Ep 179: The Metaphoric Two Step

What if you could transform a hard, spinning, overwhelming emotion into something useful — in as little as thirty seconds? This episode teaches exactly that.

The Metaphoric Two-Step is a tool rooted in Marie's training as a hypnotist, and it's applicable to anyone at any age. It's how she helped her son navigate panic attacks around bullying in kindergarten. It's what left her mom — a retired therapist who literally wrote her thesis on the use of metaphor in psychology — completely astounded. And it's a practice Marie returns to again and again to clear her emotional space so her mind can follow.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• Why dropping into your body first thing in the morning — before trying to "fix" your mindset — is the move that actually works
• How emotions carry data, and what you miss when you shove them down or act them out instead of feeling them
• The 90-second practice for sensing where an emotion lives in your body and using metaphor to understand it more deeply
• How metaphor allows the brain to access both hemispheres, decreasing anxiety and lowering resistance to the emotional state 
• Why allowing emotions should be followed by alchemizing them into something that serves you 
• How to use visualization to transform that metaphor into something more helpful — a keystone image you can return to anytime, anywhere
• How to anchor that image to invoke it and change your emotional state at any time you need to 
• Why this tool works for kids, adults, seasoned therapists, and everyone in between. (And yes — it's a little bit like the Boggart in Harry Potter. If you know, you know.)

Mentioned in this episode:

• The Metaphoric Two-Step tool (from Marie's hypnosis training)
• Harry Potter — the Boggart scene

Ready to go deeper?

The Moxie Mastermind is enrolling for the September cohort now. Find the application at dothebloom.com.

How to connect with Marie:

• On the Web | The Local Bloom
• Instagram: @the.bloom.coach
• All Things Marie on LinkTree

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, Certified Coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we have today an episode where I'm drilling down to give you a quick cheat sheet into one of the most valuable tools that my clients use every single day just to stay in the energy that they want to be in. And I'm gonna tell you that this is called the metaphoric two-step. It is something that I was trained in during my self-hypnosis, hypnosis, my training to be a hypnotist with Melissa Tears, who lives in New York and is an incredible hypnotist. This is during my work in training to work with neuroplasticity and neural reprogramming to reprogram the way that our system responds to triggers in the environment around us. And that happens at an alert awake state. And also during that training, I was trained as a hypnotist. So this is one of the tools that I learned in that training program. And it's something that I've had so much traction around lately with multiple different clients that I work with. I use this all the time. I've mentioned on the podcast that I used this with my son when he was experiencing hardship in his school environment when he was younger. There was a bullying situation and he was processing a lot of emotion. It was really hard. And I used this with him, and he's got this in his tool belt now, and he uses it as well. And recently I was using it with my mom, and I'm going to tell you the story about that. But first, I want to say before we dig into the metaphoric two-step, that the summer is rolling right now. We are having the most amazing summer together, me and my family. And one of the things that uh I did on that I had on my summer bucket list, my personal summer bucket list, was to run my very first moxie mixer. So one of my dreams is that not only is the Moxie Mastermind a six-month mastermind that people, you know, come into to make their ideas into real things, to get this sisterhood of ride or die, other women who are living from their moxie, living these incredible, like expressed, fun, wonderful, loving, courageous lives that feel like freedom and that feel like themselves, but they're also pulling off some badass stuff in the world, uh, putting their ideas into the world to make the world a better place. And that's what we're all about in the Moxie. And one of my ideas here is not only that the Moxie is a mastermind group that women are in, but also there are live events that keep us really connected to one another. So these are like four or five times a year. And two of those live events are retreats. So I ran my first retreat this year for Moxie, and that was amazing. Our next one's coming up this fall. And then that we also have live events within San Diego. So I live in San Diego and I had my first one last week and crashed it off my bucket list. So the Moxie mixer was at a local, my friend's house. It was so beautiful overlooking the canyon in San Diego. And I had this moment where I was just looking around with the sunlight kind of filtering down through my friend's orange umbrellas. They were so on brand, I couldn't believe it, in his backyard. We were sitting by the pool. It was this beautiful home overlooking the canyon. We had had these charcuterie boards and mocktails and frose, and everyone was sitting around and we were coaching for about an hour and a half, two hours there. And it was the end of the evening, and I'm sitting there just realizing that just happened. This I had this idea like two months ago or something like that, right? And it's just like watching these ideas come real, become real one after another after another, is so satisfying. But what makes it so incredibly satisfying is hearing the impact that they're having on the world around me. So at the end of that, I was looking around at all these faces, and one of the women that's in the Moxie Mastermind, so the mixer is like people in the Moxie Mastermind and also other women that just want to be a part of the community. One of the women that's in the Moxie Mastermind was saying to somebody else and sharing with a group, you know, I've never wanted to be in a group coaching program. I never would have done it, but I trust Marie, and she told me that's what's next for me. And so I came into the Moxie Mastermind and now I never want to leave. She said, I'm just addicted to it. It like helps make me stronger and clearer and so powerful, and it's helped me so much in my business financially and in connection and in every other way. And I just want to always be in it. And that was so beautiful to just hear this idea that was just an idea five months ago has just changed people's lives now that they're in it. And then at the event itself, a woman said at the closing, she said, I just want every single woman to know that every woman that got coached, nothing that anybody said wasn't directly applicable to me. She said, Every single thing that every single one of you had Marie coach you on was something that benefited me directly because I've experienced some form of every single thing that you said in my own life. And what was shocking and amazing about that, it's not shocking, but it's like every single time I hear that. I heard it again today in the Bloom Room. Someone said, I got so much from every single thing that every person got coached on, is that people got coached on all different kinds of things. And what it does over and over again is it being in groups where we're sharing and communicating and getting coaching and working through our challenges, what it does is it normalizes the challenges that we face. We all at some points feel alone and feel like we're weird or like we're the only one facing the challenges that we have, especially in groups of people that just look like they have their shit together and where we're pulling off a lot, running businesses, but we all have challenges. And it's so beautiful to just sit there and hear the impact that these ideas are having on the world, and they wouldn't have that impact if I didn't just move through self-doubt, move through what's hard, and keep putting these ideas out there to make the world a better place. So, this is me sharing how good it feels to me and how good it feels to watch all of these women making their ideas real, and how much I encourage you, whatever that idea is that's in your mind, to make it real, to put it out there, to take action. This is your one precious life. And it's up to you, whether what you do with it. Get into groups of women, get into groups of people that can lift you up and inspire you and believe in your best self to help you pull this off. But we want to, we want what you've got. We want what you have to contribute. And if you'd like to join us in the Moxie Mastermind, we are enrolling this month for our next cohort, which starts in September. And we've got a rad group of women, and we are have a few more spots. So reach out to me if you if those spots are yours, DM me at the.bloom.coach. So I was sitting and talking to my mom last week, the week before. Oh my gosh, summertime warp. I don't even know. When I was staying with my parents for a week, and I was talking to my mom about the metaphoric two-step, which is a tool that we use all the time in my work because every single one of us has emotions to process. I use this tool every single morning before I start my meditation. So here's what I want to say to preempt before I go into the brief description of how to use this tool. It's that Eckhart Tole said, I actually saw this this morning, he said something that basically said, when we focus on the present moment, we're pulling ourselves out of the natural automatic self-hypnosis that's happening all the time. Our thoughts are running on automatic, and they're providing this backdrop of like hypnosis, basically. They're hypnotizing us into believing that the world is a certain way. And I was like laughing. I sent the screenshot to a couple of my clients because that's so true. We're hypnotizing ourselves automatically all the time, anyways, which is such a good foundation to motivate you to hypnotize yourself to think what you want to think, to use help self-hypnosis in the mornings to get your subconscious mind lined up in a way that will support you throughout your day, throughout your week, throughout your life. Now, the metaphoric two-step is a tool that you can use anytime during the day to process emotion. Like I told you, I used it with my son when he was experiencing anxiety. I use it with myself all the time. But also you can use it before you head into a meditation or a self-hypnosis, and it clears out your system. So you don't have to fight the thinking mind so hard. So I was describing this to my mom, and I found out, my mom was a therapist her entire life, and I found out in this conversation that she actually wrote her whole thesis on metaphor and the use of metaphor in psychology. And we were like geeking out on this together. Her thesis, by the way, was like a 75-page paper that she was encouraged to publish, but it burned up in the fire because at that time things weren't digitized. And so when our house burnt down the first time, her we lost her thesis with it, which I am so sad I never got to read my mom's thesis on metaphor. But as we were geeking out about this, I described the process to her, and she has started to use it before her meditations, and she meditates every day, and she has been reaching out to me and telling me how amazing this tool has been for her and how significant it has been in helping her to clear her mind. So the way that the tool works, and I use it every single morning first thing before I start my meditation, is I drop down into my body. So you'll feel an emotion, and you drop down into your body and ask yourself, what emotion is there? Where is it in your body? And you can turn down the dial on your thinking mind if you'd like to. I like to see a volume knob and literally visualize myself turning that volume knob all the way down, dropping down into my physical body and saying, What is the emotion that's there? Where is it in my body? What color is it? What shape is it? Is it moving? Is it still? Is it spiky? Is it round? Is it soft? Is it hard? What is it like? And then you ask yourself, if it were a thing, what would it be? So the first step is to move towards the emotion and embrace it, and then ask yourself, what would it be if it were a thing? Maybe it would be a heavy stone, maybe it would be a little weed. Sometimes I've had people describe it as a ball of knotted yarn, or as a wave that they're being tumbled around in, or as a bunch of spiders, like people will describe it in many different ways. And then you ask yourself, What would it need to change? And just see what happens. So, for instance, if it is a hard stone in the middle of your chest and you say, What would it need to change? You might need to see that stone start to disintegrate into tiny grains of sand. And then you might see a gust of wind come through and just blow the sand so that it all clears out. Maybe it turns into like glittery dust and it just sparkles there. If it is uh a spider or a bunch of spiders, maybe what it needs is for all of those spiders to kind of like gather together and start kind of dancing around each other and moving faster and faster until they get so light that they turn into a cloud and it kind of drifts away. I had someone that had the bones of a house that turned into monarch butterflies and they floated over the ocean. So, whatever it is, it gives your mind access to an emotion that gives you the ability to shift the emotion to something else. In different schools of thinking, people sometimes call this alchemizing your emotion. Dropping into your emotion, sensing it, and then turning that emotion into something else, alchemizing it. So there's lots of different names for this, but here's what I want you to take with you. Number one, when you're feeling an emotion, we tend to want to shove it down, act it out, block it, ignore it, put something else on top of it. And the only way to work through, move through an emotion and have it pass is to embrace it and be with it. So the first step is to embrace the emotion, be there with it. And the second step is to alchemize it, to turn it into something else. And using metaphor in your mind can be an amazing way to give you access to quickly and easily change a feeling that is big and hard into something that moves through you and turns into something else. You can use this anytime during the day that you have an emotion you want to move through. You can use it to clear your mind before meditation, self-hypnosis, or any big event. And any age person can use this. So, for instance, I described my mom, who is an, you know, a lifelong, had a lifelong career as a psych uh as a psychotherapist, used metaphor and she just learned this tool. It has been an incredible support for her. And the last thing that I'll say here is that when you have the second part of that metaphor that's really helpful to you, like the monarchs over the ocean, or like uh, you know, the grains of sand blowing away. Once I had a client that turned this feeling of overwhelm of being spun around in an ocean wave, she realized as we were doing this that she could just put her feet down and stand up and that the waves would then just lap at her knees and she could feel the sun on her face. Whatever that is, when you find a really strong visual that helps you, you can anchor that visual and come back to it anytime you need a reminder of that emotional state. It can kind of hotwire your system back into that beautiful emotional state that gives you access to calm, to flow, to whatever it is that you wanted to anchor in yourself. So, that, my friends, is the metaphoric two-step. I hope that is helpful to you. I use it all of the time. A little cheat sheet for you on one of my favorite tools. And that's what I've got for you this week. I will see you next week. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you gotta come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real. One idea at a time. We'll see you in the bloom room.