BY LINDSEY ALLEN
In the Summer of 2025, I ran a series of workshops called Our Pain Thinks About Metaphors.
These workshops were part of a larger research project all about metaphor as a technology. This work pushes metaphor out of the realm of literature and instead presents an understanding of metaphor as a tool, a conceptual framing or structure that shapes our understanding the world. Metaphors are chosen by societies, by cultures. They say something about the person using them, but they also say something about the context in which that person is. The metaphors we use shape our understanding of the things they describe.
Most people do not realise it, but we are using metaphors all the time. In my previous work, I had specifically focused on the language of pain, exploring the medical metaphors that are used to describe, diagnose, and treat pain. Words like stabbing, burning, piercing, crushing. Medical tools and questionnaires like the McGill Pain Questionnaire. The framing of specific types of movement as ‘pain behaviours’. These are medical metaphors that have been created for, and by, a reductionist and mechanistic medical system. They do not necessarily work for us – the people in pain.
So, I knew that (for me), metaphor was a technology that I could see myself and other people using to describe, treat, diminish, and manage pain. I felt like this connection might be important to someone else. And I wanted to know if we - the patient, the person in pain - could use it: this thing that I kept turning to when faced with my own pain.
This research was guided by this key question: can metaphor be reclaimed by those in pain, as a technology with which we can understand our bodies, our pain, and the world we live in?
I planned a series of four workshops. These aimed to explore metaphor and its importance (or lack of importance) for a group of other people with chronic pain. Between July and September, I ran three cycles of these four sessions, with a total of twenty-two attendees. All of us had chronic pain, of some kind, but no other demographic or medical information was collected.
In each workshop, I presented prompts that we worked through or used as a way in. Some of the prompts might make less sense if you don’t have chronic pain yourself. Yet probably— almost surely—you have felt pain, some time, to relate to.
These prompts were based on previous research, and I often spoke through some key quotes or references to introduce the ideas that we would be exploring. These quotes are included with the prompts below.
Sessions One and Two focus on pain and dominant descriptions: What are these medical metaphors of pain all about? Who is making them? And why are we using them?
Sessions Three and Four speculate about what might or could be: What are the practices of making metaphor that aren’t imposing? What metaphor would you choose for yourself? What could this do for you?
Each workshop has a warm-up prompt to ease you in, before two more focused prompts per session. You can spend as much, or as little, time with each prompt as you want. If you are doing these in a group, I suggest the following timings – five minutes for the warm-up, and then fifteen minutes of independent time for the two main prompts. Between each prompt, you can discuss your responses together and see what this might add to your understanding.
You can respond in any way you choose. For some inspiration - in our workshops, people wrote, drew, painted, stitched, collaged, embroidered. Some people came out after fifteen minutes with entire poems, some with just a word or two.
Session 1
Warm-up: Think/write/draw as many words/images as possible to describe your pain
Prompt 1: Imagine yourself in conversation with a curious alien who knows nothing of your pain. What are you giving/making/describing to them?
Prompt 2: Pick out one image, metaphor, or word. Follow this—what does it tell you/what do you tell it?
Session 2
Warm-up: A (new?) definition for “pain.”
“The scientific edifice will stretch past the sky like an endless erector set but it is still built on a core of metaphor.”
Shane Neilson, physician
“Explanatory models of pain are always metaphorical because they develop according to the constraints of human conceptual thinking.”
Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, Cormac G Ryan
Prompt 1: Write a medical explanation for (your) pain. Pick out one image (e.g. nerves misfiring, etc) and take this as a starting point for something. You can stay in the “medical” sphere or try and wrangle it outside.
Prompt 2: Susan Sontag suggests that it those “mysterious and unexplained” illnesses that leave us reaching for metaphor. What is the least mysterious illness you can think of? Describe it (with or without metaphors).
Session 3
Warm-up: Draw (or write) the shape of your pain.
This session follows this understanding presented by anthropologist Thomas Csordas (influenced by Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein). Language is more than simply representation of the world but is itself a mode of being-in-the-world. It does not describe a world ‘out there’ but is the reason this world exists to us at all.
Prompt 1: What came first, the language or the pain, the mind or the pain?
“The metaphor is also an autobiography, a vision.” – Ocean Vuong
Prompt 2: If metaphor is a vision, what future can you see through yours? What future would you want to see through it?
Session 4
Warm-up: Pick out one example of the classic vocabulary of pain (e.g. stabbing). Try and escape this existing vocabulary: what is a way to describe pain that feels like the opposite of this example?
“Changing the story is a way of changing thinking”
Jennifer Patterson, Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not
Prompt 1: In a universe where you know your pain is understood, what metaphor would you choose for yourself?
“The very temptation to invoke analogies to remote cosmologies […] is itself a sign of pain’s triumph”
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
Prompt 2: Imagine a remote cosmology for your pain to take you to.
You might notice differences between the metaphors you came with for the first prompt, and the metaphors you have grabbed on to during Session 4. In our sessions, we spotted metaphors that came up again and again: pain gremlins, plants and their roots, water, interplanetary travel, mud, gravity, electrical currents. Strange connections between different countries, different languages, different pains. Maybe you, too, can recognise your pain in these metaphors.
These workshops were run as part of a larger project, which was developed within the “Unwired Currents—Imagining Technologies Otherwise” fellowship under the mentorship of Iyo Bisseck and Mio Kojima. The fellowship was a larger collaborative program between the think & do tank Dezentrum and the intersectional feminist platform Futuress, along with the transnational collective Dreaming Beyond AI, designer and researcher Franca López Barbera, and the anti-educational platform Matería Oscura.
From the research conducted through these workshops, I have developed a longer essay and a publication exploring one of the metaphors – the pain gremlin. These will soon be published on futuress.org and dreamingbeyond.ai. If you do experiment with any of the prompts here, I would love to see the metaphors that you have carried with you or created.
Books
Illness as Metaphor - Susan Sontag
The Body in Pain - Elaine Scarry
Metaphors we live by - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Inside Chronic Pain: An Intimate and Critical Account – Lous Heshusius
The Undying – Anne Boyer
A Matter of Appearance – Emily Wells
The Body is a Doorway – Sophie Strand
Explaining Humans – Camilla Pang
Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
Articles/Chapters
Pain as metaphor: metaphor and medicine – Shane Neilson
Perspectives on the insidious nature of pain metaphor: we literally need to change our metaphors - Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, and Cormac G Ryan.
Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not: representations, language and transformation – Jennifer Patterson
Space and Embodied Experience: Rethinking the Body in Pain – Marja-Liisa Honkasalo
How metaphors shape the particularities of illness and healing experiences – Raymond W. Gibbs (Jr)
The message in the bottle: Illness and the micropolitics of resistance – Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock
Other
The politics of pain – Rob Boddice
https://aeon.co/essays/pain-is-not-the-purview-of-medics-what-can-historians-tell-us
Interview with Ocean Vuong
https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-ocean-vuong/
In the Summer of 2025, I ran a series of workshops called Our Pain Thinks About Metaphors.
These workshops were part of a larger research project all about metaphor as a technology. This work pushes metaphor out of the realm of literature and instead presents an understanding of metaphor as a tool, a conceptual framing or structure that shapes our understanding the world. Metaphors are chosen by societies, by cultures. They say something about the person using them, but they also say something about the context in which that person is. The metaphors we use shape our understanding of the things they describe.
Most people do not realise it, but we are using metaphors all the time. In my previous work, I had specifically focused on the language of pain, exploring the medical metaphors that are used to describe, diagnose, and treat pain. Words like stabbing, burning, piercing, crushing. Medical tools and questionnaires like the McGill Pain Questionnaire. The framing of specific types of movement as ‘pain behaviours’. These are medical metaphors that have been created for, and by, a reductionist and mechanistic medical system. They do not necessarily work for us – the people in pain.
So, I knew that (for me), metaphor was a technology that I could see myself and other people using to describe, treat, diminish, and manage pain. I felt like this connection might be important to someone else. And I wanted to know if we - the patient, the person in pain - could use it: this thing that I kept turning to when faced with my own pain.
This research was guided by this key question: can metaphor be reclaimed by those in pain, as a technology with which we can understand our bodies, our pain, and the world we live in?
I planned a series of four workshops. These aimed to explore metaphor and its importance (or lack of importance) for a group of other people with chronic pain. Between July and September, I ran three cycles of these four sessions, with a total of twenty-two attendees. All of us had chronic pain, of some kind, but no other demographic or medical information was collected.
In each workshop, I presented prompts that we worked through or used as a way in. Some of the prompts might make less sense if you don’t have chronic pain yourself. Yet probably— almost surely—you have felt pain, some time, to relate to.
These prompts were based on previous research, and I often spoke through some key quotes or references to introduce the ideas that we would be exploring. These quotes are included with the prompts below.
Sessions One and Two focus on pain and dominant descriptions: What are these medical metaphors of pain all about? Who is making them? And why are we using them?
Sessions Three and Four speculate about what might or could be: What are the practices of making metaphor that aren’t imposing? What metaphor would you choose for yourself? What could this do for you?
Each workshop has a warm-up prompt to ease you in, before two more focused prompts per session. You can spend as much, or as little, time with each prompt as you want. If you are doing these in a group, I suggest the following timings – five minutes for the warm-up, and then fifteen minutes of independent time for the two main prompts. Between each prompt, you can discuss your responses together and see what this might add to your understanding.
You can respond in any way you choose. For some inspiration - in our workshops, people wrote, drew, painted, stitched, collaged, embroidered. Some people came out after fifteen minutes with entire poems, some with just a word or two.
Session 1
Warm-up: Think/write/draw as many words/images as possible to describe your pain
Prompt 1: Imagine yourself in conversation with a curious alien who knows nothing of your pain. What are you giving/making/describing to them?
Prompt 2: Pick out one image, metaphor, or word. Follow this—what does it tell you/what do you tell it?
Session 2
Warm-up: A (new?) definition for “pain.”
“The scientific edifice will stretch past the sky like an endless erector set but it is still built on a core of metaphor.”
Shane Neilson, physician
“Explanatory models of pain are always metaphorical because they develop according to the constraints of human conceptual thinking.”
Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, Cormac G Ryan
Prompt 1: Write a medical explanation for (your) pain. Pick out one image (e.g. nerves misfiring, etc) and take this as a starting point for something. You can stay in the “medical” sphere or try and wrangle it outside.
Prompt 2: Susan Sontag suggests that it those “mysterious and unexplained” illnesses that leave us reaching for metaphor. What is the least mysterious illness you can think of? Describe it (with or without metaphors).
Session 3
Warm-up: Draw (or write) the shape of your pain.
This session follows this understanding presented by anthropologist Thomas Csordas (influenced by Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein). Language is more than simply representation of the world but is itself a mode of being-in-the-world. It does not describe a world ‘out there’ but is the reason this world exists to us at all.
Prompt 1: What came first, the language or the pain, the mind or the pain?
“The metaphor is also an autobiography, a vision.” – Ocean Vuong
Prompt 2: If metaphor is a vision, what future can you see through yours? What future would you want to see through it?
Session 4
Warm-up: Pick out one example of the classic vocabulary of pain (e.g. stabbing). Try and escape this existing vocabulary: what is a way to describe pain that feels like the opposite of this example?
“Changing the story is a way of changing thinking”
Jennifer Patterson, Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not
Prompt 1: In a universe where you know your pain is understood, what metaphor would you choose for yourself?
“The very temptation to invoke analogies to remote cosmologies […] is itself a sign of pain’s triumph”
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
Prompt 2: Imagine a remote cosmology for your pain to take you to.
You might notice differences between the metaphors you came with for the first prompt, and the metaphors you have grabbed on to during Session 4. In our sessions, we spotted metaphors that came up again and again: pain gremlins, plants and their roots, water, interplanetary travel, mud, gravity, electrical currents. Strange connections between different countries, different languages, different pains. Maybe you, too, can recognise your pain in these metaphors.
These workshops were run as part of a larger project, which was developed within the “Unwired Currents—Imagining Technologies Otherwise” fellowship under the mentorship of Iyo Bisseck and Mio Kojima. The fellowship was a larger collaborative program between the think & do tank Dezentrum and the intersectional feminist platform Futuress, along with the transnational collective Dreaming Beyond AI, designer and researcher Franca López Barbera, and the anti-educational platform Matería Oscura.
From the research conducted through these workshops, I have developed a longer essay and a publication exploring one of the metaphors – the pain gremlin. These will soon be published on futuress.org and dreamingbeyond.ai. If you do experiment with any of the prompts here, I would love to see the metaphors that you have carried with you or created.
Books
Illness as Metaphor - Susan Sontag
The Body in Pain - Elaine Scarry
Metaphors we live by - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Inside Chronic Pain: An Intimate and Critical Account – Lous Heshusius
The Undying – Anne Boyer
A Matter of Appearance – Emily Wells
The Body is a Doorway – Sophie Strand
Explaining Humans – Camilla Pang
Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
Articles/Chapters
Pain as metaphor: metaphor and medicine – Shane Neilson
Perspectives on the insidious nature of pain metaphor: we literally need to change our metaphors - Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, and Cormac G Ryan.
Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not: representations, language and transformation – Jennifer Patterson
Space and Embodied Experience: Rethinking the Body in Pain – Marja-Liisa Honkasalo
How metaphors shape the particularities of illness and healing experiences – Raymond W. Gibbs (Jr)
The message in the bottle: Illness and the micropolitics of resistance – Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock
Other
The politics of pain – Rob Boddice
https://aeon.co/essays/pain-is-not-the-purview-of-medics-what-can-historians-tell-us
Interview with Ocean Vuong
https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-ocean-vuong/
Lindsey Allen is an award-winning writer, researcher, and designer based in Bristol. Allen thinks and works in the intersections of care, time, disability, and the natural environment - aiming to platform disabled knowledge and lived experience. Her work is grounded in anthropological methods, exploring how people understand the world they live in, and their hopes and imaginaries around how this world could be. Allen's writing is focused on creative non-fiction and the essay form., and in her broader creative practice, she makes socially-engaged and participatory work, utilising caring methodologies.
BY LINDSEY ALLEN
In the Summer of 2025, I ran a series of workshops called Our Pain Thinks About Metaphors.
These workshops were part of a larger research project all about metaphor as a technology. This work pushes metaphor out of the realm of literature and instead presents an understanding of metaphor as a tool, a conceptual framing or structure that shapes our understanding the world. Metaphors are chosen by societies, by cultures. They say something about the person using them, but they also say something about the context in which that person is. The metaphors we use shape our understanding of the things they describe.
Most people do not realise it, but we are using metaphors all the time. In my previous work, I had specifically focused on the language of pain, exploring the medical metaphors that are used to describe, diagnose, and treat pain. Words like stabbing, burning, piercing, crushing. Medical tools and questionnaires like the McGill Pain Questionnaire. The framing of specific types of movement as ‘pain behaviours’. These are medical metaphors that have been created for, and by, a reductionist and mechanistic medical system. They do not necessarily work for us – the people in pain.
So, I knew that (for me), metaphor was a technology that I could see myself and other people using to describe, treat, diminish, and manage pain. I felt like this connection might be important to someone else. And I wanted to know if we - the patient, the person in pain - could use it: this thing that I kept turning to when faced with my own pain.
This research was guided by this key question: can metaphor be reclaimed by those in pain, as a technology with which we can understand our bodies, our pain, and the world we live in?
I planned a series of four workshops. These aimed to explore metaphor and its importance (or lack of importance) for a group of other people with chronic pain. Between July and September, I ran three cycles of these four sessions, with a total of twenty-two attendees. All of us had chronic pain, of some kind, but no other demographic or medical information was collected.
In each workshop, I presented prompts that we worked through or used as a way in. Some of the prompts might make less sense if you don’t have chronic pain yourself. Yet probably— almost surely—you have felt pain, some time, to relate to.
These prompts were based on previous research, and I often spoke through some key quotes or references to introduce the ideas that we would be exploring. These quotes are included with the prompts below.
Sessions One and Two focus on pain and dominant descriptions: What are these medical metaphors of pain all about? Who is making them? And why are we using them?
Sessions Three and Four speculate about what might or could be: What are the practices of making metaphor that aren’t imposing? What metaphor would you choose for yourself? What could this do for you?
Each workshop has a warm-up prompt to ease you in, before two more focused prompts per session. You can spend as much, or as little, time with each prompt as you want. If you are doing these in a group, I suggest the following timings – five minutes for the warm-up, and then fifteen minutes of independent time for the two main prompts. Between each prompt, you can discuss your responses together and see what this might add to your understanding.
You can respond in any way you choose. For some inspiration - in our workshops, people wrote, drew, painted, stitched, collaged, embroidered. Some people came out after fifteen minutes with entire poems, some with just a word or two.
Session 1
Warm-up: Think/write/draw as many words/images as possible to describe your pain
Prompt 1: Imagine yourself in conversation with a curious alien who knows nothing of your pain. What are you giving/making/describing to them?
Prompt 2: Pick out one image, metaphor, or word. Follow this—what does it tell you/what do you tell it?
Session 2
Warm-up: A (new?) definition for “pain.”
“The scientific edifice will stretch past the sky like an endless erector set but it is still built on a core of metaphor.”
Shane Neilson, physician
“Explanatory models of pain are always metaphorical because they develop according to the constraints of human conceptual thinking.”
Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, Cormac G Ryan
Prompt 1: Write a medical explanation for (your) pain. Pick out one image (e.g. nerves misfiring, etc) and take this as a starting point for something. You can stay in the “medical” sphere or try and wrangle it outside.
Prompt 2: Susan Sontag suggests that it those “mysterious and unexplained” illnesses that leave us reaching for metaphor. What is the least mysterious illness you can think of? Describe it (with or without metaphors).
Session 3
Warm-up: Draw (or write) the shape of your pain.
This session follows this understanding presented by anthropologist Thomas Csordas (influenced by Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein). Language is more than simply representation of the world but is itself a mode of being-in-the-world. It does not describe a world ‘out there’ but is the reason this world exists to us at all.
Prompt 1: What came first, the language or the pain, the mind or the pain?
“The metaphor is also an autobiography, a vision.” – Ocean Vuong
Prompt 2: If metaphor is a vision, what future can you see through yours? What future would you want to see through it?
Session 4
Warm-up: Pick out one example of the classic vocabulary of pain (e.g. stabbing). Try and escape this existing vocabulary: what is a way to describe pain that feels like the opposite of this example?
“Changing the story is a way of changing thinking”
Jennifer Patterson, Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not
Prompt 1: In a universe where you know your pain is understood, what metaphor would you choose for yourself?
“The very temptation to invoke analogies to remote cosmologies […] is itself a sign of pain’s triumph”
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
Prompt 2: Imagine a remote cosmology for your pain to take you to.
You might notice differences between the metaphors you came with for the first prompt, and the metaphors you have grabbed on to during Session 4. In our sessions, we spotted metaphors that came up again and again: pain gremlins, plants and their roots, water, interplanetary travel, mud, gravity, electrical currents. Strange connections between different countries, different languages, different pains. Maybe you, too, can recognise your pain in these metaphors.
These workshops were run as part of a larger project, which was developed within the “Unwired Currents—Imagining Technologies Otherwise” fellowship under the mentorship of Iyo Bisseck and Mio Kojima. The fellowship was a larger collaborative program between the think & do tank Dezentrum and the intersectional feminist platform Futuress, along with the transnational collective Dreaming Beyond AI, designer and researcher Franca López Barbera, and the anti-educational platform Matería Oscura.
From the research conducted through these workshops, I have developed a longer essay and a publication exploring one of the metaphors – the pain gremlin. These will soon be published on futuress.org and dreamingbeyond.ai. If you do experiment with any of the prompts here, I would love to see the metaphors that you have carried with you or created.
Books
Illness as Metaphor - Susan Sontag
The Body in Pain - Elaine Scarry
Metaphors we live by - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Inside Chronic Pain: An Intimate and Critical Account – Lous Heshusius
The Undying – Anne Boyer
A Matter of Appearance – Emily Wells
The Body is a Doorway – Sophie Strand
Explaining Humans – Camilla Pang
Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
Articles/Chapters
Pain as metaphor: metaphor and medicine – Shane Neilson
Perspectives on the insidious nature of pain metaphor: we literally need to change our metaphors - Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, and Cormac G Ryan.
Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not: representations, language and transformation – Jennifer Patterson
Space and Embodied Experience: Rethinking the Body in Pain – Marja-Liisa Honkasalo
How metaphors shape the particularities of illness and healing experiences – Raymond W. Gibbs (Jr)
The message in the bottle: Illness and the micropolitics of resistance – Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock
Other
The politics of pain – Rob Boddice
https://aeon.co/essays/pain-is-not-the-purview-of-medics-what-can-historians-tell-us
Interview with Ocean Vuong
https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-ocean-vuong/
In the Summer of 2025, I ran a series of workshops called Our Pain Thinks About Metaphors.
These workshops were part of a larger research project all about metaphor as a technology. This work pushes metaphor out of the realm of literature and instead presents an understanding of metaphor as a tool, a conceptual framing or structure that shapes our understanding the world. Metaphors are chosen by societies, by cultures. They say something about the person using them, but they also say something about the context in which that person is. The metaphors we use shape our understanding of the things they describe.
Most people do not realise it, but we are using metaphors all the time. In my previous work, I had specifically focused on the language of pain, exploring the medical metaphors that are used to describe, diagnose, and treat pain. Words like stabbing, burning, piercing, crushing. Medical tools and questionnaires like the McGill Pain Questionnaire. The framing of specific types of movement as ‘pain behaviours’. These are medical metaphors that have been created for, and by, a reductionist and mechanistic medical system. They do not necessarily work for us – the people in pain.
So, I knew that (for me), metaphor was a technology that I could see myself and other people using to describe, treat, diminish, and manage pain. I felt like this connection might be important to someone else. And I wanted to know if we - the patient, the person in pain - could use it: this thing that I kept turning to when faced with my own pain.
This research was guided by this key question: can metaphor be reclaimed by those in pain, as a technology with which we can understand our bodies, our pain, and the world we live in?
I planned a series of four workshops. These aimed to explore metaphor and its importance (or lack of importance) for a group of other people with chronic pain. Between July and September, I ran three cycles of these four sessions, with a total of twenty-two attendees. All of us had chronic pain, of some kind, but no other demographic or medical information was collected.
In each workshop, I presented prompts that we worked through or used as a way in. Some of the prompts might make less sense if you don’t have chronic pain yourself. Yet probably— almost surely—you have felt pain, some time, to relate to.
These prompts were based on previous research, and I often spoke through some key quotes or references to introduce the ideas that we would be exploring. These quotes are included with the prompts below.
Sessions One and Two focus on pain and dominant descriptions: What are these medical metaphors of pain all about? Who is making them? And why are we using them?
Sessions Three and Four speculate about what might or could be: What are the practices of making metaphor that aren’t imposing? What metaphor would you choose for yourself? What could this do for you?
Each workshop has a warm-up prompt to ease you in, before two more focused prompts per session. You can spend as much, or as little, time with each prompt as you want. If you are doing these in a group, I suggest the following timings – five minutes for the warm-up, and then fifteen minutes of independent time for the two main prompts. Between each prompt, you can discuss your responses together and see what this might add to your understanding.
You can respond in any way you choose. For some inspiration - in our workshops, people wrote, drew, painted, stitched, collaged, embroidered. Some people came out after fifteen minutes with entire poems, some with just a word or two.
Session 1
Warm-up: Think/write/draw as many words/images as possible to describe your pain
Prompt 1: Imagine yourself in conversation with a curious alien who knows nothing of your pain. What are you giving/making/describing to them?
Prompt 2: Pick out one image, metaphor, or word. Follow this—what does it tell you/what do you tell it?
Session 2
Warm-up: A (new?) definition for “pain.”
“The scientific edifice will stretch past the sky like an endless erector set but it is still built on a core of metaphor.”
Shane Neilson, physician
“Explanatory models of pain are always metaphorical because they develop according to the constraints of human conceptual thinking.”
Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, Cormac G Ryan
Prompt 1: Write a medical explanation for (your) pain. Pick out one image (e.g. nerves misfiring, etc) and take this as a starting point for something. You can stay in the “medical” sphere or try and wrangle it outside.
Prompt 2: Susan Sontag suggests that it those “mysterious and unexplained” illnesses that leave us reaching for metaphor. What is the least mysterious illness you can think of? Describe it (with or without metaphors).
Session 3
Warm-up: Draw (or write) the shape of your pain.
This session follows this understanding presented by anthropologist Thomas Csordas (influenced by Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein). Language is more than simply representation of the world but is itself a mode of being-in-the-world. It does not describe a world ‘out there’ but is the reason this world exists to us at all.
Prompt 1: What came first, the language or the pain, the mind or the pain?
“The metaphor is also an autobiography, a vision.” – Ocean Vuong
Prompt 2: If metaphor is a vision, what future can you see through yours? What future would you want to see through it?
Session 4
Warm-up: Pick out one example of the classic vocabulary of pain (e.g. stabbing). Try and escape this existing vocabulary: what is a way to describe pain that feels like the opposite of this example?
“Changing the story is a way of changing thinking”
Jennifer Patterson, Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not
Prompt 1: In a universe where you know your pain is understood, what metaphor would you choose for yourself?
“The very temptation to invoke analogies to remote cosmologies […] is itself a sign of pain’s triumph”
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
Prompt 2: Imagine a remote cosmology for your pain to take you to.
You might notice differences between the metaphors you came with for the first prompt, and the metaphors you have grabbed on to during Session 4. In our sessions, we spotted metaphors that came up again and again: pain gremlins, plants and their roots, water, interplanetary travel, mud, gravity, electrical currents. Strange connections between different countries, different languages, different pains. Maybe you, too, can recognise your pain in these metaphors.
These workshops were run as part of a larger project, which was developed within the “Unwired Currents—Imagining Technologies Otherwise” fellowship under the mentorship of Iyo Bisseck and Mio Kojima. The fellowship was a larger collaborative program between the think & do tank Dezentrum and the intersectional feminist platform Futuress, along with the transnational collective Dreaming Beyond AI, designer and researcher Franca López Barbera, and the anti-educational platform Matería Oscura.
From the research conducted through these workshops, I have developed a longer essay and a publication exploring one of the metaphors – the pain gremlin. These will soon be published on futuress.org and dreamingbeyond.ai. If you do experiment with any of the prompts here, I would love to see the metaphors that you have carried with you or created.
Books
Illness as Metaphor - Susan Sontag
The Body in Pain - Elaine Scarry
Metaphors we live by - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Inside Chronic Pain: An Intimate and Critical Account – Lous Heshusius
The Undying – Anne Boyer
A Matter of Appearance – Emily Wells
The Body is a Doorway – Sophie Strand
Explaining Humans – Camilla Pang
Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
Articles/Chapters
Pain as metaphor: metaphor and medicine – Shane Neilson
Perspectives on the insidious nature of pain metaphor: we literally need to change our metaphors - Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, and Cormac G Ryan.
Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not: representations, language and transformation – Jennifer Patterson
Space and Embodied Experience: Rethinking the Body in Pain – Marja-Liisa Honkasalo
How metaphors shape the particularities of illness and healing experiences – Raymond W. Gibbs (Jr)
The message in the bottle: Illness and the micropolitics of resistance – Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock
Other
The politics of pain – Rob Boddice
https://aeon.co/essays/pain-is-not-the-purview-of-medics-what-can-historians-tell-us
Interview with Ocean Vuong
https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-ocean-vuong/
Lindsey Allen is an award-winning writer, researcher, and designer based in Bristol. Allen thinks and works in the intersections of care, time, disability, and the natural environment - aiming to platform disabled knowledge and lived experience. Her work is grounded in anthropological methods, exploring how people understand the world they live in, and their hopes and imaginaries around how this world could be. Allen's writing is focused on creative non-fiction and the essay form., and in her broader creative practice, she makes socially-engaged and participatory work, utilising caring methodologies.
BY LINDSEY ALLEN
In the Summer of 2025, I ran a series of workshops called Our Pain Thinks About Metaphors.
These workshops were part of a larger research project all about metaphor as a technology. This work pushes metaphor out of the realm of literature and instead presents an understanding of metaphor as a tool, a conceptual framing or structure that shapes our understanding the world. Metaphors are chosen by societies, by cultures. They say something about the person using them, but they also say something about the context in which that person is. The metaphors we use shape our understanding of the things they describe.
Most people do not realise it, but we are using metaphors all the time. In my previous work, I had specifically focused on the language of pain, exploring the medical metaphors that are used to describe, diagnose, and treat pain. Words like stabbing, burning, piercing, crushing. Medical tools and questionnaires like the McGill Pain Questionnaire. The framing of specific types of movement as ‘pain behaviours’. These are medical metaphors that have been created for, and by, a reductionist and mechanistic medical system. They do not necessarily work for us – the people in pain.
So, I knew that (for me), metaphor was a technology that I could see myself and other people using to describe, treat, diminish, and manage pain. I felt like this connection might be important to someone else. And I wanted to know if we - the patient, the person in pain - could use it: this thing that I kept turning to when faced with my own pain.
This research was guided by this key question: can metaphor be reclaimed by those in pain, as a technology with which we can understand our bodies, our pain, and the world we live in?
I planned a series of four workshops. These aimed to explore metaphor and its importance (or lack of importance) for a group of other people with chronic pain. Between July and September, I ran three cycles of these four sessions, with a total of twenty-two attendees. All of us had chronic pain, of some kind, but no other demographic or medical information was collected.
In each workshop, I presented prompts that we worked through or used as a way in. Some of the prompts might make less sense if you don’t have chronic pain yourself. Yet probably— almost surely—you have felt pain, some time, to relate to.
These prompts were based on previous research, and I often spoke through some key quotes or references to introduce the ideas that we would be exploring. These quotes are included with the prompts below.
Sessions One and Two focus on pain and dominant descriptions: What are these medical metaphors of pain all about? Who is making them? And why are we using them?
Sessions Three and Four speculate about what might or could be: What are the practices of making metaphor that aren’t imposing? What metaphor would you choose for yourself? What could this do for you?
Each workshop has a warm-up prompt to ease you in, before two more focused prompts per session. You can spend as much, or as little, time with each prompt as you want. If you are doing these in a group, I suggest the following timings – five minutes for the warm-up, and then fifteen minutes of independent time for the two main prompts. Between each prompt, you can discuss your responses together and see what this might add to your understanding.
You can respond in any way you choose. For some inspiration - in our workshops, people wrote, drew, painted, stitched, collaged, embroidered. Some people came out after fifteen minutes with entire poems, some with just a word or two.
Session 1
Warm-up: Think/write/draw as many words/images as possible to describe your pain
Prompt 1: Imagine yourself in conversation with a curious alien who knows nothing of your pain. What are you giving/making/describing to them?
Prompt 2: Pick out one image, metaphor, or word. Follow this—what does it tell you/what do you tell it?
Session 2
Warm-up: A (new?) definition for “pain.”
“The scientific edifice will stretch past the sky like an endless erector set but it is still built on a core of metaphor.”
Shane Neilson, physician
“Explanatory models of pain are always metaphorical because they develop according to the constraints of human conceptual thinking.”
Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, Cormac G Ryan
Prompt 1: Write a medical explanation for (your) pain. Pick out one image (e.g. nerves misfiring, etc) and take this as a starting point for something. You can stay in the “medical” sphere or try and wrangle it outside.
Prompt 2: Susan Sontag suggests that it those “mysterious and unexplained” illnesses that leave us reaching for metaphor. What is the least mysterious illness you can think of? Describe it (with or without metaphors).
Session 3
Warm-up: Draw (or write) the shape of your pain.
This session follows this understanding presented by anthropologist Thomas Csordas (influenced by Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein). Language is more than simply representation of the world but is itself a mode of being-in-the-world. It does not describe a world ‘out there’ but is the reason this world exists to us at all.
Prompt 1: What came first, the language or the pain, the mind or the pain?
“The metaphor is also an autobiography, a vision.” – Ocean Vuong
Prompt 2: If metaphor is a vision, what future can you see through yours? What future would you want to see through it?
Session 4
Warm-up: Pick out one example of the classic vocabulary of pain (e.g. stabbing). Try and escape this existing vocabulary: what is a way to describe pain that feels like the opposite of this example?
“Changing the story is a way of changing thinking”
Jennifer Patterson, Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not
Prompt 1: In a universe where you know your pain is understood, what metaphor would you choose for yourself?
“The very temptation to invoke analogies to remote cosmologies […] is itself a sign of pain’s triumph”
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
Prompt 2: Imagine a remote cosmology for your pain to take you to.
You might notice differences between the metaphors you came with for the first prompt, and the metaphors you have grabbed on to during Session 4. In our sessions, we spotted metaphors that came up again and again: pain gremlins, plants and their roots, water, interplanetary travel, mud, gravity, electrical currents. Strange connections between different countries, different languages, different pains. Maybe you, too, can recognise your pain in these metaphors.
These workshops were run as part of a larger project, which was developed within the “Unwired Currents—Imagining Technologies Otherwise” fellowship under the mentorship of Iyo Bisseck and Mio Kojima. The fellowship was a larger collaborative program between the think & do tank Dezentrum and the intersectional feminist platform Futuress, along with the transnational collective Dreaming Beyond AI, designer and researcher Franca López Barbera, and the anti-educational platform Matería Oscura.
From the research conducted through these workshops, I have developed a longer essay and a publication exploring one of the metaphors – the pain gremlin. These will soon be published on futuress.org and dreamingbeyond.ai. If you do experiment with any of the prompts here, I would love to see the metaphors that you have carried with you or created.
Books
Illness as Metaphor - Susan Sontag
The Body in Pain - Elaine Scarry
Metaphors we live by - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Inside Chronic Pain: An Intimate and Critical Account – Lous Heshusius
The Undying – Anne Boyer
A Matter of Appearance – Emily Wells
The Body is a Doorway – Sophie Strand
Explaining Humans – Camilla Pang
Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
Articles/Chapters
Pain as metaphor: metaphor and medicine – Shane Neilson
Perspectives on the insidious nature of pain metaphor: we literally need to change our metaphors - Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, and Cormac G Ryan.
Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not: representations, language and transformation – Jennifer Patterson
Space and Embodied Experience: Rethinking the Body in Pain – Marja-Liisa Honkasalo
How metaphors shape the particularities of illness and healing experiences – Raymond W. Gibbs (Jr)
The message in the bottle: Illness and the micropolitics of resistance – Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock
Other
The politics of pain – Rob Boddice
https://aeon.co/essays/pain-is-not-the-purview-of-medics-what-can-historians-tell-us
Interview with Ocean Vuong
https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-ocean-vuong/
In the Summer of 2025, I ran a series of workshops called Our Pain Thinks About Metaphors.
These workshops were part of a larger research project all about metaphor as a technology. This work pushes metaphor out of the realm of literature and instead presents an understanding of metaphor as a tool, a conceptual framing or structure that shapes our understanding the world. Metaphors are chosen by societies, by cultures. They say something about the person using them, but they also say something about the context in which that person is. The metaphors we use shape our understanding of the things they describe.
Most people do not realise it, but we are using metaphors all the time. In my previous work, I had specifically focused on the language of pain, exploring the medical metaphors that are used to describe, diagnose, and treat pain. Words like stabbing, burning, piercing, crushing. Medical tools and questionnaires like the McGill Pain Questionnaire. The framing of specific types of movement as ‘pain behaviours’. These are medical metaphors that have been created for, and by, a reductionist and mechanistic medical system. They do not necessarily work for us – the people in pain.
So, I knew that (for me), metaphor was a technology that I could see myself and other people using to describe, treat, diminish, and manage pain. I felt like this connection might be important to someone else. And I wanted to know if we - the patient, the person in pain - could use it: this thing that I kept turning to when faced with my own pain.
This research was guided by this key question: can metaphor be reclaimed by those in pain, as a technology with which we can understand our bodies, our pain, and the world we live in?
I planned a series of four workshops. These aimed to explore metaphor and its importance (or lack of importance) for a group of other people with chronic pain. Between July and September, I ran three cycles of these four sessions, with a total of twenty-two attendees. All of us had chronic pain, of some kind, but no other demographic or medical information was collected.
In each workshop, I presented prompts that we worked through or used as a way in. Some of the prompts might make less sense if you don’t have chronic pain yourself. Yet probably— almost surely—you have felt pain, some time, to relate to.
These prompts were based on previous research, and I often spoke through some key quotes or references to introduce the ideas that we would be exploring. These quotes are included with the prompts below.
Sessions One and Two focus on pain and dominant descriptions: What are these medical metaphors of pain all about? Who is making them? And why are we using them?
Sessions Three and Four speculate about what might or could be: What are the practices of making metaphor that aren’t imposing? What metaphor would you choose for yourself? What could this do for you?
Each workshop has a warm-up prompt to ease you in, before two more focused prompts per session. You can spend as much, or as little, time with each prompt as you want. If you are doing these in a group, I suggest the following timings – five minutes for the warm-up, and then fifteen minutes of independent time for the two main prompts. Between each prompt, you can discuss your responses together and see what this might add to your understanding.
You can respond in any way you choose. For some inspiration - in our workshops, people wrote, drew, painted, stitched, collaged, embroidered. Some people came out after fifteen minutes with entire poems, some with just a word or two.
Session 1
Warm-up: Think/write/draw as many words/images as possible to describe your pain
Prompt 1: Imagine yourself in conversation with a curious alien who knows nothing of your pain. What are you giving/making/describing to them?
Prompt 2: Pick out one image, metaphor, or word. Follow this—what does it tell you/what do you tell it?
Session 2
Warm-up: A (new?) definition for “pain.”
“The scientific edifice will stretch past the sky like an endless erector set but it is still built on a core of metaphor.”
Shane Neilson, physician
“Explanatory models of pain are always metaphorical because they develop according to the constraints of human conceptual thinking.”
Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, Cormac G Ryan
Prompt 1: Write a medical explanation for (your) pain. Pick out one image (e.g. nerves misfiring, etc) and take this as a starting point for something. You can stay in the “medical” sphere or try and wrangle it outside.
Prompt 2: Susan Sontag suggests that it those “mysterious and unexplained” illnesses that leave us reaching for metaphor. What is the least mysterious illness you can think of? Describe it (with or without metaphors).
Session 3
Warm-up: Draw (or write) the shape of your pain.
This session follows this understanding presented by anthropologist Thomas Csordas (influenced by Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein). Language is more than simply representation of the world but is itself a mode of being-in-the-world. It does not describe a world ‘out there’ but is the reason this world exists to us at all.
Prompt 1: What came first, the language or the pain, the mind or the pain?
“The metaphor is also an autobiography, a vision.” – Ocean Vuong
Prompt 2: If metaphor is a vision, what future can you see through yours? What future would you want to see through it?
Session 4
Warm-up: Pick out one example of the classic vocabulary of pain (e.g. stabbing). Try and escape this existing vocabulary: what is a way to describe pain that feels like the opposite of this example?
“Changing the story is a way of changing thinking”
Jennifer Patterson, Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not
Prompt 1: In a universe where you know your pain is understood, what metaphor would you choose for yourself?
“The very temptation to invoke analogies to remote cosmologies […] is itself a sign of pain’s triumph”
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
Prompt 2: Imagine a remote cosmology for your pain to take you to.
You might notice differences between the metaphors you came with for the first prompt, and the metaphors you have grabbed on to during Session 4. In our sessions, we spotted metaphors that came up again and again: pain gremlins, plants and their roots, water, interplanetary travel, mud, gravity, electrical currents. Strange connections between different countries, different languages, different pains. Maybe you, too, can recognise your pain in these metaphors.
These workshops were run as part of a larger project, which was developed within the “Unwired Currents—Imagining Technologies Otherwise” fellowship under the mentorship of Iyo Bisseck and Mio Kojima. The fellowship was a larger collaborative program between the think & do tank Dezentrum and the intersectional feminist platform Futuress, along with the transnational collective Dreaming Beyond AI, designer and researcher Franca López Barbera, and the anti-educational platform Matería Oscura.
From the research conducted through these workshops, I have developed a longer essay and a publication exploring one of the metaphors – the pain gremlin. These will soon be published on futuress.org and dreamingbeyond.ai. If you do experiment with any of the prompts here, I would love to see the metaphors that you have carried with you or created.
Books
Illness as Metaphor - Susan Sontag
The Body in Pain - Elaine Scarry
Metaphors we live by - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Inside Chronic Pain: An Intimate and Critical Account – Lous Heshusius
The Undying – Anne Boyer
A Matter of Appearance – Emily Wells
The Body is a Doorway – Sophie Strand
Explaining Humans – Camilla Pang
Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
Articles/Chapters
Pain as metaphor: metaphor and medicine – Shane Neilson
Perspectives on the insidious nature of pain metaphor: we literally need to change our metaphors - Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, and Cormac G Ryan.
Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not: representations, language and transformation – Jennifer Patterson
Space and Embodied Experience: Rethinking the Body in Pain – Marja-Liisa Honkasalo
How metaphors shape the particularities of illness and healing experiences – Raymond W. Gibbs (Jr)
The message in the bottle: Illness and the micropolitics of resistance – Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock
Other
The politics of pain – Rob Boddice
https://aeon.co/essays/pain-is-not-the-purview-of-medics-what-can-historians-tell-us
Interview with Ocean Vuong
https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-ocean-vuong/
Lindsey Allen is an award-winning writer, researcher, and designer based in Bristol. Allen thinks and works in the intersections of care, time, disability, and the natural environment - aiming to platform disabled knowledge and lived experience. Her work is grounded in anthropological methods, exploring how people understand the world they live in, and their hopes and imaginaries around how this world could be. Allen's writing is focused on creative non-fiction and the essay form., and in her broader creative practice, she makes socially-engaged and participatory work, utilising caring methodologies.
BY LINDSEY ALLEN
In the Summer of 2025, I ran a series of workshops called Our Pain Thinks About Metaphors.
These workshops were part of a larger research project all about metaphor as a technology. This work pushes metaphor out of the realm of literature and instead presents an understanding of metaphor as a tool, a conceptual framing or structure that shapes our understanding the world. Metaphors are chosen by societies, by cultures. They say something about the person using them, but they also say something about the context in which that person is. The metaphors we use shape our understanding of the things they describe.
Most people do not realise it, but we are using metaphors all the time. In my previous work, I had specifically focused on the language of pain, exploring the medical metaphors that are used to describe, diagnose, and treat pain. Words like stabbing, burning, piercing, crushing. Medical tools and questionnaires like the McGill Pain Questionnaire. The framing of specific types of movement as ‘pain behaviours’. These are medical metaphors that have been created for, and by, a reductionist and mechanistic medical system. They do not necessarily work for us – the people in pain.
So, I knew that (for me), metaphor was a technology that I could see myself and other people using to describe, treat, diminish, and manage pain. I felt like this connection might be important to someone else. And I wanted to know if we - the patient, the person in pain - could use it: this thing that I kept turning to when faced with my own pain.
This research was guided by this key question: can metaphor be reclaimed by those in pain, as a technology with which we can understand our bodies, our pain, and the world we live in?
I planned a series of four workshops. These aimed to explore metaphor and its importance (or lack of importance) for a group of other people with chronic pain. Between July and September, I ran three cycles of these four sessions, with a total of twenty-two attendees. All of us had chronic pain, of some kind, but no other demographic or medical information was collected.
In each workshop, I presented prompts that we worked through or used as a way in. Some of the prompts might make less sense if you don’t have chronic pain yourself. Yet probably— almost surely—you have felt pain, some time, to relate to.
These prompts were based on previous research, and I often spoke through some key quotes or references to introduce the ideas that we would be exploring. These quotes are included with the prompts below.
Sessions One and Two focus on pain and dominant descriptions: What are these medical metaphors of pain all about? Who is making them? And why are we using them?
Sessions Three and Four speculate about what might or could be: What are the practices of making metaphor that aren’t imposing? What metaphor would you choose for yourself? What could this do for you?
Each workshop has a warm-up prompt to ease you in, before two more focused prompts per session. You can spend as much, or as little, time with each prompt as you want. If you are doing these in a group, I suggest the following timings – five minutes for the warm-up, and then fifteen minutes of independent time for the two main prompts. Between each prompt, you can discuss your responses together and see what this might add to your understanding.
You can respond in any way you choose. For some inspiration - in our workshops, people wrote, drew, painted, stitched, collaged, embroidered. Some people came out after fifteen minutes with entire poems, some with just a word or two.
Session 1
Warm-up: Think/write/draw as many words/images as possible to describe your pain
Prompt 1: Imagine yourself in conversation with a curious alien who knows nothing of your pain. What are you giving/making/describing to them?
Prompt 2: Pick out one image, metaphor, or word. Follow this—what does it tell you/what do you tell it?
Session 2
Warm-up: A (new?) definition for “pain.”
“The scientific edifice will stretch past the sky like an endless erector set but it is still built on a core of metaphor.”
Shane Neilson, physician
“Explanatory models of pain are always metaphorical because they develop according to the constraints of human conceptual thinking.”
Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, Cormac G Ryan
Prompt 1: Write a medical explanation for (your) pain. Pick out one image (e.g. nerves misfiring, etc) and take this as a starting point for something. You can stay in the “medical” sphere or try and wrangle it outside.
Prompt 2: Susan Sontag suggests that it those “mysterious and unexplained” illnesses that leave us reaching for metaphor. What is the least mysterious illness you can think of? Describe it (with or without metaphors).
Session 3
Warm-up: Draw (or write) the shape of your pain.
This session follows this understanding presented by anthropologist Thomas Csordas (influenced by Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein). Language is more than simply representation of the world but is itself a mode of being-in-the-world. It does not describe a world ‘out there’ but is the reason this world exists to us at all.
Prompt 1: What came first, the language or the pain, the mind or the pain?
“The metaphor is also an autobiography, a vision.” – Ocean Vuong
Prompt 2: If metaphor is a vision, what future can you see through yours? What future would you want to see through it?
Session 4
Warm-up: Pick out one example of the classic vocabulary of pain (e.g. stabbing). Try and escape this existing vocabulary: what is a way to describe pain that feels like the opposite of this example?
“Changing the story is a way of changing thinking”
Jennifer Patterson, Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not
Prompt 1: In a universe where you know your pain is understood, what metaphor would you choose for yourself?
“The very temptation to invoke analogies to remote cosmologies […] is itself a sign of pain’s triumph”
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
Prompt 2: Imagine a remote cosmology for your pain to take you to.
You might notice differences between the metaphors you came with for the first prompt, and the metaphors you have grabbed on to during Session 4. In our sessions, we spotted metaphors that came up again and again: pain gremlins, plants and their roots, water, interplanetary travel, mud, gravity, electrical currents. Strange connections between different countries, different languages, different pains. Maybe you, too, can recognise your pain in these metaphors.
These workshops were run as part of a larger project, which was developed within the “Unwired Currents—Imagining Technologies Otherwise” fellowship under the mentorship of Iyo Bisseck and Mio Kojima. The fellowship was a larger collaborative program between the think & do tank Dezentrum and the intersectional feminist platform Futuress, along with the transnational collective Dreaming Beyond AI, designer and researcher Franca López Barbera, and the anti-educational platform Matería Oscura.
From the research conducted through these workshops, I have developed a longer essay and a publication exploring one of the metaphors – the pain gremlin. These will soon be published on futuress.org and dreamingbeyond.ai. If you do experiment with any of the prompts here, I would love to see the metaphors that you have carried with you or created.
Books
Illness as Metaphor - Susan Sontag
The Body in Pain - Elaine Scarry
Metaphors we live by - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Inside Chronic Pain: An Intimate and Critical Account – Lous Heshusius
The Undying – Anne Boyer
A Matter of Appearance – Emily Wells
The Body is a Doorway – Sophie Strand
Explaining Humans – Camilla Pang
Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
Articles/Chapters
Pain as metaphor: metaphor and medicine – Shane Neilson
Perspectives on the insidious nature of pain metaphor: we literally need to change our metaphors - Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, and Cormac G Ryan.
Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not: representations, language and transformation – Jennifer Patterson
Space and Embodied Experience: Rethinking the Body in Pain – Marja-Liisa Honkasalo
How metaphors shape the particularities of illness and healing experiences – Raymond W. Gibbs (Jr)
The message in the bottle: Illness and the micropolitics of resistance – Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock
Other
The politics of pain – Rob Boddice
https://aeon.co/essays/pain-is-not-the-purview-of-medics-what-can-historians-tell-us
Interview with Ocean Vuong
https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-ocean-vuong/
In the Summer of 2025, I ran a series of workshops called Our Pain Thinks About Metaphors.
These workshops were part of a larger research project all about metaphor as a technology. This work pushes metaphor out of the realm of literature and instead presents an understanding of metaphor as a tool, a conceptual framing or structure that shapes our understanding the world. Metaphors are chosen by societies, by cultures. They say something about the person using them, but they also say something about the context in which that person is. The metaphors we use shape our understanding of the things they describe.
Most people do not realise it, but we are using metaphors all the time. In my previous work, I had specifically focused on the language of pain, exploring the medical metaphors that are used to describe, diagnose, and treat pain. Words like stabbing, burning, piercing, crushing. Medical tools and questionnaires like the McGill Pain Questionnaire. The framing of specific types of movement as ‘pain behaviours’. These are medical metaphors that have been created for, and by, a reductionist and mechanistic medical system. They do not necessarily work for us – the people in pain.
So, I knew that (for me), metaphor was a technology that I could see myself and other people using to describe, treat, diminish, and manage pain. I felt like this connection might be important to someone else. And I wanted to know if we - the patient, the person in pain - could use it: this thing that I kept turning to when faced with my own pain.
This research was guided by this key question: can metaphor be reclaimed by those in pain, as a technology with which we can understand our bodies, our pain, and the world we live in?
I planned a series of four workshops. These aimed to explore metaphor and its importance (or lack of importance) for a group of other people with chronic pain. Between July and September, I ran three cycles of these four sessions, with a total of twenty-two attendees. All of us had chronic pain, of some kind, but no other demographic or medical information was collected.
In each workshop, I presented prompts that we worked through or used as a way in. Some of the prompts might make less sense if you don’t have chronic pain yourself. Yet probably— almost surely—you have felt pain, some time, to relate to.
These prompts were based on previous research, and I often spoke through some key quotes or references to introduce the ideas that we would be exploring. These quotes are included with the prompts below.
Sessions One and Two focus on pain and dominant descriptions: What are these medical metaphors of pain all about? Who is making them? And why are we using them?
Sessions Three and Four speculate about what might or could be: What are the practices of making metaphor that aren’t imposing? What metaphor would you choose for yourself? What could this do for you?
Each workshop has a warm-up prompt to ease you in, before two more focused prompts per session. You can spend as much, or as little, time with each prompt as you want. If you are doing these in a group, I suggest the following timings – five minutes for the warm-up, and then fifteen minutes of independent time for the two main prompts. Between each prompt, you can discuss your responses together and see what this might add to your understanding.
You can respond in any way you choose. For some inspiration - in our workshops, people wrote, drew, painted, stitched, collaged, embroidered. Some people came out after fifteen minutes with entire poems, some with just a word or two.
Session 1
Warm-up: Think/write/draw as many words/images as possible to describe your pain
Prompt 1: Imagine yourself in conversation with a curious alien who knows nothing of your pain. What are you giving/making/describing to them?
Prompt 2: Pick out one image, metaphor, or word. Follow this—what does it tell you/what do you tell it?
Session 2
Warm-up: A (new?) definition for “pain.”
“The scientific edifice will stretch past the sky like an endless erector set but it is still built on a core of metaphor.”
Shane Neilson, physician
“Explanatory models of pain are always metaphorical because they develop according to the constraints of human conceptual thinking.”
Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, Cormac G Ryan
Prompt 1: Write a medical explanation for (your) pain. Pick out one image (e.g. nerves misfiring, etc) and take this as a starting point for something. You can stay in the “medical” sphere or try and wrangle it outside.
Prompt 2: Susan Sontag suggests that it those “mysterious and unexplained” illnesses that leave us reaching for metaphor. What is the least mysterious illness you can think of? Describe it (with or without metaphors).
Session 3
Warm-up: Draw (or write) the shape of your pain.
This session follows this understanding presented by anthropologist Thomas Csordas (influenced by Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein). Language is more than simply representation of the world but is itself a mode of being-in-the-world. It does not describe a world ‘out there’ but is the reason this world exists to us at all.
Prompt 1: What came first, the language or the pain, the mind or the pain?
“The metaphor is also an autobiography, a vision.” – Ocean Vuong
Prompt 2: If metaphor is a vision, what future can you see through yours? What future would you want to see through it?
Session 4
Warm-up: Pick out one example of the classic vocabulary of pain (e.g. stabbing). Try and escape this existing vocabulary: what is a way to describe pain that feels like the opposite of this example?
“Changing the story is a way of changing thinking”
Jennifer Patterson, Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not
Prompt 1: In a universe where you know your pain is understood, what metaphor would you choose for yourself?
“The very temptation to invoke analogies to remote cosmologies […] is itself a sign of pain’s triumph”
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
Prompt 2: Imagine a remote cosmology for your pain to take you to.
You might notice differences between the metaphors you came with for the first prompt, and the metaphors you have grabbed on to during Session 4. In our sessions, we spotted metaphors that came up again and again: pain gremlins, plants and their roots, water, interplanetary travel, mud, gravity, electrical currents. Strange connections between different countries, different languages, different pains. Maybe you, too, can recognise your pain in these metaphors.
These workshops were run as part of a larger project, which was developed within the “Unwired Currents—Imagining Technologies Otherwise” fellowship under the mentorship of Iyo Bisseck and Mio Kojima. The fellowship was a larger collaborative program between the think & do tank Dezentrum and the intersectional feminist platform Futuress, along with the transnational collective Dreaming Beyond AI, designer and researcher Franca López Barbera, and the anti-educational platform Matería Oscura.
From the research conducted through these workshops, I have developed a longer essay and a publication exploring one of the metaphors – the pain gremlin. These will soon be published on futuress.org and dreamingbeyond.ai. If you do experiment with any of the prompts here, I would love to see the metaphors that you have carried with you or created.
Books
Illness as Metaphor - Susan Sontag
The Body in Pain - Elaine Scarry
Metaphors we live by - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Inside Chronic Pain: An Intimate and Critical Account – Lous Heshusius
The Undying – Anne Boyer
A Matter of Appearance – Emily Wells
The Body is a Doorway – Sophie Strand
Explaining Humans – Camilla Pang
Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
Articles/Chapters
Pain as metaphor: metaphor and medicine – Shane Neilson
Perspectives on the insidious nature of pain metaphor: we literally need to change our metaphors - Mark Johnson, Matt Hudson, and Cormac G Ryan.
Acute pain is sexy and chronic pain is not: representations, language and transformation – Jennifer Patterson
Space and Embodied Experience: Rethinking the Body in Pain – Marja-Liisa Honkasalo
How metaphors shape the particularities of illness and healing experiences – Raymond W. Gibbs (Jr)
The message in the bottle: Illness and the micropolitics of resistance – Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock
Other
The politics of pain – Rob Boddice
https://aeon.co/essays/pain-is-not-the-purview-of-medics-what-can-historians-tell-us
Interview with Ocean Vuong
https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-ocean-vuong/
Lindsey Allen is an award-winning writer, researcher, and designer based in Bristol. Allen thinks and works in the intersections of care, time, disability, and the natural environment - aiming to platform disabled knowledge and lived experience. Her work is grounded in anthropological methods, exploring how people understand the world they live in, and their hopes and imaginaries around how this world could be. Allen's writing is focused on creative non-fiction and the essay form., and in her broader creative practice, she makes socially-engaged and participatory work, utilising caring methodologies.