framing story of the Zen master who came home to find his house burned down. He looked at the
charred ruins and declared that at last he had an unobstructed view of the moon at night. As in the
tale of Cinderella, there is no description of how the character moved through the processes from
one set of circumstances to another. The tale does not tell us how, unless you have the wisdom or
spiritual mastery of a high-order Zen practitioner, to move from the process of grief and loss to the
reframed attitude of positivism.
Some clinician-authors seem to take a different view about the use of magic in metaphor. Lin-
den, for example, says,
Magic is a very important metaphor. It is full of surprise and it implies that change can happen
(Lankton, 1988). When a child’s sense of him or herself, or of the future, has been destroyed be-
cause of some kind of traumatic experience, magic is a very powerful antidote. Children under-
stand magic as a way to make things happen that ordinarily cannot happen. It can give children
a sense of outcome and mastery in situations which seem hopeless, and does so with delight and
joy.... The possibility of magic restores hope. (Linden, 2003a, p. 247)
The building of hope is certainly an important function of therapy. Seligman’s work (1995, 2002)
highlights the value of hope for children and adults in combating depression and creating happiness.
The case of the child with elective mutism that I presented in Chapter 1 shows that magical stories
do work, sometimes—in this case, because the child already had the resources to speak, and to speak
with certain people in certain circumstances. Generally, however, offering hope without the means
is a bit like a parent saying to a child, “You can wish for your desired birthday present but I don’t have
the money to buy it.” Hope without the resources to attain it is likely to heighten disappointment
and possibly exacerbate the trauma experiences, so I would want to say, “Offer hope, offer outcome,
and if magic stories help achieve that, use them—but with them, also offer the means, steps, skills,
or processes that the child needs to make them realistic and attainable.” While hope without means
may be a false hope, hope with means gives the child replicable resources to facilitate transition and
provide empowerment to overcome the problem.
Let me also distinguish between magic-outcome stories and the magic-wand question that is
commonly found in brief solution-focused therapy (Berg & Dolan, 2001; Berg & Steiner, 2003).
Magic-wand questions (e.g., “If you had a magic wand and could wish for what you wanted most in
your life, what would you want?”) may be useful to include in therapeutic conversation and thera-
peutic metaphors as a way to define a child’s goal. It is then essential to explore those questions that
are going to help the child move toward his or her goal: questions such as “What do you think you
can do to have that wish become a reality?” and “When are the times you feel closest to where you
want to be?”
It is, of course, possible to create metaphoric tales that incorporate these processes. This I have
attempted to do in “Creating a Wish” (Story 80). This tale uses a magic character (a genie in a lamp),
has magic in its content, and asks a magic-wand question. At the same time, it seeks to empower lis-
teners in the means to achieve their desired outcomes. In fact, the concept of empowerment is the
key issue here. The bottom line with metaphor therapy, as indeed with any form of therapy, is to em-
power the child or adolescent to find his or her own best solutions. This doesn’t happen as much by
magic as by appropriate actions.
USING METAPHORSHow Can I Use Metaphors Effectively? 235