Written by Terry Elston
The meta-model in NLP or neuro-linguistic programming (or meta-model of therapy) is a set of questions designed to specify information, challenge and expand the limits to a person’s model of the world.
It responds to the distortions, generalizations, and deletions in the speaker’s language. The meta model forms the basis of Neuro-linguistic programming as developed by then assistant professor of linguistics, John Grinder and Richard Bandler. Grinder and Bandler “explained how people create faulty mental maps of reality, failing to test their linguistic / cognitive models against the experience of their senses.”
The meta model draws on transformational grammar and general semantics, the idea that language is a translation of mental states into words, and that in this translation, there is an unconscious process of deletion (not everything thought is said), distortion (assumptions and structural inaccuracies) and generalization (a shift towards absolute statements). Likewise in hearing, not everything said is acknowledged as heard.
The Meta Model presents a way in which we create maps linguistically, distorting reality through various filtering processes such as deletion of information and generalizing from particulars (which may be mistaken). Common examples are often expressed in statements starting with I should, I know, You must and in any given sentence you may find more than one Meta Model “violation”.
“If they knew how much it annoyed me, they wouldn’t do it”.
The Universal Model Process has within it three elements
1. Distortion - The process of representing parts of the model differently than how they were originally represented e.g process to event
2. Generalisation - The way a specific experience (or number of experiences) is mapped to represent the complete category of which it is a member
3. Deletion - Where portions of the mental map are omitted and do not appear in the verbal expression