What Do Motivational Interviewing and Metaphor Have to Do With Each Other?
A therapist's fifteen-year relationship with a single metaphor — and what it taught her about ownership, curiosity, and the ethics of helping someone else make meaning.
By Janeth Nuñez del Prado, LCSW | Desert Bloom Psychology & Consulting.
The Canoe
I will never forget the moment, fifteen years ago, sitting in a graduate school classroom, when my professor introduced Motivational Interviewing as a way to "ride with clients down the river of change."
The OARS skills — Open-ended questions, Affirmations, Reflections, Summaries — were the paddles that helped us navigate. Then the professor paused, and the students took the metaphor further. One pointed out that rivers have currents. Sometimes the water is calm. Sometimes it's rolling rapids. We talked about how there are moments when simply not falling out is an accomplishment. We talked about paddling together, moving with the current instead of fighting it.
Little by little, the river stopped being an illustration and became a way of understanding the work itself — and our role as clinicians who carry the incredible honor of accompanying people through change, rather than steering it for them.
I don't remember the PowerPoint from that day. I don't remember the bullet points, or the lecture outline.
But I remember the river.
Fifteen years later, I still think about it.
Now I teach it.
It Is Not Like Something
Many Western educational traditions treat metaphor primarily as a teaching tool—a way of illustrating a concept rather than a way of knowing.
I grew up in a culture where metaphor was not like something. It was the thing itself.
"Una no se seca la ropa con la luz de mañana."
Tomorrow's sun won't dry today's laundry.
It means you can't live today on tomorrow's resources. Work with the light you have now. Hope exists, but hope alone can't accomplish today's tasks.
It is not like the thing. It is the thing. And it's a lesson that shapes how many children learn to think before they ever learn to name it as thinking.
We perceive experience through images, symbols, meaning — long before we perceive it through language built for explaining. The subconscious speaks in symbols. When we dream, we rarely dream about things as they are; we dream in symbols, because this is one of the deepest ways we make meaning and come to know something.
We certainly don't dream in PowerPoint slides. Gracias a Dios.
I have come to think of this as a kind of stewardship — metaphor stewardship — the practice of caring for someone else's symbolic world without assuming ownership of its meaning. What that means, and what it looks like in actual clinical practice, will take the rest of this essay to show.
Clients Already Speak in Metaphor
Clients — especially in seasons of deep stress, trauma, or transformation — naturally speak in metaphor. Those metaphors become the building blocks of the stories people tell themselves about who they are, what has happened to them, and what they can expect from the world.These are the moments when the ordinary words no longer meet the moment, and the psyche reaches for image instead. Symbols can hold what language alone cannot fully convey.
They say things like:
"I feel such a heaviness in my chest."
"I am drowning."
"I don't recognize myself anymore."
None of these are literal. None are quite figurative either. They are maps of how a person is experiencing themselves and the world.
It is not like a map. It is a map.
What Reflective Listening Is Actually Reflecting
One core skill in Motivational Interviewing is reflective listening. When used well, reflections communicate back to clients the deeper meaning beneath what they are saying. It does more than mirror content or emotion. A skillful reflection reveals the architecture of someone's inner world.
Reflections should stay grounded in the patterns you've heard and the values the client holds. A reflection communicates that you are listening, that you care. A good complex reflection communicates something more: that the client is deeply seen, and accepted.
A reflection is also a decision point. Every time a client offers us a metaphor, we have four options:
We can ignore it.
We can explain it.
We can replace it with our own meaning.
Or we can enter it with curiosity.
Curiosity is the doorway. Interpretation, when it comes, should emerge from the client's own exploration rather than the clinician's first impression.
The Ethics of Ownership
Client: "I feel like I'm drowning."
Therapist A: "It sounds like you're feeling overwhelmed."
or
Therapist A: "It sounds like you're losing control."
or
Therapist A: "I wonder if this is your trauma coming up."
All of those might be accurate.
Another therapist responds differently.
Therapist B: "That sounds really hard. Tell me about the water."
On the surface, this looks like a difference in technique. I think it is more than that.
It's a difference in who gets to author the meaning of an experience.
Every act of assigning meaning to someone else's experience is a small act of authority. Clinicians already hold real authority in the room: credentialed language, diagnostic frameworks, positions of social privilege, and, at times, the trust — or even idealization — that clients place in us. This authority is inherent in the relationship and deserves to be named.
Because of that, we should approach interpretation with humility. To offer an interpretation before fully understanding a client's own sense of it is to assume expertise in an experience that ultimately belongs to them. Interpretation may eventually become part of the therapeutic process. It simply shouldn't be our first instinct.
I have come to think of this the way I think of a garden. The client is the gardener. I am not. My role is to tend the conditions — to protect the soil, to keep the weeds back, to make sure there is enough light. What grows, and when, and in what shape, belongs to them.
I have learned this the harder way too — watching what happens when meaning is handed over before the client's own has finished forming. When a person is in the middle of something still forming — grief, trauma, a self dissolving and reorganizing — premature interpretation and therapist-imposed meaning-making is one of the fastest ways the opening closes again. The psyche, sensing its experience is about to be collapsed into someone else's framework before it is ready, retreats. What might have grown into something whole gets picked before it has roots.
This is why curiosity is essential, and curiosity does not mean passivity. Motivational Interviewing is an active, directional approach to conversation. The clinician listens carefully for values, strengths, hopes, current challenges to change, and past successes. We choose what language to reflect, what to ask about, and how to hold up a mirror to the distance between what someone wants for their life and what their life currently looks like. Direction exists throughout the conversation. The difference is that the direction grows from the client's own language rather than being imposed from ours.
The client who says, "I am drowning," is not asking you to rush into problem-solving or offer solutions. They are asking you to stay with them long enough to understand the water. From there, you can help them discover what has kept them afloat, where the current is carrying them, and which direction they want to swim.
When the Therapist Has a Metaphor
Everything I've written so far might sound as though the therapist's role is simply to recognize and protect the client's metaphors. That is certainly a central part of the story of therapy, but it isn't the whole book.
There are two human beings in the room. Two minds making meaning. Two brains that naturally organize experience through images, symbols, and patterns. Sometimes — especially after years of sitting with people — a metaphor quietly (or loudly!) appears in the therapist's mind.
There is certainly room for that in metaphor stewardship.
The difference lies in how it is offered.
A metaphor offered by the therapist with humility becomes an invitation into shared curiosity. The client remains free to embrace it, reshape it, or leave it behind. Ownership of meaning never leaves the client.
My own therapeutic style includes a great deal of humor. Many of the people I work with carry profound trauma, and trauma work deserves room to breathe — and sometimes even laugh.
I have been known to say,
"Feel free to tell me, 'Janeth, you're being too much of a hippie again,' but an image just popped into my head..."
Imagine a client who has spent the session talking about honesty, integrity, and the kind of person they want to become, and they are struggling with a difficult decision. I might find myself wondering aloud:
"As you've been talking, I've been thinking about your values as a compass. When you think of the decision you are struggling with, and you picture your values as a compass, where does the compass seem to be pointing?"
Motivational Interviewing is built on the belief that lasting change grows from the inside out. I believe meaning does, too. I offer the image as something to think with, not as a verdict. The client decides whether it fits, whether it needs reshaping, or whether it belongs nowhere near their experience. My role is to wonder alongside them, trusting that they remain the expert on the meaning of their own life.
Sometimes it won't.
Sometimes it will reveal a place on the map that neither person knew was there.
Still in the Canoe
Fifteen years ago, a professor handed me a metaphor.
I thought he was teaching me Motivational Interviewing.
What he was really teaching me was how to trust another person's language before reaching for my own.
I am still in the canoe.
I don't always know where the current will take us.
Sometimes the water feels familiar.
Sometimes the river opens into water I never knew existed.
But I've learned that people rarely need someone to paddle for them.
They need someone willing to keep paddling beside them, curious about the river only they can see.
That, to me, is the heart of Motivational Interviewing. It is also the heart of the workshop I'll be teaching this August.
If this way of thinking resonates with you, I'd love to have you with me for Motivational Interviewing and the Ethics of Behavior Change — Friday, August 14, 2026, at Heart Healing Center.
We'll spend the day practicing the skills, exploring ethics, and learning how to become careful stewards of the stories people entrust to us.
Approved for 6 Ethics CEUs · Limited to 25 Participants · $200 + GRT
Register: desertbloompsych.com/trainings
A Gentle Invitation
If something in this article speaks to you, I invite you to sit with a few questions.
What feelings came up while you were reading it?
Were there certain sections that resonated more than others? Why?
Did any part of this remind you of your own experience? Which part — and why?
What are the tools you already use?
Which cases feel like small waves? Which ones feel like riptides?
When do you know it's time to find the cove?
You do not have to have the answers.
The first step is asking the questions.
And in the asking, reflective practice begins.
This piece is intended for informational purposes and is not a substitute for individualized mental health care. Clients have been de-identified to protect confidentiality.