How Does Clean Language Work With The Body?

Clean Language works with bodies, as well as brains. Effective Clean coaching should be more than “mental masturbation” - it should have a physical effect both in the room at the time, and in the real world after the session.

It’s as if the mind is like a rider on an elephant. The rider is the conscious part of the mind – the small fraction of our being that we are aware of – and the elephant is everything else. When we talk in our native language, we don’t usually choose our words carefully. It’s the elephant who “selects” them. And when we talk, we use between six and nine metaphors per minute. It’s the elephant who “selects” those metaphors.

Skilled Clean coaches will look to improve the relationship between elephant and rider. They do this using a specific feature of metaphor: spontaneous metaphors usually describe a more abstract concept in terms of a more physical thing. It’s a one-way street.

To use James Geary’s example, drawn from a song: “Love is like a bottle of gin, but a bottle of gin is not like love.”

So by exploring metaphor, we shift attention from the abstract towards the physical, from the world of thoughts and words and ideas towards the world of physical experience.

Once we become aware of the physical sensations that make up our emotional experience, we experience them differently. We literally feel differently about

things, physically, in our physical bodies.

Clean Language works as a catalyst to this chain reaction. It uses the metaphors in language and gesture to help people feel differently, so that they behave differently.

Why Does Working With The Body Matter?

I've recently been blogging, speaking, and making videos about "How Your Body Thinks". 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 when I read Robert Scaer's new book, 8 Keys to Brain-Body Balance. It's a fabulous piece of work, putting forward a straightforward, non-woo-woo explanation of how somatically-based trauma therapies work. (Scaer is talking about the relationship between bodywork and trauma resolution, but I think his ideas can be applied more broadly. After all, you don't need to be traumatised to get emotional and psychological benefit from a massage.)

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,