Although each of the different kinds of meta can be useful in changing a client’s experience of a problem or outcome, there are also clients whose problem is a result of already going meta in one or more of the ways described; for them a meta intervention will either make no difference, or make their problem worse. What they need is some kind of experience of “un-meta,” but the word “meta” is so vague that’s not clear what kind of “un-meta” will be a useful intervention.
Accordingly I advocate eliminating the use of the word “meta” altogether, and replace it with a specific VAK description of a client’s experience. “So you are looking back at that event and wishing it hadn’t happened,” “When you think about that event, it makes you angry,” “It’s as if you are seeing that event from her point of view,” etc.
Likewise any intervention can be an equally specific description of a change in that experience such as, “Look at that event from a point on the ceiling,” “How else could you describe that event?” “Can you see the larger context around that event,” etc.
This kind of specificity tells you exactly what a client is experiencing, and how an intervention will change it in a useful way. Nothing is lost by replacing the vague word “meta” with a more specific description.
At the very least, realize that when you use the word “meta” (as with the words “trauma,” “problem,” or “state,”) that is really only a sort of “placeholder” for a package of ignorance unless it is specified in much greater detail.
Furthermore, some kinds of client problem already involve one or more of the kinds of meta described above, so any kind of “going meta” will either make no difference, or will make the problem worse.
For instance, a client who is grieving over a loss is already seeing the lost person from a distant point of view, which is what creates the feeling of absence/loss. Additional distance, or taking a different point of view will only increase the feeling of emptiness/loss. Recategorizing the loss as “inevitable,” or as something that “everyone experiences” may normalize it, but that won’t change the feeling of loss itself. In the resolving grief process the key intervention is to “un-meta” what they are doing by seeing the lost person out of your own eyes, close enough to touch, so that they are experienced as present, no longer absent.
Some very “mental” or “intellectual” clients already live in a vague, shadowy meta-world of abstraction, with very little direct sensory-based experience. These clients don’t need any form of meta; they need the opposite — how to find specific sensory-based examples of their lofty generalizations, so that they can change their experience in useful ways. The best-known way to do this is by asking the questions in the meta-model “Who/what/where/when/how specifically?” etc. (The meta-model is appropriately named — it’s a language model of language, an example of recursive meta-categorization. However, the result of using the meta-model is the opposite of going “meta.”)
Now make a very short movie by adding a few seconds that occurred before that moment, and adding a few seconds that follow that moment (real or imagined), and notice any change in your response. . . .
Now make that short movie a little longer, by adding a few minutes that occurred before that moment, and adding a few minutes that follow that moment (real or imagined), and notice any change in your response. . . .
Now make that movie even longer by adding the half-hour that occurred before that moment, and adding the half-hour that follow that moment (real or imagined), and notice any change in your response. . . .
Continue to gradually lengthen this movie, stepwise, pausing each time to notice your response, . . .by adding days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, until your movie is as long as the age of the universe before and after this moment. . . .
In this experiment, the scope of time attended to is gradually increased. You could also start with a large scope of time, and then gradually diminish the length of the movie, or you could “change frame” by attending to a completely different scope of time that doesn’t overlap at all.
When you change the scope of what you observe, that usually changes the content of what is attended to, and that often changes your response to the scope of what you see. Your experience of a longer scope of time will tend to be less detailed than a shorter one. However, all of these different scopes will be more or less sensory-based images of what you see.
The same kind of experiment can be easily done in the auditory or kinesthetic modality, but only with some difficulty with taste and smell, because of our limitations in those modalities.
Then expand the scope of what you notice slightly, so that your field of view is perhaps 4” x 4,” and notice any change in your response. . . .
Then expand your field of view to be about a foot square, and notice any change in response. . . .
Continue to enlarge the scope of your experience, stepwise, pausing each time to notice your response, . . . until you finally reach a panoramic scope in which you are completely surrounded, imagining the scope behind you, above you, and beneath you, where you can’t actually see unless you move your head.
In this experiment, the scope of space attended to is gradually increased, while maintaining the same point of view. You could also start with a large scope of space, and then gradually diminish it, or you could “change frame” by attending to a completely different scope of space that doesn’t overlap at all.
When you change the scope of what you observe, that usually changes the content of what is attended to, and that often changes your response to what you see. Your experience of a larger scope will tend to be less detailed than a smaller one. However, all of these different scopes will be more or less sensory-based images of the content in the scope.
The same kind of experiment can be easily done in the auditory or kinesthetic modality, but only with some difficulty with taste and smell, because of our limitations in those modalities.
Experiment 2
Begin by thinking of someone you have strong feelings about — either positive or negative. . . .
Now imagine that person fairly close to you in a specific context, and notice both what your image of this person looks like, and your feelings toward them. . . .
Now describe that person with a more general word such as “man,” or “woman,” or a word that describes that person’s occupation, and notice how that image changes, and how you feel toward that changed image. . . .
Now use an even more general word, such as “mammal,” and notice how the image, and your response to the image changes. . . .
Next use the word “vertebrate” and notice how your image and response changes. . . .
Next use the word “animal,” and notice the changes. . . .
Next use “organism,” and notice the changes. . . .
Finally, notice what image and response you have to a “flow of energy and information.” . . .
As you went through this process of going from a very specific and “concrete” image to a much more abstract and general one, I want to point out three things:
- Each successive image became less sensory-based and detailed, more fuzzy, vaporous, and indistinct. Typically the only relatively distinct part of the image is the part that represents the key criterion for the category, for instance the breasts for the category “mammal,” or the spinal column for “vertebrate.”
- The context soon vanished, making it impossible to identify a specific time or place for your experience.
- Your feelings became less intense, perhaps dwindling to near zero with “flow of energy and information.”
Start by noticing what you see now, looking out of your own eyes. . . . Now move your head two feet to the left or right, and notice how that changes what you see. . . . Probably most of what you see is the same, but this new point of view will be somewhat different; you will see parts that you couldn’t see before, and no longer see parts of what you saw before. Next imagine moving your head two feet to the left or right, but without actually moving your head, in order to change your view point. . . .
Next imagine moving your head two feet up or down, but again without actually moving your head, and notice what you see from this different point of view. . . .
Next pick a point on the ceiling, floor, or corner of the room, and imagine what you would see if you were looking from this point of view. . . .
There is an infinite number of different points of view that you could take. Each of them will include somewhat different content, but each one will be a more or less accurate sensory-based image of what you would actually see from that viewpoint.
What is the experience called “Meta”?
Steve Andreas
I want to start with a brief exploration of how prepositions work, because this provides a basis for understanding the experience of the word “meta.” Notice your image in response to the sentence, “She is on the bed,” and compare that with your images for the same sentence, but replacing the word “on” with “off,” “in,” “under,” “beside,” or “behind.” . . .
Next, notice your image of the sentence, “Buy some groceries before you drive home,” and compare that with your images for the same sentence, but replacing “before” with “after,” “when,” or “as.”
A “pre position” positions two things (“she” and “bed”) with respect to each other in space, or two activities (buying groceries” and “driving home”) with respect to each other in time.
In NLP generally, and in Michael’s writing, the prefix “meta” is used for many different experiences, with the general meaning of “about,” such as “meta-position,” “meta-model,” “meta-communication.” If you look up synonyms for “meta,” the most common is “about,” a preposition.
“About” has one meaning that is explicitly about location, as in “She looked about the room,” or “His things were scattered about.” A second, more general meaning is “on the subject of” or “concerning,” as in, “I was thinking about you,” in which some thing or event is described from a different position in space or time.
In one very interesting subset of uses the prefix “meta-” is self-referential, “about its own category,” “an X about X.” Meta-cognition is cognition about cognition, “meta-emotion” is emotion about emotion, “meta-discussion” is a discussion about discussion.
In the early days of NLP the prefix “meta” served a useful purpose, directing attention to important elements of communication that had been ignored. However there are now so many different meanings of the word “meta” that it has become almost meaningless.
I want to explore three very different kinds of experiences of “meta” or “about,” each of which has specific, but very different therapeutic uses. (There may be a number of other kinds of meta experiences, but three are adequate for my purpose, which is to demonstrate how ambiguous the word is.)
- One kind of meta is changing the point of view to some other point in space than seeing out of the eyes, a pure process intervention that usually changes the content attended to. Examples are the V/K dissociation for phobias, seeing an image of your future self, as in the swish pattern, “reviewing a past behavior,” taking “other” or “observer” perceptual position, etc.
- A second kind of meta is changing the categorization of an experience. The new category could be at the same logical level of abstraction, or could be at a more specific or more general level. Changing a category is not a pure process intervention, because it introduces the content contained in the new category. Examples are “redescription,” content reframing, eliciting the positive intent of a troublesome behavior, any negation, any emotional response, etc.
- A third kind of meta is viewing an experience while changing only the scope of what is seen in space or time, a pure process intervention. Examples are “seeing the big picture,” context reframing, “seeing something in perspective,” “focusing in on what’s relevant,” etc.
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