Symbolic modeling is a therapeutic and coaching process developed by psychotherapists Penny Tompkins and James Lawley, based on the work of psychotherapist David Grove. Using Grove’s Clean Language, a progressive questioning technique using clients’ exact words, the facilitator works with a client’s internalized metaphors to clarify personal beliefs, goals, and conflicts, and to bring about meaningful change.
Regarding the individual as a self-organizing system that encodes all feelings, thoughts, beliefs, experiences etc. in the mind/body as metaphors, the five stage symbolic modeling process guides the client through an exploration of these metaphors, their organization, interactions, and patterns. Using the client’s internal metaphors, the ones s/he‘discovers’, means you are working in the language of the client’s subconscious, bypassing cognitive awareness and its limitations. These embodied metaphors may be restricting a client’s ways of viewing the world and his/her coping strategies, due to the metaphors’ prescribed inner logic. Without shifting these, lasting change is difficult, as the mind/body continues to work from this old paradigm. By helping the client determine how these metaphors can change to meet their desired outcomes, transformative shifts can occur within a client's “metaphor landscape”, bringing about meaningful change on cognitive, affective and behavioral levels.