A review of "Grovian Metaphor Therapy, part one" - a weekend with James Lawley and Penny Tompkins

This, the first of two weekends exploring Grovian Metaphor Therapy, was held on 22nd and 23rd March 1997 at the TAD Centre, Middlesborough, England. Penny and James, assisted by Caitlin Walker, lead us into the enchanting and empowering world of using client generated metaphors and the techniques of clean language - developed by David Groves.

To explain - people often talk in metaphors, such as "it's like banging my head against a brick wall", or "I've got a bright future ahead of me". This is in contrast to a metaphor made up by a trainer or therapist and then offered to a learner or client. Metaphor therapy is about working with these client generated metaphors and exploring the clients' own perceptions, without trying to interpret them.

"Clean language" is a set of questions which prompt the client to explore the metaphor further without contaminating the metaphor with the therapists own presuppositions. If the client says that they are stuck, asking how they could get unstuck presupposes that getting unstuck is appropriate, this might not be the case.

One clean language question might be "and what kind of stuck is that stuck?" Here the client can begin to explore the nature of the "stuck". Remarkably such explorations lead towards a more resourceful development of the metaphor.

Over the weekend we covered:

an introduction to Grovian Metaphor Therapy
navigating the five stage process
clean language
utilising non-verbal cues
exploring symbolic time and space
cognitive maps
identifying and utilising resource symbols

Penny and James lead us gently but firmly through a highly interactive weekend, with plenty of opportunity at every stage to practice and integrate the skills. Many on the course found it to be a profound experience, evolving and developing ones own metaphors (particularly those relating to conflict or problem) can be a transformational (or is that trance-formational?) experience.

Grovian Metaphor Therapy, like NLP, is highly practical and experiential and so the weekend was high on involvement and low on theory - but with enough background and explanation to put the techniques in context.

Although this was only Part One, I have already been putting the techniques to use in my role as a computer trainer, with some remarkable results. Using client generated metaphors and clean language is the operational definition of having respect for someone else's' map of the world and an unequivocal demonstration that everyone has all the resources they need.

And Part Two is yet to come...