Clean Language: does it count as 'hypnosis'?

Hi, A friend has directed me here as a great place to find some hypnotists! We'd been discussing whether Clean Language counted as 'hypnosis' or not, and I'm curious to hear your views.

Clean Language is a questioning and listening technique that works with the metaphors a person uses in their own language (and non-verbals), often leading to profound transformation.

The chap who invented it, the late David Grove, was an expert in Ericksonian approaches before he came up with it, and as he travelled round the world presenting it to therapists, it was often grouped with hypnotic techniques. And I understand that it's taught as a module on a couple of hypnosis courses in the UK.

Clients are 'in trance' to the extent that they are usually very much 'inside', paying attention to their own inner worlds. But they are not 'asleep' in any way, and the session remains 'theirs' - Clean Language is 'clean' to the extent it minimises suggestions, presuppositions and metaphors from the facilitator.

So, what do you reckon? What factors qualify a specific technique to be described as 'hypnosis' for you.

Judy

PS. For people wanting more info, I'm not sure how many links I can give without falling foul of the 'no adverts' rule. www.cleanlanguage.co.uk and www.cleanchange.co.uk (my site) have articles and details of various applications. There's a piece on Wikipedia, and Amazon has a book or two.

Tags: clean, david, grove, language, metaphor

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Permalink Reply by Michael Ellner on February 5, 2009 at 5:34am

Hey Gary -

Good to be heard and good to be hearing from you- I loved your senseless act of creation!

Briefly, I was calling attention to the set and setting in which CL is used as being persausive -- The unspoken suggestion - "If I do this something will happen-" -- Why is the person accessing and utilising their metaphors? What does the person expect?

The process then becomes secondary to the beliefs and expectations attached to going through the process --

Michael E

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Permalink Reply by Judy Rees on February 5, 2009 at 5:42am

Nicely put, Michael!

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Permalink Reply by Gary Lintern on February 6, 2009 at 2:15am

Interesting ideas. My mind is duly expanded. Thanks Michael !

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Permalink Reply by Gary Lintern on February 6, 2009 at 2:23am

Thanks Judy. Wasn't aware of Michael Hall's use of a similar term for something different. I was coming from a Grovian POV.

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Permalink Reply by Gary Lintern on February 6, 2009 at 2:53am

Oh, and glad you liked the video! Did you see the one I made of Fable bouncing silver balls down the stairs?

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Permalink Reply by Jaime Nichols on February 9, 2009 at 9:05am

"I think there is a distinction to be drawn between 'clean language' as an NLP term used by Michael Hall etc, and 'Clean Language' as the name of the system devised by David Grove. The NLP 'clean language' means something like 'use the client's words as far as possible'. I'm sure Michael would not claim, nor want to claim, to be doing anything Grovian."

Having said this, what Grove does at its core is exactly reflecting the client's language and metaphor back at them, encouraging them to elaborate and get to the essence of meaning behind their words. NLP's backtrack frame and such restates the language but does not necessarily reflect it exactly. There's also the likelihood of injecting new content with a paraphrase. Of course, one can criticize clean language for being somewhat arbitrary as to what chunks are reflected and targeted. Sort of a "forest for the trees" critique.

--Jaime

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Permalink Reply by Judy Rees on February 9, 2009 at 11:52pm

My understanding is that David Grove was aware of the NLP use of 'clean language' and extended its meaning to describe what he was doing. But that's not to say that every NLPer who 'keeps their language clean' is doing anything Grovian.

The choice of which question to ask, and what chunk of client language is reflected and targeted, is where the art and science of (Grovian) Clean Language lies. That's why it's worth learning how to do it well, rather than just picking up the questions and doing something random. But even random questions about fairly random chunks are useful, in many cases.

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Permalink Reply by John Kelly on February 10, 2009 at 2:42am

I wanted to come back and backtrack a little on this clean languaging stuff...and share a couple more thoughts hopefully these will be worth while....

I am still with the idea of the communication (or the way one communicates) is the response one gets and not the meaning one intends but rather the interpreted meaning the persons has and technically it seems to me a created response from their domain. (Where would like to be? What would like to have happen? and What are we creating together?a socially coordinated management of meaning CMM.) Any conversation we have directly or indirectly can entrance a person consciously or subconsciously it seems to me, technique or no technique.

The main factor that qualifies as hypnosis for me is the fact that person is already coming with their set of trances....some subtle others not so subtle and that trance is an aspect of their cognitive functioning (trances as amplified deviation systems (positive feedback) either amplifying or de-amplifying).

"Clean languaging" Grovian style seems to lend itself more to a counseling model, that unless well contextualized, otherwise, would seem a little out of place conversationally, because we are dealing mostly with Metaphors. The 'Metaphor-model' of language, with its nine basic questions is a more structured therapeutic technique while conversation doesn't seem to be. Perhaps, metaphor counseling works best when it's not conversational to deal with deeper subconscious symbolic aspects of the content metaphor (and certainly could be used for trance induction if wanted or was necessary).

Perhaps, what I am coming back to: is to suggest that perhaps the client knows best somewhere inside or outside themselves; where to start and what to say.Whatever the context (street corner, office, bus stop, check line) and whatever the other person's first words are: ('I can't go on like this' or whatever), if they seem to have a problem, or a comment and you want to be helpful, provocative or whatever, the chances are that your first inter-vention (between breaths) will be at a conversational level. Where do we start? We have infinite choice it seems but not infitine time. Clean Conversations? Philip Harland is a neurolinguistic psychotherapist with a private practice in London, England. He has written many articles on Clean Language for professional journals and the internet, and is writing two books that cover the whole field of Clean and Emergent Knowledge. Visit www.powersofsix.com and his article:

http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/95/1/The-Mirror-Mo...

Then there is the question about space, in clean space they ask almost up front where would they like to be...in that regard perhaps we need to update our models and go form a more directive model to a more self-reflexive model in terms of our directives or requests. According to this model there are whole areas that haven't really been explored with clean space and could profoundly affect a persons perception. This satisfies my interests about paralanguage and nonverbal communications! Penny and James have both been UKCP registered psychotherapists since 1993, supervisors, coaches in business, and certified NLP trainers.
http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/24/1/Clean-Space-M...