Why I think about Anchors as a metaphor

I use a lot of storytelling and metaphors in my work. This is part of who I am, and is partly because it comes natural to me. It’s why I write novels for fun in my spare time. There’s always something powerful for me, the way humans interact with stories and storytelling. It’s one of, if not our oldest art forms. It’s also more than that. Storytelling is a way of communicating ideas to each other when the plain facts themselves may not speak loudly enough. It’s why science needs art. So many of us can recognize Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Bill Nye, but how many Nobel prize winning scientists can the average person name?

Patch Adams is one of the doctors that always stands out to me when I think of doctors because he is such an amazing storyteller. I’ve seen him speak half a dozen times and each one was astounding in terms of his ability to get information across to incredibly diverse groups in ways that each person present would absorb and take things away from the talk. This inspired me early in my career, and is something I’ve thought about a lot over the years. Sometimes in life, it’s not enough to be given the facts, we have to have the story that helps us connect the facts to our lives.

I often think about pain, or sadness, or anger, or hatred, as an anchor. Picture this with me:

The Anchor as a metaphor

I’m out on a boat at night, celebrating life and being with friends and family. The boat could be the metaphor for my life in this example. Something happens and I fall off of a boat and plunge into the frigid, dark waters of the ocean. The water is dark and murky. I’m scared, so I grab on to the anchor as it is lowering in the water because it’s the only thing I can see to grab on to. My friends, family, and my therapist all shout out to me to let go of the anchor or it will take me to the bottom, but I can’t let go. The anchor is the only thing I can grab onto that’s solid. It feels real when little else does. 

Sometimes in life, things happen and it causes us to feel unsafe, afraid, or overwhelmed and so our instinct is to grab on to the thing that feels most solid, or real, to anchor us. This speaks to a real human fear that is reflected in research. People often report that they’d rather believe a secret, evil cabal of elites are ruling the world behind the curtains rather than believe that no one is. That fear of the murky water becomes scarier than any shark that might be in the water. 

There’s many anchors in life. Maybe after a bad breakup, my pain and grief might be that anchor, and I clinged to it even as it prevents me from living my life because it’s all I have left of the person I once loved, and so it feels most real. How did I learn to let go? By practicing it, by asking for help, and by finding the support I needed to get myself to the place where I could let go. With support, I learned that I can let go of the anchor and float free. 

There’s a question in that for all of us; what am I holding on to, and why? It’s okay to feel pain, or to feel sadness, loss, or anger. It rarely feels okay, but a vital part of my practice in my mental health journey is to radically accept that my thoughts and feelings are welcome. The thing is, our feelings and our thoughts are only a piece of us as whole beings. Holding onto them can be like gripping that anchor tenaciously as it drags us down. It’s okay that our feelings and our thoughts feel real, but do we want to let them make our decisions for us?

This is where a lot of the cognitive therapies enter the scene, but also where these kinds of stories and metaphors help us merge the science with the art, to more fully embrace the humanity we all share. It can all come back to choice. 

The fear is real to me, but what do I choose? Do I choose to let go of the anchor and choose to trust that I will float, or that someone will throw me a life preserver? Giving myself the freedom to feel whatever feelings come up, but make my choices independently of those feelings is how I began to take my power back.