David Grove (Clean Language)

David Grove is a New Zealander and the originator of the therapeutic and coaching communication process called Clean Language.

Grove has 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 excited by 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, during some of its darker days.

In 1983, he completed a graduate degree in Counselling Psychotherapy at the State University of Minnesota and began developing his unique style of therapy. He focussed 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 U.S., Ireland, New Zealand and the UK, including at a retreat centre in Cumbria.

Grove felt it was important to honour and respect a person’s metaphors, and that the therapist’s role was to promote self-healing by facilitating a metaphorical journey. He devised a set of questions designed to interfere with this process as little as possible, which developed into a “natural language of trance”, Clean Language. These aspects of his work were modelled and documented by Penny Tompkins and James Lawley in their book Metaphors in Mind.

Most recently Grove has moved his focus to an exploration of the therapeutic effects of space, known as Clean Space, and become interested in the science of emergence and how its insights can be applied in therapeutic contexts. He has been working on this with a number of leading NLP figures, particularly in the UK.