From the author: I specialize in helping clients with various kinds of anxiety-phobic disorders. Do you love metaphors as much as I love them!? I really like metaphors and I constantly use them in my work. Metaphor allows you to tap into creativity, it can evoke a strong emotional response, which is very important in the process of psychotherapy. Short-term strategic therapy and acceptance and responsibility therapy are simply saturated with various metaphors that are an integral part of the psychotherapeutic process. Metaphor allows us to explain sometimes complex processes in a concise and accessible way. The metaphor is well remembered due to its imagery and has a very strong psychotherapeutic effect. I specialize in helping clients with various kinds of anxiety-phobic disorders. A client comes to a psychologist and says that he wants to get rid of his fear, anxiety, love addiction, panic attacks, etc. How correct is such a request and is it possible to get rid of what we don’t like? If you don't like your old sofa, it's easy to throw it away or post an ad on the Internet and your sofa will be taken away. If you don't like onions, then you don't buy them. However, such actions that work well in the external environment are often of little use to our psyche. Sometimes it is impossible, and there is no need, to get rid of those mental processes that we do not like. During work, I invite my clients to consider such a metaphor. Let's imagine that your fear or anxiety is a wild tiger. He causes you pain and suffering. This wild tiger bites painfully, scratches with its claws, growls terribly and behaves completely unpredictably. The client wants to get rid of his wild tiger, which is causing him pain and suffering. I am not an advocate of getting rid of the wild tiger. Since it was given to us by nature, then we need it for some reason and destroying the tiger is not an environmentally friendly solution to the problem. Anxiety and fear perform their useful function. They allow us to survive in a world full of dangers. However, sometimes fear and anxiety become a problem when their levels exceed a certain threshold. In such cases, I suggest studying your scary tiger better, getting to know him and taming him. Make it manual and more predictable. In this case, the tiger will become your friend and this will give you courage. With this metaphor I explain the essence of my work together with the client. What do you do with your scary tiger? Are you fighting it, running away from it, trying to distract yourself or forget yourself? How does a tiger behave in such cases? Probably, he will always catch up with you, put you on both shoulder blades and, having defeated you, he will become even more terrible and furious. Do you want to tame your tiger? If you found the article interesting, the author will be pleased for your thanks. This will inspire you to write new interesting articles! Sign up for a consultation: phone 8-905-793-2237 skype sovlad2 Oleg Vladimirovich Surkov I work with my soul!