The Metaphor Cure – How Language Can Heal What Medicine Can’t

If pain had a voice, it wouldn’t be clinical. It wouldn’t speak in milligrams or MRI scans. It would whisper, roar, curl up in corners, or dance like rain across your skin. And that’s why metaphor matters, because pain doesn’t speak science. It tells a story.

In the past century, we’ve seen the rise of what you might call a necrophilous mindset – a cultural orientation fixated on the mechanical, the inanimate, the measurable. The body becomes a machine. Pain is a fault in the system. Treatment? A war on the malfunction.

You’ve heard it before:

“Fighting pain”
“Painkillers”
“Battling the body”
“Crushing symptoms”

These metaphors don’t just describe pain – they shape it. As Johnson, Hudson, and Ryan (2023) point out, metaphor is not just decoration; it’s the architecture of thought. Our metaphors shape how we live, particularly how we navigate life with pain.

Now, imagine flipping the switch.

Biophilic Metaphors: Language That Loves Life

A biophilic metaphor sees pain not as an enemy, but as a signal, a teacher, a wave to be surfed rather than a storm to be conquered. It’s the difference between “my back is shot” and “my back is asking for rest.” One reduces you to a broken machine. The other reminds you that you’re alive and worth listening to.

Here’s the twist: the metaphors we use don’t just reflect our inner world, they build it.

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argued that metaphors are conceptual tools that define how we make sense of reality. In other words, your metaphors are your mind’s operating system. Choose warlike metaphors and you’ll live in a battle zone. Choose biophilic ones, and you might just start healing in a garden.

The Problem with the Clinical Voice

Modern medicine leans heavily on mechanistic metaphors, neurons “fire,” nerves “transmit,” and the brain is a “command centre.” These metaphors, while helpful in textbooks, can be profoundly alienating in real life. They create distance between the person and their pain, transforming it into an object to be studied, managed, or defeated; not something to be understood or integrated.

The risk? We lose the human in the healing. We medicalise suffering. We strip away meaning.

The Metaphor Reset: Reclaiming the Story

The antidote? Reclaim our metaphors.

Use language that invites agency, fluidity, and hope:

“Pain is a wave, some days small, some days wild, but always moving.”
“Pain is a whisper from within, not a siren from a broken part.”
“This body is a garden, not a battlefield.”

Such metaphors don’t just sound nicer. They offer a salutogenic lens, a view that centres health, coherence, and wholeness over disease and decay.

Why It Matters (More Than You Think)

A metaphor is not just words – it’s a worldview. And worldview drives behaviour. Research shows that metaphors like “pain is a battle” can lead to fear, over-medicalisation, and disconnection. However, when people use metaphors like “pain as a companion” or “pain as a wave,” they often feel more empowered, understood, and open to change.

In a time when so many feel stuck in a loop of chronic symptoms and diagnoses, perhaps what’s needed isn’t just a new treatment; maybe we need a new language.

One that doesn’t fight life, but loves it.

So maybe the revolution isn’t in a pill or a protocol. Maybe it starts with a poem. A metaphor. A moment of seeing pain not as a fault but as a part of the human condition, worthy of being heard on its own terms.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s where healing begins.