What was David Grove up to?

David Grove, creator of Clean Language, was a consulting psychologist. He had a background in business – but where he did most of his his consulting was in clinical, psychotherapeutic contexts.

When I’m busy seeking to make Clean Language accessible and easy to pick up and use in everyday situations, the pieces I’m teaching can seem quite different from David’s original work. So it was good to have a reminder of the history from David’s former partner, Cei Davies Linn, at the Clean Conference recently.

As Cei tells it, David was working originally with people who suffered from phobic disorders, and then segued into a wide spectrum of trauma. Typical clients included adults who had suffered sexual abuse as small children (and the “Cleanness” of Clean Language meant that David and Cei were welcomed into a world where there was a clear danger of false memories).

From about 1974, she says, David was creating Clean Language based on the following rationale:

• Create hygienic conditions within the client’s experience, allowing the experience to become more amenable to change

• Avoid contaminating or deconstructing the client’s subjective experience

• Facilitate a state of self absorption and naturalistic trance

• Communicate effectively and efficiently with non-conscious processes

• Reduce resistance

• Translate feelings out of words into physiological imagery.

David’s therapeutic way of using Clean Language, in the main period he and Cei worked together, was significantly different from how I’d tend to do it in coaching, and how I teach beginners to use it.

Rather than developing a metaphor for an outcome, or indeed going for the worst moment of the trauma, David directed his question to “T-1”. Cei describes T-1 as “the moment one breath before the worst part of the experience. One count away from “take off”. The penultimate moment in time.”

They believed that it was typically at T-1 that the person would dissociate, and their symptom would often be “born”.

Here Cei’s worldview and mine wildly diverge. In her talk handout she says: “At a specific moment during a trauma, the child’s ego boundary becomes semi permeable. That is to say, the impact of a word or action enters the child’s experience as objects from the immediate environment. For example, a mother who is standing in the garden shouting at the child matches some element in the environment, such as a rock or stone or stick that “lodges” itself in an exact area of the child’s body. After a child has imported this foreign object, the metaphor, into their body as a representative of the event…”

Maybe it’s just because I don’t work in clinical contexts, but I find this kind of story doesn’t match my own or my clients’ experience. Maybe we haven’t had the “right” kinds of traumas in our lives. Yes, we find we have surprising, and sometimes unwanted, metaphorical objects in exact positions in our bodies. But whether they’ve been imported at the moment of a trauma? Who knows.

If they were, where do the good ones come from? My client this morning, who had a bright, warm lightbulb in the centre of his chest, which made him feel confident… and when it flickers, he knows he can adjust it in its lampholder and make it burn brightly again…

And I suppose that’s why the complex story that David – and Cei – wove around what they were doing doesn’t hold my interest. I’m more interested in what they actually did, what questions they asked and when, than the stories they were telling themselves as they did it. And luckily, that was where Penny Tompkins and James Lawley and their modelling project came in.

So Cei’s more subtle distinctions around different kinds of metaphors and how to work with them rather pass me by. “Young fragments”, “metaphors of dissociation”, “information storage forms” and “four quadrants” just never seem to click.

What does click, for me, is what to do about them. Get a location for the symbol. Develop, develop, develop. And keep going until things change!