By: Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht

The meta-model is a way to create questions that move you from less specific statements toward the specific sensory experiences that the statement came from. You could say it serves to help people become more re-sponsible for where their thoughts come from. For example, if a person forms their opinions from vaguely recalled images and headlines from the media, you know that this happily brainwashed person resembles the people in Orwell’s novel 1984.

The meta-model comes from NLP’s ability to get a bird’s-eye view of what is going on. The meta model looks at how we create a mental map of reality. In order to make a real map, you know you have to dispense with much of the available information. Stephen Wright jokes that he has a full-scale map of the United States. He says last summer he folded it. If he wants that map in his glove compartment, then he’ll need to get one with less information, just like we do when we form our mental maps.

In order for us to create mental maps, we have to delete or distort the available information. Another way of putting it is that we have to filter or encode it. If you see a house painted white, you would say it was a white house. But if you didn’t see it from all sides, you’re assuming all the walls are all white. Of course, if we didn’t delete information our brains would be overwhelmed, so it is necessary. What it comes down to is whether we are doing it in an effective way or not. The art of applying the meta model is in bringing dys-functional deletions, distortions and generalizations to awareness in order to bring in valuable but over-looked information.

Part of NLP’s job is to examine how people create their maps. NLP looks for problems such as overgeneral-izing. Bigotry is a nasty case of overgeneralization. If I say that all French people are rude, I’d be overgen-eralizing. If I said many French people are tired of silly tourists, I might at least be less of a generalization. But I’d still be telling only part of the story.

Where do poor maps of reality come from? Genetics provides one answer. We are genetically programmed to think of our group as being superior, and to feel aggressive toward the out group. Anthropologists esti-mate that tribal civilizations generally had incredibly high death rates because of ongoing tribal warfare. Other sources of poor maps include rules we subconsciously get from our families and society, and our own psychological defense mechanisms and temperaments. When people suffer from depression, many of them also experience very different thought patterns such as negative thoughts about themselves that were not typical of them before they became depressed.

Examples of deletions, generalizations, and distortions, as well as responses that highlight them can help us understand the meta model.

Here is an example of uncovering an overgeneralization. If I say, All Germans make love loudly,” you might say, “I had no idea you were such a voyeur. Where did you get the time to listen to them all?”

Now, let’s hear an unspecified relationship. If I say, “I won’t really feel like a man until I have a nice car,” an NLP practitioner might say, “How have you felt like a man since you haven’t had a nice car?” I suppose we could get a little cheeky and take this to another level. You could say to the practitioner, “Silly practitio-ner, didn’t you know that the phrase ‘I won’t really feel like a man’ is an idiom for, ‘I’m neurotic’?” The practitioner might reply, “And my fees are an idiom for, ‘I’m very effective at what I do.’”