First published in Rapport, journal of The Association for NLP (UK), Issue 50, Winter
2000
RESOLVING PROBLEM
PATTERNS
with clean language and
autogenic metaphor
Part II of a two-part paper
Philip Harland
"How can client patterns be
discerned, decoded and the information within them
be released?"
David Grove1
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INTRODUCTION
"People do not seek help because
they have a problem.
They go to a therapist because they realise that without
intervention the repetitive nature of certain thoughts,
feelings and behaviours will continue into the future. They
notice there is a pattern in their life which they do not
like and do not know how to change."
James Lawley and Penny Tompkins 2
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There is a tremendous need in most of us for continuity and
consistency. Even when our patterns are unproductive we'll go to a
great deal of trouble, literally and metaphorically, to hang on to
them. My purpose in the second part of this paper is to help you
reflect on ways of facilitating clients to decode and release problem
patterns. You will notice an emphasis on the use of clean language
and autogenic metaphor.
Metaphor is a container for complex information from the
unconscious.
Autogenic metaphor is metaphor generated spontaneously by
the client and untainted by therapist suggestion or interpretation.
Clean language is a minimalist intervention methodology
which allows the client to self-model their unconscious process at
the threshold of consciousness, the place where conscious awareness
connects to original source, the place where change can be
facilitated, known and matured. 3
Philip Harland trained in analytic and
humanistic psychotherapy, is a Master Practitioner of NLP,
and over the last five years has studied extensively with
David Grove, originator of Clean Language, and with Penny
Tompkins and James Lawley, co-developers of Grove's work and
of their own innovative approach, Symbolic Modelling. He is
one of the original members of the London Clean Language
Practise Group and co-ordinates a Metaphor and Clean
Language Research Group. |
In Part I of this
paper (Rapport 49 Autumn 2000) we considered two
questions:
1 What is a pattern?
A repeated behaviour, feeling, thought or
belief was described in terms of a configuration in the
client's internal landscape with coherence and continuity
which could be identified in space, time or form, or any
combination of these (see figure 1). A problem pattern is
simply a pattern that gives the client problems.
2 How can patterns be discerned?
Two kinds of discernment were identified:
associative discernment based on guesswork, where the
therapist fills in 'missing' bits of client information with
internal patterns of the therapist's own; and direct
discernment based on clean language questioning, where the
true client pattern cannot help but emerge. 4
Part II asks:
3 How can patterns be decoded?
(And compares the approach of different models of therapy)
4 How can the information within a pattern be
released?
(And explores what happens next, and examines how clean
language works) |
Figure 1: defining
pattern
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Note This paper has a bias towards psychotherapy,
but the art of clean language and symbolic modelling applies
to any area of human facilitation -- education,
communication, training, consultancy -- so you might allow
the therapist-client paradigm to act as a metaphor for
consultant-client or teacher-pupil or whatever you wish. |
3 How can patterns be decoded?
deciphered/unscrambled/figured out? 5
Colin |
I'll be going along quite happily and suddenly, wham,
I'm doing the same old thing again, my head is spinning, I'm
on a rollercoaster and there's like a big black vortex that
sweeps me up off the ground and I have no control. I'm
terrified, I'm very confused. You know only yesterday I
... (client goes on) |
Going along ... wham ... same old thing ... head spinning ...
rollercoaster ... vortex ... what is this client's unconscious
communicating? These are all metaphors that are isomorphic
(correspond in form) with internal patterns. But the language is
cryptic. The information is in code. Would it be easier to translate
if the client were more succint?
Colin |
(half an hour later) I've been going round in circles
for years. |
Still seems pretty hopeless. Well, never take a metaphor for
granted. The client has progressed from several descriptions of the
problem to a simple description of the pattern. It's at a higher
logical level.
Clean language
therapist |
And you've been going round in circles for years. And
when you've been going round in circles for years, what kind
of circles are those circles? |
Colin |
It's like I'm on a roundabout. |
Now what? The client has simply translated one disabling pattern
into another, and still has no control. Or has he? Never interpret.
Never presume.
Therapist |
And it's like you're on a roundabout. And when it's
like you're on a roundabout, is there anything else about
that roundabout? |
Colin |
It's a magic roundabout. |
In two clean language questions Colin's metaphor has moved from
implacably binding problem to potential resolution with infinite [magic] possibility.
Most clients will express themselves even more circuitously. Below
is a symbolic representation of a certain client pattern. Imagine the
client is saying something you cannot make head or tail of -- it
might as well be in code.
Client |
|
Remember the client is already manifesting in some way the pattern
that brings them to therapy. This first part represents the whole.
The pattern is isomorphically present. But what kind of
pattern is this? In Part I we considered how all patterns manifest in
space, time and/or form. There are obvious spatial components
here: A seems to be above B in some way, and B is further on a bit.
Is that enough to decode it? We could hazard a guess -- repressive
parent, subordinate child desperate for autonomy etc. Perhaps as the
client goes on the pattern will become more apparent:
Client |
|
We can now suppose that this pattern is continuing not just in
space but over time. If you had made an intervention based
solely on its spatial components you may well have been wide of the
mark. This client is manifesting another pattern altogether, though
with no insight of their own into it they might well have gone along
with yours. For a while. Before relapsing.
In fact the series has a very simple code. This is a pattern not
just in space and time, but also form.6
If you take this puzzle as a metaphor for any client presentation
there might be information for you as a therapist in the way you
approached it.
(i) Chances are that you postulated one or two theories
quite early on and attempted to fit the pattern to them, discarding
parts of the theory that didn't fit and holding on to parts that
might, until the theory so completely fitted the pattern that it
couldn't possibly be anything else. In other words you took an
objective view of the evidence and confronted what you detected
directly. The scientific method.
(ii) Or perhaps you decided not to be enticed by the form
in which the puzzle appeared and approached it obliquely. You
detached yourself in some way, took an intuitive path of your own and
either through belief or fancy imagined that the solution would
follow. You worked in an indirect way on the pattern from outside it.
(iii) Or you may have supposed some kind of affinity with
the pattern. You sat with it as it unfolded in the way that Einstein
is said to have imagined himself riding a beam of light in order to
understand relativity. You worked directly or indirectly on the
pattern from as close as you could possibly get to it.
(iv) And maybe there is another way. What led you to try to
'solve' it at all? No one asked you to. I guess like me you made an
assumption that that's what you ought to do. And now that you
have, how can you be sure you're 'right'? What if this arrangement of
the Roman alphabet is only one component of a far more sophisticated
conundrum that dates back to Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian
pictographs, and further back still to a time before writing?
If you simply allowed yourself to be with this client's puzzle,
made no assumptions and applied no propositions, assisting it only to
know itself, you would be identifying with the pattern from within
the pattern, privy to its inherent logic, respectful of its unique
purpose, and the owner would eventually have all the information they
needed to decode it for themselves -- if that is what they wanted to
do.
To summarise: we can predicate four ways of decoding patterns
(figure 2):
(i) working directly on the pattern from outside the pattern
(ii) working indirectly on the pattern from outside the pattern
(iii) working in/directly on the pattern from alongside the pattern
(iv) working directly with the pattern from within the pattern.
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working
directly
from outside
|
working
indirectly
from outside
|
working
in/directly
from alongside
|
working
directly
from within
|
Figure 2: four ways of decoding client
pattern
|
(i) working directly on the pattern from outside the pattern
Client |
As I was saying, A / B C D / E ... |
Therapist |
[who is probably not even thinking of the notion of
'pattern'] Hm. I notice you have placed A and E above the
line and B C D below, now I wonder what you make of
that? |
Most of the standard talking therapies -- cognitive,
client-centred, psychoanalytic, humanistic -- might start in this
way: aspiring to objectivity by remaining 'outside' the pattern. Yet
if you analyse this therapist's intervention carefully you will
notice they have already introduced three patterns of their own into
the client's system. 'Placed', 'above the line' and 'below' are
therapist-generated metaphors.
A gestalt therapist might go on to suggest confronting the pattern
-- placing A E F on one chair, B C D on another, and polarising the
obvious division between the two in the expectation of some sort of
ideographical integration. A transpersonal therapist might want to
stress the spiritual dimension:
Would you agree, B, that you are more than your
shape?
A transactional analyst might see the differences rooted in
critical parent above the line and adaptive child below. An
existential therapist might focus on the 'givens' of human existence
for poor old B -- death, alienation and suffering: ok, so now what? A
Freudian might check this information from the client against a
generalised model of transference and sexual development in order to
help the client come to terms (after a couple of years or so) with
its underlying pathological structures:
I suggest to you that B really wishes to sleep with
A but first must kill C ...
Even a client-centred (Rogerian) counsellor, wary of
interpretation, attempting to reflect the client back to themselves,
would be predisposed -- in common with these other therapies -- to
paraphrase the client's words and to install non-client material
unwittingly.
In most talking therapies the therapist is in control of the
process and interventions come from within the therapist's own
patterns, whether inbuilt or acquired. Here is an excerpt from a
recent television documentary of a (male) psychotherapist of
unspecified alignment talking to a (female) patient who suffers from
so-called body dysmorphia. Diane is a pseudonym. She has been seeing
the therapist for several months. Opposite are my comments.
Therapist |
Good to see you again, Diane. How many hours a day
would you say is spent thinking about your appearance now? |
Therapist setting client agenda and characterizing the
pattern. |
Diane |
Probably about six. |
Client answers in therapist's terms. |
Therapist |
Six hours a day. So it's still ... |
Note that apparently inconsequential 'still' -- anchoring
the client to the problem pattern she was in when she first
came months ago. |
Diane |
Yeh ... |
|
Therapist |
Very significant. |
Well, he thinks it is. |
Diane |
Yeh. It's a lot less. It used to be seventeen, maybe
more. But within those six hours a lot of that will be
positive. I'll still be preoccupied, but I'll be thinking
good things, just sort of how I'd like to have my hair next
and that sort of thing. |
Client attempts to re-set the agenda and rearrange the
pattern. |
Therapist |
Uhuh. |
|
Diane |
And also thinking about how I'm happy with my hair or
how I'm happy with something I've got on. |
Seems ready to find encouragement in anything -- even
that noncommital 'uhuh'. |
Therapist |
OK. I haven't seen that so often, where you're saying,
you're saying it's not negative things, it's things where
you're comfortable with. |
Maybe because what she is saying is 'thinking how I'm
happy with my hair', but he doesn't acknowledge that. Is he
committed to a pattern of his own? |
Diane |
Yeh. |
Uncertain of her discernment of her own pattern, she's
ready to endorse whatever his might be. |
Therapist |
As if you're trying to reassure yourself. |
Reassured by that 'yeh', he comes clean. |
Diane |
(Pauses for several seconds) Yeh. Maybe. Yeh. Mm. Now
you say that I don't know if that's such a good thing, but I
was under the impression that that was all good. (Uncertain laugh) Even though I was still preoccupied
it was ... |
|
Therapist |
Well it does suggest you're still quite vulnerable. |
If she wasn't she will be now. |
Diane |
Yeh. (Nods) Yeh. I suppose you're right. |
No comment. |
In the space of two minutes the therapist has made three direct
suggestions ("it's very significant", "you're trying to reassure
yourself", "you're still quite vulnerable"), used one word ("six") that was Diane's alone -- out of 131 possible -- and
placed her gently back in the unresourceful pattern that will
probably keep her in therapy for years. 7
I'm not saying this therapist was mistaken in his interpretations
of Diane's pattern, and clearly we don't know the full history of the
therapy, but I do suggest that the underlying methodology allows at
least as high a possibility of being unhelpful to the client as the
guesswork of the average clairvoyant (and I judge clairvoyants to be
averagely helpful people). Of course not all talking therapies
operate in this way. In cognitive work the suggestions will be more
blatant; in humanistic interventions they may be more subtle. I have
practised in both and I am not knocking either. I am making
comparisons.
(ii) working indirectly on the pattern from outside the pattern
A way of working shared by the behavioural, physical, postural,
sensory, expressive and 'healing' therapies. I include homeopathy and
traditional medicine, or drug therapy, among the physical therapies.
I have worked in behavioural and expressive therapies. My knowledge
of the other models comes from study and personal experience.
Drug therapy supposes the body to be somehow in a state of
conflict with our sense of self and our emotional and spiritual
experience. Drugs work on the brain in the hope of indirectly
modifying patterns in the mind.
Patient |
Oh dear, A seems to go above the line, B below, I'm
not sure where to put ... |
Doctor |
Sounds like you're depressed. I think we'll put you on
a course of amitryptiline. |
Patient |
I don't know, doctor, what do you recommend? |
Doctor |
You can have an injection or take the pills. |
Patient |
What kind of pills are they? |
Doctor |
Pink. Unless you prefer the blue. |
I have worked with many clients who were concurrently on drug
therapy, and my sense of the best drugs did for them was to dull the
problem without touching the pattern that produced it. Dulling a
problem is an understandable way of coping with the stress of
reality, but hardly a way of developing the potential in a client's
life.
Body and postural therapies -- acupuncture, massage,
reflexology, Feldenkrais etc -- all work to one degree or another
from outside. They aim to relieve the symptoms of negative patterns
-- pain, tension and stress -- through movement or manipulation, and
to influence internal events indirectly through mind-body or 'energy'
connections.
Behavioural approaches such as 'familiarisation',
'aversion' or 'flooding', where the client is gradually introduced to
more and more of the phobic trigger, work in the belief that changing
behaviour changes thinking changes feeling, an essentially indirect
approach.
'Healers' believe their power comes from God or from
universal psychic energies. The healer is the indirect conduit and
the patient the passive receiver. Energy is believed to be
transmitted in some indeterminate way from one to the other. My
experience of Reiki healing was that the sheer concentration of the
therapist obliged me to focus on internal balance in a way I would
never -- or perhaps could never -- do alone. Again, an indirect
effect.
Expressive therapies, including art, music, dance, primal
therapy and anger release, work at one stage or several stages
removed from the pattern. They explore the expression of feeling
rather than its construction, and seek liberation -- of something,
usually a symptom rather than a cause. You could call it the hopeful
domino theory of therapy: free one component and trust the rest will
follow.
Although most of the non-drug based indirect therapies describe
themselves as 'holistic' and talk of the patient as a
body-mind-spirit whole, they are in fact partial and work on the mind
in a secondary way via posture, muscle tension or 'energy lines'.
(iii) working in/directly on the pattern from alongside the
pattern
I count hypnotherapy and NLP in this category, and I have
practised in both. The hypnotherapist or the NLP therapist guides the
client through a process, and from the client's point of view the
process may be entirely internal.
Client |
There's this A and this B and ... |
Hypnotherapist |
And as you see A and B, and hear the sound of my
voice, and your breathing gets deeper, I want you to ... |
Client |
[Shifts from A B C to] Z - Z - Z ... |
In hypnotherapy all that is required of the client is to respond
passively and positively to the direction of the therapist. Once in
the trance state, what happens next depends on the suggestivity of
the client and the resourcefulness of the therapist. The
effectiveness of the work is based on the therapist-led re-creation
of generalised client resources which are brought to bear on the
problem pattern obliquely.
NLP works with the subjective experience of the client as
represented externally by the client. The neurolinguistic model says
that all our subjective experience is coded in sub-modality
distinctions in the sensory cortex of the brain. Problem patterns
therefore have a coherent structure. Once the client gains access to
that structure it can be described, and if it can be described it can
be decoded. And if it is decoded in the context of a well-formed
outcome for change, change will happen.
Client |
So there's this A and this B and ... |
NLP therapist |
Hang on a minute, what's your outcome here? What do
you want? |
Client |
I want to get rid of A of course. |
Therapist |
And what will that get for you? |
Client |
I'll feel better about B. |
Therapist |
Ok, and what will that get for you? |
Client |
What do you mean? |
Therapist |
[Tries another technique] When you say 'A' do you get
a picture, a sound or a feeling? Is that in black and white
or colour? Moving or still? (etc etc) |
Information about client patterns comes from sensory
representations elicited conversationally by the therapist and
reported cognitively by the client. That is arguably direct
information, but cannot help but be modified by its dependence on the
therapist's own (nlp and subjective) patterns and on the client's
translation of their internal experience into a language the
therapist can 'understand'. Thus the work remains generalised and
takes place in the vicinity of the pattern at best.
Excellent indirect or partial modelling of client patterns is
possible with NLP techniques such as sensory calibration,
sub-modality analysis, meta-programme elicitation, strategy
sequencing, logical level differentiation and meta-model questioning,
all of which require exquisite attention on the part of the therapist
to client process. However, these procedures are of necessity
therapist-led and will not all (or always) apply to the client
sitting in front of you.
And as most of the client changework that stems from NLP modelling
depends on the therapist-led superimposition of good feelings over
bad so that the bad have less significance, the resulting patterns (particularly in the case of therapist-generated
metaphor and so-called 'sleight-of-mouth' reframes) are likely to
derive more from the ingenuity of the therapist than the singularity
of the client. The only NLP-inspired change models I know that are
exclusively client-information-led rather than therapist-procedure-led are symbolic modelling, autogenic
metaphor and a conversational variant on both I call the
mirror-model. 8
(iv) working directly with the pattern from within the pattern
Imagine you are a therapist from another planet. You know all
about electro-magnetic waves, but you have never experienced them as
'sunlight'. 'Sunlight' is an alien concept to you, but it has
enormous significance for your earth-bound client. Now the
extraordinary thing about clean language (assuming that as a
therapist from another planet you came here for the training), is
that you don't have to know a thing about 'sunlight' in order to help
your client explore it and use it for transformative therapeutic
purpose.
Autogenic metaphor is a glorious resource for any therapist. It
contains information about client pattern that is purely
client-generated. It comes from the unconscious direct. The therapist
does not have to reconstruct, paraphrase or 'understand' the
information, and this minimises generalisation, deletion and
distortion.
Client |
There's this A.... |
Clean language therapist |
And there's this A. And when there's this A, what kind
of A is this A? |
Client |
I don't know. It reminds me of the frame of an attic
roof. |
Therapist |
And is there anything else about the frame of an attic
roof? |
Client |
Oh no. I remember being in the attic ... I'm two or
three and I'm terrified ... |
Therapist |
And when you remember being in the attic, and you're
two or three, and you're terrified, where is that
terrified? |
Client |
(Pointing to heart) Here. |
Therapist |
(Replicates gesture) And here. And does terrified ...
here ... have a size or a shape? |
Client |
Yes. (Gestures) About this big. |
Therapist |
And (replicates gesture) about this big. And
when terrified is ... here ... and ... about this big,
that's terrified like what? |
Client |
Oh god, like a balloon about to burst. |
Therapist |
And like a balloon about to burst. And when a balloon
about to burst, what kind of balloon is that balloon, before
it was about to burst? |
Client |
Well, it's beautiful, red, light and firm, and I'm
having fun with it. |
Never-before-discerned patterns begin to emerge through clean
language modelling as the therapist facilitates the client to
identify component parts of their metaphorical perceptions, to
develop those components in form, space and time, to elucidate key
relationships between components, to discern patterns across their
perceptions of those relationships, and to notice the relationship of
those patterns to their lives. As the client explores their
perceptual space in a state somewhere between trance and full
awareness they are in essence modelling themselves. It is the client, not the therapist, who determines the significance of
their perceptions. And as the system learns about its own
organisation a context for self-generated change is created, and it
is the client, not the therapist, who determines what needs to
happen for the system to evolve.
In NLP therapy, client outcome is elicited and explored
cognitively -- that is, in a state dissociated from the internal
pattern which produced the client's need for the outcome. Outcome in
clean language therapy can be elicited in a variety of states, but is
normally explored, and always evolves, in a state directly related to
the pattern's intrinsic need for self-resolution -- that is, from
within the pattern itself.
Figure 3 summarises these various approaches to working on or with
problem patterns. In my own practice I find autogenic metaphor
therapy using clean language to be as respectful as client-centred
counselling, as inner-resource-finding as hypnotherapy, and as
mind-changing and modelling-efficient as NLP. It can be as
spiritually-integrative as transpersonal therapy, as expressive as
art therapy, as liberating as any humanistic intervention and as
past-revelationary as psychoanalysis. It is without doubt the most
holistic means of conducting therapy I know. And clients get to keep
their clothes on.
Figure 3: working on or with problem
patterns, a comparison
Continued in part IIb ...