Mining Your Metaphors

Change the metaphor, change the self.

  • Home
  • About
    • Clean Language and Symbolic Modeling, Explained
    • Interview with Gina
    • Clean Language Facilitators
  • Get Certified
    • Why Get Certified?
    • Clean Language Facilitator (CLF)
    • Applying
  • Services
    • For Individuals
      • Audio and Video Session Samples
      • How Can SyM Help Me?
      • What Do Clients Say?
    • For Professionals
      • Upcoming Events
      • Who Can Use These Skills?
      • Audio and Video Sample Sessions
      • Trainings
      • What Do Trainees Say?
    • For Equine-Assisted Therapy Practitioners
      • Upcoming Events
  • Upcoming Events
  • Resources
    • Books and Such
    • Web Links
    • Blog
  • Contact Us
    • Contact Us
    • Make an Appointment

Guiding concept #2: Work from the bottom up

November 9, 2018

This is the second in a series of six blog posts excerpted from the introduction to Gina Campbell’s book, Panning for Your Client’s Gold.

Fundamental to the processes David Grove developed is the respect in which he held the client’s wisdom and the confined role he assigned for the coach, therapist, or other helper or healer. In Clean processes, the client, not the professional, is the expert on himself. The professional is there to hold the space and facilitate the client’s exploration. Grove would surely never have assigned so little responsibility to the facilitator and so much to the client unless he truly believed—and had seen demonstrated quite literally thousands of times in his practice—that clients have within what they need to heal.

So if the client is to get accurate information about his inner organizing structure, where does the facilitator direct him to start looking?

Top-down approaches

Helping professionals using top-down approaches start with pre-established generalities, to which a client is compared. This might mean referring to a list of categories to which the client is matched. These categories then suggest appropriate ways to diagnose and work with the client. Examples would be the DSM-V, Enneagrams, and the Meyers-Briggs Inventory.

While some practitioners adhere to their chosen framework without deviance, others use the frameworks to inform, but not dictate, what they do. In either case, a top-down approach inevitably involves applying some assumptions. If your framework has only square boxes, you will probably be looking for and asking about only what is in the square boxes. You risk missing entirely what’s outside the boxes, especially if your client isn’t consciously aware of it.

A bottom-up approach

Grove believed that to help a client learn about and help himself, he is best off working from the bottom up, that is, starting from scratch. No predetermined boxes. The facilitator encourages the client to expand his self-awareness by helping him find fundamental self-definitions: Who am I? What do I know? What do I want? What needs to change for me to get what I want? These are broad, generic questions that provide no implicit answers.

David Grove determined to make as few assumptions as possible in the way he worked. His guiding intention was to work with the client’s own content only, trusting that the client would find for himself what he needs.

Equal information employers

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Grove’s Clean processes is they are designed to work with whatever the client offers up, regardless of the kind or source of information. They are what Grove called “equal information employers.” Information may come from the past or the present or be oriented to the future. It can be a feeling, a thought, a belief, a behavior, or a gesture. It can be an image, a metaphor, or a sound. Its relevance may not be immediately obvious to you or the client. But with patience and trust in the process and in the client, what is needed will emerge.


Filed Under: Uncategorized

Clean Language guiding concept #1: We are emergent, self-organizing systems

September 24, 2018

This is the first in a series of six blogs posts excerpted from the introduction to Gina Campbell’s book, Panning for Your Client’s Gold: 12 Lean Clean Language Processes (2015)

The science of emergence

Emergence attempts to explain how a collection of individual units become complex, self-directing systems. From evolutionary leaps in nature to the growth of cities, from busy ant colonies to sensitive stock markets, self-organizing systems and patterns emerge from innumerable small interactions of the system’s parts in response to simple guiding rules, repetitions, and feedback. 

When a system reaches a level of complexity for which the existing management structure is no longer adequate, a transformation occurs. Something new, something that is more that just a sum of its parts, comes into existence. By definition, emergent features are unpredictable; there will be characteristics of the new whole that do not exist among its component parts. Thus you cannot know in advance what the “new” will be. Nor can you predict precisely if or when a shift will occur.

Shifts in organizational patterns sift down through the system. In a process termed downward causation, the original component parts that made up the system are affected by the new structure. They change because the individual’s system has a feedback loop: it learns from itself. The parts are no longer exactly as they were before.

From the micro-level of quantum physics to the macro-level of the global economy, there are numerous examples of emergence at all levels when conditions give rise to some new structure of organization. Fundamental to this concept is that the reorganizing of the system happens naturally, without needing a structural organizer from outside the system. Over the long term, the system self-regulates.

Guiding concept #1: We are self-organizing, self-correcting systems

David Grove applied emergence theory to the individual, regarding him as a system of interrelating parts with numerous bits of information, experiences, and coping strategies accumulated over the years. At any given time the system has an organizing structure, a modus operandi or way of functioning. 

When the individual has a problem, a contributing factor may be that his system’s organization is not optimized to resolve it. Healthy or helpful functioning is not a result of what the interrelating parts are; it is a matter of organization, of how the parts are interacting, which is why, for example, two soldiers with similar combat experiences may experience very different long-term effects. 

According to the principles of emergence, with enough pieces of information relating to the problem, a system with a less-than-optimal way of organizing that information will eventually find a better way. This new structure of organization leads to the clients’ having a different way of coping or managing, which can in turn, mean new choices and outcomes are possible.

For some clients, the shift filters through the system’s parts rapidly. The old structure may have proved to be so inadequate that it collapses and spontaneously disappears entirely. Other times, the new pattern of organization that emerges may incorporate some or all of the old pattern. 

Still other times, the old pattern gradually fades away. Given our mind/body system’s natural tendency to self-correct to function efficiently and beneficially, as the new structure demonstrates to the mind/body system its more beneficial, stable way of functioning, it becomes the go-to pattern of responding. 

Depending on the pressures on it, the new emergent state exists for awhile (maybe for a very long while) until some new dilemma challenges it. This creates a pressure for change, and at some point, a new order will again emerge. 

It is a dynamic process of self-correction.

So what might happen when a client’s system reorganizes? Of course it is different for each individual, depending on what’s needed. In terms of observable effects, I have had clients finally leave a job or relationship, change careers, decide to have an operation, start exercising regularly, lose weight, start Alcoholics Anonymous, have a difficult conversation, cease debilitating grieving, forgive themselves, and do all sorts of things that they had agonized over for months, if not years. Sometimes the effects are more about a pervasive feeling: a sense of relief or joy or engagement with life. Their systems evolve a new coping strategy that allows them to establish a new modus operandi.

Suggestions that come from the outside, that is, any external source such as a therapist’s or coach’s ideas or solutions, may or may not penetrate to the system level; if they do, they may not override old patterns and beliefs. David Grove maintained that comprehensive and lasting change, change that resonates throughout the individual’s entire system, requires structural reorganizing from within.

How do Grovian processes apply emergence theory?

All Grovian processes rely on the characteristics of emergent systems to naturally self-correct, even those David Grove developed before he began to study the science of emergence specifically. Grove’s intention with Clean interventions was to optimize the conditions whereby the client discovers, accesses, and accumulates information from his mind/body system, including relevant data that may have been inaccessible or unrecognized before. The processes focus the Clean facilitator on structuring the exploratory experience rather than introducing any new content. 

 


Filed Under: Uncategorized

Hope in A Corner of My Heart

January 30, 2018

COMING in 2018!  My next book…

Are you wondering what a Clean Language session is like? My newest book will offer you a window into the ways inner metaphors work, with a logic closer to dreams than to everyday physical reality. Like a series of short stories, the true tales of client Julia’s twelve sessions tell the healing journey she takes to embrace life again after the sudden death of her daughter, Barbara.
        Every chapter ends with a Clean Language experience that invites you to embark on your own journey of self-discovery. You will experience how greater clarity about your hidden metaphors can change your life for the better.
        If you are a new Clean Language facilitator, you can find ways for these 12 session descriptions to help you learn what David Grove’s Clean Language questions and strategies you might use in a particular situation. Throughout the book, I periodically comment on what I was noticing and why I chose to guide Julia’s attention in a particular direction.


Filed Under: Uncategorized

You Are What You Wear

December 28, 2017

Research demonstrates that what you wear gives your subconscious messages that affect how you behave.  So, are you the metaphor you wear?

Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management professor Adam Galinsky teaches ethics and decision in management. He and Hajo Adams conducted a study of the effects of wearing lab coats on people’s attention spans.  Pre-tests showed the participants associated the lab coats with attentiveness and carefulness, presumably because they identified them with doctors or scientists and what the participants considered to be their professional characteristics. When the coat was identified as a lab coat, participants wearing them had increased attention spans. When told the coats were painters’ smocks, participants demonstrated no difference in attention spans. Galinsky further mused, “Does wearing the robe of a priest or judge make people more ethical? Does putting on an expensive suit make people feel more powerful? Does putting on the uniform of a firefighter or police officer make people act more courageously?”

The questions raised are endless. I wonder, how do suits affect professionals behavior in business, and what happens on “casual Fridays”?  Ladies, do you feel more feminine in a pair of heels? What effect does it have in a professional setting? Does wearing school uniforms change students behavior? Many educators claim they see fewer discipline issues after their schools adopt uniforms.

In each example, the clothes themselves have become a metaphor for the ideal performance of a job. They suggest the person has the attributes we associate with the job well done, be it a particular set of skills, an attitude of professionalism, caring, courage, wisdom, whatever. We expect there to be something more than just another human being under the uniform, and it seems, the clothes can serve as prompts, signaling us to deliver something more ourselves.

And what about the other side of the coin? Don’t people in uniform sometimes abuse their power, be they military, police, judges or what have you?  While being reminded that you belong to a particular group can inspire better behavior, it can also distort one’s sense of  entitlement or encourage a herd mentality.

I welcome your comments on other examples that come to mind–for good or for ill– of clothes that make the man–or woman or child. And tell us, what is it that you wear that brings out the best in you?

 


Filed Under: metaphors, Mind/body, Subconscious Messages, Uncategorized

Pillow Fort: An Oxymoron?

November 22, 2017

 

What kind of protection could it offer?
What kind of protection could it offer?

Did you build forts with the pillows from the furniture in your living room as a child? I sure did. (I was lucky to have mother tolerant of easy-to-clean-up messes.) It strikes me as interesting that I’ve never heard anyone call these temporary edifices pillow houses or pillow castles; no, they were forts.

So why would we choose a word that suggests it offers strong protection when describing something made of soft and insubstantial  cushions? Is it an oxymoron, a pairing of contradictory words (like Iron Butterfly or sweet sorrow)? Is it just childhood imagination reaching beyond the limits of the material that’s readily available? Or could childhood metaphors hold more truth than is at first apparent?

Blows, whether they are physical or emotional, are things we try to “deflect”. A stone fort would logically offer an example of a surface that blows could bounce off of. But we also say  we seek to “soften the blow.” What better item to absorb the harsh impact of a blow than something as thick and cushioning as a sofa seat?

I suggest, then, that “pillow fort” isn’t an oxymoron at all; it’s a perfect description of what we all try to construct around us at times to deal with life’s challenges. Who knew back when we were  children, we were “enacting a metaphor”?


Filed Under: metaphors, Power of Words, Subconscious MessagesTagged: childhood, metaphors, oxymoron

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 5
  • Next Page »

Connect With Gina

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Get Gina’s Latest Book!

Hope in a Corner of my Heart book cover

Get Notices About Gina’s Upcoming Courses and Workbook Releases!

GoodTherapy.org

Gina Campbell, offering Clean Language trainings since 2005

gina_campbell

A Certified Clean Practitioner with a Masters degree in a developmental counseling field and decades of teaching experience. Read more

Upcoming Workshops!

  • Jan 19, 2021 - Learning Clean Language Basics Part ONE: Facilitating Clarity ,
  • Jan 11, 2021 - Learning Clean Language Basics Part TWO: Facilitating Change ,
  • See Full List Upcoming Events
Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2021 Mining Your Metaphors · Website Maintenance by Colorado Web Support