If you spend any time with a therapist who is trained in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), you will notice something striking: they like to speak in metaphors. You might hear about switch that can be flipped on or off, or an experience of getting caught in quicksand, or someone standing in a hole with shovel in hand. It may seem a little strange at first, as though the session has shifted from clinical work to something closer to storytelling.
That shift is intentional, and it is one of the reasons ACT is such a powerful modality. It has been shown to help people a wide range of concerns, including anxiety, depression, chronic pain, substance use, OCD, and stress related to chronic illness.
Introducing ACT
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — pronounced as the word “act,” not spelled out letter by letter, grew out of behavioral science, and belongs to the same family as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Importantly, rather than treating painful thoughts and feelings as problems to be corrected or removed, ACT asks this question: what would it mean to build a meaningful life with those thoughts and feelings, instead of waiting for them to leave first?
The model rests on a commitment to increase our psychological flexibility, which itself has several components, such as ability to contact the present moment without judgment or resistance, clarity about one’s values, and a willingness to make room for discomfort rather than wage war against it. That last piece is often the hardest for people to sit with, because most of us arrive in therapy hoping to be taught how to feel better, how to get rid of whatever pain we are experiencing. ACT redirects that hope, sometimes gently and sometimes a bit more forcefully, toward a different aim: a life spacious enough to hold both difficulty and meaning at once.
Why Metaphors Are Helpful in Therapy
ACT terms like “cognitive defusion” or “experiential avoidance” can feel too abstract and theoretical. But nearly everyone can picture quicksand, or a shovel, or an unwelcome guest who will not leave a party (more about those metaphors shortly).
Metaphor does two things simultaneously. It moves past the analytical mind — that part of us that wants to argue, qualify, and intellectualize its way through pain, and instead lodges the idea somewhere more immediate and embodied. A metaphor does not need to be argued into acceptance. It is understood the way a piece of music is understood, before the analytical mind has had the chance to take over.
There is also something gently protective in metaphor. It creates perspective without disconnection. A client can recognize themselves in the image of digging a hole, feel that recognition, and hold it at a slight remove from their struggle. The image does some of the emotional labor so the person does not have to carry the full weight of their struggle as directly.
Also, metaphors are conveniently portable! A good one does not stay behind in the therapy room. It resurfaces days later, in traffic, at 2 a.m., in the middle of an argument. It’s easier to connect with an idea that has a visual and a story attached to it. That, more than anything, is the measure of whether a metaphor is doing its work.
What follows are five we return to often in our own practice, along with one additional favorite we could not leave out!
1. The Shovel
Picture someone standing at the bottom of a hole, shovel in hand, digging with real effort. The hole represents the struggle itself. That may be anxiety, sadness, an old resentment, whatever the client is carrying. The shovel represents every strategy reached for in an effort to climb out: arguing with the thought, numbing it, avoiding anything that might provoke it, trying to think one’s way to certainty.
The trouble is that digging feels like progress. It is active. It is effortful. Surely all that exertion is moving things forward. But in this particular hole, digging does not lead up — it leads further down. The very tool a person believes will save them is what keeps them stuck.
This metaphor tends to land because so many clients recognize the exhaustion of having tried everything, only to find themselves worse off than when they started. It does not ask anyone to stop struggling through sheer willpower. It simply asks them to notice they are holding a shovel in the first place, and to consider what might happen if they set it down.
The original version — the “Man in the Hole” metaphor — appears in full in the Compendium of ACT Metaphors.
2. Quicksand
Where the shovel metaphor speaks to our coping strategies, quicksand speaks to the panic underneath them. Anyone who has heard about what getting into quicksand is like knows this: you thrash about, kick, fight to break free. And anyone who has actually studied quicksand knows that instinct is precisely wrong. Struggling pulls a person under faster. The counterintuitive guidance is to lie back, spread the weight out, and let the surface hold.
Applied to emotional pain, this image captures something that direct explanation rarely manages: that our instinct to fight difficult feelings often intensifies them. Panic answers to panic. The client who is working hardest to force their anxiety away through sheer effort is frequently the one who ends up most entangled in it. Learning to soften, to let the feeling exist without layering frantic resistance on top of it, changes the entire experience of the moment.
Russ Harris’s original telling, paired with the struggle switch (see below), appears in his Introductory ACT Workshop Handout.
3. Two Mountains
This one speaks less to a single struggle and more to the therapeutic relationship itself. The therapist stands on one mountain, the client on another. Each can see the other. The therapist can call across the distance, offer perspective, point toward a trail the client may not have noticed from where they are standing. But the therapist cannot climb onto the client’s mountain and do the climbing on their behalf, and pretending otherwise serves no one.
We are drawn to this metaphor because it quietly resets what people expect from therapy. It is not meant to be a rescue. The therapist is not going to reach in and extract the client from their pain. What can be offered instead is companionship, a different vantage point, and an honest account of what is visible from across the valley, while the client does the actual climbing. It guards, gently, against the fantasy that someone else can climb a mountain that was never theirs to climb. No one can do that for another person, not even a therapist who genuinely cares. It also honors the reality of the climb being the client’s journey, not the therapist’s.
Read the metaphor as Russ Harris originally described it, via the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.
4. The Struggle Switch
Imagine a switch somewhere inside a person, one that can be flipped on or off. With the switch off, painful thoughts and feelings still arise, but they simply pass through, the way weather moves through a day. With the switch on, every difficult feeling acquires a second layer stacked on top of it: frustration at feeling it, fear about what it means, an internal argument over why this should not be happening at all.
The pain itself, in other words, is not always where the suffering originates. Often it is the flipped switch — the fight against having the feeling at all — that turns a wave into a flood. This metaphor gives clients a way to locate the one lever they actually have some influence over. They usually cannot switch off the original feeling. But they can learn to notice when the struggle switch has flipped on, and experiment with easing it back off.
Russ Harris walks through the concept directly in this short explanation.
5. The Unwelcome Party Guest
A person is hosting a party. Most of the guests are pleasant company. One, however, arrives uninvited. He is rude, poorly timed, unwilling to leave. There are two paths available. One can spend the entire evening arguing with this guest, following them from room to room, attempting to remove them by force, which means abandoning everyone else at the party in the process. Or one can allow the guest to remain, unpleasant as they are, and return attention to the people, the food, the music — the parts of the evening that were actually wanted.
The unwelcome guest stands in for the intrusive thought, the old shame, the anxious voice that arrives at the worst possible moments. Removing them is rarely an option; they tend to stay regardless of how hard one fights. What remains within a person’s control is how much of the evening they are willing to hand over to that guest.
Psychologist Joe Oliver’s original telling of the metaphor is available here: The Unwelcome Party Guest.
Bonus: Passengers on the Bus
This is one we could not leave out. A person is the driver of a bus, and the task is to keep driving toward the places that matter most. Along the way, unruly passengers climb aboard — fear, self-doubt, old grief, and so on — and begin calling out demands from the back seat. Pull over. Turn around. Do not go there, it is too risky.
The instinct is to stop the bus and deal with these passengers directly, perhaps to argue them off, perhaps to negotiate. But the moment a driver turns around to argue, the bus has stopped moving. The suggestion at the heart of this metaphor is that the passengers do not need to fall silent, or disembark, or be won over, in order for the driver to keep both hands on the wheel. One can let them protest from the back seat for the entire ride and still take the intended route.
Psychologist Joe Oliver’s telling of the metaphor is available here: Passengers on the Bus.
Parting Words
None of these images are meant to argue anyone out of their pain. That would run counter to everything ACT stands for. What they offer instead is a different relationship to difficulty: less struggle and more willingness to carry what cannot be set down. Metaphors can help us get started on this new approach to our difficult emotions and thoughts. If you would like to learn more about how ACT therapy at Wildflower can help you, our intake team is available to speak with you.
Further Reading & Videos
- Compendium of ACT Metaphors — the shovel / “Man in the Hole” metaphor and dozens of others, collected in one document
- Russ Harris’s Introductory ACT Workshop Handout — quicksand and the struggle switch, presented together
- Two Mountains Metaphor — via the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science
- The Struggle Switch — Russ Harris explains it directly
- The Unwelcome Party Guest — Joe Oliver’s original telling
- Passengers on the Bus — Steven Hayes tells the metaphor he developed
