Background: Interdisciplinary artist, singer-songwriter and body image activist Mindy Dillard presents her one-woman musical: How to Survive a Poison Apple.Through metaphor and original songs, Mindy invites participants through a fractured fairy tale. Holly Finlay, Clinical director of Eating Disorders Treatment Center will discuss the value of metaphor in the treatment process.
Content Outline
- What is a metaphor?
- The value of using metaphors in the treatment of eating disorders and other issues
- Two types of metaphor interventions
- Three qualities of a salient metaphor
- Once Upon a Time…
- How to Survive a Poison Apple: A Fractured Fairy Tale of Healing
- Question and Answer Session
Metaphor-making is an imaginative act that involves comparing dissimilar things on the basis of some underlying principle that unites them. By its very nature, metaphors combine what is already known in a new way to produce a new thing not yet fully understood (Siegelman, 1993). The “not yet fully understood” image or information can then be explored, understood, and "reworked" allowing for transformation.
Metaphor Therapy is a framework to use in the therapeutic process, rather than a new school of therapy. It is a lens to view the unconscious content bubbling up to the surface through the metaphor brought into session by our clients.
People with eating disorders typically do not have words to express their thoughts and feelings. Metaphors mirror our inner worlds and are linguistic representations of our early self-objects, lives, and connections with others. This framework offers our clients a new way to describe their indescribable internal languages. Just as Alice went through the looking glass, beyond the boundaries of what is seen, to discover her inner landscape, our clients can uncover their own unrealized processes and generate therapeutic change.
Mindy Dillard, interdisciplinary artist, singer-songwriter, and body image activist, demonstrates the healing power of metaphor through her one-woman musical How to Survive a Poison Apple. Through metaphor and original songs, Mindy invites participants through a fractured fairy tale: Her own eating disorder and subsequent healing journey. Holly Finlay, Clinical director of the Eating Disorders Treatment Center of Albuquerque, will join Mindy to discuss the value of metaphor in the treatment of eating disorders.
Originally from Salt Lake City, UT, Mindy trained as an actor before deciding to write her own stories in song. She’s now a singer-songwriter and body image activist. In her folk-rock song cycle, How to Survive a Poison Apple, Mindy transforms fairy-tale images to comment on the contemporary world of advertising and peer pressure. By sharing her own eating disorder story, she invites her audiences to explore their own relationships to body and self-image. She’s currently touring Poison Apple to NEDA walks, fringe festivals, arts organizations, colleges and treatment centers.
and
Holly A. Finlay, MA, LPCC, CEDS, CSP
Holly Finlay has been a member of iaedp for over 20 years, and has served on the Board of Directors since 2004. She is currently the Founder and Clinical Director of the Eating Disorders Treatment Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico where she has been in practice for over 20 years. Holly is both a Certified Eating Disorders Specialist and a Certified Sensorimotor Psychotherapist. She provides individual therapy, clinical supervision, group therapy, and runs both an adult and adolescent intensive out-patient program in Albuquerque.
