The tenets and philosophies of Clean Language

Thoughts and ideas from David Grove

When we met David in London and when he came to the Yorkshire practice group, he shared with us the basic tenets and philosophies of Clean Language. Here's my summary of what David shared with us, combining the information from the two evenings. I can't guarantee that this is a hundred per cent faithful to what David said, it is of course my own interpretation of my recollection.

Here's a blatant 'Simon-ism', I make no apologies for the fact that this is simply my belief, so it is not be taken as a fact or an observation: If you want to really acquire a set of skills it is necessary to at least in part take on the philosophies that lead to those skills. It's my belief that as nothing more than a set of questions Clean Language is of limited value. As a philosophy and a methodology and a set of skills it is of enormous value and is extremely powerful and beneficial.

David began by outlining some of the thoughts which lead to Clean Language. One of them was the idea of a basic operating metaphor, which influences the development of other things. When Freud was evolving his theories and ideas the dominant metaphor for things of power was the steam engine. Thus psychology took on some of the qualities of the steam engine metaphor. We had the release of emotions, as though they were something under pressure, which when released were dissipated, we had the quantities of a water tank, such as deep down and close to the surface.

Problems are also created from these (as David called them) "operating fictions", and so it is important to consider what are the operating fictions around today. In the modern world we have been accustomed to tapes running in our head, lights going on and off, and now we're into the world of information processing - Clean Language should be thought of in terms of information processing.

So where did Clean Language come from - what are its roots. Originally David was using NLP skills and working with trauma victims in the VA hospitals in America. He noticed that many trauma and phobia patients were unable to recall the original incident which lead to the trauma or phobia. They were unable to create a sufficiently clear visual picture to allow the fast phobia cure (for example) to work.

They were, however, able to come up with a lot of verbal description and movement as an attempt to describe their experiences, and David started to ponder the question "can I use this 'other' stuff?" Clean Language evolved from that desire to make therapeutic use of the 'other stuff'.

The space shuttle (I wondered what David was talking about when he started with this story, but it became clear) often starts the countdown, and with only seconds to go, at T minus one, it's stopped and they start the whole launch preparation process all over again. So it is with the memory of trauma, relieving it up to just before the trauma event itself.

If the Trauma event itself is called T then the client is locked in the time called T minus one. Clean Language is a way of stopping conversation and going between the lines into the area of T minus one.

At this point David shared with us the basic principles of Clean Language, this being:

1. The therapist ought to visit the client's model of the world, instead of selling the client a hallucination about therapy.

2. The therapist ought to use questions which do not imply that the client's answer should be restricted to one specific modality.

   The question "how do you feel?" requires an answer about feelings, but what if the client's model (and thus their answer) is in terms of location, or movement?

3. The therapist ought to use questions which do not contaminate the clients model.

4. There is no such thing as a resistant client, but there is such a thing as a therapist who doesn't know what to do with the information they are being given.

5. Normal conversation is okay socially, but not much use for using language as a healing art.

   Clients have within themselves things they need to heal but can't access them. The nature of Clean Language is homeopathic, it excites the curative powers within.

   Symptoms are unsuccessful attempts by the mind and body to heal itself. So our job is to create a suitable context in which we can encourage those symptoms to be successful.

   Many approaches try to get rid of the symptoms, Clean Language is about the identification, gathering and blessing of those symptoms. Clean Language interrogates the symptoms (and symbols) until they confess their strengths.

6. Clean Language is psychoactive - it has the ability to recreate and construe contexts so that they become self healing.

   Thus the healing experience occurs in real time, right infront of you, in the pauses between your questions.

7. There are response inviting gaps which are left after a question in which the psychoactivity takes place.

   Therefore the delivery of the Clean Language questions has to be more powerful than the onset of the trauma itself.

8. Physicality - the agency by which the questions have the psychoactive impact.

   Clean Language questions have an Oooomph!!! factor which distinguish them from cognitive questions.

   As David said - "if you ain't got oomph you don't got it!"

   (a) Ooomph can be felt (as being the right question)
   (b) it doesn't require repetition, if it requires repetition then it ain't the right question
   (c) the client can always answer the question and it always feels right
   (d) the questions are closely coupled to the client's last statement or to the logical consequences of the construct which has been evoked
   (e) if there's any resistance it's the client's way of training you how to ask better questions

9. (a) Clean Language is really hard for the therapist (operationally) and really easy for the client - because it addresses the notion "what is the next question you would really like to be asked?"
   (b) There is the delivery of the Clean Language questions:
   (i) the acoustical parameters, the sing-song like quality of the voice
   (ii) the "the" is left out
   (iii) all sentences start with "and"
   (iv) no proper names are used, only personal pronouns
   (v) repetition of a recursive form not a repetitive form, it is spiral not circular
   (vi) repetition creates forward momentum and a protective temporal and spatial womb or matrix in which your job is to be a good midwife to recognise, develop and assist in the birthing of new information. New information is born out of static noise, red herrings, non-sequitors, asides, off the topic comments, under the breath comments, idiosyncratic sounds and so on.

10. Clean Language is INFORMATION CENTRED, it is NOT client centred. It is centred on the information, not on whatever ego state the client is in. Clean Language therefore respects that the information is stored in a number of different places:

    semantically
    somatically
    spatially
    temporally (in both biographical time and ancestral time)

11. Clean Language is deeply agreeable to the soul.

12. Clean Language recognises and gathers together all disparate kinds of information into an organising proximal landscape/psychescape, i.e. metaphor map. These informations include dreams, hallucinations, obsessive compulsive phenomenology, ticks, superstitions, Freudian slips, as well as all the usual suspects, as well as spiritual values, the client's spirituality and cosmology, cultural and social milieu and ancestral associations.

When I asked David about how strictly we should stick to the format of the Clean Language questions he suggested that to begin with we should stick rigidly to them, as practice. But, he added, Clean Language is really about degrees of cleanliness.

Among the rest of discussions I noted three other things which particularly caught my attention.

Firstly that Clean Language gets the story to complete itself, it is not limited to words. It blesses that which has been damned, cursed and debased - the symptoms.

Secondly, it never gets any easier. If it got easier then you'd know what you're doing, so how would you know what the client is doing?

Thirdly, once you birthed something - you have to give it a place, on the map.

At this point David started a demonstration in setting an assignment, setting someone up to draw a map. This is something we've practised and usually invite the client "would you like to draw that". David took around thirty to forty minutes to set up the task and identifying what should be included!

David (as previously reported) visited the Yorkshire Clean Language Practice Group and spent more time sharing his ideas with us. Here are some of the things I noted from that encounter.

David described 'how' Clean Language is information centred. In the phrase "I want you to tell me about how you feel about x" the locus of attention shifts:

"I want..." - the locus is with the questioner
"...you to tell..." back to the client
"...me about..." back to the questioner
"...how you feel..." back to the client
"...about x." and now on to the information.

In contrast, Clean Language questions put the locus of attention on the information and keeps it there.

He then went on to describe how the rhythm, tone and tempo of Clean Language feels right even though it's not grammatically correct. Ending a question with the same words the client used 'rhymes', and it feels right.

At the end of a practice session it can be a good idea to ask the client "which questions were not good questions?" and "which questions would have worked better?"

The skill, David said, is to be clever enough not to be clever, and avoid taking big leaps of logic. The client is allowed to lead.

I'd like to thank David for sharing this with us. Personally these insights have helped me greatly come to a deeper understanding of Clean Language and to advance my skills in helping people.