The search for information
Most people who seek help with healing think they have to choose between therapist-directed techniques that are out of touch with today’s philosophy of self-help, and medically-directed drug treatments, with their crude impact on the delicate balance between brain chemistry and psychology. Before David Grove, no school of psychology other than Neuro Linguistic Programming had approached information gathering and change from an integrated structural and semantic standpoint. NLP cut through a lot of the waffle of 1970s humanistic psychology, and it did so by systematizing our mental representations – the symbols we employ to capture and communicate what is really going on in the unconscious. It was a significant step, but it did not go all the way. That benign developer of new patterns of NLP, John McWhirter, has said that the techniques of NLP are not in themselves a complete therapy. I agree. They may reach many of the underlying constructs that hold a client’s unwanted behaviours, beliefs and feelings in place, but at the critical point of contiguity, that boundary between stimulus and response, input and output, they oblige the practitioner to hallucinate what the best interests of the client require. In this important respect they do not deliver ‘cleanly’.
The first principle of Clean Language is to ease the client’s entry into the organization of their subjective experience untainted by outside interference and into an altered state of their own creation: to know themselves in their own way. When Grove began to develop his philosophy in the late 1980s this was a radical enough concept, but his means of achieving it were novel and original, and some thought bizarre. The structure of Clean Language follows the empirical structure of the client’s own language, exactly as expressed. The client’s words are repeated back to them without re-interpretation, without challenge, without comment, without paraphrase, without subtle re-wording; attention is drawn to what the client has said; and a clean question is asked about what they have said. (You can find the detailed syntax elsewhere on this site.) To put it as simply as it deserves: clients hear themselves back to themselves, and are invited to embark on the search for more information. The less attempt there is by the facilitator to change the client’s model of the world, the more the client gets to know it for themselves. And what happens next is inevitable, and not complicated: the self-system learns from itself. Power returns where it rightly belongs and change emerges organically in the context of the outcome desired.
Even today as clean algorithms begin to enter the psychological mainstream they are still resisted by some professionals. How can over-anxious or mentally unbalanced patients be trusted to know what is best for them? How can trained professionals admit to ignorance of what is best for their clients? Only with an about-turn in our philosophical and linguistic orientation can we get our heads around such ideas.
Clean questions are asked, as Grove has said, “so that the client can understand their perspective internally, in their own matrix. Our questions will have given a form, made manifest, a particular aspect of the client’s internal experience, in a way that they have not experienced before.”12 Information gathered for rather than from the other person.
As we explore the inherent logic of our model of the world without re-interpretation the metaphors that represent our internal experience are honoured. We hear ourselves back to ourselves, and in so doing we re-create ourselves, and somehow, sooner or later, there comes a moment when something unexpected, even magical, happens.
Light beyond Alison’s cloud
A middle-aged woman is weeping as she describes the “black cloud of despair” that has enveloped her for months. She has a sense that there is “light beyond the cloud”, but it is “too bright, too harsh” to venture into. It is a moment when the conscientious counsellor, doctor, colleague or friend might come up with any number of ideas to move Alison out of her despair and to make things happen. Instead I ask a question that suggests nothing:
And when black cloud of despair, and light beyond that is too bright, too
harsh, what happens next?
There is a long pause. Again I am tempted to intervene, to move things on, to do or say something to ‘help’. After all, my client has been in this situation countless times before, stuck in the cloud, aware of nothing but darkness and despair around her. But this time something new happens. Her tears stop, and when she speaks her voice has a quality of curiosity:
I make a little hole in the cloud. It lets diffused light through and I see a
little blue sky.
It is at this moment that Alison brings metaphor and reality together and chooses an entirely new way of perceiving herself and the world. And she does it in a way that only she knows how. Without revisiting childhood trauma, without years of analysis, and without any suggestion from me, she has learnt to trust her unconscious.
The 17th century Spanish writer Cervantes made his protagonist Don Quixote a new kind of hero, one who was neither over-introspective nor at the mercy of others. He was “one who wills to be himself.” As 21st century heroes, neither self-consumed nor subordinate to others, we almost certainly have more will to be ourselves than any generation before us. All we have to do is keep it clean.
© 2006 philipharland@blueyonder.co.uk Philip is a neuro-linguistic psychotherapist specializing in Clean Language, Clean Space and Therapeutic Metaphor. He has a practice in north London working with individuals and couples, and also works on the phone nationally and internationally. More articles of his can be found on the website.
Keeping It Clean / notes
1 Mind is what the brain does, etc: Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works, Penguin 1999. Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield characterizes the mind as ‘your personalised brain’ that requires you to see the world in terms of things that have happened to you already and to you alone (Sensational Minds, New Scientist 2 February 2002).
2 Brain capacity: Edelman (1992), Greenfield (1996, 2000), Pinker (1997), Carter (1998). Those who like numbers have calculated that there are about 1070 particles in the visible universe, a modest sum compared to the 10100s (googols) of different words, sentences, meanings, feelings, melodies, objects, ideas, places, chess games etc etc etc that the brain is capable of processing and distinguishing between. Pinker calculates that in addition to whatever incalculable inexpressible thoughts we might have each of us can entertain something like a hundred million trillion different expressible thoughts, or about a hundred times the number of seconds since the birth of the universe!
3 Divergence of character: Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859.
4 Endless and enduring variety: Steven Pinker, as before.
5 First-person reporting: Francisco Varela in an interview with Susan Blackmore, Conversations On Consciousness, Oxford 2005. Varela’s paper Neurophenomenology: a methodological remedy for the hard problem, was published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in June 1996.
6 Clean Language training: the basics can be learnt in a day or two; the more advanced training takes two weeks; the experience to practise intuitively takes as long as you like.
7 Maxims of the Seven Sages: ‘Know thyself’, ‘Nothing to excess’, ‘Seek one sole wisdom’, ‘Choose one sole good’. 2,600 years ago Thales of Miletus was asking ‘What is the source of all things?’, a question we are still trying to answer.
8 Freud’s heart not in treating patients: Steve Ayan, Psychotherapy on Trial, Scientific American Mind April/May 2006.
9 Progress via linguistic revision: Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, International Non-Aristotelian Library 1933.
10 Client dignity and autonomy: Jeffrey Masson, Against Therapy, HarperCollins 1989.
11 Humanity’s last chance: Martin Rees, Will the Human Race Survive the Twentyfirst Century?, Heinemann 2003.
12 “Clean questions are asked to…”: from David Grove and Basil Panzer, Resolving Traumatic Memories, Irvington 1989.
