The Power of Six
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Below is an exclusive extract from the 'The Power of Six' by Philip Harland.
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THE JOY
OF SIX
A Six-Step Guide to Self Knowledge
Know thyself
For David Grove
1950-2008
Six nights after its birth the chosen child of the Māori is immersed in a stream and hears the Karakia, the formula of words with power that open its mind to the world for the first time. Then six red stones are taken by the mother and placed in the earth in a sacred place. And those stones join the six of the last generation, and the six that went before, and all the others put there through time. The last woman of the line always knows the number of stones within that ground. She anchors the birth line held in trust by all the mothers that went before her.
During its first six days and six nights the spirit of the baby is kept safe by twelve companions who travel with it. Twelve is the number of stars we try to reach and touch during our journey through life. Twelve and multiples of twelve are the numbers for the trails of the sea, the land, the mind and the spirit.
Those born on the bright moon come into the world when all doors are open to the thirty-six houses in the heavens. Their winds fill with the light of the Universe and open to trails reaching out to the stars.
from ‘The Song of Waitaha’
The Polynesians used to say that you could tell a Wayfinder by his bloodshot eyes. For much of the voyage he had to stay awake, continually using his highly developed powers of memory and mental calculation to plot the Waka's route. In December 2006 David Grove was staying with me in London and working as usual into the night. One morning he came down to breakfast, eyes only slightly bloodshot, and asked me in that deceptively gentle way of his if I would spend 2007 with him on his latest work in Emergent Knowledge, and oh, while I was at it, write a book on it – and yes, why not, do audio and videos version too. I said no way, David, I'm far too busy writing a book on the existing work in Clean Language and Metaphor. Three weeks later we were sharing a mountain top in North Island, New Zealand, surrounded by giant fractal ferns, planning 'The Power of Six' in some detail, running a therapeutic clinic in Auckland to get case history material, and going for long evening walks. It was an intense and productive time. Then I went on to Melbourne to stay with my son and start writing, and David flew off to Missouri, or Paris, or Liverpool, to run more seminars and salons. Back in London I ran the process with my clients, David g-mailed way-out ideas now and again, I sent him chapters at intervals, and in Autumn 2007 we got together in France to go over an early draft. It was the last time I saw him. He died suddenly in the United States in January 2008.
David Grove created what I believe to be the most innovative work in psychotherapy since Sigmund Freud, and made the most fruitful use of symbol and metaphor since Carl Jung. His presence is on every page of this book, which is dedicated to his extraordinary, deep and unshakeable devotion to his clients; to his delight in jeu de mots and the puns, quips and carriwitchets of language; his endless enthusiasm for innovation and experiment; and to his countless little surprises, challenges and kindnesses. David died young, but he had always been ahead of his time. And it is possible that having developed not one, but six groundbreaking therapeutic methodologies, he felt he had achieved enough for six lifetimes and could now allow what would come from their interaction and iteration to emerge as it would.
INTRODUCTION
I was going to call this A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe of Six. I had thumbed a ride with a pioneering genius and expected him to do most of the driving. But David Grove's special intelligence was to give what he knew for others to pass on, and that is what this book is about. I offer you an extraordinary journey, powered by Grove, piloted by me, in which the vehicle, the energy, and the joy will be, I trust, entirely yours.
Why should you read this book? Because words can have an effect on the brain every bit as powerful as drugs, and if you want to use language to help people without the risk of harm to them you will find much that is new here. In the process, you will learn a great deal about the psychology and the step-by-step practicality of change. If you are a coach, consultant, counselor, health professional, psychologist, teacher, therapist, or trainer you will learn how to progress your clients more easily and safely. They will work through their traumas without being retraumatized. They will find a path through the woods of their confusion very quickly indeed and at the end of the day, importantly and properly, they will own their own process. They will heal themselves. As a result, you will find your work less taxing. You will end the day in a more relaxed state, because you will not have been, to quote a psychoanalyst colleague, "stuck in transference all day."
'Transference' is the redirection onto another person of emotions unconsciously retained from childhood. The term is usually applied to a patient's redirection onto the therapist, but it happens the other way round too. It can be distracting and de-energizing for both parties. The process described in this book considerably reduces transference, because it concentrates the attention of both parties on the client's relationship with their information and not on their relationship with the therapist or coach. As facilitator of this process, you will guide your client's attention through the content of their problem to its structure and beyond its structure to its solution. And you will have had the help of a set of simple but powerful questions. Six little friends, Grove called them. The numbers will have done most of the work for you.
What qualifies me to be your guide? Before becoming a psychotherapist, I studied architecture and military law, and worked in film and theatre. Not an obvious path, you might think, but it brought three things together for me. Looking at buildings taught me that anything of enduring value could only be constructed from the ground up, by attending first and last to the user's needs rather than to the designer's. As a prosecuting and defending officer in courts martial during military service, I learnt both the manipulative and the healing power of words: language could imprison people, but it could also free them. And from writing and directing drama and documentary, I learnt the importance of beginnings and endings, and what happens in-between. The start of any dramatic work – film, play, court case, therapeutic process – is vital in setting up the legitimacy of what happens next. The middle bits have to maintain momentum and help the protagonists surmount obstacles to progress. And the ending – the learning, the resolution – though it may be unexpected, even surprising, has to be true to all that went before.
It was not until I decided that real lives were far more interesting than fiction, and discovered that human feelings and problems, like cathedrals, cottages, Queen's Regulations and films, had a structure, that I became a psychotherapist. I wanted to rewrite the endless conflicts and paradoxes of human existence. I wanted to use language to heal or alleviate human unhappiness. Although a part of me believed that we were all doing the best we could with what we had, another part told me that most of us could do better.
First I had to find out what it means to be a client, however, because I didn't know myself well enough to be the slightest use to others. Like most people who come from dysfunctional families, I found myself repeating erratic patterns that I couldn't for the life of me understand and certainly couldn't sort out on my own. I did three years of Jungian analysis and then trained in analytic, humanistic, and cognitive-behavioral models of therapy, but none of these ways of doing therapy left me wanting to be a therapist. They were – are – without exception, interpretive. They translate the meaning of a client's experience into metaphors of their own, then attempt to rewrite the original to fit the translation. At best this is done openly, with the client's consent, but for the most part it's done unthinkingly, and at the worst surreptitiously. The balance of power is skewed hugely in favor of the therapist as the source of knowledge and authority, and this seemed to me politically, pragmatically, and morally wrong.
Then I came across neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), and found an approach to human communication and change that derived from our actual experience rather than from generalized theory. NLP had a methodology that was founded, ah yes, on how we construct our subjective perceptions. When feelings were messy, as they often were, and the going got rough, as it frequently did, structure was something I could hold on to, like the handrails on a cross-Channel ferry. I qualified as a Master Practitioner, but still found myself having to hallucinate what my clients required in order to solve what I presumed to be their problems. That didn't feel right. I didn't know best. No therapist does. Clients know best. But clients don't always know how to sort and retrieve the knowledge they need. Where is the key to this subliminal store? How can people be facilitated to find it themselves?
In 1995, synchronicity brought me to an experimental workshop in 'Clean Language' run by James Lawley and Penny Tompkins, who had just begun to apply their NLP modeling skills to the work of a peripatetic therapist by the name of David Grove. Here at last were non-interpretive principles that mirrored my own, a methodology that was congruent and reproducible, and a simple client information centered, non-doctrinaire approach to working with people. No external validation or certification was required to practice it. The philosophy of Clean was its own just cause.
Traditional therapies have always centered on the relationship between therapist and client: explicitly in the case of 'client centered' and 'humanistic' approaches, and implicitly in the case of psychoanalysis and its heirs and successors. Actually, analytic methods seem to me particularly relationship-oriented, drawing explicit attention as they do to feelings of attraction, rage, hatred, dependency, and so on that the patient may have towards the therapist (and vice versa). Interpreting and confronting these emotions requires the parties to communicate in an everyday language that may presume too much and open up significant gaps in understanding between them. People can be in therapy for years and only the relatively well off can afford it. Meanwhile health professionals are required to treat psychological problems as behavioral or chemical deficits, and to manage their patients' symptoms with cognitive techniques and mind-modulating drugs rather than with self-regenerative therapy. As a result, the underlying patterns that hold problems in place remain largely unresolved and patients find themselves back on a waiting list when the symptoms return – as they often, even usually, do.
Grovian therapies reduce the client's dependence on the therapist considerably. There is a division of labor between facilitator and respondent that echoes the Socratic alliance. But whereas Socrates emphasized his pupils' relationship with what he called the truth, Grove drew his clients' attention to their relationship with themselves. Socrates would take a leading role in deconstructing his pupils' false reasoning before allowing them to share the initiative in a reconstructive second phase. The Grovian way facilitates the client to take responsibility for both. In one of Plato's dialogues, 'The Theaetetus,' Socrates describes himself as a midwife on remarkably similar lines to the way Grove would two millennia later. Indeed, says Socrates,
so far like the midwife that I cannot myself give birth to wisdom ...
and though I question others I can myself bring nothing to light,
because there is no wisdom in me. The many admirable truths
my respondents bring to birth have been discovered by themselves
from within.
'Mid' is an old preposition whose meaning was 'with.' The role of a good midwife is to be with the mother during pregnancy and childbirth, not directing or instructing her. Both Socrates and Grove professed to accompany rather than lead their respondents' gestation and delivery, but the precise, procedural model of questioning that Grove was developing in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Clean Language, encouraged clients to take by far the greater share of the labor. Clean Language speaks to the intuitive visual, auditory, and kinesthetic metaphors that people use to describe their problems – 'dark cloud,' 'cry from the heart,' 'knot in the stomach,' and so on. When these are treated as coded messages from the unconscious and questioned without interpretation or interference, the client is invariably led to a hurt, imprisoned, or abused 'inner child,' and further back yet to an earlier, joyful, pristine state. A remedial or healing resource will be rediscovered in the earlier cosmology and brought forward to clean up the present-day problem. Years of therapy are reduced to months, months to weeks.
Grove, Tompkins, and Lawley ran the first formal trainings in Clean Language and Therapeutic Metaphor in the UK in 1996. A few of us who participated in those were invited to join a development group to try out ideas, expand the model, tease and test the key clean questions. One question in particular came up repeatedly in our researches: where could the client state or feeling come from? A client's response to the question would invariably take them to a time past, yet basic physics taught us that time and space were inseparable. Information occupying a slot in time had to have its spatial equivalent. The use of space as a present resource emerged. We began to move out of our chairs. It was something Gestalt and Psychodrama therapists had been inviting their clients to do for years, but the idea of the therapist moving as well was quite new.
And what happened is that our fixed perceptions of therapy as a dialogue between therapist and client following conversational rules changed rapidly and dramatically. The Clean therapist, counselor, coach, etc became a facilitator, freeing the client to seek out physical positions equating to mental spaces containing what had previously been inaccessible or intractable information. The technology that came to be known as 'Clean Space' evolved alongside Clean Language. Physical space became psychoactive and therapy took on a new dimension.
The concept of 'emergence' was re-emerging as a science in its own right at that time. Systems theorist Jeffrey Goldstein defined emergence as "the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns, and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems." In a 1997 article, Symbolic Modeling: an Overview, Lawley and Tompkins wrote
According to 'self-organizing systems theory', at a certain level of complexity, a system will naturally reorganize … It is through a heightened awareness of our own patterns that new levels of complexity can emerge. In other words, the system starts to self-correct.
They might equally have said, 'The client starts to do their own therapy.' Grove began to ask if the therapist could be eased even further out of the equation. He suggested that the information-rich spaces clients discovered in a Clean Space process would network together and that from their self-organization new knowledge would emerge. From there it was a small step, though now it seems more like a quantum leap, to applying the iterative principles of the new science of emergence to heal the systems of the mind. In the Emergent Knowledge process of the Power of Six, the repetition of a single question drives an algorithm of change that prompts a restructuring of the client's personal worldview in which the old stuff – fear, shame, guilt, and so on – reorganizes into a more manageable form and in some cases ceases to exist altogether.
These are exciting times... and spaces. 'The Joy of Six' is a guide to this universe of the self. It introduces a recipe, a prescription, a formula so simple that even I can follow it. My intention is not just that you should get to know the formula, but that you should get into the frame of mind of someone who uses it to do new things. No formula was ever the last word on a subject. Even E=mc2 doesn't tell the whole story about mass-energy equivalence and the nature of reality. To understand the formulaic procedures for furthering self-knowledge and self-reorganization that you will find in these pages, you do not have to have the slightest grounding in physics or math, I promise, but if I have been convinced of anything while researching this book, against all my schoolboy prejudices, it is that mathematics, pure and applied, determine and condition the cosmos and everything in it, including you and me. In that spirit, I urge you to embrace the numbers. Six new friends will be your companions – sometimes amicable and sometimes awkward, as friends can be – on an unusual journey.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Notes to the Reader
Part One THE JOY OF SIX
1 The Paris Salon
2 The Formula
3 The Facilitator
4 The Client
5 Emergent Knowledge
6 Information Networks:
what is so special about six?
Part Two KNOWING THE NUMBERS
1 Proclaim
2 Explain
3 Reinforce
4 The Wobble
5 Crash and Burn
6 Out of the Ashes
Part Three KNOWING THE NETWORK
A The Client Space
B The Problem Space
C The Space Between
D Space Beyond
E Emergent Knowledge
F The Facilitator Role
Part Four CREATING THE NETWORK
1 A Clean Start
2 What the Client Knows
3 What the Problem Knows
4 What the Space Between Knows
5 What the System Knows
6 Action Plan
Part Five SIX DEGREES OF FREEDOM
1 In Everyday Life
2 In Personal Development
3 In Relationships
4 In Healing
5 In Problem Solving
6 In Business Development
Part Six THE Ekology
A Turn in Space
Emerging Ideas
Applications
Appreciations
References and Further Reading
Ekology Psychotherapy and Seminars