Clients, especially those entering the work of change, often speak in images, stories, comparisons, fragments of memory, family sayings, cultural references, symbols, and metaphors.

A relationship feels like walking on eggshells.
Someone feels like they are drowning.
Another person is the glue holding the family together.
Someone else simply says, I’m lost.

These expressions tell us something about the world as the client is experiencing it. They can hold fear, ambivalence, identity, values, relationships, culture, history, and possibilities for change.

But when a client offers us a metaphor or a story, what do we do with it?

This 3-hour interactive training explores how clinicians can use the Spirit and skills of Motivational Interviewing to work with metaphor, story, and meaning while preserving the client’s autonomy and authorship.

At the center of the training is a framework I call metaphor stewardship: noticing, honoring, and carefully tending to the metaphors clients bring into the conversation without taking ownership of them or deciding what they mean.

Using MI Spirit — partnership, acceptance, compassion, and empowerment — participants will practice slowing down around meaningful language, reflecting it back, becoming curious about it, and using evocative questions to help clients explore the worlds their own metaphors open.

We will also explore the larger stories through which people understand their lives.

Families, communities, cultures, religions, and societies pass down stories about what it means to be strong, responsible, successful, loyal, safe, worthy, feminine, masculine, independent, self-sacrificing, or a good member of a family or community. Some of these stories sustain us, constrain us, and others do both. 

Culture and language therefore matter deeply to meaning-making. A metaphor, family saying, symbol, or story cannot be assumed to mean the same thing across people or contexts. Participants will explore how culture, language, family, community, migration, spirituality, identity, social location, and lived experience shape the meanings people make — and how cultural humility allows us to approach those meanings with curiosity rather than interpretation.

From there, we will move from metaphor into myth.

Using the Hero’s Journey as one example of an archetypal narrative, we will explore how human beings use larger stories to make sense of struggle, departure, uncertainty, identity, loss, transformation, and return. We will consider how archetypal narratives can create language for experiences that are difficult to name, while also examining whose stories are represented in familiar frameworks and what cultural assumptions they may carry.

We can tune our ears to listen for change talk, meaning-making, and stories of resilience, supporting clients as they make meaning of their own journeys while resisting the fixing reflex and the risk of colonizing meaning.

Through clinical vignettes, storytelling, experiential exercises, guided reflection, and practice, participants will learn ways to follow metaphor and narrative into conversations about ambivalence, values, identity, culture, belonging, motivation, and change while maintaining an MI-consistent stance of curiosity, humility, and respect for autonomy.

What We’ll Explore

• MI Spirit as a foundation for meaning-making: partnership, acceptance, compassion, and empowerment

• Metaphor stewardship: recognizing and deepening client-generated metaphors while preserving client authorship

• Listening for spontaneous metaphors, recurring images, symbols, family sayings, and stories in clinical conversations

• Using reflective listening to deepen metaphor without imposing interpretation

• Evocative questions that help clients explore the meaning of their own language

• Following metaphor into conversations about ambivalence, values, identity, motivation, and change

• How culture and language shape metaphor, narrative, and meaning

• Cultural and intergenerational stories about responsibility, gender, family roles, belonging, safety, sacrifice, strength, vulnerability, and possibility

• Using cultural humility when clinician and client may understand the same image, value, or story differently

• Myth and archetypal story as tools for meaning-making

• The Hero’s Journey as one framework for exploring struggle, transition, transformation, identity, and return

• Examining the cultural assumptions embedded in familiar narrative frameworks

• Recognizing when our own preferred interpretations and stories begin entering the clinical conversation

• Maintaining curiosity and humility while helping clients discover new meanings and possibilities

Participants Will Leave With

• Greater confidence recognizing metaphor, story, and meaning in everyday clinical language

• A practical framework for metaphor stewardship

• Experience using MI-consistent reflections and evocative questions to deepen client-generated meaning

• Practical ways to use metaphor to explore ambivalence, values, identity, culture, and motivation for change

• Greater awareness of how culture, language, family, community, and lived experience shape the stories people tell about themselves

• Stronger skills for exploring culturally situated meaning without assuming shared interpretation

• A thoughtful framework for incorporating myth and the Hero’s Journey into clinical meaning-making

• Greater awareness of how clinicians' own stories, values, and cultural assumptions influence what we notice and how we listen

• Opportunities to apply these ideas through clinical vignettes, storytelling, reflection, and experiential practice