Identical twins are a case in point. They share the same DNA, but can have quite different personalities. The Iranian twins Ladan and Laleh Bijani spent twenty-nine years conjoined at the head, their brains fused together, yet the twins said they felt like two completely separate individuals. “We have different world views,” said Ladan, “we have different lifestyles, we think very differently about issues.” They even managed to pursue different careers. Ladan was studying law, and Laleh journalism. Sadly, they died in a Singapore hospital in 2003 in an attempt to separate them.

    In 2001 in Lexington, South Carolina, identical quadruplets Grace, Emily, Mary Claire and Anna Mathias were born only thirty seconds apart, but all developed unique characters. When they were four years old their mother Allison said of them, “I have a leader, a – I hate to say – a whiner, and then somebody who thinks she’s the boss, and I have a teaser.” According to their father Steve, “They get along wonderfully, but fight famously.”

   “Internal difference is where the meanings are”, wrote Emily Dickinson. The taste of blueberries, the smell of coffee, my sensations of pain and joy, have an embodied meaning for me that is mine alone.

    Scientists are beginning to acknowledge the subjectivity of data gathered for scientific research, accepting that nothing can be known unless someone has observed it, and that the fact of observation – this would seem obvious to anyone but a certain kind of scientist, perhaps - produces subjective, rather than objective, information. The biologist Francisco Varela made a plea for the validity of subjectively-sourced science in a 1996 paper ‘Neurophenomenology’. He called it ‘first-person reporting’, and suggested that the detailed phenomenological examination of human experience (that is, via the senses rather than by intuition or reasoning) required a revolution in scientific thinking and a complete change in the way science was taught. “We need to introduce new first person methodologies way beyond those we have at the moment,” Varela observed in 1996. “We are extremely naïve. It’s like people before Galileo looking at the sky and thinking that they were doing astronomy.”5

    Clean facilitation is directly concerned with first-person reporting. Information is elicited directly, without paraphrase or re-interpretation.

                And then what happens?

            E=mc2

            And for you that is like what?’

The non-assumptive questioning brings abstract or cognitive concepts to phenomenological life by supporting the subject to access an inner dimension to their experience in a way they may not have done before. And what appears is ‘objectively subjective’ information, different in kind to any other.

            It’s like riding a beam of light.

The influence of others

Acknowledging difference does not mean we are not open to influence. Quite the contrary. Being human puts our minds in relationship. And being in relationship – one person as the cause of an effect on another, especially in indirect or intangible ways - was entirely responsible for what became my vocation as a psychotherapist and what led to my commitment to Clean Language.

    What qualifies me to write about this new psychology of change? I could say that it’s having witnessed its evolution over many years and thousands of hours of research, personal work, client facilitation and practitioner training with a wide range of participants of many persuasions. I might also say that it’s having witnessed its efficacy countless times in helping people resolve problems and transform their lives in ways that traditional counselling or coaching would never have thought possible. And with all that it might be nearer the truth to say that it is more like the effect of a lifetime of lies – several lifetimes, in fact. I am the product of generations of prevaricators who learnt to deny the reality of their own process: their own lives, relationships and responsibilities. Denial derived from shame in turn begets shame, and in the process reinforces itself:

shame > denial > shame about the denial > more denial

A familiar example of a neat and deadly, self-reinforcing ‘loop’. Circularity of this sort causes bewilderment in families, and children face exceptional difficulties in breaking out of it. You will know for yourselves the monosyllabic menfolk of the family who could fudge any issue, the hypocritical women who would say one thing and mean another, the prolonged domestic arguments - uncivil wars – that raged around who was right and who was wrong, and who said what to whom, and why. When I was young the communications of those close to me contained a code I never quite managed to crack.

Clean Language does a good job of unravelling the knots and binds of deceit and denial, but is really more about veracity than honesty. It elicits and facilitates the subjective truth, an internal reality uncontaminated by the assumptions, presumptions and manipulations of others. This is not the absolute truth that Plato tried (and failed) to define, and nor is it the unbiased, empirical truth about the patient to which Freud and others aspired. It is personal intelligence that no-one but the person themselves may retrieve. Only when I trained as a psychotherapist did I begin to appreciate the depth, richness and uniqueness of this information that we hold behind the heavy doors of the unconscious - and then was frustrated to find that the analytic, cognitive and humanistic models of therapy I was studying were intent on interpreting the information owners in ways not dissimilar from the ways I had always interpreted them; ways that stemmed more from the limited perceptions of my own world view than from the infinite possibilities of theirs.

When I came across David Grove’s work in 1995 all my familiar escape routes from reality, from the difference of others, were cut off. And there could be no going back. I could no longer be satisfied with guiding clients by my own lights when honouring and facilitating theirs was so much more demanding and fulfilling. The principles of Clean Language gave me a framework for facilitation and change that was simple, chivalrous and subversive: simple in that anyone can engage in it at a basic level after no more than a day or two’s training,6 chivalrous in that it is, I believe, one of the most respectful and companionable of all language-based modalities, and subversive in that it constitutes a fundamental challenge to the old, directive, manipulative, habit-of-mind methods.

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