Hi all, I was at a talk by Charles Faulkner the other night, where he was talking about the correspondences between primary metaphor (as in Lakoff and Johnson and other cognitive linguistics books) and 'clusters of submodalities'.

The small audience were mostly experienced NLPers, and whole notion seemed to be new to them. I'm wondering if anyone here knows whether it's been discussed in NLP before.

I've had a go at a fuller explanation in the article extract below.

Judy

Primary metaphor and submodalities

The metaphors we use are far from being random. They are grounded in our embodied experience – the reality of being a person living in a body, on a planet, under gravity.

Lakoff and Johnson’s latest book, Philosophy In The Flesh, points out that the youngest baby will quickly learn that warmth means affection, love and intimacy, that important things are big. The toddler learns to categorise things into containers, and to walk towards the things he wants. All these shared human experiences generate a set of metaphors we all tend to share – primary metaphors.

From an NLP point of view, this knowledge makes new sense of our familiar submodalities. You may have noticed that you think of important things as higher up than less important things. Funnily enough, that fits exactly with the primary metaphor ‘Important is Up’. For anyone used to submodality work, a short study of primary metaphors quickly reveals correlations with commonly-observed patterns, and provides a much more memorable structure than the traditional VAK lists found on many trainings.

So, it’s clear many humans share similar metaphors. But here’s a trap! While we share the broad, underlying metaphor, the details are invariably different for each individual. And the devil – and the power – is in the detail.

Think of a tree.

What kind of tree is your tree?

I can safely say it will be substantially different from the one I’m thinking of. It could be any one of thousands of species. It could be imagined at any season of the year. It could be in a particular location, or imagined on its own. It could look ‘real’, or be like a photograph, or a cartoon. Very soon, the number of potential differences outweighs the similarities.

As we know from NLP, people tend to treat their world internal world as if it’s real. Experience suggests that this is even more important at a metaphoric level than it is in the everyday world.

People’s metaphors, and the symbols within them, often have deep, personal significance. Roughly imposing assumptions can feel physically painful!

And that’s why, to get the very best from exploring a person’s metaphoric world, great care needs to be taken to ‘pollute’ the client’s metaphoric landscape as little as possible. In Clean work, we use only the client’s own words and gestures, plus David Grove's deceptively-simple questions.