Conceptual metaphor research has benefited from advances in discourse analytic and corpus linguistic methodologies over the years, especially given recent developments with Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. Such technologies are now capable of identifying metaphoric expressions across large bodies of text. Here we focus on how one particular analytic tool, MetaNet, can be used to study everyday discourse about personal and social problems, in particular, poverty and cancer, by leveraging reusable networks of primary metaphors enhanced with specific metaphor subcases. We discuss the advantages of this approach in allowing us to gain valuable insights into cross-linguistic metaphor commonalities and variation. To demonstrate its utility, we analyze corpus data from English and Spanish.