During most ordinary days, family members can offend each other and experience hurtful and difficult times. They often wish that another family member could understand how they are feeling. Using emotional word pictures is one of the best ways to have others enter into our feelings and it can motivate them to stop hurting us.

An emotional word picture is associating our feelings with either a real or imaginary experience.

Using word pictures to motivate others is identifying with them emotionally. It's motivating on an emotional level.

A teenage girl once told me how she motivated her father to listen and understand her. She used an emotional word picture relating to her father's job as an auto mechanic to tell him about something that was troubling her.

"Daddy, you know how sometimes you will tune up a car and it runs okay, but not exactly the way it ought to? Then the owner will bring it back and say it's not running exactly right. Frustrated, you take out all your tools and check everything again and sure enough, you'll make a minor adjustment that makes the engine purr. Well, you're a super dad and our relationship is running along fine, but there's a little part of it that's out of adjustment. I wish we could spend some time so that I could explain from my point of view what we could to together to fine-tune our relationship."

The girl's father understood immediately because he could imagine someone returning a car for an adjustment. Because he understood how his daughter felt, a positive change occurred in their relationship.

The use of emotional word pictures is useful for children as well as adults. Children can be affected by them at almost any age, as long as they can talk. Here are two steps for successfully using emotional word pictures. First, we need to clearly identify what we are feeling—what's going wrong or how do we feel about what's happening around us? Second, once these feelings are identified, we must make up a story that illustrates these feelings. If one is feeling discouraged he can say, "I feel like the color blue," or "I feel like a damp, smelly dishrag," or "I'm in cold water up to my neck in a deep well." Word pictures can be created by using things that are common to our experience: animals, water, mountains, desert, furniture, the seasons.

An example from the Bible demonstrates how powerfully motivating word pictures are. In the story of David and Bathsheba, David became sexually attracted to Bathsheba, lusted after her, and eventually caused her pregnancy. Feeling guilty about his actions, David arranged for her husband, Uriah, to be brought home from the battlefield to be with his wife. David thought this would get him off the hook, but Uriah refused to return home, saying he didn't want to offend his fellow comrades. David was angered, so he arranged for Uriah to be sent to the front lines of the battlefield where he was killed.

David wasn't motivated to repent or change until the Lord sent Nathan, who painted a powerful emotional word picture. Nathan related a story of two men, one very rich with many sheep, the other poor, with nothing but one lamb. The poor man raised the lamb with his children, and the animal became like a member of the family. One day a traveler came to town, but the rich man was unwilling to take one sheep from his flock to prepare for the visitor. So he took the poor man's one lamb and prepared this for his guest.

The story angered David, who said the rich man should make fourfold restitution for the poor man's lamb. David demanded that such a man deserved to die. Boldly Nathan said, "David, you are that man." The emotional word picture was so powerful that David cried out to God in grief and repented of his sin.

I've witnessed the power and effectiveness of emotional word pictures in my own home. It took five minutes to help my son change an irritating habit. I travel frequently throughout the country and am often gone for several days at a time. When I arrive home, the whole family usually greets me. It is an encouragement when they rush out to hug me and yell, "Welcome home, Dad!" When our son Greg was twelve, he would usually join in the welcome, but there was a time when, after the initial greeting, he would avoid me for an hour or two. I would try to touch him or ask him he'd done while I was gone, but he'd say, "Just leave me alone. I don't want to talk about it."

That bothered me. He was acting like his spirit was closed toward me, but I hadn't done anything to him. I asked Norma what she thought was wrong and she explained that Greg was probably angry because I had been gone, and this was his way of punishing me.

I wanted Greg to understand how his rejection hurt me, so one evening a couple of days after I'd returned from a trip, I took him out for dinner, just the two of us. After dinner, I made up a story relating to his participation on the school basketball team.

"Greg, suppose you made first string on the basketball team and you were playing well, and suddenly you got an injury. We took you to the doctor and he said you couldn't play for two weeks so the injury would heal. So you don't play, but you show up at practices. Then after two weeks, you're ready to play again, but the rest of the players and the coach just ignore you. They act like you aren't even there. How would that make you feel?"

"Dad, that would really hurt. I wouldn't want to go through that."

"That's somewhat how Dad feels when I come home from a trip and you welcome me home, but then reject me for an hour or two. I want to get back on the family team, but I feel like you are ignoring me."

"I didn't know that," he said. "That makes sense, I won't do it anymore."

About two weeks later, I left for a trip. As I was getting into the car after saying goodbye to my family, Greg yelled, "Have a great trip, Dad. And get ready to be rejected when you get home." We all laughed, but he remembered, and never again did he reject me when I returned home.

Emotional word pictures can be used with anyone. Try using emotional word pictures with your mate or a good friend before trying it on your children. The more you practice, the better you will become, and you will see that this simple motivating force is very powerful.

© Copyright 2005 Smalley Relationship Center

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