(2) Chunk down to the specific referents at each level of abstraction. Here it helps to develop a behavioristic and functional set of words to map our abstracting with specific descriptions. Descriptive language order the happenings on the objective level in sensory-based terms (p. 264). Functional words enable us to translate dynamic processes into static forms and static processes into dynamic forms.
(3) Check for reflexivity. Can you self-reflexively turn the word back onto itself? This provides a good test for multi-ordinality. As we distinguish multi-ordinal words as those terms that can operate on many levels of abstraction, this enables us to recognize their nature and how they function in our languaging. Can you move to another level and still use the term? This question tests for multiordinality. “Do you love someone? Do you love loving them? Do you love loving love?” “Do you have a prejudice? What about a prejudice against prejudice?” “What science relates to this?” “Do you also have a science of this science?” This reflexivity test will not work with non multi-ordinal words. “What a beautiful tree!” “Suppose you had a tree of that tree?”
9.6.0.36 8. Personalizing
I draw this from the field of Cognitive Therapy and REBT, Beck (1976) and Ellis (1979) who created lists of cognitive distortions that govern how we filter information and perceive the world.
Two distinctions from the list of Cognitive Distortions that do not seem to fall into the Meta-model involve: “personalizing” and “emotionalizing.” A person using these cognitive distortions would see, hear, and respond to information, events, words, etc., as if whatever occurs out there does so in a “personal” way as a statement or reflection on the person. In personalization, a person believes that they are responsible for external situations for which they could not possibly be responsible. Then they would jump to the conclusion that if they so perceive things, they should feel a certain way (emotionalize it). In emotional reasoning, a person believes that because they feel a negative emotion, there must exist a corresponding negative external situation.
Emotionalizing refers to using one’s emotions for gathering and processing information. It thereby over-values “emotions” and treats one’s emotions as an information gathering mechanism rather than a reflection of one’s values as one perceives things. In emotionalizing, a person reacts to things subjectively. Personalizing refers to perceiving things, especially the actions of others, as specifically targeted toward oneself as an attack on one’s person. It refers to perceiving the world through egocentric filters that whatever happens relates to, speaks about, and references oneself.
These ways of viewing things arise, as does identification, from the way a child’s mind work early in life—egocentrically viewing the world in terms of self, assuming the world revolves around the self, and that most communication and events by others says something personal to us or about us. It works from the assumption that if I recognize something, I have to emotionally associate into it.
Such personalizing/emotionalizing shows up in language in the personal pronouns (I, me, mine), words indicating oneself, and in implied formats.
“Tom’s making a lot of noise because he’s angry at me.”
When someone says, “Linda is ignoring me” they have selectively focused on things (also discounting and negatively filtering) that invite them to personalize. If we then can ask what that means to the person, they might say, “I will never have any friends.” In this cause-effect statement, involving some universal quantifiers (“never,” “any”), we also have another personalization, along with crystal ball mind-read of the universe!
“What does that mean?”
“It means I am all alone.”
Personalizing not only feeds self-pity, but also “the entitlement syndrome,” as well as the antisocial personality orientation. Joe typically ends work by catching a drink with the guys then going home. If he notices that the children continue playing outside or watching TV, his first thought goes, “They don’t care that I’ve been working hard all day.” If he arrives late (and doesn’t call) and Becky has cleaned up the kitchen, he automatically thinks, “That bitch never fixes a decent meal for me.” If he confronts her with that(!), and she doesn’t respond immediately, he thinks, “She’s ignoring me! How dare she!”
To challenge a personalization:
1) Inquire about how the person knows to treat it as personal rather than impersonal. “How do you know that Linda is intentionally ignoring you and doing it in order to send you a message?”
2) Explore other possibilities. “If Linda was just preoccupied, how would you tell the difference?”
3) Go meta to explore the personalization as a possible habitual meta-frame. “Do you typically read the behavior or words of others as saying something about yourself? Do you tend to be sensitive to yourself about such things?”
9.6.0.37 9. Metaphors/Metaphoring
When we look at language at both the level of individual words and statements, we find metaphors everywhere. They lurk in the corners. They often visit us like angels unawares. At other times, we have to smoke them out. Most language, it seems, operates through the structure of metaphors. In fact, several theorists have proposed that all language boils down to metaphor. Regardless, metaphor does seem to function as an essential part of how we conceptualize—we compare what we know with what we seek to know and understand.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) see metaphor as a basic process for structuring knowledge. They theorize that concrete conceptual structures form the basis for abstract thinking/talking.
“We understand experience metaphorically when we use a Gestalt from one domain of experience to structure experience in another domain.” (p. 230).
Consequently, in thinking, perceiving, understanding, and talking we constantly find, create, and use metaphors from one experience to “make sense” of another. The fundamental nature of metaphor “is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”
Analogical communication includes metaphors, analogies, similes, stories, and a great many other kinds of figurative language forms. Such language connotes and indirectly implies rather than denotes. Such language endows communication with less directness, more complexity and vagueness, and more emotional evocativeness. It describes more the language of the poet than the scientists. I say “more” because scientists also use metaphor constantly, but more as an end in itself, for its beauty and charm. To become sensitive to the metaphorical level and use of language, we need to think in terms of analogies and analogous relations. What term, sentences, and even paragraphs imply or suggest some metaphorical relation? What metaphors does the speaker use to structure their thinking and framing?
What metaphors occur in the following? “What you claim is indefensible.” “She attacked the weakest point in his line of arguments.” “His criticisms were right on target.” “They shot down all my arguments.” Since the overall frame of reference involves conflict, battle, war, we can identify such as the operating metaphors here. The speakers analogously compare the communication exchange to soldiers battling to win a war. How great this differs from another possible metaphor. “Arguing with him is like a dance.” “We danced around the core issue for a long time.” “The movements of our meanings whirled around with no pattern at first.”
Metaphors operate like presuppositions in that we usually experience them at meta-levels. This makes them mostly unconscious. So when someone says, “Now I feel like I’m getting somewhere,” we may not even notice the “travel” metaphor of journeying, adventuring, etc. “That was over my head” suggests a “space” metaphor to ideas and understandings.
9.7 Thought Questions To Assist Your Learning:
Why do we say that the Meta-model functions as “the heart of the magic?” How does it do this?
Without referring back, list the thirteen distinctions of the Meta-model.
Where did Bandler and Grinder get the Meta-model? List the influencing and contributing factors.
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br /> How do you explain the Meta-model when someone asks you about it?
Name the three modeling or mapping processes.
Describe “the wheelbarrow test” that we use for nominalizations.
What additional distinctions has Michael Hall added to the Meta-model from Korzybski?
9.8 Linguistics Today
Grinder and Bandler originally developed the Meta-model from the language patterns that they heard and modeled from Perls and Satir and then later from Erickson. And they did so using the tools of Transformational Grammar (TG) —hence the lengthy appendix on TG in their first book, The Structure of Magic. They even noted in one of their footnotes the new development in TG of Generative Semantics (p. 109, note 6).
Actually, prior to their 1975 publication, TG had suffered what Harris (1994) later called The Linguistics Wars. There he detailed first the wars within the field of linguistics, the rise of various “schools” of thought within TG, and finally the “death” of both Chomsky’s Interpretative Grammar model (1957, 1965) and Lakoff’s Generative Semantics.
Lakoff (1987) later explained why TG failed as a linguistic model in terms of the philosophical difference between a formal mathematical model-driven process and the way people actually think and process information. Earlier he and others (McCawley, Ross, etc.) had taken Noam Chomsky’s original vision of ultimately finding meaning within the foundations of the Deep Structure and began pushing in that direction. Yet the more they moved in that direction, the more Chomsky backed off, went on the attack, and ultimately reformulated TG so that he eliminated Deep Structure as an explanatory device altogether. Increasingly he sought to explain all of the transformational rules solely in terms of Surface Structure devices.
As TG—as a linguistic model—became more and more problematic, it eventually gave way, as did Generative Semantics, to other theories and models. In the 1990s Fauconnier’s (1985) space grammar which he designated mental space and Langacker’s extensive two-volume work (1987, 1991) on the foundations of Cognitive Grammar, along with others, began to predominate in the field.
Where does all this leave NLP and the Meta-model? To raise this question we have to ask several other questions:
How much does the Meta-model depend upon TG?
To what extent does the Meta-model need the Deep and Surface Structure format of TG?
In developing the Meta-model, Bandler and Grinder obviously depended upon TG primarily for their terminology. From that field they brought over and began utilizing “modal operators, nominalizations, universals,” etc.
Interesting enough, however, as the model developed, they (and especially their initial disciples) moved further and further away from the usage of such terms in TG. In fact, no subsequent author ever repeated the TG appendix and no NLP trainer ever spent any significant time teaching Transformational Grammar as such.
In fact, some of the same confusions that led Chomsky to drop the use of “Deep Structure” in linguistics occurred in the field of NLP. These revolved around the connections of “deep” signifying greater or more significant “meaning.” This usage began showing up in some NLP literature. And also this highlights what the Meta-model depends upon—namely, a logical-level system.
Not surprisingly, Alfred Korzybski (1933, 1994) offered precisely this in his model of the “levels of abstraction.” He constructed this from his studies of neurology and it refers to the fact that the nervous system abstracts first at the sense-receptor level, thereby transforming the energy manifestations of the world into various neurological translations. But the nervous system doesn’t stop there. It then abstracts again from the cell activation at the end receptors as it transforms and transmutes those “information” forms into bio-electric impulses which it sends to the central nervous center and brain. It next abstracts from those products as it translates the impulses using various neuro-transmitter chemicals, and so it goes.
The Meta-model assumes this kind of levels of abstraction—that what we say in our surface expressions arises from “abstracting”, summarizing, and synthesizing at a lower level, etc. In this, the Meta-model does not have a marriage with TG—only an affair. In the fling, it only appropriated the language of linguistics and the idea of levels of information processing.
In Cognitive Grammar today we see new developments that actually fit the NLP model of representations, logical levels, frames and contexts much better than TG ever did. In Langacker’s (1991) work, Image, Metaphor, and Concept, he speaks about internal representing of information/language in terms of “mental images,” metaphors, and conceptual categories or domains. For a fuller description of this, see Michael Hall (1998) The Secrets of Magic.
9.8.0.38 Notes – Chapter 8
11Harris, Randy Allen, The Linguistics Wars (NY: Oxford University Press, 1993).
10
Hypnosis Part I
The Misunderstood Nature Of So-Called “Hypnosis”
Using Language To Create Neuro-Linguistic “Realities”
10.1 What you can expect to learn in this chapter:
What hypnosis really means
How hypnosis functions at its core
A number of everyday trances we all experience
How to access and anchor hypnotic states
Empowering things we can do with hypnosis
A hypnotist hypnotizes by… saying words. Pretty incredible, wouldn’t you say?
Previously, we hinted that “hypnosis” functions as a form of communication and a state that arises from a certain type of language processing. What do we mean by that? In this chapter, we will define what we mean by this term and offer some understandings of the phenomenon.
10.2 Defining Hypnosis
When we finally boil down what a hypnotist actually does—what do we have? What medium does a hypnotist use to affect the minds-emotions, bodies, and nervous systems of those who cooperate with the process? They simply say words. Think about that. A hypnotist hypnotizes by… saying words. Pretty incredible, wouldn’t you say? “Just saying words.” So how does that work? How can the saying of words “hypnotize?”
As a more formal definition, “hypnosis” literally means “sleep” and refers to “being asleep to the outside world” because a person has totally focused on something in their inside world.
As a more formal definition, “hypnosis” literally means “sleep” and refers to “being asleep to the outside world” because a person has totally focused on something in their inside world. They have inwardly focused on some memory, idea, thought, representation, feeling, person, etc. Yet this definition poorly identifies the experience, and has led to lots of misunderstandings. It describes things accurately only to this extent: to someone viewing the hypnotized person from the outside, it often looks like the person has gone into a kind of sleep. The person seems to have gone into a trance—which means, they do not seem present, but off somewhere else, lost in their thoughts, zoned out. When this happens in everyday life, we wave our hand in front of their face and say, “Hello? Anyone home?” “Earth to John!”
But this only partially describes the experience. When someone goes on some internal journey in their thoughts—and “space out” external stimuli (the “hypnosis” experience), on the inside—in their sense and feel of the experience—they seem more awake and more alive and more in control of themselves than ever.
Perhaps the word “trance” works a bit more usefully. It speaks about the “transition” that we make from one state of mind to another. Communication professionals, psychologists, and hypnotists have distinguished a dozen different kinds of mental states that we sometimes call “the hypnotic state.” For instance, consider the highway trance. I (MH) always trance-out when I drive the 430 miles across the state of Kansas on Interstate 70. I can never stay sufficiently alert, so much in sensory awareness (up time), that I don’t “go inside” and visit more interesting places in my mind.
Before going further we ask you to put all of your previous associations,
definitions, and experiences with these terms on hold. You may have all of those anchored to such things as the occult, mind manipulation, drug trips, stage showmanship, etc. Such misinformed linkages will only keep you ignorant about the true significance of “hypnosis,” as a form of communication and human consciousness, as we shall show.
Rest assured also that the meanings we give to these terms and our use of the terms in no way have any association with those kinds of popular ideas. If you like to use more comfortable, everyday parlance for these concepts, you might use one of these as a substitute: “not paying attention,” “daydreaming,” “twilight before going in and out of sleep every night and morning,” “lost in deep thought,” or “focused inside.”
Also, in NLP, we do not use formal hypnotic inductions. Rather we informally utilize the natural trans-derivational search (TDS, see Chapter Thirteen) transitioning processes that occur when the human mind makes meaning of language. This means that a listener’s mind always and inevitably “goes inside” and uses its stored logic (learnings, history, and experiences) to make sense of things. Hypnosis as such does not necessarily operate in opposition to reason or volitional control. Actually, it accesses such!
The value of all this? Once we understand the true nature of a hypnotic trance we will begin to realize how people naturally use it destructively to create dysfunctional problems. We say that a person “isn’t thinking,” “seems under a spell,” “act as if out of control,” “has gone crazy,” as they compulsively act against their own values. In other words, a great deal of our work with “trance” and “hypnosis” will involve bringing people (ourselves included!) out of old trance states—de-hypnotizing!
The User's Manual for the Brain Volume I Page 22