The "Five Whys" is an approach in which you ask and answer a "Why?" question five times to try to get at the root cause for a situation you'd like to address. It's used extensively in quality improvement in healthcare and other fields, where it helps us look beyond the immediate reasons a problem might have occurred and work instead to address the underlying cause of a problem. Here's an old New York Times piece in which a family uses the Five Whys to realize that the trick to eating dinner as a family actually lay in making a change to their morning routine.

I'm a huge fan of the Five Whys, but sometimes a different approach is needed.

About a year ago, I was feeling stuck and frustrated about how I didn't feel represented as a pregnant trans person. It wasn't that I didn't understand some of the reasons I might be feeling that way, it was that understanding the reasons didn't seem to help me feel any better. I didn't need reasons, I needed to understand how to look at the situation differently. I needed to find a new way to hold the situation. A different frame, a different metaphorical container.

I decided to adapt the Five Whys into the Five Metaphors.

Here's how:

1. Write down the problem, as you see it.
2. Come up with a metaphorical description of the problem. Be as melodramatic as you'd like!
3. Read your metaphorical description and ask a new question. The question can use the language from the same metaphor, or not. "Why?" questions are encouraged but not required.
4. Answer the new question using a different metaphor.
5. Continue until you have five metaphors.
6. Look them over -- does any new way of thinking about the situation emerge?

Below I've pasted my original Five Metaphors activity, although it feels vulnerable to do so.

It's raw, it's melodramatic, and it did help me feel unstuck.

The Five Metaphors

I don’t feel represented as a pregnant trans person.

1. I can’t find the perfect-sized burrow to rest my tired, fearful body in the earth, a place I can feel held and understood by the ground beneath my feet, which is really the ancestors. I could dig my own burrow, but I don’t know what tools to use, and I don’t know if it will come out how I want. I fear if I try, I will exhaust and disappoint myself, that it will just be a reminder of how that perfect place to curl up didn’t seem to exist for me in the first place.

Why are you so afraid to try? What if you just started digging?

2. I’m afraid of what I might find. I’m afraid I can’t do it, I’m afraid I’ll exhaust myself in looking, I’m afraid I’ll break my tools, break my fingernails, break what little I have to take care of myself each day in an attempt to look for a comfort that maybe I should accept just doesn’t exist for me.

Why do you feel you should accept that this doesn’t exist for you? Is that what feels true for you?

3. No, but giving myself permission to hope feels like venturing out on a tightrope while pregnant. Maybe it’s better to just stick to what I know, which is squinting to find myself in other people’s stories. I’m used to it anyway.

What would you need in order for it to feel less scary to give yourself permission to hope?

4. Hoping feels foolish sometimes, it reminds me of all the times I hoped I was pregnant and wasn’t. I don’t know how to relate to hope anymore. I feel like I’m trying to keep my feet on the ground, and hope feels like it’s whispering around in the air and I don’t know how to engage with it besides getting on a ladder to nowhere.

What are other ways that the ground and the air connect?

5. Through spores, the fungi send their spores into the air, the spores help make rain that comes down to the ground.

What might this mean for you?

Maybe I can put things out and look for them to come back in unexpected ways. I’m not sure.

No guarantees with this activity! See what shakes loose for you.