Jumping in the Shower: Dad jokes, dead words, and a different kind of attention

Person One: "I'm just gonna jump in the shower real quick."

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Person Two: "Probably best if you just stand there and let the water fall on you, no need to jump."

Why do we like dad jokes (and hate them at the same time)? Because they re-open something closed. For a second dead language is alive again, without changing a word. That's your brain catching a metaphor in the act.

Today's post is a little different. It's more psychology and philosophy than therapeutic application. I have personally found these frameworks helpful for my own emotional wellbeing though, which is why I'm sharing them today. And it all starts with metaphor.

Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist says metaphor is not decoration or an add on to language. He says it is "the bedrock of language." Metaphor means carrying over. It carries over truth from experience into a form we can notice and do something with. Sensations, feelings, thoughts, movements, and of course words are all forms we can notice.

McGilchrist goes on to say that whenever we use language at all, we are using metaphor. Which means every time we speak. A metaphor can be dead or alive though. Ricoeur said a metaphor is alive while it's new and still saying something, and dies once it settles into the dictionary. We notice the alive ones in songs and poetry, or a compelling talk or speaker. But over time what once felt novel and intriguing becomes rote and just functional. Think of a two year old learning to talk. They reveal the wonder of language as they begin to communicate at a higher level. They repeat words and tell you about words that to most of us feel too common to even notice in day to day life.

When someone says don't jump, just stand there and let the water fall on you, your attention gets jarred into hearing the literal words, jumping inside a shower, and how silly they sound, maybe for the first time. Which is why it's funny.

Metaphors come in more forms than just words though. Thomas Kinkade paints light coming from a house in the woods and it registers as a flat fairytale. Comforting, maybe, but not alive, because it isn't carrying anything over from lived experience. Van Gogh's self portraits, however, stir us because of how he attended to his own face and the metaphor it created visually. That attention is in the paint, and it still reaches us.

So why does this matter? I am about to tell you, but first let me explain a little more background. McGilchrist says the left hemisphere handles cliché, the worn and familiar and known. When words stop feeling new they become cogs in the wheel of communication (notice the metaphor I just used!?). Live metaphor is the right hemisphere's territory. It works out the hidden meaning in the novel. It is not bothered by the non-literal meaning and even likes the tickle of the absurdity it notices. The left then takes a reduced form of that information so it can make functional use of the symbol.

So the difference between cliché and live metaphor is not in the words. It's in how they are attended to.

Which leads, somewhat surprisingly, to three things: attention comes before all other cognitive functions, attention is a creative act, and not all attention is the same. As McGilchrist said, "The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to."

Which means the feeling of cliché or deadness is not a property of a painting or a song or a sentence. It's a property of the attention brought to it.

What does that actually look like? This question deals with the two main sides of our brains, the left hemisphere and the right. They aren't doing different jobs so much as attending to experience in different ways. It isn't that one takes care of feelings while the other takes care of rational thought. The left cannot experience life first hand. It can only deal with what the right hemisphere tells it about the experience of life. The left provides narrow attention to what we are dealing with. It grasps something specific, holds it still, takes it apart, categorizes it, and gets it ready for use. The right has direct access to lived experience, and its attention stays wide. It holds the whole field, the context, the thing as it is rather than as a type of thing. McGilchrist sums it up as the left helping us apprehend the world in order to manipulate it, and the right helping us comprehend it, to see it for what it is.

Both are needed. McGilchrist's classic example of why is a bird on the ground: a narrow beam to pick the seed out of the gritty dirt, and at the same moment a broad vigilance for the hawk on the prowl. Lose the narrow one and you starve. Lose the wide one and something eats you. Even so, the argument I am making here is for an increase in right hemisphere attending.

Attending with right hemisphere qualities means widening. Staying with the whole instead of the useful part. Letting a thing be itself before it becomes defined. Tolerating that you don't have it pinned down yet. Less doing and more being. Tending to a moment with a right hemisphere bias gives you a better chance of being present to what is. That said, with the dialectic of the left and right hemispheres intact, how present any of us can get to full reality is debatable.

Almost nothing you handled today was the thing itself. The word chair is not a chair. Your name is not you. The story you tell about your marriage is not your marriage. "Anxious" is a sound standing in for something happening in your chest that has no sounds in it at all, which is itself standing in for an experience you lived before you had a word for it. McGilchrist says it flatly: we live "no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it."

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan gave this a name. He called it the symbolic order, and we live inside it. All symbols (and he would say the entire world we perceive is made of symbols) are what he called signifiers. For Lacan, signifiers don't point to some true version like Plato talked about. Instead they confusingly just point at other signifiers. There is no way to use the symbolic to point at anything other than the symbolic. He says there is experience outside the symbolic. He calls that the Real. Again, don't hear that as Platonic, as though the Real were a truer world sitting behind this one. Hear it as the problem with symbols. Experience arrives formless, and forcing it into a shareable form leaves you holding a signal of something that was more complete before it got reduced. The Real is all that resists being named and formed and put into a symbol.

So we don't get to experience the Real. But Lacan says trauma is a symptom of it intruding into the reality we have built inside the symbolic order. We get disorganized by something our faculties cannot define. He calls that an encounter with the Real. Jokes, when they gently alert us to an absurdity standing alongside a rational concept, are perhaps a light version of that encounter. Or at least a glitch in the matrix, a moment where we get to recognize the order we are inside.

Lacan's point was that the order of symbols was here before you were. You were born into a form, and that form sits inside a world of words, names, rules and relations already in motion. Somebody named you before you could object. He suggests that to be human is to carry an internal unsolvable wound, the felt loss of a wholeness that Lacan says we never even really had. The felt loss is real. Assuming we were once whole and that that’s what we grieve is a retroactive contruction we make in effort to make sense of our pain.

Here is where I think Lacan and McGilchrist are not saying the same thing. Lacan gives us a theory for the structure of our reality, and tells us the wound that structure causes does not heal. McGilchrist gives us a mechanism, and a mechanism has a dial on it. So the gap does not close. But it has a width, and how we attend sets the width. I'm not suggesting we can escape the symbolic order. Some yogis claim experiences of an all unifying reality, so the jury is still out, but it is safe to say it is very unlikely for most of us. I am suggesting that right hemispheric attention is the difference between living in a thin description of your life and living in a wider one. Which is most of what I watch happen in a therapy room. Nobody gets out of the symbolic order. Some people get more room inside it.

Symbols also help us connect. Metaphors allow us to communicate. They solve for isolation in this life. We can translate what is inside of us to others and feel seen and known, at least in part.

So the symbols were never the problem. Forgetting they are symbols is, because that's when we stop being present. We start living in a description of life instead of life itself. That's what over-leaning on the left hemisphere does. This is much of McGilchrist's warning, that we are allowing our cultures to become homogenized toward a left hemisphere way of attending to the world.

So it's up to us to resist. Start small. Listen to what you said today. You caught a flight. You killed time. You ran an idea past someone. You were going to jump in the shower.

None of it is literally true. Every one is a bridge, but what if you could stop mid bridge and look around?

Nothing in that list is permanently dead. A shift out of rote and back into experience is still possible. The deadness was never in the words, so it can't be sealed in there. It sits in the attention, which means it's reversible, by you, today, by tracing the language you already have back toward the experience it came from, the part that is less defined symbol and more full picture mystery.

Which makes attending a skill. Something you practice, and the practice is widening. Noticing what you feel before you name it. Staying with a sensation instead of explaining it. Hearing what someone actually said rather than the category you filed it under. Narrow the attention and the world gets smaller. Open it and there's more there than there was a minute ago.

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References

Channel McGilchrist. (2022, May 16). Understanding the matter with things dialogues episode 6: Chapter 6 emotional & social intelligence [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZViXjsYjY4

Lacan, J. (1988). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's papers on technique, 1953–1954 (J.-A. Miller, Ed.; J. Forrester, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1975)

Lacan, J. (1998). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (J.-A. Miller, Ed.; A. Sheridan, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1973)

McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the Western world. Yale University Press.

McGilchrist, I. (2021). The matter with things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world. Perspectiva Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1977). The rule of metaphor: Multi-disciplinary studies of the creation of meaning in language (R. Czerny, K. McLaughlin, & J. Costello, Trans.). University of Toronto Press. (Original work published 1975)

Why Panic Can Feel Like It Comes From Nowhere

One of the strangest things about panic is how often it arrives without a story attached. There's no clear reason, nothing you can point to, just the alarm going off in the middle of an ordinary moment.

In an earlier piece, I wrote about panic as an attachment alarm rather than a fear response. Panic isn't your brain asking "am I in danger?" It's an old, loud signal built to maintain connection, telling you that you're disconnected right now, or convinced that disconnection is about to happen. That system, which researchers call PANIC/GRIEF, runs on different chemistry than fear does and directly affects your breathing, heart rate, and pain sensitivity, which is why the alarm shows up as a full-body event rather than just a thought.

What I want to get into here is a different question. Why does the alarm so often go off with no obvious trigger? Why does it feel like it's coming from nowhere?

Two kinds of attention

I think part of the answer has to do with how the two halves of the brain handle information differently, an idea the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has spent much of his career working out.

His argument isn't the old, oversimplified version you may have heard, that the left brain does logic and the right brain does creativity. McGilchrist's case is that the two hemispheres aren't divided by subject matter at all. They're divided by the kind of attention each one pays to the world. Both hemispheres are involved in most of what the brain does. They just interact with experience in different ways.

The right hemisphere takes in the whole picture at once: context, relationship, body state, the things that are true but haven't been put into words yet. It's comfortable holding something ambiguous without rushing to resolve it. The left hemisphere works differently. It wants the explicit, the categorized, the already-known. It's fast and confident, and according to McGilchrist, it doesn't know what it doesn't know. If something doesn't fit a category it already has, the left hemisphere tends to filter it out rather than sit with the uncertainty.

McGilchrist also argues that the right hemisphere is more closely tied to the body, to reading relational and emotional cues, and to intense emotional states in general, especially the harder ones like fear and distress.

A signal with nowhere to go

Put those two pieces together and it starts to make sense how you can know something and not know it at the same time.

It's entirely possible for your right hemisphere to pick up on something real: a shift in someone's tone, a withdrawal, a relationship that's fraying, a sense that you're more alone in a room full of people than you should be. All of that can register well before it can be put into words or sorted into a category the left hemisphere will accept. If the left hemisphere can't find a clean, explicit story for what's being sensed, it may not integrate the signal at all. The information doesn't vanish. It just doesn't make it into the version of events you're consciously telling yourself.

So the body notices something and signals it, but the signal has no way into the ordinary channel of thought and language. This might be part of why Freud paid such close attention to slips of the tongue, words that come out unintended and seem out of place, and to dream interpretation, even though he wouldn't have described it in these terms. Both were attempts to reach content that was present but blocked from conscious, verbal access. The PANIC/GRIEF system doesn't need permission from your conscious narrative to act. If the felt sense of disconnection is strong enough and the explicit story isn't catching up to it, the alarm keeps escalating until it's loud enough that you can't ignore it. That's one way to understand why panic so often hits with no obvious trigger. The trigger was there. It just didn't pass through the part of the brain that explains things to you in words.

Why this matters for treatment

This is a contested area of neuroscience. McGilchrist's broader claims about the hemispheres have real critics, and some argue he overstates how cleanly these functions divide. So know that this isn't settled fact.

But the narrower point, that something can be accurately sensed in the body and in relationship before it's consciously articulated, fits well with what's already known about how the PANIC/GRIEF system works. It doesn't wait for you to have a sentence ready. It acts on what's felt, not on what's been said yet.

That has a practical implication. If the original signal never passed through the part of you built to name, define, and explain things in words, then reassuring yourself in that same verbal mode is less likely to help than something that can reach the signal where it actually lives. You can tell someone, accurately, that there's no danger in the room, and it can still miss the point, because the alarm was never about the room. This is a big part of why somatic and body-based approaches tend to reach panic in a way that talking alone doesn't. The work isn't just building a better explanation. It's helping the part of you that senses things before it can name them learn, slowly, that it's not as alone as it fears, and that it now has more capacity to handle grief and aloneness than it did back when it first learned to be afraid of them.

Reference notes: McGilchrist's claims about hemispheric attention styles, the right hemisphere's role in holding ambiguity and context, the left hemisphere's tendency toward premature categorization and closure, and the right hemisphere's closer relationship to bodily and relational awareness, come from his 2009 book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World and his 2021 follow-up The Matter with Things. These claims are influential but not uncontested. Michael Spezio, a psychologist at Scripps College, published a critical assessment in 2019, "McGilchrist and hemisphere lateralization: a neuroscientific and metaanalytic assessment," in the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior, arguing that recent meta-analyses do not support the sweeping, oppositional picture of hemispheric difference McGilchrist describes. The connection between this framework and panic attacks specifically is my own synthesis, drawn from putting McGilchrist's model of attention alongside the PANIC/GRIEF research of Jaak Panksepp covered in the companion piece, not a claim McGilchrist has made himself.

The Cult of Meaning-Making: When Thinking Hijacks Feeling

In our fast-paced culture, thinking is often elevated as the highest human function—our prized problem-solver, meaning-maker, and escape hatch. But thinking, as necessary as it is, can become a trap. Especially when it overrides our capacity to feel.

Neuroscience tells us that emotions come first. Literally. We feel before we think. Research by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven (2012) demonstrates that emotional experience arises from deep subcortical structures in the brain—what they call the “core self”—before the neocortex (the seat of conscious thought) even gets involved.

Yet when we feel overwhelmed, vulnerable, or dysregulated, we often reach for thinking as a shield. We lean into analysis, planning, interpreting—often without realizing we're doing it to avoid the raw intensity of emotion. This pattern shows up neurologically in the dominance of the left prefrontal cortex—what psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist (2010) describes as the left hemisphere’s narrow, detail-focused grasp on the world.

McGilchrist’s work reveals that the left hemisphere, especially the top-left-frontal region, tends to "make meaning" even when it lacks full data. It creates interpretations to soothe uncertainty—even if the result is distorted, fragmented, or, frankly, wrong. It favors coherence over truth. It would rather invent an answer than admit it doesn't know.

And here’s the rub: the left brain doesn’t have direct access to the richness of lived experience. It depends on the right hemisphere—our embodied, relational, and emotionally attuned brain—for that. The left side is secondary. A translator. A map-maker, not a navigator. As McGilchrist puts it, “The right hemisphere sees the whole, the left sees the parts and confuses the map for the territory” (McGilchrist, 2010).

The danger is cultural as well as personal. A society dominated by left-brain modes of thought can become obsessed with control, explanation, and certainty. Feeling is dismissed as irrational. Intuition is sidelined. Opinion replaces embodied knowing. As a result, we become more reactive, less reflective—and more cut off from ourselves.

But there’s another way.

Like many in the fields of affective neuroscience and psychotherapy, I invite a return to the wisdom of the body. As developmental neuropsychologist Allan Schore (2012) suggests, we can "shift down and to the right"—from the high-speed highways of left-brain cognition to the slower, more relational terrain of the right hemisphere and subcortical brain.

This shift asks us to pause. To feel. To listen to our body’s signals—its tension, breath, heart rate, gut response—before rushing to interpret or explain. It’s in this space, Schore says, that self-regulation becomes possible. And once we’re regulated, the deeper wisdom stored in our emotional and somatic systems begins to rise.

Our nervous systems are not just reactive—they're adaptive. But they need time. Time to feel before we think. Time to notice before we narrate. Time to allow the truth of our experience to emerge from the inside out—not be forced from the top down.

So let’s resist the cult of premature meaning-making. Let’s be willing to not know for a little while longer. In that not-knowing, something truer may take shape.

References

• Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion. W. W. Norton & Company.

• McGilchrist, I. (2010). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

• Schore, A. N. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.

The Two Sides of Your Brain: Digital Life and Mental Well-being

Drawing from psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist's groundbreaking work, we can understand how modern technology affects our brain through its distinct hemispheric systems. The left hemisphere, primarily operating through dopamine pathways, has found its perfect match in social media and smartphone technology. Each notification, like, and scroll creates a small dopamine hit, feeding our left hemisphere's appetite for quick, predictable rewards.

This explains why we often find ourselves caught in cycles of compulsive phone checking and social media browsing. The left hemisphere's dopamine-driven nature craves these bite-sized pieces of digital stimulation, much like a slot machine that occasionally pays out. The fragmentary nature of social media—breaking life into discrete, manageable chunks of information—perfectly suits the left hemisphere's preference for categorization and control.

Meanwhile, the right hemisphere, regulated by noradrenaline, yearns for novel, real-world experiences that can't be reduced to pixels and likes. This hemisphere thrives on the unexpected, the contextual, and the embodied experiences that make life rich and meaningful. It's activated when we explore new places, engage in face-to-face conversations, or immerse ourselves in nature's unpredictability.

Practical Application for Digital Balance

To restore hemispheric harmony in our digital age, try this approach:

When you notice yourself caught in a social media loop, recognize it as your left hemisphere's dopamine-seeking behavior. Counter this by intentionally engaging your right hemisphere through novel experiences: take an unfamiliar route home, strike up a conversation with a stranger, or visit a new location without documenting it on social media.

Create "novel experience days" where you deliberately avoid digital devices and instead engage in activities that challenge your right hemisphere's noradrenaline system: explore a new hiking trail, attend a live music performance, or try cooking without a recipe. These experiences might feel less immediately rewarding than social media's dopamine hits, but they provide deeper, more sustained satisfaction.

Remember: while our devices cater brilliantly to our left hemisphere's dopamine-driven nature, our overall well-being depends on balancing this with right-hemispheric, noradrenaline-based experiences that connect us to the broader, richer context of life beyond our screens.