First published on cleanlanguage.co.uk 5 May 2022
From Pain to Calm Clear Sky
James Lawley & Penny Tompkins
The following transcript comes from our fourth workshop with a group Ukrainian psychologists and psychotherapists who want to use Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling to support themselves and their clients. The aim of the session was simply to demonstrate Symbolic Modelling ‘live’.
Transcripts of previous demonstrations with this group are available:
1. Developing a resource metaphor: Journey with whales
2. Developing a desired outcome: Coping with Un-safety
3. Starting to feel the movement of life
The client's responses and our questions were translated by
Anna Stativka.
This transcript is illustrative of a number of features:
• Working with a client experiencing physical and emotional pain during the session.
• How we acknowledge and incorporate the client’s painful current reality:- her body is in pain (C2, C8, C51)
- she can “lose control over the world” (C18)
- a “dark cloud comes” (C39)
- she “cannot do anything about circumstances” (C45)
- and is living with a painful dilemma (C47).
• Some ways to respond when a client answers “I don’t know” (C45, C49, C57) to a question.
• How we make use of a number of varieties of the “And when … what would you like to have happen?” question (J1, P22, J44, J46, J48, J50).
• That even with the ongoing suffering, a valuable resource metaphor and several perspective-changing realisations can emerge.
After the transcript we provide an illustration of our schema of the client's symbols and process.
