First published on cleanlanguage.co.uk 20 May 2022
Finding Words in a Spiral Galaxy
James Lawley & Penny Tompkins
The following transcript is of a demonstration on our fifth 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 to demonstrate Symbolic Modelling ‘live’.
The client's responses and our questions were translated by
Anna Stativka and
Dr. Vladislav Matrenitsky.
This transcript is illustrative of a number of features:
- The client presents with a potentially serious physical symptom and so we start by clarifying the scope of our agreement and our expertise.
- Since the client does not know how to find the words she needs to help a mother tell her son his father has been killed in the war, we cannot develop her desired outcome directly. Instead we work adjacently – to maintain attention in the vicinity of the relevant experiences (see J13, J21 and J45) – until a resource metaphor emerges which will enable the client to find the words to support the family.
