Fish in the Water
An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Metaphor
We’re the fish, and our language is the water. How would a fish know if they were wet
if they’d never been out of the water? Jumping out of the water helps you to notice the
water.
An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Metaphor
We’re the fish, and our language is the water. How would a fish know if they were wet
if they’d never been out of the water? Jumping out of the water helps you to notice the
water.
An Acceptance and Commitment metaphor A farmer has an old, useless mule that falls into a dry, abandoned well. Upon realizing that he is stuck, the mule becomes afraid and begins to bray. The farmer, who hears the mule crying, decides that instead of pulling him out, he will just bury the creature in the…
Suppose you go skiing. You take a lift to the top of a hill, and you are just about to ski down the hill when a man comes along and asks where you are going. “Iʼm going to the lodge at the bottom,” you reply. He says, “I can help you with that,” and promptly…
Imagine you are going on a journey. Somewhere really special, where you really want to go, somewhere you’ve wanted to go your whole life. When you get to the train station you see two trains. One is a bit odd-looking and strange, some of the seats look a bit hard and overall it looks a…
An Acceptance and Commitment Metaphor There are things in our language that draw us into needless psychological battles, and it is good to get a sense of how this happens so that we can learn to avoid them. One of the worst tricks language plays on us is in the area of evaluations. For language to work at…
Sandstorms are violent wind storms that occur in the desert when high winds lift particles of sand into the air thus unleashing a turbulent and suffocating cloud of sand. They can occur unexpectedly and last for as little as a few minutes or as long as a few months. Regardless of how long they last,…
The Cold Shower Based on a metaphor submitted to ACBS by Sarah McCormack You are thinking of taking a shower but you discover there is no hot water: If you had the choice to have a cold shower…or not to, you might choose not to. Because it’s cold, it’d be uncomfortable, you could do without…