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Who was David Grove?

David Grove was the creative genius who developed Clean Language therapy and many innovative ways to support individual systems to heal from trauma. Alongside Clean Language, he developed Clean Space, Emergent Knowledge, The Power of Six, Clean Hieroglyphics and the use of the Whirly Gig for working with embodied trauma that didn't respond to talking therapy. His work is the source for Symbolic and Systemic Modelling and Clean Language interviewing.

Grove was born in 1950 in Tauranga, of Maori and European descent, and took inspiration from his whakapapa and ancestral teaching. He died in 2008 and some of the words below are from his obituary.

He graduated from the New Zealand Universities of Canterbury and Otago before taking a Masters in Counselling Psychology at the State University of Minnesota. David served as a consulting psychologist with the London Phobic Trust and published a book with Basil Panzer called Resolving Traumatic Memories (1989, Irvington).

His avant-garde approach took in learning from all aspects of life: systems theory, physics, literature, ancient Greece, aviation and the web. He was able to synthesise these ideas into his work and emerge with spectacular new processes.

A brief resume of some of David’s early work follows: In 1986 he presented a keynote address at The International Symposium for Psychotherapists in London. He spoke at the American Association for the Study of Mental Imagery at the Medical College of Wisconsin with R.D. Laing and Isaac Marks. Other engagements included speaking at the London Society for Ericksonian Psychotherapy and Hypnosis, The Vietnam Veteran Administration, Augusta, Georgia, at conferences held by Virginia Satir, founder of the Mental Research Institute for Brief and Family Therapies in Palo Alto California, working closely with Caril Lankton, Bill O’Hanlon, Dr Brian Roet and Charles Whitfield, author of Healing the Child Within and Memory and Abuse.

David was great friends with the playwright and author Willy Russell, author of Shirley Valentine and toured with other productions of Russell’s work – ‘Words on the Run’ and ‘ The Wellingborough Bootleg’.

The accepted methods of treating trauma 25 years ago were to encourage patients to ‘desensitise’ by talking through their experiences; David, however, noticed that this often re-traumatised patients and instead listened to them describe their symptoms spontaneously in metaphor, for instance ‘it feels like a ton of bricks’, and found that exploring these metaphors alleviated their disorders.

To encourage this process, he repeated patients’ own exact words back to them and developed a series of simple questions which would carry the least possible influence from the therapist. Because this honoured the patient’s experience, ideas and values without contaminating them with those of the therapist, he named this technique ‘Clean Language’.

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