Models, Levels & Multiple Worlds

By Charles Faulkner

One the least appreciated forms of hypnosis is naming. Naming something separates it from the rest of experience. If it is an ‘object,’ it is separable from its surroundings by what could be described as some natural interfaces and transformations. A tree does stand in some ways apart from the grass and greenery around it. A dog is a self-propelled entity. Still, a tree draws air and sunlight from the sky as well as water and nutrients from the earth. If it is separated from any of these for a time, it ceases to a tree – at least a living one. The same is the case for the dog. There is a natural sustenance entry and evacuation exit built into the animal. Still, most of the time, on hearing these words we imagine our mental dog and tree removed from any of the particulars of time and space.

So, how much more of a remove is there when our naming involves processes? Naming separates these processes from other processes as well as from the ‘things’ they operate on, within and between. There is also the possibility that there are several distinct processes categorized within that one name. Such are the processes of reification and nominalization – both well-known names in NLP for turning processes into things and nouns respectively. And such was the case of naming a number of perceptions and processes Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It does have a multi-syllable hyphenated name to signal its unlikely combination of disparate domains of knowledge, and it still has one, albeit long, name and an adapted acronym; NLP. Thus, NLP is one thing, right?

Of course, it isn’t. The term NLP categorizes a wide variety of perceptions, processes, principles and presuppositions as one ‘thing.’ My claim is that each of these can be accurately assigned to one of seven distinct modes of experience, one of seven distinct models-of-the-world. These are: the Sensory Modalities (and their submodalities), Anchoring, Strategies, Beliefs (and values), Metaphors (including identity), Meta-Programs and Language Patterns. These are different models in that they account for different perceptions and processes, and operate on different principles and presuppositions. For example, the sensory modalities are visual, auditory, kinesthetic tactile, proprioceptive and visceral, olfactory, gustatory and vestibular. Through these modes of perception we come to know our ‘outer worlds’ and represent our ‘inner worlds’ to ourselves. In the flow of the experience of our lives, the ones we recognize and return to again and again can be called anchors. These anchors are recurring combinations of our inner and outer sensory modalities. In that, the perception of an anchor is different than a sensory modality, as are the processes that create anchors, the principles that govern them and the presuppositions that apply.

A visual experience is not an anchor. An anchor is when a particular ‘outer’ experience – visual for example – prompts an ‘inner’ complex of sensory modalities and their submodalities. Anchors are a different ‘order’ or model of experience than sensory modalities. Like wise, a sequence of anchors does constitute a behavior, but not a strategy. For a strategy, two additional conditions must be met. An anchored experience must be going to happen (in the future) and a behavioral sequence must be accessed in an effort to attain it. Behavior as such has no teleology orientation. It is ‘simply’ stimulus-response.

Further, these three models are distinctly different from processes of evaluation. Evaluations are applications of values to certain experiences, not just to anticipated anchors for experiences (outcomes), but to most of our life processes from our morning latte to lunch to love to life purpose and most everything in between. The wider the range of time and experience these evaluations cover and the more distinct they are in their evaluation, the more they are referred to as beliefs. It has become popular to think of beliefs as only applying to total life interpreting experiences, but as beliefs are a form of generalization, we have beliefs for all sorts of experiences. These include, but not limited to, how to cook or cleaning, what is good-looking clothing, what’s worth conserving, and how to convince others. When we come to the question of who is doing all this evaluating, we need a model of identification – which is also the structure of metaphor – a fundamental process of language. In fact, almost all of our experience is almost completely immersed in some language or other. We know from historical reports and some tragic circumstances that human beings who are not raised as children in a language community are limited to a dog-like signal system of communication. They never develop the neuro-linguistic capacity to mentally manipulate their inner experience in ways that we take for granted. There are many detailed studies of the structure of language and language processing, both anecdotal (Milton Erickson, Carl Whitaker, Steve DeShazer, Bill O’Hanlon, etc.) and more formal (General Semantics, various schools of Linguistics) that continue to discover how our various elements of speech (Meta-Programs) and syntactic structures (Meta-Model, Milton Model) affect and reflect our ‘inner’ experience.

I have surmised that all of these modes of experience, and the models associated with them, and more are going on simultaneously at most of the ‘levels’ of our experience most of the time. We only become aware of them if we are of a self-reflective nature, or when self-reflection is foisted upon us by the repetition of some particular form of unpleasantness again and again. We begin to wonder what is going on, and we make an enquiry through the mode or modes of experience that are most familiar to us, most developed through our life experience. If you are more oriented to your senses (sensory modalities/representational systems), you are more likely to try to change your outer environment – move location, redecorate, get the lights turned up or sound turned down and so on.

If you are more aware of your behavior and/or the behavior of others, you are more likely to try doing something to produce a change in the situation. This is likely to be something that has worked before that is short term and bears results quickly – request, confront, challenge, buy off and so on.

If you are consciously outcome oriented, you are more likely to engage in some kind of assessment and planning strategy. What can you figure out about the nature of this difficulty? What skills and strategies are likely to be most effective? What level of sophistication is the other side bringing to this? What backup plan do you have?

If you are more aware of your values (and feelings it turns out) and/or have ideas of societal fairness and like beliefs, you will tend to focus yourself on these and are likely to try to get others to take on your values and beliefs. Of course, when you do this, your response can vary from a knee-jerk reaction to strategizing a multi-year program for change. Also, there are a few people who attempt to appreciate the beliefs of others and work with them.

If you are more aware of yourself and/or of the other selves in the situation, you will attend to that. Depending on your sophistication, you might expect that they will have ideas and beliefs at odds with your own and attempt to create some mutual understand. However, keep in mind that none of these modes of experience guarantees a more enlightened answer. It is equally possible to be very aware of the other selves in the situation and use everything one knows to try to establish some kind of dominance over these others. Recent events on the international political stage show this is not only possible, but fairly common and all too frequent.

Much less frequent these days, and perhaps in any era, are individuals who are aware of the effects of their communication and will vary their rhetoric – that is the old fashioned word for it – according to their audience. This was the path of the Sophists Socrates hated so much, and later in the Middle Ages the Rhetoricians. Much later brings us to Dr. Milton H. Erickson, MD. and from him we follow a path through Gregory Bateson to the Brief Therapies and NLP....more here...