How to combine Clean Language with other therapies
The creator of Clean Language, David Grove, used to use it in psychotherapy. By helping his clients to explore their metaphors, he discovered, they became more aware of their own patterns of behaviour.
Frequently, as he continued asking lots of Clean Language questions, the client’s metaphors would change “on their own”, and real-world transformation would follow. Neither the therapist, nor the client, needed to “make” things change.
But that’s not how most people who know about Clean Language use it. Instead, they combine it with other techniques designed to help people to change.
Examples include:
Coaches who might use Clean Language for part of a session, or one session in a series, while using other approaches at other times
Health professionals who use Clean Language in their initial conversation with a client, to establish symptoms before beginning conventional or complementary treatment
Hypnotherapists who use Clean Language to elicit the client’s own metaphors, which are then incorporated into a tailored hypnotic script.
All these approaches seem, on the face of it, to be more complex and require more skill than simply staying Clean, asking lots of Clean Language questions, listening to the answers, and allowing change to emerge.
So what’s going on?
Part of the answer lies in the context. If a doctor uses Clean Language to establish that a particular drug treatment is appropriate, of course he will go on to prescribe it.
Part of the answer must lie with the client, or at least the facilitator’s beliefs about the client. “They’ve come to me for hypnosis, I’d better give them a bit of ritual.”
And part of the answer lies in the facilitator’s state of confidence. “I know my ordinary way of doing things works, at least up to a point. This Clean Language is untried, at least by me. Better test it gently at first.”
The snag is, though, that when it’s working, Clean Language doesn’t feel gentle all the time. In an effective Clean language session, there will often be wobbly moments, moments of frustration, moments of confusion, and moments when the client can’t answer the question. And the path to transformational change goes through these moments and out the other side.
By mixing Clean Language with other techniques too readily, facilitators and their clients may miss out on a lot of its power to help people to change.