Clean Language: Facilitating Client-Led Exploration and Change

For coaches and therapists, clean language is a specific approach to questioning and communication that aims to minimise the therapist’s influence on the client’s experience. It is a purposely ambiguous form of language and uses questions that avoid imposing the therapist’s own content, ideas, or interpretations onto the client.

Client Benefits of Clean Language in Sessions

The primary benefit for the client is that clean language facilitates a deeper exploration of their own inner world using their own metaphors and symbolism. By the therapist refraining from imposing their own understanding or leading the client, the client is empowered to:

• Explore their experience without contamination: The client can delve into their thoughts, feelings, and perceptions without the therapist inadvertently steering them in a particular direction.
• Access their own unique understanding: Clean language helps clients to identify and work with their own metaphors and symbols, which hold personal meaning and can be key to their healing process.
• Experience organic change: As the client explores their own symbolic landscape, the symbolism itself can shift and change, indicating progress and healing that arises from within the client.
• Maintain a client-centred approach: Clean language ensures that the focus remains firmly on the client’s perspective and experience, respecting their autonomy and inner wisdom.

Can Clean Language Be Used for Self-Help? How?

While the sources do not explicitly detail using clean language for self-help, the underlying principles suggest potential applications. One could attempt to apply clean language principles by:

• Asking oneself clean questions: Instead of asking leading questions or making assumptions about one’s own experiences, one could try to formulate open and ambiguous questions that mirror clean language techniques. For example, instead of “Why am I so anxious?”, one might ask, “What kind of anxiousness is that?” or “Where is that anxiousness?”.
• Paying attention to one’s own metaphors: Noticing and exploring the metaphors that arise in one’s thoughts and feelings, without immediately interpreting them, could be a self-help application.
• Observing changes in one’s internal symbolism: By tracking one’s internal metaphors over time, one might gain insight into personal shifts and progress.

However, self-application might be challenging as it requires a high degree of self-awareness and the ability to step back from one’s own perspectives, which is a key skill a clean language therapist brings to the process.

Principles and Ideas Behind Clean Language

The core principles and ideas behind clean language, include:

• Minimising therapist influence: The fundamental aim is to avoid leading the client or imposing the therapist’s framework onto the client’s experience.
• Respecting the client’s model of the world: Clean language operates on the understanding that the client’s internal experience and the way they represent it (through metaphors, etc.) are valid and important.
• Working with emergence: The therapist trusts that the client’s own insights and solutions will emerge naturally through the exploration facilitated by clean questions.
• Focus on the client’s language: The therapist pays close attention to the specific words and phrases the client uses and reflects these back in their questions.
• Content-free or low-content questioning: Clean language questions often focus on the structure and nature of the client’s experience rather than the specific content or problem.

What is Clean Language Trying to Achieve?

Clean language is ultimately trying to achieve:

• Facilitation of client-driven healing and change: By empowering clients to explore their own inner landscapes, clean language aims to support them in finding their own pathways to resolution and growth.
• Deepened self-awareness and understanding: The process encourages clients to become more attuned to their own internal experiences and the way they make sense of the world.
• Unlocking unconscious knowledge and resources: By working with metaphors and symbolism, clean language can help clients access insights and resources that may not be readily available through more direct, content-focused approaches.

Summary

Clean language is a precise communication method for therapists and coaches that prioritises the client’s perspective by using ambiguous, content-minimal questions. It aims to facilitate client-led exploration of their unique experiences, particularly their metaphors and symbolism, leading to organic insights and change. While direct self-application might be difficult, the principles of self-inquiry and attention to one’s own language can be beneficial. The core of clean language lies in respecting the client’s model of the world and trusting their capacity for self-discovery.