterns. Psychodynamic approaches recognize that recurring images and themes may reflect underlying experiences that have not yet been fully integrated into conscious awareness.
Embodied metaphor research suggests that imagery capturing multiple aspects of experience, sensory, emotional, and relational, can facilitate deeper insight (Hicks et al., 2026). By staying with the metaphor rather than immediately analyzing it, therapy allows meaning to unfold gradually.
Metaphor, in this framework, provides access to emotional truth without requiring immediate confrontation.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): Changing the Function of Thoughts
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is particularly well known for its structured use of metaphor.
ACT does not aim to eliminate difficult thoughts. Instead, it seeks to change how individuals relate to them. Within the ACT model, psychological suffering is often linked to processes such as experiential avoidance and cognitive fusion, the tendency to take thoughts literally and allow them to dictate behaviour (Hayes et al., 2012).
Metaphors are used to promote cognitive defusion, which involves creating distance between oneself and one’s thoughts. For example, individuals may be invited to imagine their thoughts as passengers on a bus: the thoughts may speak loudly, but they do not control the direction of travel (Hayes et al., 2012). Similarly, thoughts may be compared to clouds passing through the sky – noticed, but not clung to.
The aim is not to argue with the mind, but to loosen its grip.
A Shared Mechanism Across Approaches
Although therapeutic modalities differ in language and emphasis, the use of metaphor reveals a common principle.
- Research on embodied metaphors demonstrates that imagery enhances emotional clarity and perspective (Hicks et al., 2026)
- Child Trauma research shows that imagination and symbolic play restore flexibility and agency following overwhelming experiences (Haen, 2020)
- ACT research highlights how metaphor promotes psychological flexibility by shifting the relationship to internal experiences (Hayes et al., 2012)
Across these approaches, metaphor creates distance without disconnection. It allows individuals to observe their experience rather than be consumed by it. It transforms abstract suffering into something that can be examined, understood, and gradually reshaped.
Reflection
If emotional experiences are often difficult to name directly, it is not because something is wrong. It is because human emotion is complex.
Metaphors provide language where literal words fall short. They create structure where there was overwhelm. They allow movement where there was rigidity.
In therapy, finding the right metaphor is not about being creative. It is about creating the conditions for understanding, flexibility, and ultimately, healing.
References
Haen, C. (2020). The roles of metaphor and imagination in child trauma treatment. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 19(1), 42–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/15289168.2020.1717171
Hayes, S. C., Pistorello, J., & Levin, M. E. (2012). Acceptance and commitment therapy as a unified model of behavior change. The Counseling Psychologist, 40(7), 976–1002. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000012460836
Hicks, K., Cleveland, M., & Canessa-Pollard, V. (2026). Finding the words to say how you feel: Experiences of using embodied metaphors. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515070.2026.2616754
