Clean Language

David Grove

Clean Language was founded by New Zealand-born and educated David Grove, who drew on his bi cultural (Māori/Pākeha) roots when designing the therapeutic and coaching communication process. Grove had degrees from the universities of Canterbury and Otago and a Masters in Counseling Psychology at the State University of Minnesota. Grove served as a consulting psychologist with the London Phobic Trust, and published a book with Basil Panzer, Resolving traumatic memories: metaphors and symbols in psychotherapy. (1989, Irvington).

Clean Language in detail

In a very specific way, clean language combines four general elements of communication: syntax, wording, vocal qualities, and non-verbals.

Note: psychiatrists refer to the person asking questions as the 'facilitator' (or questioner) and the person receiving the questions the 'client' (or questionee). This habit comes from the therapeutic roots of the Clean Language process. Depending on the context, these labels could be 'coach' and 'coachee', 'interviewer' and 'interviewee', or 'doctor' and 'patient'.

Wording

Clean Language questions are cleansed as far as possible of anything that comes from the questioner's "maps" -- metaphors, assumptions, paradigms or sensations—that could direct the questionee's attention away from increased awareness of his or her own metaphorical representation of experience.

Clean Language offers a template for questions that are as free as possible of the questioner's inferences, presuppositions, mind-reading, second guessing, references and metaphors. Clean questions incorporate all or some of the client's specific phrasing and might also include other auditory components of the client's communication such as sighs, pitch, tonality, etc. The questioner might also draw attention to any non-verbal signals that coincide with the client's auditory output, e.g., a fist being raised simultaneously with a sigh, that might also represent elements of the client's metaphorical representation of experience.

Vocal qualities

Where client's words are used, the vocal qualities of the client's words are repeated. In therapeutic applications, the questioner's words are often given slower, with a rhythmic, poetic and curious tonality. In everyday interactions the facilitator can maintain their usual tone of interest. Voice speed, tone and volume can all affect the kind of attention the client pays to their own experience. Slow, rhythmic questions can lead towards a deeper, more trance-like experience for the client, while a conversational approach seems to encourage more cognitive, conceptual processing.

Nonverbals

'Nonverbals' is the short form of 'non-verbal communication', that is, all the ways the client is expressing them-self in conversation without the use of spoken language. These include gestures, line-of-sight, sighs, oral sounds (oos and ahs), posture and movement.

Besides the words of the client, nonverbals are repeated or referenced in a question as far as the questioner noticed them and if they might be of symbolic significance.

Note: Clean Language facilitators do not follow popular generalised assumptions about the meaning of 'body language' (e.g. assuming that crossed arms mean the person is 'closed'), preferring to ask and find out what such behaviour means to the client.

Example

Clean Language questions are designed to reduce to a minimum any influence from the facilitator's 'map of the world' via his or her metaphors, interpretations or unwarranted assumptions. They are also designed to direct the client's attention to some aspect of their experience (as expressed in their words or non-verbal expressions) that the facilitator has noticed and chooses to highlight for the client's potential learning. An example dialog is as follows:

Client: "I feel strange." Non-Clean Language facilitator responses might include:

"Have you got a headache?"

"Are you ill?"

"You're probably catching a cold."

"You must be hung-over!"

"Stop complaining! Take a pill..." etc.

Clean Language facilitator responses might include:

"Where do you feel strange?"

"What kind of strange?"

"Strange like what?"

"Is there anything else about that 'feels strange'?"

"What happens just before you feel strange?"

While there is a set of 9+3 basic Clean Language questions that get used about 80% of the time, the concept of being 'clean' resides not in the questions themselves (which are merely the medium) but in the intention of the facilitator.

Research Methodology

Clean Language is being used to enhance the authenticity and rigour of interview-based qualitative research. One application is as a method for eliciting naturally occurring metaphors in order to provide in-depth understanding of a person's symbolic world.