The NLP linguistic meta-model formulates specific questions that clarify deletions, generalizations, and distortions in speech. When done incorrectly, these are referred to as violations of well-formed syntax. Syntax in grammar refers to the correct order of words in a sentence. Syntax in NLP refers to the proper arrangement of concepts in speech.
The NLP meta model is important for everyone to understand because violations of well-formed syntax cause a wide range of problems, from everyday relationship issues to major political issues. However, by asking meta-model questions that clarify these violations, we also clear our thinking. They also assist us in recognizing when another person’s thinking is influenced by these violations, allowing us to regain control of our own mental maps and sense of reality. We are much less vulnerable to manipulation with the meta-model.
The meta-model assists us in analyzing speech by distinguishing between two types of structure: deep structure and surface structure. The deep structure is, at its core, a collection of sensory representations (neurological connections) that come together a lot like a chemical reaction. They bubble up and come together to form thoughts, opinions, and decisions. Then we put those thoughts, opinions, and decisions into words. That’s when we have the surface structure. Those words cannot possibly contain all the impressions that led you to speak them.
Generalizations
Generalizations happen when someone translates some experiences into a rule that applies to all similar experiences. Sometimes generalizations can go by without being noticed. If someone says, “Everybody at the party hated me!” you might ask, “Who else did they hate?” If she says, “Everyone had friends there, they were just mean to me,” you know she is unaware of anyone else feeling uncomfortable there. If you asked, “Oh, so they were sorry to see you arrive and glad to see you go,” she might start thinking of exceptions and reveal one, even though she seems to be attached to the idea that everyone hated her. This means that her poor syntax just opened the door to a more accurate internal map; that is, she realized that there were exceptions to her generalization. Now she has a resource: the knowledge that there are people that appreciate her.
Universal Quantifiers
Universal quantifiers are an all or nothing kind of generalization. If someone says, “Every time I do someone a favor, it ends up biting me in the rear,” you might ask, “I wonder what it is about you that makes that happen every time, you know, since that doesn’t happen every time to anybody else.” Your friend might come up with an insight like, “Well, you’re right, I need to quit trying to help people who are so out of control, because it spills into the lives of anybody who connects with them.” In this case, he found a universal source that gave the universal quantifier at least some truth. In this case, that could be better than finding the exceptions to his generalization.
Lost Performatives
Lost performatives make a rule without anybody having responsibility for it. If a girl gets a cut on her face and a nurse says, “Now you’ll never win a beauty pageant,” then you have a kind of cloud of lost performatives. One is that she should care about winning beauty pageants. Another is the implication, not a direct statement, but the implication that people will think she is ugly for the rest of her life. Another is in the nurse’s tone of voice, which is telling the girl that it is her fault. You had to be there to hear that part. If you consider the culture of the region where this happened, it is also connected with the idea that she won’t find a man to love her. Let’s just take the main one, which is that she should care about winning beauty pageants. You might respond to that with, “You idiot, she’s just an impressionable, vulnerable, wonderful, young girl with infinite potential, and she’s too bright to waste her time running around with bimbos who try to be beauty queens.” I’m going to get you fired for being such a twisted human being. " But that’s pretty confronting. How about this one: “Who is it who thinks she should care about winning beauty pageants?”
Modal Operators
Modal operators make a “must” out of a preference. Albert Ellis, the developer of rational emotive therapy, focused a great deal on this one. People cause themselves a lot of suffering with modal operators because, when the “must” is not achieved, they feel like some horrible injustice has taken place. It distracts them from finding creative solutions and enjoying life as it is. If a client says, “I must have that woman, but she likes my friend,” you might say, “It sounds like something really awful will happen if you don’t get her.” Tell me about that. " He might say, “Well, that is a really awful thing. If I don’t get her, that will be really awful. " You might say, “So if you didn’t get her, you will be in a really bad emotional place, really broken-hearted.” To which he might say, “Yes, I couldn’t handle it.” Now you can go in for an exception, asking, “I wonder how many months it would take before you get your sense of humor back.” His subconscious mind would have to have an incredible amount of restrictive control over him to keep him from clicking into exceptions. You could add fuel to this. “I suppose you’d know that from how you’ve handled a broken heart in the past.” Witty quotes charm us because they toy with our internal syntactical violations. Consider this quote from Oscar Wilde: “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
Deletions
Deletions happen when the speaker leaves something out. When a person is being too vague or manipulative, deletion may be the culprit. If someone says, “What a lousy day,” you could ask, “What is so lousy about it?” If she says she has lice, you now know she really DID mean it was a lousy day, since that’s how the word “lousy” got its start. Unless you need to know where she got the lice, that’s probably more information than you needed to know. Simple deletions are those where information is simply left out. You can’t talk for long without making numerous simple deletions. After all, if you included all the details, it would take a long time and you’d get a reputation as a crashing bore, so deletions are a necessary part of everyday speech. Unspecified nouns and verbs are deletions that leave you wondering what thing or action the person is talking about. If a powerful local criminal says, “I’d hate to see what happens to your family if you don’t pay us to take care of your nice restaurant in our part of town,” you’d say, “How much do I pay and to whom do I write the check?” Oh, I mean, do you take unmarked bills? " Maybe that wasn’t such a good example. What if your friend hears, “I was driving and here I am with this bad head wound.” While she’s taking her friend to the hospital, she might say, “But, what happened?” Maybe it wasn’t a car accident. Was he attacked? Was he being vague because he was hiding something, or was he being vague because the head injury affected his brain? If so, then we could say that the deep structure is the injury itself. Let’s hope it isn’t too deep. But seriously, it is important to remember that deep structure includes everything from manipulation to psychological defenses to pure physiology. Let’s try one more, a nice plain one. Your employee says, “We’ll be a little late delivering to the buyer this month.” You might ask, “How late is it exactly?” With the information you need, you’ll know whether it’s an emergency and how to handle the buyer. Otherwise, you could really be blind-sided. Employers and other leaders often get a watered-down version of bad news from their staff. That is a good time to trot out your meta-model questions.
Lack of Referential Index
Lack of a referential index is a deletion where there’s an unspecified party or an unknown “they.” If someone tells you, “Everybody knows you’re a liar,” you could say, “Who on earth would say something like that about someone like me?” That kind of backs the person into a corner, challenging them to disclose their sources. Maybe someone does think that you’re a liar or that you lied about something, but how could every single person think that? Has this person been telling stories behind your back? At the very least, your meta-model question shows them that you can’t be intimidated by such a cheap shot.
Comparative Deletions
Comparative deletions happen when the speaker fails to say what they are comparing something to. If a sales person tells you, “This motorcycle gets fifty percent better gas mileage!” you may want to ask, “Better than what, my skateboard?”
Distortions
Distortions are based on real sensory data, but they twist it in some way to create the wrong conclusion. If it’s extreme enough, it’s a form of delusion. If someone says, “A white car followed me all the way to the gas station. Someone must be obsessed with me and stalking me,” you might wonder if the driver of the white car was going to the same gas station.
Coincidences are distorted all the time. When someone hears about two simultaneous occurrences, like a few small businesses closing in town, and turns it into a pattern, they might say, “Can you believe it? The whole country is going out of business. I’m moving to Brussels. " You could say, “I’m moving to Brussels because six new businesses have opened. That means we’ll be overrun in no time! Let’s go before there are no English speakers left.” Maybe that would be a little too sarcastic. You’d better get to know this person well before you get too carried away with your reactions, or else you’ll end up alone, bitter, homeless, and frozen. Whoops, I just used some distortions., haven’t I?!
Nominalization
Nominalization happens when we transform a verb or adjective into a noun. It also has to be something that isn’t a real thing in the world. In other words, you couldn’t put it into a wheel barrel. In fact, come to think of it, nominalization is a nominalization in and of itself.It’s a noun that isn’t an actual, real-world object.
Some other examples include: accuracy, righteousness, superiority, excellence, and destiny. You can see nominalization happening in old philosophy and old psychology texts quite a bit. That’s odd, because philosophers have published material critical of this for centuries.
It gets more problematic when a number of nominalizations, or a chain of them, are discussed as though they were definite, real, understood things / objects. When people do this, they come to all sorts of weird conclusions. Here’s an example: Someone said that atheists believe in a dog-eat-dog world. The deep structure that went on in their minds went something like this. Atheism equals evolution. Evolution equals Darwinism. Darwinism equals social Darwinism. Social Darwinism equals survival of the fittest, which means no compassion for those in need, a dog-eat-dog world. But social Darwinism is a political philosophy that only got Darwin’s name attached to it because it resembled natural selection, which is a part of the theory of evolution. On each side of that weak link, the chain contains fairly good generalizations. Most atheists believe in evolution.
Social Darwinists believe in a dog-eat-dog world. But those two chains are only linked by a completely irrelevant nominalization. The verb “to evolve” becomes a noun: evolution. Then, that noun gets attached to social Darwinism only because Darwin discovered evolution. The jump to social Darwinism is only possible because of word play. This is what we mean when we say that people live in a fantasy world because they act as if words are real things. But there is often a hidden agenda behind nominalization. People who are not very introspective may not even realize that they are pursuing an agenda. The person who said atheists are dog-eat-doggers wanted so badly to feel superior to non-believers that he came up with this as a response to research showing that atheist doctors were doing more for poor people than religious ones. Outside the field of NLP, another word for nominalization is “reification.”
Mind Reading
Mind reading is an irritating distortion. This happens when someone decides they know what you are thinking. For some reason, it’s usually something negative and untrue. If you tell them they are projecting, they probably won’t understand. If you tell them what you are really thinking, they may actually argue with you, as if they know what you’re thinking and you don’t. If they think you’re lying, what more can you say? So you see how irritating this meta-model violation can be.
Cause and Effect Distortions
Cause and effect distortions can be sneaky. This happens when someone thinks they know what caused something simply because the two things happened together. It’s like the rooster thinking that crowing makes the sun come up. He must be right. It happens every time. People do that a lot with their emotions. They’ll say someone made them angry, as if they had no responsibility for their emotions. Everyone understands what they mean, but people can go too far with this. If they do it to manipulate people, as in emotional blackmail, then you might want to say something like, “Even I am amazed at the power I have over your every emotion.” Or you could simply restate that you are doing what you do for perfectly good reasons and let them sort it out. After all, if you don’t pay attention to emotional manipulation and you DO pay attention to their mature, appropriate behavior, you will probably have a better time, and they will respect themselves more. It’s good to bring the best out in others. You could say that this is meta to the meta level, because when you produce a strategy that serves your personal well-being or higher values, then you have gone beyond coming up with cute responses to show other people that they are illogical. You have taken things to another level. It is understanding and using the meta-level that is important, not having a lot of snappy comebacks that could alienate people. This section was designed to build your knowledge and observation skills, not make you think you need to be sarcastic or directly confrontational all the time in real life.
Complex Equivalence
Complex equivalence connects two ideas that don’t belong together. For example, if your client is too upset about an argument with her son, she might say, “I can’t believe I told him he was lazy. Now he’ll be traumatized forever.” You could respond by asking questions about the kinds of stress that he has survived, and how he recovered from them, maybe even how they have helped to build his character. You could discuss ways to get over the argument and build better agreements about his responsibilities and the consequences of good and bad behavior. You could talk about how to create more consistent rules at home and how this benefits everyone. One of the best ways to help with complex equivalence is to supportively approach the issue from several factual and positive directions, as in the example above.
Presuppositions
Presuppositions are the hidden ideas in a statement. If someone asks you if you have stopped beating your spouse, they are presuming that you still beat your spouse. And that’s assuming that you have one to beat. You could say, “You should know, or haven’t you spoken to your mother lately?” but we wouldn’t advise that. Maybe you could say, “I never started, but I hear it’s hard to stop once you start. Have you considered a support group?”