What is the experience called “Meta”? ↑

metanymous 04 января 2018, 10:12 в посте Metapractice (оригинал в ЖЖ)

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.)

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.