Is Clean Language Somatically Based?
I’ve recently been blogging, speaking, and making videos about “How Your Body Thinks”: I may even write a book about it.
But I’ve been asked several times: “What’s that got to do with Clean Language?” The question’s not just coming from Clean Language newbies, but people who’ve followed my work for years.
Initially, that shocked me. Isn’t it obvious that Clean Language – at least in the context of transformative coaching or therapy – is all about working with the body, connecting with the body, manipulating awareness of the body, and healing through the body?
Apparently not.
This issue came into sharp focus last week when I read Robert Scaer’s new book, 8 Keys to Brian-Body Balance. It’s a fabulous piece of work, putting forward a straightforward, non-woo-woo explanation of how somatically-based trauma therapies work. His examples include EMDR and EFT, but I instantly recognised that David Grove’s original work with Clean Language in treating trauma fitted exactly into his system.
Scaer points out that most of these techniques have been discovered serendipitously by therapists over the last 20 years, leading to anecdotal claims of rapid resolution of trauma-based symptoms, phobias, panic, anxiety disorders and PTSD.
He sets out six features of these apparently-successful therapies:
Attunement: a way of inhibiting the amygdala during treatment. In Clean Language, this is achieved by “getting into rapport with the client’s metaphorical landscape”
Ritual: some process or procedure to follow. In the case of Clean Language, this ritual is the asking of Clean language questions about the client’s metaphors
Empowerment: ensuring the client is actively involved, rather than reduced to a helpless state. Clean Language doesn’t attempt to force clients to change, or even deliberately send them into trance – the client is awake and in control at all times.
Crossing the cerebral hemispheres: engaging left and right brains in the process. The process of talking about the metaphoric landscape does this by translating images into words and vice versa.
Completion of Defence or Escape: based on the idea that people “freeze” just before or at the moment of trauma, and that some act of completion is needed for healing. David Grove talked about this frequently, and it was a central idea which guided his therapeutic sessions.
Restoring Perceptual Boundaries: many trauma patients have regions in the space around them where any stimulus can cause anxiety or panic: for example, war veterans typically sit or stand with their back against the wall because this area of sensitivity is behind them. This would normally be explored in a Clean Language therapy session, if the client wished it.
The most important thing for me to say, though, is that Clean Language is all about the body. An accomplished Clean Language facilitator working in transformative coaching or therapy will be directing their client’s attention to the metaphorical symbols inside and immediately around their body.
They’ll be laying the whole thing out in physical space, in real time, with the client at the heart of the system, rather than encouraging a dissociated, “looking in” state. And they’ll be developing metaphors for the client’s “felt sense” using David Grove’s “feeling to metaphor” process.
As things change, the client’s physical state will change. They may flush, or go white. They may heat up. They may need to stand up and move about. It may be quite dramatic and provoke massive emotional release.
To find yourself unexpectedly facilitating this would be quite hair-raising if you’d just picked up Clean Language from a book or a few online videos! Fortunately, however, achieving these kind of results normally requires significant training and practice.
And the fact is that the ideas which underpin Clean Language are useful in much more everyday, prosaic contexts as well.
Listening, asking questions, and paying attention to metaphor will make a huge difference in most walks of life, and that’s what’s had most of my attention in the last few years.
Has my work “dumbed down” Clean Language? If so, I hope I can redress the balance.
Do you want to see this in action? Join me for a day of demonstrations in London on 1 December 2012.
Comments from original on judyrees.co.uk
Philip Rowland
15 April 2014
>>Isn’t it obvious that Clean Language – at least in the context of transformative coaching or therapy – is all about working with the body?
Sorry Judy, but it’s not been obvious that it’s **all about** working with the body any more than with EFT or EMDR etc even though they also can result in huge physical change.
Working with “Mind-body” or “Brain-body-connection”, yes, but even then the emphasis in CL has been on the metaphors and the verbal dialogue.
Plus, CL isn’t presented as some new form of physical therapy.
My experience of the books on CL that I see generally available to the public are, if anything, “thought provokers”, or insight provokers, and more of a “heady” thing as opposed to an “body” thing.
Lawley and Thompkin’s “Metaphors in Mind” is pretty heady stuff.
And maybe their whole NLP modeling approach is what has set the tone for the later works on CL.
As with NLP’s calibration, matching, or presupposition that the “brain and body are a whole”, the CL literature refers to the gestural matching, searching for metaphor within gesture, etc., but for me at least (and I’m just a newbie here – I haven’t done any formal training in CL yet) those come across as enhancers or supplements to the process, not the central focus.
Maybe David Grove’s explorations of Clean Spaces, emergent knowledge etc point towards some later realization of the centrality of the body. But all that comes later in the typical CL course of study.
So, I’m not disagreeing with the thrust of your post – indeed it’s super interesting, **thought provoking**, and the link to the book is appreciated.
And, hey, maybe from now on you **should** start emphasizing more that CL is ultimately a body process.