The meta-model is really simplistic, but it's still the foundation of everything we do. Without it, and without systematic control over it, you will do everything that we teach you sloppily. The difference between the people who do the things that we teach well and those that don't, are people who have control over the meta-model. It is literally the foundation of everything we do. You can be bright and witty and sharp and make the most complex metaphor in the world, but if you can't gather information well, both internally and externally, you won't know what to do. The meta-model questions are the ones that really give you the appropriate information immediately. It's a great tool for that, both on the outside and the inside. It will turn your internal dialogue into something useful.
When you use language with people, they assume that all the stuff they are accessing on the inside is the same as what you said. There's so much going on inside that they have no consciousness of the external form of your communication. You can utter sentences of syntax which have no meaning and people will respond to you as if what you said is completely meaningful. I'm surprised that anyone ever noticed that some schizophrenics speak "word salad." I have gone into places and spoken word salad and people have responded to me as if I had uttered perfect English. And of course you can embed crazy commands in word salad.
Once we were having a party at our house and we wanted to buy some champagne. We live in an area where there are no stores, so we went into a restaurant and said "Look, we want to buy a couple of bottles of champagne to take home." And the guy said "Oh, we can't do that. It's against the law." We said "Well, we're having a party and we come here and eat a lot and isn't there anything you can do something" He stopped for a moment, and he said "Wait a second. I think I can do something." So he took the bottles and gave them to himself, and then he went outside behind the restaurant and gave them to us and we tipped him. Our behavior was totally bizarre, but he had to respond, because the only thing that was evident in his consciousness was this odd sequence. It's really important to understand that most people are very chaotically organized on the inside.
Man: Does the intellectual level of the client make a difference, say retarded versus genius?
No. I don't know of any. Unconscious minds operate amazingly the same no matter what the educational level or intelligence level is. "IQ" is also a function of the kinds of structures we've been talking about.
Woman: When you ask the person to go through whatever the experience is that troubles them and you watch them, you become aware of what the process is that they go through?
Yes, in a special sense of the word "awareness. " There is nothing that I have done here at any point today that I am conscious of, in the normal sense of being reflexively conscious of what I am doing. The first time I know what I'm going to do or say is when I find myself doing it or hear myself saying it. This is an important point. I really believe that the face-to-face task of communicating with another human being, let alone a group of people, is far too complex to try to do consciously. You can't do it consciously. If you do, you break up the natural flow of communication.
Are there any of you who play music? How many people in here can play an instrument? OK. How many of you, when you play something well, play it consciously? ... Exactly. None of you. You are aware of the result, the sounds you are making, but not of the process of making them. And what happens when you become conscious of what you're doing in the middle of playing something? Boom! You mess it up. Yet in order to learn to play that very same piece of music, you went through some conscious steps.
As we are communicating to you here, I am aware in the sense that I respond directly. But I have no reflexive consciousness of what I am doing. If I did, I'd do a crummy job.
Let's say you go back into your office Monday morning and a new client walks in and says "I have a phobia of gum chewing." A little voice goes off inside your head and says "Ah! This is an unprecedented opportunity for me to try to do something new." And then you look up and ask the person "Well, when was the last time that you had a very intense phobic response?" Then they begin to go through certain eye movements and stuff. If you begin visualizing the blackboard up here, and the list of the accessing cues, and talking to yourself about the things you heard us say, and having feelings about whether you are going to be able to do this or not, you will have no sensory information on which to base what you do. That's the sense in which reflexive consciousness in face-to-face communication is not going to be useful. If you have to tell yourself things, and make pictures, and have feelings while you are doing therapy, probably you will end up doing therapy on yourself. I think that's what happens much of the time. Often therapists are not doing therapy with the other human being in the room. They are doing therapy with themselves. And many clients who change, change by metaphor.
Most people in the field of therapy go to school, but they don't learn anything about people that is relevant to therapy in any way. They learn about statistics: "Three and a half percent of clients are..." But you very rarely have a hundred people walk into your office so that you can work with three and a half of them. So you go to workshops to learn how to do therapy. There are a lot of people who are very good therapists who do workshops but who don't know how they do what they do. They will tell you what they think they are doing, thereby distracting you from paying attention to the client they are working with. If you are lucky you will pick up the kinds of cues we're talking about subliminally, and be able to respond out of yourself in some systematic way. However, that doesn't work with a large number of people. There are a large number of people doing therapy unsuccessfully. What you need to begin to do is to restructure your own behavior in terms of paying attention to your clients.
As professional communicators, it seems to me to make a lot of sense for you to spend some time consciously practicing specific kinds of communication patterns so that they become as unconscious and as systematic in your behavior as riding a bicycle or driving a car. You need to train yourselves to be systematic in your behavior, which requires some conscious intervening practice time. So that when you see visual accessing cues and hear visual predicates, you can automatically have the choice of responding by matching, or responding by mismatching, or any combination that you can think of.
In other words, you need a good unconscious systematic repertoire of patterns for each choice point that you have that's going to come up repetitively in your work: How do I establish rapport with this other human being? How do I respond in a situation in which they don't have information consciously and verbally to respond to my question? How do I respond to incongruity? Those are all choice points. Identify what choice points are repetitive in your experience of doing your work, and for each of those choice points, have a half a dozen different responses—at least three, each one of which is unconscious and systematic in your behavior. If you don't have three choices about how to respond to things that occur in the therapeutic situation, then I don't think you are operating out of a position of choice. If you only have one way, then you are a robot. If you have two, you'll be in a dilemma.
You need a solid foundation from which to generate choices. One way to get that solid foundation is to consider the structure of your behavior and your activity in therapy. Pick out points that are repetitive, make sure you have lots of responses to each of those points, then forget about the whole thing. And add one ingredient, a meta-rule which says "If what you are doing is not working, change it. Do anything else."
