The Powers of Six

Intro  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8

Intro  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8

Intro  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8

Intro  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8

Intro  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8

Intro  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8

Intro  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8

Intro  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8

Intro  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8

In December 2006 when David Grove was staying with me in London he asked in that deceptively gentle, insistent voice of his if I would write a book on Emergent Knowledge and the Power of Six. I said no way, David, I'm far too busy. Three weeks later we were sharing a mountain top in North Island, New Zealand, planning the book in some detail, running a therapeutic clinic in Auckland to get case history material, and going for long evening walks. Things went well, we agreed on everything, but David hated the process of writing and wanted to be free to roam the world in his usual way. He said I should write the book just as I saw it. I sent him extracts at intervals, and in Autumn 2007 we got together in Normandy to go over a first draft. It was the last time I saw him. He died in the U.S. in January 2008. He may have felt that having created six groundbreaking therapies* he had achieved enough for six lifetimes, let alone one, and could now allow what would come from their interaction and iteration to emerge as it would. Philip Harland London, March 2008 * Clean Language, Therapeutic Metaphor, Intergenerational Healing, Clean Space, Emergent Knowledge, The Power of Six. Philip Harland THE JOY OF SIX A Six-Step Guide to Self Knowledge Know thyself For David Grove This book is dedicated to David's extraordinary commitment to his clients, to his spirit of experiment and innovation, and to his countless little surprises, challenges and kindnesses. INTRODUCTION I was going to call this A Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Universe of Six - I had thumbed a ride with a pioneering genius, and I expected him to do most of the driving. But David Grove's special intelligence was to give what he knew for the receiver to pass on, and that is what the book is about. I offer you an extraordinary journey, powered by Grove, piloted by me, in which the vehicle, the energy and the joy can be all yours. Why should you read this book? If you are interested in improving the human condition you will find much that is new here, and in the process learn a great deal about the psychology and the step-by-step practicality of change. If you are a coach, consultant, counsellor, psychologist, therapist, etc, a facilitator of others, 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 psychotherapist colleague, "stuck in transference all day". You will have guided your clients through the content of their problem to its structure, and beyond its structure to its solution. And you will have had the help of six indispensable friends. The numbers will have done most of the work for you. The Canadian writer Stephen Leacock wrote, "I know of no way in which a writer may more fittingly introduce his work to the public than by giving a brief account of who and what he is. By this means some of the blame for what he has done is very properly shifted to the extenuating circumstances of his life." I shall spare you the extenuated version. Suffice to say that when I left school I studied architecture (which taught me to design things for the benefit of the user rather than the designer), spent time in the army prosecuting and defending courts martial (which gave me a sense of both the manipulative and the healing power of words), worked for many years writing and directing for film and television (where I learnt the importance of beginnings and endings, and what happens in-between), and finally – finally - when I realized that real lives were infinitely more fascinating than fiction, and that human feelings and problems, like buildings, Queen's Regulations and films, had a structure, I became a psychotherapist. First I had to learn 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 fragmented 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 went into Jungian psychoanalysis, and after three years had perhaps half an idea of what was going on, but I also had the beginnings of a serious, surprising and abiding interest in others. I went on to study analytic, humanistic and cognitive-behavioural models of therapy with the intention of swopping chairs and becoming a therapist myself. 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 feelings and thoughts into metaphors of their own, then attempt to rewrite the original to fit the translation. I can only think of this as manipulative. At best it's done openly, with the client's agreement, however for the most part it's done unthinkingly, and at worst surreptitiously. The balance of power is skewed hugely in favour of the therapist as authority, and this seems to me politically, pragmatically and ethically wrong. When I came across neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) I discovered an approach to human communication and change that derived from our actual perceptions 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 hand-rails on a cross-Channel ferry. I became a Master Practitioner but realized I was still hallucinating 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 helped to find it themselves? Then in 1995 fortune brought me to an experimental workshop in Clean Language run by Penny Tompkins and James Lawley, who were applying their NLP modelling skills to the work of a peripatetic therapist by the name of David Grove. Here at last was a philosophy that mirrored my own, a methodology that was congruent, teachable and reproducible, and a radically new approach to counselling and therapy that I could pace and help develop. Traditional therapies have always centred on the relationship between therapist and patient, but they speak to a woolly everyday language that presumes too much and opens up too many gaps in understanding between them. People can be in therapy for years, and only the relatively well-off can afford it. National Health professionals are meanwhile obliged to treat psychological problems as behavioural or chemical deficits, because civil servants and drug companies tell them it's more cost-effective (to the state if not to the sufferers) to manage patients' symptoms with cognitive techniques and drugs. As a result the underlying patterns that hold problems in place remain unresolved, and patients have to go back on a waiting list when the symptoms return. Grovian therapies reduce the client's dependence on the therapist considerably. The precise, procedural language that Grove developed in the early nineties spoke to the intuitive visual, auditory and kinaesthetic metaphors that clients 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 to an earlier, joyful, pristine state, and further back yet to the biographical and intergenerational sources of both hurt and joy, injury and remedy, where a healing resource is discovered and brought forward to clear up the problem. Years of therapy are reduced to months, months to weeks. The first UK trainings in Clean Language and Therapeutic Metaphor were run by Grove, Tompkins and Lawley in 1996. A few of us who participated in and assisted on those were invited to join a development group to try out new techniques, expand the model, tease and test the key clean questions. One question in particular came up time and time again in our researches: where could the client state or feeling come from? A client's response to this would invariably take them to a time past, yet basic physics teaches us that time and space are inseparable. Information occupying a slot in time had to have its spatial equivalent. Thus the use of space as a present resource emerged. We began to move out of our chairs. Our fixed perceptions of therapy as a dialogue between therapist and client following conversational rules changed rapidly and dramatically. The therapist became a facilitator, freeing the client to move, to seek out physical positions equating to mental spaces containing what had previously been inaccessible or intractable information. Space became psychoactive, and therapy took on a new dimension. There was more to be done. Could the therapist be eased even further out of the equation? Grove had a notion that a client's information spaces would network together, and that from their integration 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. These are exciting times (and spaces). In the Emergent Knowledge process of the Power of Six the repetition of a single question drives an algorithm of change that prompts a systematic restructuring of the client's personal cosmology in which the old stuff – fear, shame, guilt and so on - reorganizes into a more manageable form, or in some cases ceases to exist altogether. 'The Joy of Six' is a guide to this universe of the self. It takes the form of 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, which in any case is not necessarily complete (even E=mc2 doesn't tell the whole story), but that you should get into the frame of mind of someone who uses it to do new things. You do not have to be good at maths, 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 little friends will be your companions - sometimes amicable and sometimes awkward, as friends can be when they tell the truth - on an extraordinary journey. THE BOOK IN OUTLINE 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 POST SCRIPTS A Turn in Space Emerging Ideas The Power of Six Canon References and Further Reading Acknowledgments Power of Six Seminars THE POWERS OF SIX Six nights after its birth the chosen child of the Maori 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. We are all given six bright stars at birth, and the remaining six are won by our own achievements. 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’