I have spent a chunk of time in therapy.

Often, when trying to explain my thought processes, I gravitate towards metaphors that have their roots in a domain in which I am more comfortable: physics & maths & earth science. This means I have found myself explaining the inverse-square law, or the geologic principle of superposition, to the person in the chair opposite in order to help them understand me.

I doubt I'm the only one. And this makes me curious as to what other science-y metaphors, however tenuous, might have been / could be used.

Additionally, I wonder there is any value in cataloguing these^[1]?

for example

Maybe you behave like an ice-marginal lake, filling up until you drain catastrophically.

Instead getting angier at a linear rate, a logistic model might be more appropriate at representing the path between not angry and angry.

Sometimes you might wish your springs (strategies for coping) were joined in parallel rather than series.

Perhaps you woke up feeling like a double compound pendulum, which means, for some reason, that if you do erupt today it'll be more effusive.

Or regelation might aptly describe your response to pressure.

Do you only make covalent bonds?

When navigating life's difficulties do you keep forgetting to account for magnetic declination?

a cursory search

A quick search^[2] for therapy metaphors throws up some research on the efficacy of metaphors; the difference between patient-led and therapist-led metaphors^[3]; and a few .pdfs containing some common and clichéd metaphors^[4]. However, I could not find, unsurprisingly, a library of nerdy metaphors. I want something that would only make sense to a computational chemist, or a string theorist, or a biophysicist. I want to hear about how it was genuinely useful to think about your relationships by looking at them through the lens of lenses: diffraction and refraction.

please share

I would like to low-key curate a collection of these. If you feel comfortable sharing some examples, I would love to hear them - so do get in touch.

footnotes