The Metaphor Mirror
Clinica Nefrologica Dialisi e Trapianto
Ospedale San Martino
Genoa, Italy
A multiple-phase study addressing staff and patient wellbeing in peritoneal and hemodialysis:
Acute In-Patient Care
Ospedale Galliera
Genoa, Italy
Assessment of metaphor-mirroring as a means of productive emotion-communication: exploration of correlations between TAS-20 alexithymia scores and metaphoric reflections of affect state elicited by metaphoric affect processing. Evaluation includes administration of an adapted version of the 2009 Russell-Barrett Circumflex Model of Affect to quantify shifts of mood quality in relationship to feeling-content, even when feelings themselves remain unchanged.
Pre- and Post-Partum Affect Assessment
Ospedale San Martino
Genoa, Italy
Designing methodology to evaluate the metaphor-mirror document as a qualitative indicator of present-moment emotion-states, and as a possible screening tool for post-partum depression.
S.I.M.P.A.
Italian School of Medicine and Palliative Care
Milan, Italy
Theoretical and experiential workshops in Metaphoric Affect Processing for doctors, nurses and psychologists in cancer, palliative and hospice care.
Day Hospital
Ospedale San Martino
Genoa, Italy
Metaphor-mirroring as support for patients' wellbeing before, during and after chemotherapy treatment sessions, with metaphoric inquiry facilitating open communication and anxiety reduction.
Post-surgical recovery
In-Patient Care
Ospedale San Martino
Genoa, Italy
Metaphor-mirroring to facilitate participants' self-awareness and reporting of emotion-states while improving a sense of wellbeing in the context of treatment and hospitalisation.
University and Public Health Service
In-Patient Care
Ospedale San Martino
Genoa, Italy
Facilitated communication for groups and individuals through the metaphoric identification and verbalization of feelings, particularly among those individuals for whom this posed a challenge.
When used to identify and verbalize emotion surrounding trauma, metaphor-mirroring helps keep participants grounded in the present both conceptually and sensorially. It guides exploration of the feelings being experienced now, in the present with regard to the past, rather than directly exploring the past experience itself.
In MAP, participants actively refrain from revisiting the trauma itself. Instead, present moment sensations of current emotion are explored through a process codified to facilitate an intuitive verbalisation of one's emotional "now", which can then be regulated (experientially "edited") and improved upon through strategic use of metaphor. "Re-experiencing" is actively avoided. While past events and reactions cannot be rewritten, experience shows that present ones can.
Metaphoric affect processing has been codified to keep its participants positioned implicationally (as opposed to propositionally) with regard to difficulties being verbalised. The metaphor-guided introspection is inherently metacognitive. Participants explore feelings from the safe distance of symbolic emotion-perception. Combined with MAP's objective, "definitional" approach to commentary, the result is an introspection that is less likely - than when stimulated by more straight forward dialogue - to trigger counter-productive associative thought-patterns, habitual relational modes, ruminative tendencies and anxiety.
While anecdotal experience has shown MAP to be a productive tool for engaging symptoms of trauma as they present in various contexts, a future research interest is the quantification of effects of Metaphoric Affect Processing in work with PTSD during various stages of treatment
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