Model as a tool, there’s no reason to quit. I ask, “How do you know when it’s spare?”
They say, “Because my mind races…”
“Ah, the racing mind,” I go. Now I start to get quality information. I ask, “When your mind is racing, what exactly is it doing?” and this is where all the details emerge of how the subject is creating the experience: pictures going by, voices yakking away, feelings slopping from here to there, or any combination.
What actually happens with this approach is that you’re defining the experience as volitional instead of outside the person’s control. You say things like: “So if you make a picture of X, then you say that to yourself Y, then you feel Z…” This is all process, and once expressed as a process, it presupposes that the process is open to change.
If we accept the other way of saying things, “I have depression” or “The problem is my frustration,” the speaker has taken a verb and turned it into a noun (nominalization), and in so doing has also deleted information such as the fact that he’s making the pictures, saying those negative things in his head, and feeling those bad feelings.
Every sentence has a lost performative (an indication as to who is responsible for the action being complained of), and as soon as you restore that performative, you’re returning responsibility and power to the client. I use the phrase, “So, what you’re saying to me is…,” to restore the lost performative.
They might say: “I’m not happy” and claim they’ve “never really” been happy.
I can choose to challenge them by questioning the “never,” or I can say something like: “So, you’re saying to me that you can never be happy.”
They’ll say, “Well, yes.”
I’ll ask, “And how do you know that?”—because they’re making a comment about their state of mind, not about the nature of reality.
They’ll usually respond: “Well, I just know it, because…”
I’ll say: “No, no, I don’t want to know why. I want to know how you know.”
They’ll say something like, “Well, because I’ve never really been happy.”
I’ll follow up with: “Well, if you’ve never tried something, how do you know whether you like it or not? Maybe happiness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe really happy people are actually miserable. They could be just pretending. It could all be a big con.”
Then they say, “Okay, I know because I’ve had moments when I’ve been happy.”
I say, “Ahh, so there have been moments. What was that like?”
Using the Meta Model requires a certain amount of finesse and elegance. Just asking the questions by rote is not going to get the results you want. There should always be the presupposition of change in the language you use. For example, often, as I’m bringing someone out of trance, I tell them to “go back and remember this bad feeling for the last time.” Nobody ever questions it. I say: “Have you got it?”
They say, “It’s really hard now.”
I say, “Work at it more.”
Now, whether they get the feeling back a little or a lot doesn’t matter. They’ve already accepted the presupposition that the bad feeling can and will be felt “for the last time.”
Meta Model questions are designed to gather information. You can think of the model itself as a sword that chops up meaning. It slices things out, sorting what works from what doesn’t, always moving toward whatever outcome you want.
So, whatever it is they want, your message is, “Okay, we chop away all the things that won’t get you there.”
People will tell you they want something like “being comfortable about public speaking.” The presupposition in there, right to start with, is that what they’re asking for is a good thing. You could challenge what the Meta Model calls the Universal Quantifier by asking, “Are you saying you want to fall asleep in front of your audiences?”
They’ll say, “No, of course not. No, maybe, it’s…I’d like people to admire me.”
You might respond, “For no particular reason? You want them to just to hang around obsessively admiring you?”
They’ll say, “Wow, no. I don’t want that, I want…”
You slice away the nonsense until finally they explain, “Look, okay, so, I want to be relaxed, but alert. I want to engage my audience’s attention and see that they’re enjoying themselves,” and so on.
Then they realize they’ve been going inside, seeing themselves terrified, sweating, voice cracking, everybody in the audience laughing, and you say: “Good plan. That’ll get you into the right state.”
Not only do they see that their old behavior was not a good plan, but that they’ve been doing it habitually and also unconsciously. By asking the Meta Model questions, you bring their behavior up into consciousness, make it move a little slower, then start slicing away the nonsense. It tells you everything you need to know, including what to do next.
One of my favorite cases, which I wrote about in Magic in Action, involved a woman who had psychotic episodes whenever anyone she was expecting to meet was late. She’d been in therapy for eight years, had three different therapists that I knew about, and whenever anyone asked her why she had these responses, she’d say, “I don’t know.”
But when the woman said, “I have a problem I’m too close to,” I knew the solution was to push away the pictures. She was making pictures of horrible road accidents that became progressively closer, bigger, and more detailed, until she smelled the burning metal and felt the warm blood spattering on her skin. That would scare anyone. She let me know that we needed to push the images out, make them less and less distinct until they disappeared. We did, and it worked, all in a fifteen-minute session.
MAKING THE DIAGNOSIS WRONG
I’m not trying to diagnose people with this approach; I’m trying to make the diagnosis wrong. If people come in and say they’re depressed, I want them laughing their asses off as quickly as possible, so, after that, every time they think about being depressed they burst out laughing.
I want to give them a better problem. Often I listen to clients and think: “What a sad little problem. They need something bigger and better.” They need to find the answer to questions like: How much pleasure can I stand? How much can I get done in a lifetime? How can I feel really great every time I go into a meeting or see my husband or wife?
If people don’t ask the right questions, their brains don’t learn. I always know when the questions are coming, so I throw out a better question. I say, “Stop and say to yourself, ‘It’s time to do something. What should I do?’” I just switch the Referential Index (who is saying what). It’s not elegant, but it works.
All the above examples illustrate how the Meta Model works. The questions lead us directly to where we want to go, because we’re looking at the syntax of the question, not its content. If you fall into content, you’ll drown because content is infinite. We all
