What do you do as a therapist, teacher, doctor or manager when your client, student, patient or colleague says "It's like I'm hitting my head against a brick wall" or "I'm so wound up I can't see straight" or "Things keep getting on top of me"? This article describes a way for individuals to discover how their metaphors are organized and, if they wish, what needs to happen for them to change so that they have a different perception of the world.
Many therapists and counsellors work intuitively with their clients' metaphors -- without knowing there is a language model and a process for doing so. Clean Language is the basis of the appoach and it can be encorporated into most therapeutic modalities.
Certain aspects of our subjective experience seem best suited to metaphoric and symbolic expression. To bring this type of experience to consciousness requires a method which is compatible with the nature of metaphor. This article was written as a step towards establishing such a methodology: Symbolic Modelling
In the beginning was the Meta Model. Richard Bandler and John Grinder's brilliant linguistic methodology for exploring and influencing a client's model of the world — in the direction of sensory experience. Then came the Milton Model. The linguistic art of utilising non-specific and conceptual experience for therapeutic ends. The marriage of these two models produced an offspring: Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). But what if there was another type of experience — metaphoric and symbolic — never coded by Bandler and Grinder?
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