David Grove (Clean Language)
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David John Grove (1 December 1950 - January 8, 2008) was a New Zealander and the originator of the therapeutic and coaching communication process called Clean Language. He died of a heart attack in Kansas City, USA on 8 January 2008, aged 57 years. His body has been returned to New Zealand for a funeral in Tauranga on 21 January.
Grove had European and Māori ancestry. He graduated with a BSc from the University of Canterbury in 1972, then studied Business Administration for a postgraduate degree.
He was working in business when he came across Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) in 1978, and became attracted to the way it looked at the structure of experience. Initially, he was planning business applications.
Then he tried to attend an NLP business workshop but found it cancelled because not enough people had turned up. The organisers persuaded him to join another group... David became interested in phobias and trauma.
He went on to work with NLP’s founders, to qualify as a Master Practitioner and to develop skills in Ericksonian hypnosis before walking away from NLP in 1981.
In 1983, he completed a graduate degree in Counselling Psychology at the State University of Minnesota and began developing his unique style of therapy. He focused his attention on resolving traumatic memories: memories of childhood abuse or, in the case of Vietnam veterans, war.
He went on to work with over 40,000 people in workshops and healing retreats in the United States, Ireland, France, Holland, New Zealand, Australia and the UK.
Grove's process was designed to honour and respect a person’s metaphors, the therapist’s role being to promote self-healing by facilitating a metaphorical journey. He devised a set of questions designed to explore the client's metaphorical landscape while minimising the intrusion or 'pollution' of that landscape by the therapist's own metaphors. Grove called the question set which emerged from his development work "Clean Language". Clean, in this sense, being itself a metaphor for the intention of the therapist to 'stay clean' by keeping their own metaphors to themselves as described above.
These aspects of his work were modelled and documented by Penny Tompkins and James Lawley in their book Metaphors in Mind. They call their model of his work Symbolic Modelling.
More recently Grove had moved his focus to an exploration of the therapeutic use of perceived and physical space. He developed a new process which he called Clean Space for working with a client, facilitating them to explore their internal and external perceived landscape by physically moving to different spaces.
From that, he became interested in the science of emergence and how its insights can be applied in therapeutic contexts, a process broadly referred to as Emergent Knowledge. He had been working on this with a number of leading NLP figures around the world.
Reference
- Death Notices in New Zealand Herald (Auckland) of 17 January 2008.