The distinctions of the Meta-Model give us linguistic features that relate to modeling, map making, and well-formed structures for our internal movies. When NLP began with the eleven or twelve linguistic distinctions of the Meta-Model (the lists varied from eight to twelve distinctions), Bandler and Grinder did not claim that they had exhaustively identified every linguistic distinction. They, in fact, anticipated that additional distinctions would be added to the Meta-Model. They noted this at the beginning of The Structure of Magic (1975, 1976): “… our Meta-Model covers only a portion of the verbal communication which is possible …” (p. 107) And, “… we suspect that some of the research currently being conducted in Generative Semantics … will be particularly useful in expanding the Meta-Model further.” (p. 109)
Given this, what additional distinctions can we find, identify, and develop to expand the Meta-Model? What other typical linguistic distinctions occur in our everyday expressions of thought and ideas that can also cue us to ill-formed structures of deletions, generalizations, distortions, and presuppositions?
I (MH) began my own search for missing Meta-Model distinctions in 1990 by engaging in an in-depth exploration of the foundational work of neuro-linguistics in the classic work of Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933/1994). I published these as a series of articles in Anchor Point as “The Missing Meta-Model Distinctions” (1992). These were later published in German (Multimind-NLP Aktuell magazine), then translated into Russian, Spanish and other languages and finally they were published as The Secrets of Magic (1998), which is now Communication Magic (2001).
Today if we ask, “Is there anything new to learn about the linguistic distinctions in NLP?” we delightfully tell you, “Yes, there is.” In fact, numerous people have been exploring other linguistic distinctions that deserve a place in an extended Meta-Model.
Here we will briefly survey these new developments—the seven linguistic distinctions from Korzybski and two from the field of cognitive linguistics. The fact is, there have been a lot of new developments in the field of linguistics since 1975. In fact, just as The Structure of Magic was first being published (1975, 1976), Noam Chomsky, developer of transformational grammar, denounced the deep-structure part of the model. And that was only the beginning. In the following years, the whole field of linguistics went through tremendous upheaval, eventually moving on from transformational grammar entirely. Harris describes all of this in The Linguistic Wars (1993). Today, cognitive linguistics has taken the leading role and we personally think that it fits the NLP and NS models in a far better way. But our concern here is not for linguistics, but neuro-linguistics.
The Meta-Model enables us to openly examine our maps and the movies that they elicit allowing us to make sure they are semantically well formed. We can examine them in terms of their construction, form, and usefulness. We can quality control our maps to make sure that they really will help us navigate various facets of life. If “the menu is not the meal”, and we have an abbreviated menu, we can expand the menu choices. If we have a really old menu, we can update it. If the menu has become folded, smeared, or dirtied so we cannot even read it, we can replace it.
The Meta-Model entirely avoids the epistemological questions about the “truth conditions” of the map. Rather than evaluate whether we have “true” or “false” maps, it focuses more pragmatically on other concerns:
The first seven distinctions that follow come from the key linguistic distinctions that Alfred Korzybski identified in his General Semantics model. As linguistic markers, they cue us about different ways that our language can be ill formed and hinder us in mapping and engineering our neuro-linguistics and in communicating effectively.
To expand the Meta-Model with these distinctions for more productive map making, we have reformulated seven Korzybskian distinctions using the Meta-Model format. We have packaged them in terms of neuro-linguistic distinctions and questions. First come the distinctions for detecting the structure of the mapping. Then come the questions to explore the poor map construction or ill-formed structures. This makes these distinctions explicit in a way that Korzybski did not.
Figure 12.1
| 1. Over-/underdefined terms (O/U) | |
| 2. Delusional verbal splits (DVS) | |
| 3. Either/or phrases (E/O) | |
| 4. Multiordinality (M) | |
| 5. Static or signal words (SW) | |
| 6. Pseudo-words (PW) | |
| 7. Identification (Id) | |
| 8. Personalizing (Per) | |
| 9. Metaphors (Mp) |
The distinctions refer to the language patterns that indicate structures of mapping. These appear as the surface expressions or statements that we use as we communicate. Yet these forms often create conceptual limitations that impoverish our world.
To address this impoverishment, we question or challenge the linguistic structure. As we meta-model, we invite a person to reconnect to his or her experiences out of which the map arose and to remap it more fully, appropriately, and usefully. We do this specifically by offering a question, response, or challenge that elicits more specificity in indexing the referents or in constructing a more enhancing map. As meta-modeling engages our mapping processes, it activates our processes of encoding our movies in ways that are usually outside of our awareness. While the transformational grammar labeled this the “deep structure”, cognitive linguistics describe it as the overarching hierarchies of “cognitive domains” and “matrixes of domains”—the meta-levels of our frames.
1. Over-/underdefined terms
These terms refer to how we overdefine some terms at meta-levels and underdefine them in sensory-based terms. We talk about “marriage” and define it in abstract terms that exclude specific behavioral referents. This leaves us using lots of abstract terms that are not operationalized and so encourage vagueness, imprecision, hallucination, and ill-formed structures.
“This is a beautifully decorated room.” What do you mean by beautiful? What features in this room meet your criteria for beautiful?
2. Delusional verbal splits
This refers to words that have verbally and linguistically cut apart processes and that treat the elements as if they could stand alone. “Mind” and “body” and “emotion” illustrate this. Where there is “mind” there is “body” and “emotion”. So we use punctuation to indicate the full system of interactive parts that cannot actually be split, mind-body-emotion, time-space, neuro-linguistic.
“Well, in my mind I do know better but emotionally I feel like doing it.”
“So tell me about the part of your thinking-and-feeling system that knows better and then tell me about the other facet of your thoughts-and-feelings that is activated to do otherwise.”
3. Either/or phrases
Either/or phrases posit an Aristotelian worldview that assumes a simple black-and-white view of the world so that things are either this or that with nothing in between. Yet the great majority of things in the world are grays, in between, to some degree. “Either you love your job or you hate it.” “Either you are a failure or a success.” Filling in the excluded middle enables us to map things with more accuracy.
So there’s nothing between failure and success? You couldn’t succeed in some things and fail in others? You couldn’t be on the verge of success but need to deal with a few things getting in the way?
4. Multiordinality
Multiordinality refers to the nominalizations that can refer to themselves. The meaning of the term depends on what level of abstraction is used. At each level, the term will mean something different. For example, at the first level, we experience love as attraction and affection. Then at the next level love of love becomes infatuation, then love of love of love becomes romanticism, and so on.
“My fear of disapproval is just eating me up and sabotaging everything I do.”
“So this fear that you’re speaking about, is it fear of Jim or Jane’s disapproval if you do that project without their okay, or is it fear of the idea that they will disapprove? At what level is this fear?”
5. Static or signal words
Static words are those multiordinal terms that we have limited to a single, rigid, absolute, and static meaning. It may start as our way of specifying a multiordinal term, but then we fail to keep it flexible. Having specified how the term is used in one place, we freeze it so that it becomes static and universally true for all uses. This creates limitations and rigidity in thinking.
“I’m just afraid of being shamed and embarrassed if I fail.”
“This ‘fear’ sounds like it is almost like a solid thing rather than a process. When you experience this fear about the idea of someone ‘shaming’ you, do they actually say, ‘Shame on you!’ in the tone of the childish curse, ‘Nay, nay, nay, nay, nay’? Or is it that they look at you and roll their eyes? How do they do this shaming act and what is so fearful about it?”
6. Pseudo-words
Pseudo-words are those spell marks or noises that look and sound like words, and that we use as if they were truly symbols that stood for something that had actual or logical reality, but do not. They stand for nothing. They are pseudo-terms. “Unicorn” in the field of zoology is a pseudo-term. In the field of mythology, it does have a referent and so stands for a referent. “Heat” in physics sounds like a noun, a substantive, and therefore a real thing. It is not. This misguided physicists for centuries. It wasn’t until scientists re-languaged the referent describing thermodynamic relations that the actual referent was mapped.
“Failure is just the worst thing. I just can’t stand it. That’s why I work so hard, to avoid failure at all costs.”
“I’m fascinated by what you are referring to when you use the word ‘failure’, it almost sounds like a thing, like a wild beast trying to devour you. Where is this thing you call ‘failure’? What does it look like? Is it always full grown or could there be a little mini-version of it? Would you be as fearful of it as the full-size version?
7. Identification
Identification refers to identifying with something and making it part of one’s self-definition. It refers to the next logical development of complex equivalences. The equivalence is taken between one’s definition of self and some external behavior, experience, or role, or some internal concept, belief, or emotion. There is no “sameness” in the world: there are only differences. Identification starts insanity by ignoring that.
“You don’t understand, I have been a failure all my life, and I’m afraid I always will be.”
“Yes, you’re right: I don’t understand. I didn’t know that you had been inducted into the Failure Hall of Fame as one of the great pioneers and leaders of Failurehood or that you had built it so thoroughly into your résumé. Does that identity have some perks that I’m not aware of? If it does perhaps I should identify with some of my failures and become one also.
8. Personalizing
Personalizing refers to both a thinking pattern (a meta-program) and a way of languaging events, experiences, things, feelings, or ideas as “mine” or “about me”. In this way we mentally map problems into ourselves, thereby creating more limitations and unresourcefulness, or, conversely, personalize resources to fill up our neuro-linguistic world with resourcefulness.
“It seems that you’re making fun of me and my pain. It’s not funny. Losing that job was the worst thing ever.”
“Well, yes I can see that you are nothing more than your job and that you are nothing more than what anyone says to you, and that taking everything anyone ever says to you personally is not only your style, but who you are.”
9. Metaphors
Metaphors refer to one thing through another. While all language is metaphorical, when metaphors are alive and vital, we notice them and use them to set a frame as a way to think about one thing in terms of another. “Communication is a dance” radically differs from the idea that “communication is war”.
Because our intention and focus here involve mastering the Meta-Model, what do we mean by this? What are the signs or indicators of such mastery?
Mastery means moving beyond using this list of distinctions and questions in an unthinking or rote way. When we first learn the Meta-Model, we focus on the specificity questions.
It makes perfect sense that we first learn to stop hallucinating from people’s words and representationally track from the words to the sensory-based referents they elicit and that we track to our internal cinema. When we cannot do so, then we ask for more information.
“Who are you specifically talking about?”
As the person fills in the map details, then we can map it on the mental screen of our mind. Representationally tracking from the symbol used cleanly enables us to accurately hear and encode what the other person actually says. This, however, is a rare art and one not easily developed. It takes time, patience, and lots of practice to accurately hear what a person is saying and use the symbols without supplying more meaning. Representationally tracking enables us to avoid being hypnotized by the words of our clients, customers, and friends.
“That humiliation really sent me into a deep depression.”
There is a high fog factor in those words. The nominalizations “humiliation” and “depression” have frozen some sets of actions and behaviors and encoded them as if they were things. The causation structure of the one nominalization causing (“sent me into”) the other nominalization represents yet another ill-formed facet of the mapping. We meta-model such fog when we inquire about the see-hear-feel referents of these terms.
“Who was humiliated by whom, in what way, when, how do you know …?”
“How did the humiliating activities demand, force, or cause you to depress yourself?”
“What specifically did you depress yourself about? How did you do that, specifically?”
While meta-modeling begins here, it does not end here. First we get the missing pieces, the referent experience that has not been fully mapped. NLP mastery at this level involves understanding why we do this and why this is important.
Why?
Ah yes, the forbidden NLP question—at the practitioner level. But now, at the master practitioner level, we ask it and explore it. How is it that we can search out the why now, but not earlier? Earlier the why questions would contribute to the vagueness and ill-formedness of mapping. “Why are you that way?” “Why did you do that?”
Such questions would not have first flushed out the details of what happened: they would have invited the one questioned to provide reasons, explanations and rationalizations. That would not make anything clearer. It would have increased the fog. Yet once we have the details, once we have filled in the specifics of the map so that the mapping represents a fuller expression of the neuro-linguistic mapping, now we can explore the higher frame of reasons, understandings, even excuses and rationalizations. If we ask why at the practitioner level, we lack awareness of what the answers do, and so can easily get caught up in content and miss the very structure of the experience. Yet asking why at the master level means we are now able to listen for the supporting frames and being able to explore them as structure.
For example, someone says, “Criticism really hurts me. I feel crushed when I’m criticized unfairly.” We meta-model by asking, “What do you mean by criticism [nominalization]?”
“Well, negative comments, you know.”
“And how do you know that comments are ‘negative’?”
“Well, ah, if the words insult me …”
“Has that happened recently?”
“Yes, just yesterday. My boss said that I had messed up the report.”
“And those words were an ‘insult’ and ‘negative’ and therefore the ‘criticism’ that hurts you?”
“Well, it’s not the words: it was the tone. You know, that sarcastic and harsh tone of voice that he used.”
“So a negative criticism that you experience as an insult involves a sarcastic and harsh tone?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“So if he had said these words matter-of-factly, they would not have been a criticism?”
“Right. I would have heard it as his understanding and evaluation about the report.”
“And you could have felt resourceful to have dealt with that?”
“Sure.”
“What if he had said with the harsh and sarcastic voice, ‘You really did a good job here!’? Would that have been criticism?”
“Of course.”
This meta-modeling flushes out the details of the structure of the experience that goes under the classification of “criticism.” Imagine if the person had started off asking a why question.
“Why are you so sensitive to being criticized?”
“Well, because of the way my dad treated me when …”
Then the person would have taken off into history as if it were the history and the experience that caused that state, rather than the mapping. It would have then been so easy to have gotten lost in details of the historical memory and to reinforce the map and the state. How different indeed is meta-modeling. And how different when we ask the why question from the master practitioner level. After obtaining the structural details of how the person formats and frames “criticism”, then we can ask why.
“Why do you think you connected the sarcastic and harsh tonality to the category of ‘criticism’? What would have been the positive value of originally doing that?”
The why of intention is really a very different question than the why of source. So also with the why of value and outcome. “Why do you want that?” “Why is that important to you?” These why questions elicit very different information. They elicit the governing frames that structurally support the experience. So Meta-Model mastery involves knowing what why questions to ask, when to ask them, and what to listen for.
EXERCISE: Exercising your “why” options
1. Get a notebook and notice all of the why questions that you and others ask in a day’s time. Write the why questions down and then discern the kind of “why” being inquired about.
2. Develop a set of why questions that enable you to explore significant meta-levels.
The highest logical level in the Meta-Model alerts us to the structural framework of numerous presuppositions—presuppositions of, for instance, existence, time, and space. Tuning our ears to hear such presuppositions means learning to listen at a meta-level for the assumed framework above and beyond the words. To do this we have to step back, so to speak, from the words and in wonder about the presuppositions within the words.
We do this with other Meta-Model distinctions. For example, with modal operators of necessity, we learn to hear that a world of rules and laws (necessities) is presupposed.
“You have to get your act together.”
“Have to? And what will happen if I don’t?”
“Boys shouldn’t cry.”
“They shouldn’t? Why shouldn’t they? What’s the rule that forbids it? Who forbids it? What will happen if they do? What will that mean?”
In Chapters Twenty-One and Twenty-Two we will delve into the presuppositions of language that explore the assumptive framework of such language.
The distinctions of the Meta-Model are those linguistic ones that identify styles of mapping in language. These linguistic features cue us about how we have edited, directed, and produced our mental movies.
That’s why we can use them to unpack the screenplay information within them and more clearly understand the internal movies that play in the theater of our mind. By questioning the “how do you know?” and “what does that mean?” structure of the language, we discover how a movie works in terms of both content and structure.
The linguistic distinctions of the Meta-Model began with the original twelve and have now been extended to another nine to give us more ways to enter into a structure of experience and to identify its magic.
Figure 12.2: The extended meta-model
| Patterns Distinctions |
Responses Questions |
Predictions Results |
1. Over-under-defined terms (O/U) |
||
| “I married him because I thought he would make a good husband.” | What behaviors and respones make a “good” husband for you? What reference facts do you have for “husband?” | Recover the extensional facts about the terms used. |
2. Delusional Verbal Splits (DVS) |
||
| “My mind has nothing to do with this depression.” | How can you have “mind” apart from “body” or “body” apart from “mind?” | Recovers the split that someone has created verbally in language. |
3. Either-or Phrases (E-O) |
||
| ‘If I don’t make this relationship work, it proves my incompetence.” | So you have no other alternative except total success or failure? You can’t imagine any intermediate steps or stages? | Recovers the continuum deleted by the statement. Either-Or structure. |
4. Multiordinality (M) |
||
| “What do you think of yourself?” | What do you mean when you refer to “self”? | Recovers the level of “Self” which can have many different meanings, depending on context and usage which speaker operates from. |
5. Static Words (SW) |
||
| “Science says that…” | What science specifically? Science according to whose model or theory? Science at what time? | Recovers the deleted details. |
6. Pseudo-words (PW) |
||
| “And that makes him a failure”. | What do you mean by “failure” as a word that modifies no real referent. | Challenges a map that uses words which define. |
7. Identification (Id) |
||
| “He is a democrat.” | How specifically does he identify with “democrat”? In what way? | Recovers the process of identification. |
| “She is a jerk.” | Upon what basis do you evaluate her using the term “jerk”? | Invites one to create new generalizations. |
8. Personalizing (Per) |
||
| “He does that just to irritate me.” | How do you know his intentions? How do you know to take these actions personally? | Challenges the process of personalizing. |
9. Metaphors (Mp) |
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| “That reminds me of the time when Uncle John…” | How does this story relate to the point you want to the story and the person’s concepts. | Recovers isomorphic relationship between make? |