by James Geary
Jung described the active imagination technique in a letter to a certain Mr. O., who had written to Jung asking for advice about dream interpretation. The description applies equally well to clean language:
Start with any image415 . . . Contemplate it and carefully observe how the picture begins to unfold or to change. Don’t try to make it into something, just do nothing but observe what its spontaneous changes are. Any mental picture you contemplate in this way will sooner or later change through a spontaneous association that causes a slight alteration of the picture. You must carefully avoid impatient jumping from one subject to another. Hold fast to the one image you have chosen and wait until it changes by itself. Note all these changes and eventually step into the picture yourself, and if it is a speaking figure at all then say what you have to say to that figure and listen to what he or she has to say. Thus you cannot only analyze your unconscious but you also give your unconscious a chance to analyze yourself.
Allowing the client’s unconscious to analyze and learn from itself is key to how Grovian therapy works. But the clean language process is not like Jungian dream interpretation. Grove believed that client metaphors were unique to individuals rather than being of universal significance like Jungian archetypes. He also went out of his way to avoid interpreting client metaphors, a practice he believed only interfered with the therapeutic process.
Grove called his language “clean” precisely because it pared away the therapist’s own assumptions, ideas, and biases. Clean language is meant to be a blank slate on which the client paints a metaphorical landscape. The technique, he once told Lawley, is for the client to “interrogate the metaphor416 until it confesses its strengths.”
To facilitate these interrogations, Grove devised questions to elicit and enhance client metaphors. After studying transcripts of Grove’s client work over about a decade, Lawley and Tompkins picked out a dozen key queries and organized them into three main categories.417
Grove’s questions address the metaphor itself, not what the client or the therapist happens to think about the metaphor. The therapist’s role is “to pay unbelievable attention to the client’s exact words,” according to Tompkins. “You have to walk side by side with the person through their metaphor landscape. You have to keep the attention on their experience in the moment. The power of directing attention where people don’t normally go is astronomical. When you notice the uncanny in a metaphor, when you hear the shock in the client’s voice, you know you’ve hit pay dirt.”
So, when a client uses a metaphor in a clean session, the therapist treats the phrase literally and begins asking questions of it. “When someone says, ‘I’m a ticking bomb,’ normal logic says, ‘That’s not real,’ ” Lawley explains. “Clean language asks, ‘What kind of bomb? Is there anything else about that ticking?’ ”
The first six clean questions, known as “developing” questions, are signposts to direct clients deeper into their metaphor landscapes. Each question begins with “and” to emphasize the sense of a continuing narrative and the expectation that the metaphor, if followed, will actually lead somewhere. The therapist also repeats the client’s exact words when posing questions, thus keeping the landscape clear of everything but the client’s own metaphors.
The six developing questions are as follows (X and Y represent verbatim quotations of what the client has previously said):
And is there anything else about X?
And what kind of X is that X?
And where/whereabouts is X?
And that X is like what?
And is there a relationship between X and Y?
And when X, what happens to Y?
The second set of questions, known as “moving time” questions, create the metaphor’s backstory, sketching in the context against which the metaphor plays out. The three moving time questions are:
And then what happens?/And what happens next?
And what happens just before X?
And where could/does X come from?
The final set of basic questions, known as “intention” questions, nudge the metaphor toward the client’s actual experience, connecting the metaphor landscape with the changes the client would like to see in his or her actual life. The three intention questions are as follows (the material in brackets represents the exact words the client has previously used):
And what would you/X like to have happen?
And what needs to happen for X to [achieve what X would like to have happen]?
And can X [achieve what X would like to have happen]?
For Grove, the therapist has a vital but limited role in a clean session. Metaphors carry information, he believed, and that information can only be accessed through the metaphors themselves, not through a therapist’s or a client’s clever explications of them. Explication is not only unnecessary but also unhelpful. “Questions couched in ‘normal’ language418 ask the client to comment on his experience,” Grove wrote in Resolving Traumatic Memories: Metaphors and Symbols in Psychotherapy. “Every time he does that he comes out of a state of self-absorption to perform an intellectual task which interrupts the process we are working to encourage and to facilitate.” That process—the process of personal transformation—is about experience rather than interpretation.
Tompkins and Lawley describe a client who came to them wanting to break what he felt was a destructive pattern of relationships. Over the past two decades or so, he had fathered five children with three different women. In each case, he remained with his partner for about seven years, or until the eldest child born from the relationship was about four. Then he would fall in love with another woman and leave his partner. When he came to see Tompkins and Lawley, he was just embarking on a new relationship and did not want the same thing to happen again.
The man’s metaphor for his pattern of behavior was an apple that he kept throwing away but which always ended up back in his hand.
He worked with Tompkins and Lawley for several months. During that time, they noticed that when he wasn’t using his right hand to enact the movement of throwing away an apple, he often sat with that hand cupped around his eye, as if blocking something from view.
During one session, Tompkins asked: “And what happens just before you throw away the apple?”
The man momentarily dropped his right hand from around his eye, turned his head to look down to his right, and fought back a deep sob.
Tompkins responded with “And where did that come from?”
The man began to weep. He described a memory of playing at the top of a hill as a small child. It was foggy. As the fog gradually cleared, he saw his village below. He saw the front door of his house. He saw his father leave the house, close the front door, and walk away down the street.
He never saw his father again; he abandoned his family without any explanation. The client was four years old at the time.
The client’s metaphor metamorphosed into the memory of being abandoned by his father. For the first time, he saw the connection between his own behavior and that of his father. Today, he remains happily married to his partner and they have two teenage children.
Why did he cup his right hand around his eye? Because it blocked the line of sight from which he had seen his father leave, a metaphorical gesture that shielded him from real emotional pain.
Metaphor has a paradoxical power. It distances an experience by equating it with something else, but in so doing actually brings that experience closer. “By talking about what something is not, you understand what it is,” as Lawley puts it.
For Grove, clean language created an objective correlative for the client’s experience. “Our questions will have given a form419, made manifest some particular aspect of the client’s internal experience in [a] way that he has not experienced before,” Grove wrote. “The experience is alive and real; not just contained in words or dissipated in answers. We structure an environment internally: the client is going to experience rather than describe what the experience is li
ke.”
Clean language is not limited to therapeutic encounters. The practice has been used by the British police force to help officers with their interviewing techniques; by the British National Health Service to improve patient-doctor communication; in Northern Ireland and Bosnia as part of the post-conflict reconciliation process; and by major consultancy firms as an aspect of their management training schemes.
Lawley recalls one session with a senior manager in a multinational firm who wanted advice on dealing with difficult colleagues. During their initial meeting, the manager described what was going on in the office. Lawley jotted down some of the man’s metaphors. The manager said he wanted “to be able to hold the line” against aggressive senior colleagues. “I have to defend my people,” “The troops are falling by the wayside,” and “I can lose it in the heat of battle” were some of his other remarks.
It didn’t take long for Lawley to identify the manager’s main metaphor: WORK IS WAR420. When Lawley repeated aloud the roll call of military metaphors, the manager said he was “shell-shocked.” Lawley then deployed his secret weapon—the clean language questions.
“And where does being ‘in the heat of battle’ come from?”
“You must defend your territory to be on the winning side,” the manager snapped back.
“And when ‘you must defend your territory to be on the winning side,’ what would you like to have happen?”
This question breached the manager’s defenses. He hesitated, real emotion appearing for the first time on his face and in his voice. The man shook his head and, taking a first step toward retreat, said: “Not to have to defend myself.”
Lawley spent the rest of the session developing the manager’s alternative metaphor: WORK IS PLAYING IN AN ORCHESTRA. The man understood that soldiering on with his martial metaphors would only escalate hostilities. So he made a conscious decision to change his tune, seeking harmony where previously there had been discord.
Caitlin Walker, a consultant who designs learning and development programs that address diversity, conflict, and leadership issues, has used clean language with unruly British adolescents in the context of anger management sessions. Working with one teenage boy who had a long history of getting into fistfights421, she asked: “What happens just before you hit someone?”
“I just switch, Miss,” he replied, snapping his fingers. “I go red. Everything just goes quiet.”
“You ‘go red.’ You ‘switch,’ ” Walker repeated, snapping her fingers. “ ‘Everything just goes quiet.’ And when it ‘goes quiet,’ what kind of quiet?”
“Like shutters, Miss,” the boy said, cupping his hands around his eyes like horse blinkers. “I can’t hear anything in my head and it’s like I can only see the one in front of me. The next thing I know is people are shouting, someone’s lying on the ground, and I’m in trouble.”
Walker then asked the boy some “moving time” questions to find out what happened just before he hit someone.
“You ‘go red,’ and when you ‘go red,’ what kind of red is it?”
“Blood red. It just gets red and I get angry, like my blood’s boiling.” (For this boy, anger is a heated fluid in a container.)
“And when ‘my blood’s boiling,’ what happens just before it’s ‘blood red’ and ‘boiling’?”
“It’s cooler!”
“And when ‘it’s cooler,’ ‘it’s cooler’ like what?”
“It’s cool blue, like the sky, like my Mum,” he replied, looking upward and—uncharacteristically—smiling.
“And ‘cool blue, like the sky, like your Mum,’ then ‘blood red’ like your ‘blood’s boiling,’ and then what happens after ‘blood’s boiling’?”
“I get raj [enraged] and attack. Then it’s out of me and I run and look at the sky and think of my Mum and breathe in blue until the red’s gone.”
Through this clean interrogation, Walker helped the boy see the full spectrum of thoughts and feelings preceding a violent encounter. She asked the boy to think of his color metaphors the next time he felt himself losing his temper, and to use the metaphors to get himself out of the situation before fists started flying.
When they next met, he reported back: “You know I go red? Well, yesterday I felt it happening. I get up in the morning, blue and relaxed. Then I see Dad’s drunk—red! Then I have to put dirty clothes back on cause he hasn’t done laundry—red! No money for the bus—red! I’m cold and I’m late for school—red! I get to school and get detention and I’m red and anyone says anything it boils! So, I thought, what if I walk to school past the duck pond and I stop and look in the water, cause that makes me blue and if I breathe in blue and think of my Mum then I won’t boil so fast.”
Now, every time this boy feels himself going red, he breathes in blue by the duck pond near his school. With his anger under better control, he has been able for the first time to start building friendships with his classmates.
This translation from metaphor to real life is a central tenet of Grovian therapy. To encourage that transition, Grove often asked clients to actually do something related to their metaphor, a technique he picked up from Milton H. Erickson, a psychiatrist who specialized in clinical hypnosis.
Erickson often used parables in his therapeutic work, coupling these with specific tasks for clients to perform. One of Erickson’s clients was an alcoholic. Erickson told this man a bit about the humble cactus, how the plant conserves water and can survive for up to three years in the desert without rainfall. He then told the man to go to the local botanical gardens to observe cacti422.
Erickson never heard from the man again. Many years later, after this client had died, the man’s daughter visited Erickson to tell him that her father had been sober since the day he went to the botanical gardens.
Erickson called these tasks “ambiguous-function assignments423,” but their role in furthering psychological change has become far less ambiguous since he began experimenting with them. In describing difficult emotions, we often use metaphors of containment: we keep our feelings bottled up, our bad memories sealed off, and our resentments buried. To test whether the physical acting out of these metaphors had a psychological impact on the experience of these emotions, researchers in Singapore and Canada devised an ambiguous-function assignment of their own424. They first asked participants to write down their recollections of a recent decision they regretted. Half the group then sealed their texts in an envelope before handing it in; the other half did not. When subsequently asked how they felt about the regrettable decision, those who had sealed their recollections in an envelope reported significantly fewer negative emotions.
In a related experiment, the same research team asked subjects to write down two things: their account of a news report about an infant’s accidental death and their plans for the weekend. Half the group sealed their account of the infant’s death in an envelope; the other half sealed their plans for the weekend. The researchers found that those who had sealed up the story of the infant’s death recalled fewer details of the event than those who had sealed up their plans for the weekend. Their conclusion: physical closure helps achieve psychological closure.
Grove used ambiguous-function assignments425 with his clients, too. If, for example, a client had said “I’m in a brick tunnel and I can’t see either end,” Grove might have sent the client to a transport museum to find out about tunnels, to a bricklayer to learn how tunnels are built, or to a DIY store to buy material to construct a replica tunnel. The goal: to translate insight into action.
After I finished cleaning out my mother’s house, there was only one place left to look: the attic. The entrance to the attic was through the top of my bedroom closet. I knew we never kept much of anything up there, because that was where I hid things—my teenage diaries, in particular—that I didn’t want my mother to discover. Still, I thought I would check the attic just to make sure nothing was left behind.
When I popped my head into the attic, I discovered three
dilapidated hatboxes. In each of the three boxes was one of my mother’s hats from the 1960s. One hat in particular I recognized: a pillbox hat made of bright pink feathers. Black-and-white shots of my mother wearing this hat were among the cache of photos I had found in her high school yearbook.
The hat was covered in fine black dust and a few of the feathers had fallen out. But, despite nearly forty years in the attic, it was still intact.
I took the hat home. I had it cleaned and repaired. It now occupies pride of place on our mantelpiece, a little splash of color from my mother.
Backword
The Logic of Metaphor
Hart Crane briefly tried his hand as an advertising copywriter, a shipyard laborer, and a worker in his father’s candy manufacturing business. But, as a teenager and as an adult, all he ever wanted to be was a poet. In the summer of 1926, the twenty-seven-year-old Crane wrote a letter to Harriet Monroe, the founding editor of Poetry. Crane had submitted some poems to the venerable journal, to which Monroe had replied with consternation.
She was puzzled by Crane’s use of imagery and asked him for clarification, in particular with regard to some lines from the poem “At Melville’s Tomb”426: “The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath / An embassy” and “Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars.” Monroe failed to see how “drowned men’s bones” could be “dice” or how “frosted eyes” could lift anything, let alone “altars.”
Crane wrote two books of poetry before committing suicide in 1932 by leaping into the Gulf of Mexico from the deck of the Orizaba, the ship that was sailing him back from Mexico to New York City. Crane took a Rimbaudian approach to life and to literature. He applied, pretty much literally, Rimbaud’s call for a systematized disorganization of the senses, through alcohol abuse and a volatile and sometimes violent emotional life.
Like Rimbaud, Crane regarded the poet as a professional visionary, and his poems are filled with intense, vivid, and startling images. Crane’s response to Monroe is his own version of Rimbaud’s Seer Letters.