Hall of Frames
Frames of Secrecy vs. Openness

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

In the field of Family Systems there is a little aphorism that summarizes one of the main themes in working with families to promote health, healing, sanity, and love. It’s a great line and I still use it often even though I do not formally do family or marriage counseling these days. In fact, recently Bob and I have talked about this phrase and commented about how powerful and magical it is. What’s the line? It is this.

A family is as sick as its secrets.

The power and magic within this phrase or principle identifies such healing factors for the mind-body system and for relationships as―openness, vulnerability, transparency, fallibility, humility, accountability, responsibility, etc. How can so many healing and magical ideas be contained in one line? Let’s see. Let’s pull it apart and notice all of the frames within frames, systems of thoughts-and-feelings within thoughts-and-feelings contained in such a high level principle about families and relationships.

Frames by Implication

In Neuro-Semantics, we speak about frames by implication a lot. This is the idea that within one idea there can be other embedded ideas or frames. In common language we call these “assumptions” or “presuppositions.” We presuppose some working assumptions in order to be able to say something. Structurally, an idea is embedded inside of many other frames― a matrix of frames. This gives us belief systems, value systems, systems involve domains of knowledge, understandings, rules, models of the world, etc.

So, what are the frames by implication in the idea of secrecy/openness? For beginners, we are secretive rather than open when we:

• have something to hide
• fear being seen
• fear being open and vulnerable
• conflicted inside about our own thinking, valuing, believing
• unsure, indecisive, hesitant
• fearful of not being in control of others, their responses

This is just a beginning and preliminary start. We can add other things.

What other things would you add to this list?
When you think about times when you have been secretive, what has driven that?

As you well know, none of us are born secretive. Infants and small children are not secretive. If you have any question about that, just watch them. They are open, vulnerable, and transparent. They have nothing to hide. They are who they are. This is what makes them so charming, so loveable, is it not?

Then we being the socializing and culturalizing of them, teaching them to cover their mouth when they eat or burp, or to go to the toilet for certain functions. Our teaching is so help them to become appropriate in their actions and behaviors in society. The problem is that some parents over-do this and frame some responses as if they were “bad” or “evil.” Then there are experiences in which some become afraid of being open because of the harsh criticism or rejection they get. So they grow up becoming afraid of being open.

Others simply lack good role models. No one exemplifies for them how to move through the world as an open, vulnerable, and fallible human being―holding a basic sense of respect and dignity for self as a fallible human being. This is a map they lack, the map that they never developed. Then there are others who were unfortunate enough to be born into family, racial, and national cultures that forbid openness and that rewarded secrecy. Their role models put on airs as if they were always flawless, perfect, beyond criticism and other idiotic ideas about human beings.

The result?

People develop secrecy dragons― privacy dragons, fear of openness dragons, vulnerability dragons, arrogance dragons, fear of being wrong dragons, fear of open confrontation dragons, needing to control dragons, control freak dragons, fear of open communication dragons, and the list goes on. Then some even “identify” with it, “I am a private person.”

What’s the problem?

Insecurity.

They do not like being insecure. Of course, insecurity is the human condition! But they do not accept insecurity. They do not like insecurity. They are afraid of insecurity. So they pretend. They put on false fronts. They put others down in their arrogance in order to push themselves up. They hide. They will not come out in the open. They invent belief systems to support their fear of vulnerability. Hitler did and bought into Aryan supremacy. That made him feel better. But it was sick … through and through and we all know the consequences of that toxic belief system.

Slaying / Taming the Dragon

Dancing with the Fear of Vulnerability dragon or the Secrecy Dragon is not a fun dance. Sometimes I find it challenging to get a person to dance with it. The denial frames are strong as the person defends him or herself against even going there. But without dealing with these dragons, a person locks him or herself into a dungeon of insecurity, locked up behind the defense mechanisms and inside with the fear demon. This is not good. It creates a basic existential insecurity so that the person cannot be open, cannot be held accountable, cannot take full responsibility for life, cannot make mistakes and maintain dignity (self-esteem), cannot take risks for “what will people think” if they see me as a vulnerable human being?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want any of this.

These ideas makes people sick. Literally. Physically. A family and an individual person is as sick as his or her secrets because keeping, holding, and maintaining secrets wastes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of mental and emotional energy just to remember them. It takes energy to keep up the defensive walls and to be on one’s guard against being seen, being open, being real.

And because it prevents a person from being “real” and authentic, the person cannot have real authentic relationships. That’s right. The person can only play “games” and relate to others through layers of masks. The person they present is not real, but a persona, a mask, a set of roles. This creates self-alienation.

And the fear of being exposed―the fear of being seen―that can create an existential fear that turns our emotions against ourselves that can then take a toll in the body in all kinds of stress diseases, psycho-somatic illnesses, etc. No, the Secrecy Dragon is a beast. The Fear of being Vulnerable dragon is one that prevents you from being a real live human being― fallible, weak, and insecure.

Dancing a New Dance

The meta-state structure of openness to vulnerability, openness to being real, to being what we are, fallible, to being accountable, responsible, etc. is a very wonderful and magical state. Here’s how I’ve put my richly textured state of openness to vulnerability together.

1. First I access my power-zone of my basic God-given responses: thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting. These are mine… fallible, yes, but my fallible responses.
2. So I accept them … and then go further, I appreciate and esteem these fallible powers as the powers I have to influence myself, others, and my world. Fallible? Sure, and that means that I have lots of room to grow. It also means that I stubbornly reject any toxic idea about being flawless or perfect. “Hell no!” I welcome warmly into my mind and emotions my right to make mistakes and to learn from them. Feedback is what I use to keep growing and developing.
3. I then use these fallible powers to esteem myself as having worth and dignity as a given and this self-esteeming foundation then allows me to not be afraid of being what I am. It, in fact, gives me the freedom to use my vulnerability and neediness to be real and authentic in my relationships. Now I can present myself as “just me.” I need to put on no airs of being a “somebody” because of my money, status, degrees, intelligence, looks, fame, etc. Non-sense! I have been a “somebody” since I dropped from the womb (Oh, so that’s what happened!) completely naked and having no control over my bladder for a long time! I arrived in this world a human being … a somebody … and I haven’t had to prove anything to anyone since!
4. I accept and welcome being a response-able person who can take actions and I welcome the corrections of others. I even appoint people to “hold me accountable.” In my case, I have appointed Bob Bodenhamer and Carl Lloyd to do that. I want to live up to my own goals and values and I know that they will help me to be a better person.
5. When I make a mistake, I welcome correction so that I can quickly learn, proactively make corrections, and get on with things. I refuse to wallow around feeling bad, feeling guilty, feeling inadequate. Of course, I’m inadequate. I’m human; I’m not god. And guilt ― true guilt, means that I have done wrong and need to correct something. Like a “Wrong Way” sign on a highway. No need to feel bad, just turn around ― go the other way!
6. I access the higher state of un-insultability based upon my innate dignity and therefore can matter-of-factly explore insults, criticisms, and rejections. Along that line, I give myself permission to be rejected. Of course, everybody won’t like me. What was I thinking? Of course, everybody is not going to like everything I say, do, believe, write, etc. So I grant myself permission to be disliked. It’s not that big of a deal. What, I only have 6 billion other people on the planet to relate to? That’s not enough?
7. I set a frame of openness and vulnerability and trust as my basic “way of being in the world.” So I live my life like an “open book.” Some will want to read and hang around; others won’t. If someone comes into my life and decides to use my openness and vulnerability against me, I give them a chance or two and then I do what the great Nazareth teacher said, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine.. Lest they turn and tear into you and trod your pearls underfoot.” Jesus’ statement is in the context of relationships, “Do unto others as you want them to do until you,” and “Judge not lest you be judged” (Matthew 7:1-12). It’s a passage about getting along. Be open and accepting rather than judging, but also be as wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove. If someone is hurtful and ugly, get the hell out of there! Don’t put up with it.

Super-Charge your Brain

That’s how I’ve super-charged my brain about being open. I refuse to live my life with secrets and go around fearful of what people may find out. And without the Dragon of Fear of Secrecy, Fear of Vulnerability ―it releases a lot of energy and power to follow my passions. It gives me a clear conscience. It enables me to live congruently with my values and visions.

I feel sad for the pathetic matrix that some people live in as they sneak around in the secret caverns of their mind fearful of people, fearful of being exposed, fearful of being real, fearful of just living their lives openly. What a waste. Pretty arrogant really. While they are inside worrying about what others are thinking, the others that they fear are inside worrying about what others are thinking! And the real people― those open to being vulnerable, being authentic, receiving corrections, growing, etc., they are just getting on doing things and having fun.

As a Neuro-Semanticist, I think you now see why we have structured Accessing Personal Genius training as we have. Inside that program there are other things going on. This is one of them.

References

Hall, Michael L. (2000). Meta-States: Managing the higher levels of the mind. Grand Jct. CO: N.S. Publications.

Hall, Michael. L. (2000). Dragon Slaying. Grand Junction, CO. Neuro-Semantic Publ.

Hall, Michael L. (2002). Dancing with Dragons. Article, Website: www.neuro-semantics.com

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., cognitive psychologist, international NLP trainer, entrepreneur; prolific author and international training; developer of Meta-States and co-developer of Neuro-Semantics. (P.O. Box 8, Clifton CO 81520), (970) 523_7877. www.neurosemantics.com

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

“Trust: faithful, assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something, a dependence on something future or contingent, reliance on, having confidence in.”

“All relationships are built on trust;
if you don’t have trust, you don’t have much of a relationship.”
Dennis and Michelle Reina

There are few subjects less emotionally loaded than the subject of “trust.” When we begin to ask questions about trust and to explore our experiences around this concept and category, it’s not long that we all experience some strong emotions and perhaps even some “semantic reactions.”

Who do you trust?
Who do you not trust?
What allows you to trust another person?
What kinds of actions, behaviors, etc. prevents trust, even eliminates trust as a possibility?
Has your trust ever been violated or betrayed?
Have you ever violated or betrayed someone’s trust?
Are you trustworthy?
What are the traits and characteristics of trustworthiness?
What do you look for in another person as evidence that he or she is worthy of your trust?

Born to Trust!

As we pose these and many other questions about the experience of trust, we begin to flesh out many of the facets, stages, components, and elements of this complex state that we call “trust.” In some ways, this is funny or weird or paradoxical. It’s funny because we are all born with an uncanny ability to simply trust the world and the people in the world. If this wasn’t the case, we would have stood our ground and not learn their language, their ways, their customs, and we wouldn’t trust them to feed us, clothe us, put us to bed, school us, etc. Yet we did. We trusted them implicitly. Trust was our default system.

Trust is built into us from the first moment as a survival mechanism. In what way is this really strange? Mainly because we have no basis for trusting them. After all, who are they? What do they want with us? What are they going to do with us? Can they handle their own emotions, states, meta-states, actions, etc.? Yet we trust. We naively trust. Of course, we also don’t really have any other choice, but to trust. It’s part of our original programming.

Trust is one of the developmental stages. Eric Erickson noted that the question of trust comes into play very early in our development. “Can I trust the world?” “Can I trust my care-givers?” “Is the world a friendly place or an unfriendly place?”

Hurt to Distrust

Of course, it is precisely here that many people are slapped with a tremendous handicap for coping with life. The handicap? They experience the world as an unfriendly place full of pain and hurt. Plotted down in the homes of those who have no ability, skill, or understanding about parenting―they suffer the ignorance, stupidity, cruelty of their parents. As a result they come away with a deep distrust of people and of the world. Sometimes they pick up a deep distrust of themselves. When I say that this is a handicap C it is really a big handicap. As social creatures, we only truly thrive by working with and through others. We need each other. We are only sane and effective when we are able to get along with others. Damage in the area of trust undermines all of our social skills and damages our intimacy skills.

Distrust can be created and installed in our mind-body-emotion system in other ways. Most of us are skilled at taking a traumatic event and reading it and interpreting it as calling the world into question, others into question, or ourselves into question. Add massive pain at almost any stage of life, and our minds do what minds do best― they take off on a search for meaning and reasons. Of course the problem with an infant’s mind or a young child’s mind or even an untrained adult mind is that the kind and quality of reasoning and thinking that is used in the meaning-making. Such minds do not do quality thinking, do not engage in critical thinking, and lack the ability to think about one’s thinking. So the maps generated are typically trusting maps plagued with magical thinking and other thinking distortions.

Damaging the Ability to “Trust”

The ability to trust can be damaged. Give a person plenty of disappointments and hurts and traumas and our ability to open up our minds and hearts to others and to events becomes weaker. We becomes less receptive to the words of others as accurate reflections (or maps) of some piece of reality. Trust, as our ability to take people at their word and depend on what they say, becomes damaged. We put up walls, boundaries, and defenses. We expect and anticipate hidden agendas, games, and tricks. We look for schemes and con jobs. We fearfully anticipate set-ups for rejections and disappointments.

The list of human “hurts” that can damage the fabric of trust is extensive. What does it for you? What violates your trust? What induces you into a state of distrusting and feeling hurt in that way?

Someone not keeping his/her word Being talking about behind your back Pertinent information not shared Disappointments Lies Dis-information

Lack of Reliability Posturing, Image Grooming Unmet expectations Betrayals Misrepresentations

In the end, our ability to trust is weakened, threatened, or lost. We come to not trust easily. We demand lots and lots and lots of “evidence” and “proof.” We get on the defensive. We distrust and disbelieve and ask the world of people to constantly prove themselves. Out of this some people develop a meta-program of “never convinced” about the truthworthiness of other people (See Figuring Out People). If we experience the slightest sign of human indecision or weakness or double-messages, we react emotionally. We have a semantic reactions (we freak out) of defensiveness, fear, anger, upsetness, etc. If this becomes our key frame about others, we think, feel, and act so as to communicate a self-fulfilling frame, “You have to prove to me over and over that you will not betray me.” Yet this demand that the other proves a negative (what they will not do) puts us in a position to always be looking for the slightest hint of such distrust.

To trust a person or event is to be open to it and receptive. It is to dance and play with it and see what happens. When our powers of mind and emotion won’t or can’t do this, it’s because we won’t play. We wont’ engage the person or event. We feel it’s too dangerous, too threatening, and that we could get hurt. We fear hidden agendas and schemes.

“Trust” a Relational Nominalization

If you have had linguistic training in the Meta-Model, you undoubtedly know that “trust” is a word that sounds like a noun, but is not a noun. It’s a nominalization―a pseudo-noun. Someone has labeled or named (hence “nominalize”) a set of actions. Those actions would be better served if we used a verb. Yet someone has frozen the action or actions in time and space and named it so that it sounds like a “thing.” Trust is such a word.

What are the actual actions that someone has reference to? Ah, that’s the question. What does trust look like, sound like, feel like, etc. when someone is actually trusting another person, thing, or object?

What do you trust?
How do you know that you trust that thing, that activity, that object?
What are the things that I could video-tape about that activity of trust?

Nominalizations also are seldom the actions of a single person without any reference to anyone else. Most nominalizations are relational in that there is the person trusting (doing the action) and there is another person who serves as the object of the action (receiving the trust).

Who are you trusting and about what?
What do you trust that other person to do?

This brings up the other side of trust, namely, trustworthiness.

The Multiordinality of “Trust”

If you’ve learned the new extended Meta-Model, you know the distinction of Multiordinality that comes from Alfred Korzybski in Science and Sanity. This is the linguistic distinction of those nominalizations that can be used in self-referential or self-reflexive ways. The test is the question, “Can you apply the term to itself?” If you can, then the term is multi-ordinal and will have different meanings at different levels of abstraction.

Trust is such a word. Can you trust your ability to trust? Can you trust the state of trust? Can you trust your trusting of another person or thing or event? Can you trust that your trust of your car to get you where you want to go? Do you distrust your trust? Can you distrust your distrust?

Trust is a prime state because to live and to be healthy in mind and body necessitates trust. We trust our minds that we can gather information, process that data, and learn. We trust that our emotions accurately reflect the relationship between our mental evaluations and our somatic states in relation to the world. We trust our immune system to distinguish between self and non-self and keep us healthy.

When we start distrusting ourselves, we turn a very negative mind-emotion state against ourselves. This generates the beginning of numerous dragon states. Distrustdistrust onto ourselves sends a message that can undermine the body’s ability to keep us healthy. It sends the message, “I do not trust you.” And if the body minds-to-muscle that idea, it can disable the healing processes of the body and immune system. Could this be at the heart of many of the body’s dis-eases? Could it be the cognitive content of cancer, arthritis, heart disease, etc.? It is certainly one of the first things I check when working with those issues. “Do you trust your immune system?” And when I get a “No,” that’s the first meta-stating I go for, bringing a sense and feeling and belief of trust in the body’s natural healing powers.

I trust until a person proves untrustworthy.
Evidences of trustworthiness makes trusting easy.
Do you have trouble trusting? Is this a general pattern or is there a particular problem or situation that you don’t trust?

The Other Side of Trust― Trustworthiness

Think about someone or something that’s totally untrustworthy. Think of something that you should not, under any circumstance, trust. Got it? Good. Now, does this say anything about your ability to trust? Your ability to accept a strong and robust state of trust?

Of course not! There are times when trusting would be the wrong choice, when trust would set us up for a disappointment, rejection, or hurt of some sort.

We should not trust Mike Tyson to remain calm and cool at a press conference! He has given us plenty of reasons to question, and doubt his ability to control his own states and to manage his anger. Conversely, I can trust that he will probably get out of control with his anger and get into a fit of rage at Press Conferences. I can trust that he will not follow the rules and that it’s only a matter of time before he gets in trouble with the law again. I trust that so much, I’ll wager money on that one.

Trust always occurs within complex systems of relationships within complex systems of mental frames of beliefs, values, understandings, history, etc. You would be a fool to always trust anyone about everything. Totally trusting puts us in a fool’s world. Such naivety does not describe a resourceful state. It describes the lack of discriminations to evaluate and index when and where and who. Conversely, never trusting anyone about anything is just the other side of the same continuum and just as unhealthy.

We trust what is worthy to be trusted. We trust the trustworthy― those who are dependable, reliable, congruent, and as good as their word. What they so, they do. It is trustworthiness, in fact, that invites and calls and elicits the healthiest kind of trust. What is trustworthiness? What are the signs and components of such?

Basically, when a person says something and then follows it up by acting on those words to carry out the statements and promises, that person is worthy of trust.

Trustworthiness presupposes numerous things:

1. A person can make statements about thing within his or her zone of control― his or her thoughts, feelings, speech, and behavior.
2. That person can and will then act in such a way that’s congruent with those words.
3. The person will typically and generally “be as good as his or her words.”
4. The person knows him or herself fairly well and can manage his or her states.
5. If circumstances arise that interfere, the person takes responsibility for self without blaming, accusing, and proactively seeks to make things right.

As you can see, trustworthiness is no mean feat. It speaks about a high level development of self and victory over moods, emotions, circumstances, and excuses. As a trustworthy person, we operate from a frame that it is important to make the reality of our behavior correspond to the reality of our words. We value that. We believe that such is important. Those who don’t think this way, who don’t operate from that frame, will not have the strategy and supporting matrix of frames to be trustworthy. It takes these meta-levels of beliefs, values, and understandings to be a truthworthy person.

Trustworthy people are willing to pay the price of being responsible, accountable, and true to their word. They are willing to suffer the consequences, rather than hide and cushion themselves in excuses and explanations. They do not cowardly avoid confrontation, but have a strong enough sense of self to be open, forthright, and accountable.

Those who have not learned how to be trustworthy suffer from blaming, irresponsibility, the dragons of secrecy, fear of openness, rejection, criticism, a fragile ego, conditional self-esteem, etc. They cannot earn and merit the trust of others by the congruency of their words and actions because they run scared. So they put on a show. They hide behind the masks of their public persona. They massage their image and work on their Image, valuing it as much more valuable than their word. To use the phrase of Scott Peck and the title of one of his books, they are the people of the lie.

Linguistically, they say whatever fits the moment, whatever serves their Image and Persona. They say what others want to hear rather than the reality of the moment. Being authentic scares them because that exposes their real self. And in the end, they are as sick as their secrets.

Ironically, those who protest the loudest about the untrustworthiness of others are usually the very persons who have not learn how to be trustworthy. They don’t trust themselves. And it is that distrust that they then project on others. They are quick to take offense, paranoid (or nearly so) about the faults of others, and therefore quick to judge and mind-read the motives of others. Conversely, the more trustworthy we are, the more we also trust ourselves to be able to handle the inadequacies, moods, incongruency, even the lies and deceptions of others.

Dancing with the Dragons of Distrust

People who do not trust easily may have legitimate reasons in their history, reasons which may explain the origins of their frames that governs the distrust games they play. People who do not trust easily were typically wounded early in life. So, for them, even trusting trustworthy people may not come easily. Yet that historical fact is no excuse from the work of learning to trust.

A handicap is just that. It is a handicap. It is not fate. It is not destiny. It does not put one out of the game. It is not an excuse from learning how to be trustworthy and how to trust trustworthy people. Having made an accurate map that some people are hurtful, obnoxious, unthoughtful, etc. does not validate the over-generalization of distrust, “You just can’t trust people.”

To undo this damage will mean rising up above their fears and comfort zone and confronting the dragons within. To do so means breaking the old generalizations and learning to make finer distinctions about who to trust and who not to trust, about the signs of trustworthiness, about how to handle conflicts, how to confront relational problems, and how to both be accountable to others and to hold others accountable in respectful ways. It will mean coming out of hiding in the safety of secrecy and taking the chance to trust those who we find trustworthy.

After all, it is not the experience of having been hurt or violated that “makes” us who or what we are. That which has that kind of formative power on our personality is not the experience but the frames and maps that we made from the experience. Lots of people suffer all kinds of betrayal, hurt, trauma, violation, etc. and do not create frames of distrust and so do not live such lives. It’s the map that determines our states, not the raw experience.

Every dragon that lurks in the dark corners of our mind is there because we have turned negative thoughts in the form of beliefs, understandings, and feelings against ourselves. They are there also because we have become used to them. They are familiar. They have become a habitual way to think and feel. Such familiarity leads some people to conclude (yet another meta_level) that the dragon belief must be real.

Dancing with such Dragons can be challenging because of this self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing nature of the beliefs. Yet if we keep quality controlling the system and asking if the distrust really serves us well and asking if we really want to live our lives in that attitude, then we can get some leverage on the dragon.

The Trusting-Being Trustworthy Frame Games

Trusting is what we do. It’s based on several abilities that we bring to the task.

1. Profiling people. We discern the patterns of people in terms of what they actually say and compare that to what they actually carry out.
2. Reality oriented. We recognize the reality and personality constraints that play a part in carry out what we say and how they may interfere with a person’s actual doing what he or she says. Being realistic in this way enables us to not be blind to personal and inter-personal reality.
3. Secure vulnerability. To trust we have to open ourselves up, be receptive mentally and emotionally to someone or some thing and play with it.

Trustworthiness is what the other does. It also is based on several abilities and skills.

1. Communication clarity. The ability to express ideas, beliefs, goals, promises, etc, in a clear and forthright way that is honest and accurate.
2. Response-Ability. The ability to assume personal responsibility for carrying out what we say in our words.

“You can depend on and count on the fact that I will do what I say.”
“I align my actions with my words.”
” What I say, I will do.”

1. Adjust-Ability. The ability to make proper and appropriate adjustments when we don’t come through. We apologize, inform the other person, ask for forgiveness, make amends, learn, create adjustments so that the failure will not be repeated, etc.
2. Value and Identify with Trustworthiness. Believe in and value the importance of being true to our word, being a person of our word, being congruent, honest, and living with integrity.

Trust as a “Prime” State

In Neuro-Semantics we have been identifying a dozen or more states that we call prime states. Starting from the basic states that make up the heart and core of human development, we have revisited these states in terms of being foundational for full development and maturity. In the field of Developmental Psychology, it is recognized that without effectively negotiating these foundational states, personality will not develop fully and completely, but will become distorted and warped, it will become disordered. Eric Erickson identified many of these core or prime states. Piaget added to them, as did Fowler and others.

We have taken them and made them foundational as the prerequisites of genius in our basic Training on Personal Genius. What are these prime states?

The recognition of our basic “powers” of thought, emotion, speech, and behavior
The ability to feel strong and powerful and vital in these powers
The ability to claim them, own them, to say “Mine!”
The ability to disconfirm by saying “No!”
The ability to confirm by saying “Yes!”
The ability to pleasure, enjoy, delight ourselves, have fun
The ability to dream, pretend, imagine, create
The ability to accept, to appreciate, and to esteem, to adore
The ability to learn, to be curious, to wonder
The ability to care, to love, to feel compassion
The ability to “go in” and “come out” ― to be in sensory awareness and to get lost inside
The ability to want, to intend, to desire, to feel ambition
The ability to reflect on ourselves, to go meta, to rise up in our minds
The ability to send our brain out to the events of the world and back inside an up and then round in circles and loops

These, as core prime states, are those that enable us to define and experience ourselves as a “self” and to then create meta-levels in our mind-body-emotion system that we recognize as meta-states. Yet there is one more prime state, and a crucial one,

The ability to trust― to trust self, our mind-body-emotion system, the world, and others

Building and Re-Building Trust

Trust is essential for every relationship. There is no relationship that’s not based on trust. Working with and through others in business is based on trust. Leadership is based on trust. Intimacy is based on trust.

Conversely, distrust, the lack of trust, behaviors that erode trust, and betrayal undermine relationship, effectiveness, and resourcefulness. Dennis and Michelle Reina (1999) put it succinctly in their book Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace, “Betrayal is systemic: it affects the whole system.”

“Betrayal can escalate into major betrayals if not addressed and resolved. Minor betrayals can stay alive in people’s minds for years and become bigger.” (p. 37)

To rebuild trust, they note several kinds of trust: contractual trust, communication trust, and competence trust.

Contractual trust is managing expectations, establishing boundaries, delegating appropriately, encouraging mutually serving intentions, keeping agreements, being congruent in our behavior. We will do what we said; we will honor agreements. … Building trust is reciprocal. To build trust we have first to be true and honest with ourselves. (71)

When our behavior accidentally produce a result that we don’t want and did not intent, we have to deal with that. And we need to deal with it immediately by assuming responsibility to straighten things out. This means apologizing, making amends and bringing out actions under control so that they match our words. Trust is always earned and we earn it by our actions, by acting with consistency. This means conscientiously honoring our agreements.

Communication Trust is the willingness to share information, tell the truth, admit mistakes, maintain confidentiality, give and receive constructive feedback, and speak with good purpose. (81)

When working together or in personal relationships, we need to know what is going on. To work efficiently and effectively in any arena of life and to be a part of things, we need to know what’s happening. The general rule of this game as suggested by Reina and Reina is this: “If I am not sure whether I should or should not communicate, I should.” (83). We actually undermine the trust others can put in us when we do not share information. It puts them into a position of guessing, assuming, and mind-reading. It is hardly ever in our best interest to be secretive.  What do you feel when vital information is not shared with you? We typically feel as though we have not been trusted or valued.

This means that truth-telling is a prerequisite for becoming more trustworthy. Of course, telling the truth takes courage. We have to accept the power of response (hence, responsibility) for ourselves and allow no excuses for “excusing ourselves” from being real with others. When we do not tell the truth, we compromise our own trustworthiness to others as well as to ourselves. Truth-telling means admitting our mistakes and so rebuilds trust. We have lots of examples of political leaders who refused to acknowledge mistakes or make amends and who thereby eroded their own trustworthiness.

Competence trust is respecting people’s knowledge, skills, and abilities and judgment. (99)

Recovering from the Betrayal of Trust

1) Step back in your mind to simply observe what happened.

Notice and accept.
To what degree was the betrayal intentional or unintentional?
What were the positive intentions of the other person?
To what degree was their behavior a function of their unresourceful states?

2) Welcome the feelings that surface as just emotions.

Emotions are just emotions, not edicts about what’s true or not instructions about what to do.
Accept them as emotions and explore them in terms of what maps have been violated.
What have you learned that will help and enhance your life?
How can you detect trustworthiness better?
What skills do you need to add to your repertoire for being more masterful in this area?

3) Take Responsibility for your role in the process.

How were you indiscriminate in your openness and trusting?
What boundaries do you need to establish?
How did you blindly and naively trusted and didn’t ask for more credible evidence?

4) Forgive yourself and others.

What bitter and angry thoughts do you need to release and free yourself from?
What is your best reference for letting go, releasing, and forgiving?

5) Let go and move on.

How will you act differently from this day forward?
How will you keep your ability to trust without being blind or undiscerning?
How can you lighten up so you don’t take yourself too seriously?

Summary

• Trust as a resourceful state of mind-and-emotion and trustworthiness as a resource way of being in the world is utterly crucial for leadership, quality relationships, and being able to take risks and make a difference in the world.
• Trust begins early, from the moment we arrive in the world. We are made for trust. Yet trust can be violated, damaged, and undermined by a wide-range of actions that we consider a violation of trust. This gives no license to not trusting, it only increases the challenge of learning to distinguish trustworthy from untrustworthy. Reliability gives off signs and we only have to look to see the congruence between what a person says and does.
• Where there’s the violation of trust, the burden falls on the person who has not been reliable to prove him or herself and to demonstrate in actions and not just with words and promises that he or she can and will come through, be true, and align actions with words.
• Trusting others only truly arises when we trust ourselves and trust our skills for being able to cope in the world of events and people. It arises from self-efficacy. As we become more and more true to ourselves, dependable and reliable to our word, our ability to trust others and processes increases.

References

Reina, Dennis; Reina, Michelle. (1999). Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace: Building Effective Relationships in Your Organization. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Hall, L. Michael. (2000 in press). Frame Games: Persuasion elegance. Grand Jct. CO: Neuro-Semantic Publications.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., researcher and modeler, international trainer and entrepreneur lives on the western slop of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado (P.O. Box 8; Clifton, CO. 81520 USA; 970 523-7877). See our web sites and links: www.neuro-semantics.com and www.runyourownbrain.com.

By Dr. Houston Vetter

Before I get into the meat of this article I want to say thank you so very much to Michael Hall for taking the time to respond and correspond with me. Thank you for helping me flesh out my ideas even if they may run contrary to the ones you have presented. It points to your desire for integrity, intellectual honesty and looking for the most useful tools. Much of the following is a result of Michael’s help.

I’m writing to present my disagreement with the article, “Exceptions to the NLP Presuppositions.” In that article, Michael pointed out what he considered was an exception to the NLP Presupposition. To me, however, the article actually proved the Presupposition true. Now I do have to say that as Michael explained the context of that article, he admitted that he did not write it as a formal presentation, but as a response to some things happening on some NLP chat-groups and to some of the Neuro-Semantics Trainers around the world.

The reason I’m writing this article is to focus on what can be added using some of the other NLP Presuppositions and the scientific method so that more clarity can be brought to this subject. Some people have no problem with seeing and reckoning with exceptions to everything. (A very high frame.) They think that’s part of the scientific attitude because they believe science deals with falsification, and inaccuracy, the Null hypothesis.

On the other side of the coin, instead of falsification and inaccuracy, one could see science as proving what’s true. This writer is not so much concerned with falsification, inaccuracy or truth as what is more useful, what works. So here goes.

The following is from the scientific method by the fellow, Mr. Edmund, who created, built and was the chief investigator for Edmund Scientific. Search the net for “the scientific method”.

The scientific method is the best way yet discovered for winnowing the truth from lies and delusion. The simple version looks something like this

1. Observe some aspect of the universe.
2. Invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis, which is consistent with what you have observed.
3. Use the hypothesis to make predictions.
4. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and modify the hypothesis in the light of your results.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until there are no discrepancies between theory and experiment and/or observation.

When consistency is obtained the hypothesis, becomes a theory and provides a coherent set of propositions, which explain a class of phenomena. A theory is then a framework within which observations are explained and predictions are made.

SEAGEE¾ Search, Explore, Alternative Ideas, Gather Evidence, Evaluate, Educated Guess

The following is some of what I found on the “Null Hypothesis”:

The null hypothesis is often the reverse of what the experimenter actually believes; it is put forward to allow the data to contradict it. In the experiment on the effect of alcohol, the experimenter probably expects alcohol to have a harmful effect. If the experimental data show a sufficiently large effect of alcohol, then the null hypothesis that alcohol has no effect can be rejected.

For this writer’s money, in this case I think “Exceptions to the NLP Presuppositions” is the Null Hypothesis. In addition, because many of those in this field are concerned with integrity and ecology, I offer the following excerpts by Richard Feynman from his article Cargo Cult Science:

“The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn’t soak through food. Well, that’s true. It’s not dishonest; but the thing I’m talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest; it’s a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will-including Wesson oil. So, it’s the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.”

On its face value the NLP Presupposition(s) are very valid and in fact the one that we have been picking on “The meaning of your communication is the response you get’… is so valid and so much non-exceptionable (at least in the contexts that has been put forth so far) that the examples in your article and the way your handled Tom V. and the others on the users group were examples of using this Presupposition and it’s intended meaning, not exceptions to it.

Example¾ your choice not to continue communicating to the individuals on the chat rooms was because you came to understand that regardless of your intended meaning the response they gave was the only meaning you were going to get.

Therefore, you did something different¾ YOU CHANGED YOUR COMMUNICATION not the meaning. Because you know as well as I do you cannot NOT communicate. Not responding is a response/communication. Therefore, even if you want to call it an exception you really followed the presupposition to the letter. Because as we look at the presupposition and it’s intended meaning.

The meaning of your communication is the response you get.

This Presupposition presupposes at least two different meanings: “your meaning of the communication and their meaning of the communication”. I think one way one can make an exception is to get the two meanings (yours and theirs) mixed up. This presupposition is not about my/your individual meaning (content) it is about the meaning you/they give to my/your communication (process/context). My/your meaning (content) means “nothing-0” in this presupposition.

It is not meant to be ecological it is meant to lead you to ecology. Yes, even ecology is a process. Your assertion that it is a fact that there are exceptions, using this particular Presupposition as an example is attempting to make the process static and because, it is not the outcome (ecological) there has to be an exception. (Ecology is a part of outcome not the process of how to get it.) In other words, Ecology includes both content and context.

Here is a chart for clarification:

Content (static)=my communication

Context (process)=what you say I communicated

Outcome (ecology)=Content + Context

As I re-read your article, I think I have found where we have decided to cross swords. You feel that this particular Presupposition works better underneath other frames. You wrote:

This means that “The Communication Guideline” of this NLP Presupposition works best when embedded inside of several higher frames of mind.

An agreement frame to communicate, relate, do business.

An openness frame about being forthright and honest.

A Win/Win Frame of truly wanting the best for all, or no deal.

A investment frame to engage in the process of dialogue, listening, and adjusting in order to understand.

A respect frame that is willing to restraint anger, frustration, and upset, so as to not flame the other with emotion laden terms of insult.

My belief is that it works better, not below but above most frames. I think it works best as the higher frame. Because it wasn’t intended to help the frames you mentioned above, it was to let you know if you were getting close. If you weren’t getting close¾ Do Something Different is also a useful NLP Presupposition that your communication displayed.

Which is what you did with the individuals on alt.psychology.nlp and also what you recommended in your article. (As noted below) You took their meaning of your communication and realized at this juncture what and how you had been communicating was not getting you the outcome you wanted, so you-changed your communication tactic. Isn’t that the outcome of “The meaning of your com…”?

You also wrote:

It even works very well for trainers, coaches, teachers, principals, mangers employees, therapists, etc. deal with “resistant” clients. As a guideline, it enables one to first stop, re-calibrate, listen, meta-model, pace, etc. Yet even here, after half a dozen to a dozen attempts to match message sent and message received, and one party continues to not become more aligned, we can suspect that something else is probably at work. That’s when it’s valuable to check and/or create an Agreement Frame about outcome.

What are we seeking to accomplish?

What business do we have with each other?

What outcome are you seeking?

How can we work together toward that end?

This advice does not prove the exception it proves the Presupposition. My only recommendation is to NOT wait until a half a dozen to a dozen attempts to create the Agreement Fame about outcome. It could/ should be one of the first things you create, including all the other questions.

If I were presupposing the meaning of my communication is the response I get it would automatically send me in the direction you have recommended above. If I were thinking this might be an exception it could take a half dozen or so brick walls for me to maybe accept that the response I was getting is the meaning “they” are attaching to my communication thus proving the Presupposition valid in this case.

There may be exceptions but the things you have written are not exceptions they are proof of the validity of non-exception of this Presupposition so far.

Now your article does mention things outside of this Presupposition and attempts to tie them together. For example, below you make the statement “the other person does not want an honorable exchange of ideas. It may inform us that the other wants to rattle our cage, knock us off-balance, and pry some information from that they can use against us.” You start by saying “we could use the principle to conclude (my assumption the principle is the NLP Presupposition.) My God man, if we were using the principle in the first place (not could use) we would have come to this conclusion quickly and changed the way we were communicating, that can include stopping communication. Which I believe is communication.

This NLP Presupposition has nothing to do with making the other persons intentions honorable or less honorable. It has to do with revealing through accepting their meaning of what we say as their meaning, (regardless of our intended meaning) what their intentions are regardless of +/-. (It’s about the process.) It seems your examples are outcomes and content oriented.

You also wrote:

If a person wants to create hurt, insult, manipulate, etc., then we could use the principle to conclude that from the response, the other does not want an honorable exchange of ideas. It may inform us that the other wants to rattle our cage, knock us off-balance and pry some information from that they can use against us. Couples who go through divorce often end up playing these games of hurt. Parties and governments taking rigid positions in negotiations often play zero-sum games. And in doing so, they may use all kinds of maneuvers that seem to convey good will, collaborative negotiating, etc. Yet, it’s all a ploy, a seduction.

The no-fault, no-blame principle of communication then applies and best fits in situations of common decency when people are truly willingly to be forthright, honorable and working within a Win/Win framework. When we step outside of that framework, the principle becomes less useful, less effective. It worked wonders when Virginia Satir used it in Family Therapy and when Erickson used it with clients.

Again, I am going to differ with you, this Presupposition does not have to do with the no-fault, no-blame principle of communication. That is a frame you are applying over the top of this Presupposition and who says it should be above it?

Taken at its face value this Presupposition deals with the meaning that others give to my/your communications and has nothing to do with fault or blame. It does however point out ownership of meaning, which implies more than one meaning (ours/theirs not fault/blame).

You also wrote:

The fact that there are exceptions does not create a new rule. Surely we know that. And yet, as Houston Vetter has reminded me, some people will read about an exception and then use it to fall back into the Either/Or Blame Game. So I offer this caveat: Use the NLP Presupposition communication guideline again and again and again until you have plenteous evidence that there’s something else going on in the communication exchange. And, as you do, use the other NLP presuppositions to support and back you up: There is no failure; only feedback. The variable in a system with the most flexibility will have the most governing influence in that system in the long run. All behaviors are driven by positive intentions, etc.

Based on your frames exceptions may be facts, but not based on everybody’s (ok, mine) frames. Surely, if we all accepted your “exception frame” then it was useful that I reminded you of the eventual consequences of accepting this frame. However, if you accept my contention that this NLP Presupposition and it’s intended meaning means what it says and says what it means. One would not have to use this Presupposition communication guideline again and again and again until… and then use the other Presuppositions to support and back you up: One can/should/would use them all at the same time because then there would be no need to claim, “here’s an exception, here’s an exception”.

In your attempt to educate as to why some things happen the way they do, you have moved away from getting more skill(s)/skillfulness to taking a perfectly useful Presupposition, which you demonstrate it’s effectiveness very well, and attempt to put it under a bunch of different frames that fit your model. Instead of putting it over the frames so that it explains your model even better.

You see Michael, when I take the point of view that there are exceptions to everything then everything you wrote and all the responses to my long emails makes perfect sense and I see it your way. Every single reframe.

My challenge to you is to show me where you have not eventually used this NLP Presupposition and its intended meaning. Every example and every exception you have given are not exceptions to this Presupposition; they are blaring examples of it. Yet, because you are looking at all of this, (from above) through the exception frame it makes sense that there are exceptions and they can easily be seen. Quoting Bateson and the other geniuses proves only the existence of the frame not the validity of it. How about looking at exceptions through this NLP Presupposition frame? Neither is proven to be true, just that they both exist.

You wrote me:

The ability to discriminate, to make distinctions…, which as Bateson and Korzybski said, that’s all that’s in the world ¾ Differences, is what creates genius and when misused, “justifications” for misbehaviors. Ah, this is the work of consciousness, recognizing exceptions — tempering our judgments, and knowing that we can use “reason” for rationalization –and still choosing NOT to do that.

I didn’t realize that Polarity Responders were geniuses and people that sort for sameness just can’t tell the difference. Again, I’m reminded of what a great philosopher once said, “Anything can be proven logical, it just depends what you base the logic on!”

From the logic you have based your argument on it is proven logical. In the same manner, from the logic, I have based my argument on it is proven logical. (logic/Frame) So, I guess which logic or Frame is higher? He who runs the list, of course! Therefore, when I consider which frame to use, I believe you have yet to prove your theorem because you actually used the Old NLP Presupposition without exception to claim there are exceptions.

Michael, you have once again proven how very important the frame is. You were right when you came across this NS/Meta-Stating business.

Note: If you wish to communicate directly with Houston, E-mail him at hgvetter @ doctor.com

Beyond NLP and DHE

to the Higher Levels of Meta-States
and Frame Games

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Since the controversy has begun (and been raging), I thought it might be a good time to be a tad bit controversial myself. So, here goes.

The Challenge

It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t polite. It may not have been even accurate, but it was effective. What? The Campaign Slogan. Do you remember the campaign slogan that defeated President George Bush and that put Bill Clinton into the White House? A central one that Clinton’s ad men used over and over and over was, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

A similar thing can be said about the difference between NLP and even DHE and Meta-States. For years, NLP got stuck on “submodalities.” When I was writing some books and working on the Directory for the Society of NLP for Richard Bandler, he was moving into the DHE direction and positing that everything occurs at the “submodality” level.

At the time, I bought it. And why not? I had been taught that submodalities were “the difference that made a difference.” (It was only later that I discovered that Bateson’s famous line was in a context about meta-levels, not “submodalities.”)

Further, the current NLP mythology at the time about “submodalities” was that as a “sub”-class of distinctions, they operate on the VAK modalities like atoms and sub-molecular particles work on molecules. And I bought that too.

That’s probably why so little has been developed in NLP since the late 1980s. There’s been a few new patterns. There have been some nice refinements and streamlining of the early NLP patterns, yet apart from the Meta-States Model, there have been no new models and very little practical applications. Dr. John Grinder noted this and raised this lack of creativity and innovation in an interview in NLP World last year. Why? What explains this?

I believe that one very powerful contributing factor lies in the mythology and over-emphasis on “submodalities.” We simply went in the wrong direction. This really shows up in DHE. The exercises and focus there gives up the modeling idea and running with the “sub”-molecular idea, seeks to design new states, experiences, and structures from scratch. But name one structure that has been so designed, marketed, and is now available for replication in human minds? That there are none shows the emptiness of the approach. It goes in the wrong direction.

The Original Discovery of Meta-States

From re-exploring the treasures of Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933/ 1994) and Gregory Bateson, the Meta-States Model arose. It did not go into some supposed and imagined “sub” basement of mind and personality, but “up” into the higher regions of mind.

Bateson described this by his introduction of the term “meta” and his explanations in terms of cybernetics and systems. He posited that “mind” itself arises as an emergent property from the entire body-brain system (I have a chapter in Languaging, 1996 that summarizes his theorizing about “mind” and “spirit” as a systemic property).

Korzybski described it by speaking about “orders of abstractions” and positing what happens in the interfaces between second and third orders of abstractions. He posited that both science and sanity absolutely depend upon moving up the orders and called the highest state of consciousness–consciousness of abstracting. This “awareness of awareness” he said involves an “infinite regress,” and has no stopping place. He then posited his “Theory of Multiordinality” that solves the problem of “sanity.” (I have described Multiordinality in The Secrets of Magic, 1998, and in The Merging of the Models, 1999).

When I put together these models and insights of these two “grandfathers” of NLP while engaged in a modeling project on resilience, the Meta-States Model emerged. This has led to more than a hundred new patterns, the refinement of many of the NLP patterns, numerous books, trainings, modeling projects, the certification of hundreds in Meta-States, journals, etc. It has enabled us to model much more complex structures of human consciousness and to provide training to replicate such expertise and genius (e.g., Defusing Hotheads, Selling/Persuasion Excellence, Wealth Building, Accelerated Learning, etc.).

The Truth about “Submodalities”

In 1999, Dr. Bodenhamer and I published The Structure of Excellence that challenged the whole idea of “submodalities” as involving any “sub” level and showed how that the features, distinctions, and qualities that we have called “submodalities” are actually “meta” modalities. This accorded with what other NLP leaders and thinkers had been saying for years, and so was not all that new.

This explains how and why some “submodalities” have from the beginning of NLP also been classified as “Meta-Programs.” How could they be both? How could “Associated/ Dissociated” be a submodality in every system and a meta-program? How could “Global./Specific” be both a Meta-Program and also the submodality of “Zoom in/ Zoom out”?

Without repeating all of the reasoning and examples in The Structure of Excellence, our explorations enabled us to discover several of the “secrets” of submodalities. This does not make the Qualities, Properties, Features, and Distinctions that we call submodalities go away. It enables us to appreciate them for what they are– Meta-Level Structures that enable us to set frames using such “mental” and “cognitive” distinctions. After all, every submodality classification is just that– a classification and as such, not a thing or noun and so fails “the nominalization wheelbarrow test.” “You can’t put location, intensity, distance, etc. in a wheelbarrow.” These are concepts– meta-level structures.

So what?

This is why the Meta-States Model that moves us UP to the higher levels of mind provides such a rich domain for new patterns, new processes, new structures, new refinements, etc. It provides a wealth and abundance of explorations for extending the NLP model even further. It ties together and outframes NLP itself by providing a structure for all of the meta-phenomena that comes in such common and everyday terms as: “beliefs, understandings, values, identity, mission,” etc.

Now we have a way to track “mind” up the levels. And, as we do, we watch how mind takes on more and more properties and traits of a system and so become systemic and producesystemic properties. This explains much of the magic of the meta-levels. I have more fully described these processes in Meta-States (1995), NLP: Going Meta– Advance Modeling Using Meta-Levels (1999), and The Structure of Excellence (1999). In fact, the last book has six sub-models for handling various meta-level phenomena from beliefs (confirmed thoughts) to negation frames to domains of understanding, backgrounding and foreground, etc.

Beyond NLP & DHE to Neuro-Semantics

The ability to think in meta-levels, to think systemically through the feed-back and feed-forward loops of “mind” and “emotion” as it reflects back onto itself to create every higher layers is what gives us the ability to go way beyond basic and advanced NLP and way beyond DHE to Neuro-Semantics.

It lies in the very lamination of mind as we layer thought upon thought, feeling upon feeling, etc. that new properties emerge. Then, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. The word gestalt speaks about such a configuration– an emergent state or experience that arises that one cannot reduce to its “sub” parts. A very simple example exists in the state of “courage.” What comprises the mind-and-emotional state of “courage?” Break it down and you have “fear” at the primary level. You also have some higher level thought about “self,” some “task” or “adventure,” confirmed thoughts (beliefs) about the “risk,” “probabilities,” the future, etc. that somehow, when layered and sequenced– allows “courage” to emerge.

In The Structure of Excellence, we have detailed many of the failures of NLP (the Belief Change pattern, the Confusion to Understanding pattern, trying to kinesthetically anchor a meta-state, etc.) that showed what happens when we do not take meta-levels into account. When we do take the meta-levels into account and use them with intelligence__ we can design and engineer all kinds of powerful meta-states and gestalt states. In our trainings on Wealth Building, Genius at Work and others we do just that– courage, “seeing opportunities,” self-esteeming, resilience, un-insultability, proactivity, etc.

These processes leave basic NLP and DHE in the dust. We now have testimonies from NLP Trainer after NLP Trainer to that effect. They say that Meta-States provides them a larger level understanding of NLP, is “the missing piece” that unifies the field, and opens up whole new dimensions for exploration. Many talk about finding their passion for NLP rekindled, that Meta-States has recaptured the original search for “structure,” and that it creates a sense of abundance.

Frame Games– Mastery Your Matrix

The newest thing in Meta-States if Frame Games–Mastery Your Matrix. Translating Meta-States into the language of frames, we have designed a logical level system that uses the neurological mechanism of “referencing” to create the system. It goes like this.

• The neurology of our nervous system and of the nature of protoplasm itself begins by referencing something.
• This then leads to the creation of our internal represented references, our VAK sensory system of re-presentations.
• We then reference our Sights, Sounds, Sensations, Smells, etc. (the VAK) by using Symbols– words, language, etc.
• We then use our entire “Conscious Represented Reference” as a Frame-of-Reference. We “go in” and “UP” to our frame– in this way we do our “trans-derivational searches” to our system of meaning.
• Through repetition and habituation (two other powerful neuro-linguistic mechanisms), our Frame-of-Reference becomes our Frame of Mind– and gets into our eyes– this meta-state becomes our Meta-Program and governs our perceptual sorting. Here we experience the gestalting of our systemic consciousness.
• As we continue to use, reflect back on, and operate from our Frame of Mind, it becomes the Frameworks of our mind– stabilizing the higher meta-states and meta-phenomena of believing, valuing, identifying, etc. This completes the creation of the virtual reality of our concepts and paradigms– the Matrix we live in and project out onto the world.

Frame Games provides an easy and user friendly access to all of these and turns a person on to how to not only reframe and deframe, but how to outframe.

And the Adventure Continues

Meta-States builds upon the foundation and basis of NLP–and recovers even more of the original models in the cognitive sciences, General Semantics, Bateson, Gestalt psychology, Family Systems, and others, from which NLP emerged. Meta-States refines and re-energizes the NLP model in new ways and it goes further. By modeling the higher levels of mind, it opens up a whole new domain for exploration. That’s why the model has been so productive, created specific applications, has found patterns for translating “Principles” into muscle (the Mind-to-Muscle Pattern), knows the formula for the gestalting of complex states of experts, and can engage in design engineering of new Gestalting.

Meta-States has given birth to Neuro-Semantics that focuses on the structure of Meaning at higher levels. At the primary level, meaning involves simple association or linkage– the stimulus-response type of “anchoring” that utilizes the discoveries of Pavlov. But at the meta-levels, ah, the meta-levels, now that’s where we truly enter into the human world– the Semantic States that govern the heavens and hells that we create in our minds. And when you know how to navigate that world– you have the tools for some tremendous transformations.

Author: Michael Hall, Ph.D., author of numerous books in NLP and NLP Trainer conducts training in meta-states, advanced language skills, etc. He can be reached at 1904 N. 7th. St. Grand Jct. Co. 81501. .

THE INNER GAME OF FRAMES

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

• What is frame games all about?
• What is the inner games of genius?
• Why are meta-states more critical and important than primary states?
• How does Neuro-Semantics differ from NLP?
• What are the inner games that you highly recommend?

Let’s start with the first question: What is Frame Games all about?

Frame games explores the pervasive influence of frames and the framework of nested frames within frames in our experiences.  That’s why we say, Where there’s a Game, there’s a Frame overhead.

In the Beginning is Representation

Representation is certainly important.  Representation, in fact, is where the genius of NLP truly shines.  For nearly a hundred years, psychologists and philosophers of the mind knew about and worked with, sensory representations.  Wilheim Wundt, the father of modern psychology, had even tried to create a periodic table from the sensory systems similar to what chemists created in their field.  He did not succeed.   In the field of psychology, no one had been able to make the human “senses” or the sensory representation systems the basis for “thinking.”  This is what Bandler and Grinder achieved and what Bateson acknowledged and celebrated them for in his Preface to their first book.

Representation is what we seem to experience on what seems like the theater of our mind.  I use the word “seem” purposefully here because that’s the trick.  None of it is literal or real.  It is phenomenonological.  That’s a big word about the seemingness of our internal images, sounds, sensations, smells, etc.  While the neuro-sciences have eliminated any possibility that we have any literal pictures or sounds in our heads, at the experiential level of life, we all feel as if we do.  It seems as if we do.  We experience recalling pictures of our home or of a holiday or of a special celebration.  We seem to have pictures, images, movies, sensations, smells, sounds, music, etc. in our head.  We have a Movie Mind.

NLP began by recognizing the sensory systems as a way to represent or map things and added that it is just a map.  Yet, it is the way we “make sense” of the world.  We re-present to ourselves what we have inputted through our senses.  That makes our mind a Movie Mind.  It means that many of our thoughts are snapshots or old videos playing in the Cinema of our mind.  NLP is all about the MovieMind that we experience.  It is about how to run that movie mind so that we see, hear, feel, smell and taste things and play great Movies that inspire and inform, that teach and encourage, and that give guidance and strategy as we navigate through life, relationships, work, career, hobbies, love, etc.   NLP calls this Movie Mind that we all experience by such terms as “modalities,” the “VAK,” and “sub-modalities.”

Above and Beyond Representations

Yet representation of sensory-based information is not the only facet of “thinking” or “knowing.”  As we use the meta-representation system of language, we are introduced into the largest anchoring system used by man (and woman for that matter!) — words are within the Movies of our mind as the sound-track and script.  They are also there as words above the movie as descriptors, cinematic directions, and classifications about the Movie.

In this, words are less representable than sights, sounds, sensations, and smells.  It’s easier to make a Movie with the video-camera of our senses than it is to create a Movie with abstract symbols (words).  That’s why it is easier to read and write a novel than non-fiction.  A novel tells a word picture of a see-hear-feel story that we can easily video-record on the theater of our mind.   Doing so with more abstract ideas and concepts, the subject of non-fiction writing demands that we shift to diagrams and cartoons and flow charts if we want to see such as a cinema.

But when we put both levels of words together, we have a very dynamic and wonderful way to “think,” to “make sense” of things, and to map out ideas, concepts, generalizations, beliefs, values, knowledge, and all of the forms of higher level awareness.

This is where Meta-States comes in.  Any thought or feeling or physiology set in a meta-relationship to another moves us up “the levels of mind” so that we set frames above and beyond the Movie— frames which govern the Movie.  This is the power of frames.  And the higher level “meaning” that we hold in mind above and beyond the Movie.  The Movie obviously links and connects and associates things.  The Movie sets up sequences and strategies of actions with feelings with responses.  So it creates the first level of “meaning” —associative meaning.

Yet higher to that level of meaning is the “meaning” that we create about it.  We can set higher frames that totally re-frame the Movie so that we see it in different terms.  This is true for any Movie that you watch.  Watch a horror movie in terms of how they created that effect, and you will be watching a different movie.  Watch a comedy in terms of the knowledge of the personal biography of the writer’s or director’s personal traumas, and you will see a different movie.

The meta-state structure in these lines is coded in the words, “in terms of.”  In terms of your own personal resourcefulness in running your own brain and taking charge of your own life, what have you learned so far in this article?  Ahhh, yes, that question invites you to review this article and to do with accessing a particular state of mind-and-emotion.  Do that and you may very well be reading and experiencing a different article.  In terms of how Neuro-Semantics differs from NLP, what am I saying?  That question invites you into yet another meta-state frame of mind and seeks to recruit you to view the article from yet another point of view.

Taking a meta-position is easy for us humans.  We do it all the time.  In fact, we cannot not do it.  We have a very special kind of consciousness that makes this inevitable.  We call it self-reflexive consciousness.  This means that our mind is forever reflecting onto itself.  You do it every time you think about your thinking.  You do it every time you have a feeling about a feeling.  This meta-cognitive ability allows us to rise up in our minds to make our own mind, and the products of our mind (our thoughts, feelings, physiology) the object of the next level of our thinking.

Such reflexivity then invites another dynamic into being, it invites emergent properties so that we have states-about-states, and gestalt states that are “more than the sum of the parts.”  One emergent property is the psycho-logics or “logical levels” or thought and emotion that enables us to frame or classify (categorize).  In moving to a meta-level to any state, we set the frame by labeling, classifying, categorizing, generalizing, summarizing, believing, etc.  This creates a higher level of “thought” —a thought that operates like an attractor in a self-organizing system.

So above and beyond the Movies in our minds are our frames.  This includes our belief frames, value frames, understanding frames, expectation frames, history frames, imagination frames, intention frames, etc.  There are dozens and dozens of such frames.  You could call each a “logical level,” a Matrix of frames, the inner environment of our mind-scape, our model of the world, the paradigms that we operate from, etc.  Yet whatever you call it, these frames are the inner game that we play.  They create and govern the outer games of our lives.

If our MovieMind throws up on the screen of our awareness various videos and movies, some full length features and some momentary snapshots and if that’s important in terms of the mind-body (or neuro-linguistic connection), then how much more important are the higher level structures of our frames?  The Movie provides us the content of thought.  The Cinema playing tells us what we are thinking about.  The Frames provide us the structure of that thought.  Now we move to the editor’s frame or point of view to see how the Movie is formatted and coded.  Or we can move even higher to the Director’s frame of mind about the Movie and the effects and intentions he or she seeks to create.

This shows how the cinematic features of the Movie are not “sub-modalities” but “meta-modalities.”  And it indicates how and why they work symbolically and semantically.  If the editor or director of a Movie casts it at some distance, or in black-and-white, or in color, or with fast shots from scene to scene — what does it mean?  Ultimately those cinematic features (“sub-modalities”) mean nothing in and of themselves.  It depends upon the meaning system given to it by each viewer.  And to explore any given viewer’s meaning system, we have to move to that person’s frames about such.  We have to explore that person’s matrix.

What are your Inner Games?

A group of children can grow up together and yet develop lifestyles and ways of thinking that radically differ.  As adults, they may have similar Movies playing in their mind, but it will be their frames that make the difference.

Do they frame their Movies as fatalistically determining their destiny?

Or do they frame their Movies as just experiences that they have been through?

Do they frame them to keep replaying them over and over just the way it was the first time?

Or do they frame them to keep learning more and more from them?

Do they frame them as absolutely defining them for all time?

Or do they frame them as the beginning database from which to draw conclusions?

As you can see in these questions, it’s our thinking patterns and style of meaning attribution (what we call Meta-Programs in NLP) that play a more determinative role in our mind-body experience than just the Movies.  Our inner game of our frames certainly begins with our Movies but it does not end there.

This now invites us to ask some personal questions about our thinking style and pattern regarding how we frame things.

• How were you framed in your early home and environment?
• What framing styles did you learn and adapt?
• Who framed you?
• How do you frame things today?
• How well does your framing work for you in terms of being resourceful, running your own brain, balancing the demands of life, succeeding, etc.?
• What frames would you prefer?

The frames we set about our experiences are much, much, much more important and critical than our experiences.  In this, “there is no good or bad but thinking makes it so” as Shakespeare noted.  In this, “men are not disturbed by things, they are disturbed by their interpretation of things.”  In this, “as we think in our heart, so we are.”  In this we have the cognitive-behavioral foundation for human functioning.

The Inner Games We Play with our Potential Self

In Neuro-Semantics we recognize that our Frames govern our Games and that we cannot really play a better outer game until we have some better inner frames.  In this, it’s the inner game of our frames that count most.  And the inner game is played at all levels.  It’s played at the level of the Movies that we entertain in our minds and it is played by our meta-states about those Movies.

A meta-state is the state of mind-body-emotion that we experience about our first experience.  It’s our reactions to our reactions.  It’s our second thoughts about what we first think, and our third thoughts about the second thoughts, etc.  That’s why what you think about your thinking is much more important than your first thoughts.

In fact, our first thoughts and emotions make up our primary state natural self.  This is our potential selfprimary state natural self that’s loaded with all of our potentials is what some might call our “Natural Child.”  It is natural, creative, loving, emotional, passionate, dynamic, fluid, flexible.  It has all of the childlike qualities that characterize us at our best when we were free to unfold and develop.

In developmental psychology today, we recognize that we are born with tremendous potential — potential that will unfold and develop over the life stages if we negotiate those stages successfully.  Of course, that’s the problem — failing to successfully negotiate the mental, emotional, social, relational stages.  These have been identified by numerous researchers including Piaget, Eric Erickson, Fowler, etc.

What Meta-States adds to all of this comes in at precisely this point.  As our second thoughts and reactions to our first ones — our meta-states determine how we treat our inner natural self that has so much potent.  How we meta-state our innate ever-developing Self determines almost everything about our life, emotions, skills, relationships, potential for success, etc.  It is that important.

How or why?   It happens because how we meta-state this potential self makes all the difference in the world in terms of the quality of our life and our basic life direction or orientation.  In this we have two basic choices.  We can meta-state our primary state natural self with frames that support or those that hinder.

• The hindering frames are full of prohibitions and taboos and create limitations and problems so that we get stuck in the development, we become afraid, ashamed, or guilt-ridden about our self.  This puts one on the Dragon pathway.
• The supporting frames are full of permissions, acceptance, appreciate, and understanding and create safety to risk, excitement to learn, playfulness to explore, and invite us onto the pathway of growth and development.  This puts us on the Genius or Mastery pathway.

Now you know why, in Meta-States Training for Accessing Personal Genius, we check ourselves regarding the prohibitions and taboos that create the dragons within.  The basic principle is that if we take any negative thought-or-feeling (i.e., state) and bring it against ourselves —against our thoughts, feelings, or physiological responses, we put ourselves at odds with ourselves.  We attack ourselves.  This calls forth the Dragons within.  Self-judgment, self-contempt, self-hatred, and self-depreciation … these are the chief offenders.

The inner game of our frames begins with the Inner Games of Acceptance, Appreciation, and Awe.  It begins with the Inner Games of Power, Ownership, Affirming (“Yes”) and Dis-confirming (“No”).  It begins with the Inner Games of learning, curiosity, playfulness, trust, love, fun, humor, pleasure, and intentionality.  The inner game begins when we access our personal genius … our natural passionate self that is designed to unfold and to become.

The inner game of our frames continues with the Inner Games of resilience, optimism, executive management of our frames, and all of the other Games that we play in the advanced Meta-States Training called, Living Genius.

Summary:

Let me summarize with a set of questions.

• Do you like the Games that you’re playing in life?
• Are your Games at work, business, career, finances, etc. making life a party for you?
• What about your Games with loved ones, friends, associates?
• What about your inner games that go on in the privacy of your internal Matrix of frames?  Do they enhance your life and empower you as a person?

We cannot not play both inner and outer games.  It’s the way our mind-body-emotion system works.  About that we don’t have a choice.  What we do have a choice about is the content of our Games— the Games that we Play and the quality of the Games.  Wanta’ Play?

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. translated NLP and Meta-States into Frame Games (2000) and has since been creating numerous applications— Games Slim and Fit People Play, Games Business Experts Play, Games for Becoming Financially Independent, Games for Mastering Fear, Games Great Lovers Play, Games for Accelerated Learning, etc.  Michael along with Dr. Bob Bodenhamer developed the field of Neuro-Semantics.  www.neurosemantics.com

Alfred Korzybski described the training he designed as General Semantics as to develop “flexible semantic reactions with full conditionality” — what we recognize as simply Flexibility. In NLP, we also have come to think recognize that there are 4 Pillars of NLP. O’Connor and Seymour described them in the book Principles of NLP as–

1) Rapport

2) Sensory Acuity

3) Precise Outcomes

4) Flexibility

Yet in this list, flexibility operates at a higher level to the other skills. After all, when you consider 1) connecting with others and building trust (rapport), 2) staying in the moment and calibrating to people (Sensory Awareness), and 3) having a clear and precise sense of your goals (Outcomes), flexibility operates at a higher level inasmuch as we need flexibility in each of these skills in order to stay fluid and responsive. Otherwise, we could easily become stuck.

1) Flexible rapport

2) Flexible sensory acuity

3) Flexible and precise outcomes

Flexibility plays a meta-role in the use and development of these basic pillars of NLP and as such, represents the very attitude or spirit of NLP. Given that, would you like to develop some new and Advanced Skills in Flexibility? Would you like to expand your neuro-linguistic foundations using some of the tools, techniques and processes of Korzybski?

Reasons For Expanding & Enhancing Your Flexibility Skills:

• To avoid getting stuck and becoming rigid or inflexible.
• To develop intuitions about when and how to do what.
• To develop the power for discovering more variables in any experience
• To develop the intuitive skills for turning static representations into processes
• To resist the ongoing and current pressures of the Aristotelian world that we live in.

Elegance in using NLP, running NLP patterns, and using the very spirit of NLP to develop new patterns demands Flexibility. Korzybski’s model of The Levels of “Abstraction in General Semantics offers advanced understandings and models that expand our skills in adaptability to a process world.

• Do you know more than you do?
• Do you know lots of ways to improve the quality of your life and yet for all that intelligence and wisdom you still can’t pull it off?
• Have you been deluged with lots of good advice for solving your difficulty and yet the same problem continues to recur?
• Do you feel “played” by some unknown game that keeps putting you through the same pattern over and over?
• Does it seem that no matter what you do, the “system” seems to be plotting against you? (Whether the system is your work, family, body, etc.)
• Does a certain way of thinking, feeling, or acting keep repeating itself and when you fight it, it gets stronger as if it resists being defeated?
• Do you feel that you’re just going around in circles trying to find better solutions for developing better habits in eating, exercising, relating, succeeding, etc.?
• Gives you a practical description of how the frame games that we play work, how to think about them, and how to use this information to say “No!” to stupid games that go nowhere, and how to invent new games that will bring out your best and be lots of fun playing.
• Highlights the process for Detecting the Frame Games abroad in the world and in our lives, and how to Transform the Frame Games.
• Provides an user friendly approach to learning how to think about the behaviors, emotions, and thoughts that trouble you, in yourself or another, and how to play the mind-games that you so choose.

Why You Should Develop Expert Skills in Playing FRAME GAMES–

• To gain practical insight about why people do the things they do & thereby read people effectively (including yourself)
• To stop the old games that don’t work and which sabotage your effectiveness & to refuse to be played by games others impose
• To take control of the higher forces in your mind-body that otherwise will “play” you
• To quickly recognize the games that people play with us, their source and nature, and to effectively influence their mind-frames
• To immediately recognize where people are “coming from” in order to join their games for increased rapport and trust
• To install empowering attitudes (or frames of mind) in yourself (and others) and establish entirely new games to play
• To learn the process of Frame Analysis to more effectively work with people
• To take control of your brain, to set the frames you want and to feel a sense of control over your attitude regardless of what happens or what others do

Learn to Play FRAME GAMES for Fun and Profit

If you know about NLP, you know about the field that focuses on– How to Run Your Own Brain and Manage Your Own States. If you know about Meta-States you know about the field that focuses on managing the higher levels or states of mind and accessing your own personal genius.

Now experience a brand new format for putting NLP and Meta-States together, The Frame Game. It’s all about the frames of mind that you use as you move through your world and the games that they initiate. It’s all about detecting the frame games so that you can then say “No!” to those that do not serve to enhance your life and how to say “Yes!” to the games that empower and delight. It’s also all about Design Engineering New and Empowering Frame Games that will touch your life with the kind of magic that you want for making more money, having more friends and fun, enjoying sex, becoming ferocious in learning, and making other “magic carpet rides” that you want become a reality.

If you’re sick and tired of the old frames and games that you’ve been playing and that others have been playing with you, then Frame Games offers you new, higher, and more magical games.

The field of NLP, along with the Cognitive Sciences, and most models for developing personal mastery, have long talked about our frames of mind. They highlight that there are better and healthier mental frames that would make life more fun and give us more success, health, and wealth. And these models have some rudimentary ways to actually create those new frames. Yet none of them even come close to the Frame Games Model and the transformations that you can experience and facilitate.

Frames grow up to become Frames-of-Mind which generate the particular Frame Worlds or Matrix that we then live in. Sick and Toxic Frames make for Dis-empowering Frame Games and a Matrix world of pain, limitation, frustration, self-sabotage. Healthy and Vital Frames make for the best kind of Frame Games– games that do a soul well and that invents a Matrix World that brings out our best and empowers us in mind, body, and soul.

• Would you like to become a Game Master?
• Would you like to learn how to Master your Matrix?
• Would you love to play some new and empowering Frame Games?
• Would you like to Develop the Power to do Frame Refusal?
• Would you enjoy having the skill of setting & solidifying New Frame Games?

FRAME GAMES– THE WORKSHOP
Let Me Introduce You To–

The Matrix
Your Invisible Frame World

• Frames create a matrix that makes up a world or habitable universe. This applies to you and to your mind-emotion system. You live in a very private world wherein you experience your canopy of consciousness as a Matrix that you project onto the world.
• When we enter into a frame and frames-of-frames, we enter into a world (a conceptual world) of concepts, ideas, understandings, rules, and “realities.” These frames then rule and dominate everything else inasmuch as they make up our constructed Model of the World, our Matrix.
• We all live in The Matrix of our mind– the layers of states upon states and the gestalts that arise from these meta-state structures. When we frame and frame-our-frames, we create and enter into a Matrix of our own making. The Matrix then becomes our Assumed World and we become its servant … blind to it, unaware of it, engaged in unquestioning compliance to it.
• In the game of Checkers, the frame of the board that we use and play upon initiates a habitable world. That world of Checkers is also full of rules and practices. And those who enter into that world and who learn to operate efficiently therein become Masters of that Game. And yet, the same board with different pieces (Chess Pieces) initiates an entirely different universe. It induces people into the World of Chess which involves yet other rules and practices.
• The Matrix Universe of each Game gives to each participant the perceptions, anchored responses, and self-contained environment that makes the world inhabitable. And, people can get lost in those worlds.
• So too with the personal Matrix which each of us inherit and create and then impose upon the world. The world that we see is a virtual reality, a world of our own making. We live in a Frame World. How’s yours? Is it a nice place to live?
• While you can detect a framed world from the activities or elements that you see and experience at the primary level, the Matrix itself emerges from the frames that construct it. This explains why we can experience an activity in a number of ways.

  The caddy experiences golf as work, the golfer experiences it as play, and the owner of the golf course as business. The different interests, agendas, motivations set the intentionality frame about the activity. Each frame constrains the behavior, experience, states, and perceptions of the experiencer.

• The Matrix is also Self-Perpetuating– Self-Organizing. Once constructed and commissioned, it has “a life of its own.” It begins with the frames that we use to punctuate events and activities. Then, in the process of framing, we set up classifications, categories, concepts, etc., the frames that create our Neuro-Semantic States. Then the frames become energized so that they operate systemically. This transforms them into self-organizing systems and the frames as attractors.

• The Matrix that the frame creates initiates various Frame Dramas. By framing, we create various Dramas that make up the Games that are allowed and demanded by the Frame World. Chess and checkers generates very different game realms and dramas. Once we enter into the activity and become lodged within the realm, very different dramas unfold. Frames create drama. The specific nature of the frame determines the amount and kind of drama involved, the stories that we live.

• The Matrix is Structured by the Frame Brackets. When we frame, we bracket. We establish the beginning and endings of things. We establish where a frame starts and stops. We establish what’s on each side of a frame boundary. Framing involves boundary markers or brackets which allow us to recognize the activities that are inside the frame and those that remain outside.

  Without the bracketing of a frame that establishes clear boundaries, we suffer from frame confusion. This initiates frame confusions and frame looseness.
  Then we ask, “What is this?”
  Eating: He who cleans his dinner plate can be seen as starved, polite, gluttonous, or frugal. Which is it? What is the meaning?
  The “edges” of our frames and maps gives rise to the looseness of our Frame World.

• Frame Constraints. Frames organize meaning and involvement. In organizing meaning, frames structure the significance that we give to events and ideas. In organizing involvement, frames activate us. When we fully enter a frame, the frame prescribes our actions, feelings, and responses. This describes the self-organizing influence of a frame and how it mediates meaning.

• “There’s slippage in them thar Frames!” When we move from one frame to another, there’s a “distance” between the frames. Some frames are very close to one another. Others even merge and overlap. Some are far apart. Some easily slip over into another frame. This creates Frame Slippage. Some allow no slippage at all. There’s also a degree of openness and closedness to frames. Some operate like mental traps, imprisoning everyone within.In terms of framing and frame structuring, the frame itself is neither fully “in” or “out” and yet partly inside and partly outside. This makes for the looseness of a frame.

• When we enter the Matrix with Frame Awareness about the Matrix itself, we can begin to play with the very fabric of reality. Awareness of the Frame allows us to begin to bend the rules of that Frame World. Now we can push and pull and extend that Model of the World.In this, Frame Clarity endows us meta-power. When we understand the dramas, boundaries, rules and expectations that are generated by a frame, it enables us to understand our world.

The following was written to the e-mail list group during April 2000 by Dr. Michael Hall.  It has been assembled here as an introduction to the practical value and usefulness of Frame Games.

The following is written, not to engage in a specific discussion
about Elian Gonzalez, but about the process of talking, thinking
reasoning and understanding the frames that govern this situation.

Frame Wars can and do occur at all levels of our lives.  They occur at the personal, inter-personal, family, business,  national, inter-national, and cultural levels as well as many others.  For several months and increasingly more often in the last couple of weeks we have been witnessing the Frame Wars in the media around the Elian Gonzalez case.

Given this, how do you look at the situation?  To ask that question is to inquire about your frame-of-reference and your frame of mind.

In that matter, what are the range of possible frames of reference and frames of mind that we could possibly use as we think and feel about this situation?  In this particular case, a wide range of frames have emerged in the media.

1) Hero Story Frame or Refugee Survival frame: washed up on the banks of the USA saved from certain death, the life-and-death struggle in watching mother die.  View thestory that way and it becomes a Modern Mythology of survival, a new Moses Story, asymbol of oppressed people.  View the particulars from this point of view, and you escalate the story into epic proportions and it’s no longer about the boy and his parents.

2) Political Frame: Freedom versus life in a third-world Police State country, opportunities for making a good life in an economically prosperous country versus life in a communism country, Cuba, dominated by a cultural anti-hero (Castro).  Bill Oreilly presents this frame regularly on his show on FOX news.  Viewed from this set of filters, the story is the contrast between Americanism and Communism.  We can’t dare send the boy back without denying “American Freedom.”  This frame also escalates the dynamics so that it is no longer about a particular boy.

3) Family life Frames.   A story of a Dad versus an extended family of Uncles and Aunts in Miami.  From this perspective, it’s a story about the restoration of a boy to his biological dad to restore the basic family relationships versus being raised by distant relatives in a foreign land.  From this perspective most Americas seem to realize and understand the father’s basic rights to his child and see that as primary.

4) Psychological Frames:  Traumatized and in “imminent danger” by father and “likely tosuffer irreversible emotional damage if returned, suffering PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome) and will have a depressive episode if returned” versus being brainwashed by Cuban refugees and suffering “cruel psychological pressures.”  That “the family in Miami” have come out swinging, pulling in their own “psychologists” to prove the father unfit shifts the frame to a psychological frame.  Unspoken are the assumptions of psychoanalytic model.

5) Refugee frame.  It’s a story of a mother who fled Cuba to “find freedom and opportunity in America” for her son versus the story of a 6 year old boy’s ignorance and innocence about such politics.  Is he old enough to ask for political protection?  Was it really his journey or his mothers?

6) Father comes Searching for Son frame:   Juan M. Gonzalez has now come to this country as the Miami family requested, he has arrived in Washington DC and has begun topassionately plead for his son versus the Miami family who continues to call for press conferences at last minute to accuse him of being abusive and son living in fear.

7) Federal Government or State Government Frames: This is a matter for the Federalgovernment..  No, this is a case about the local state governments.

Talk about a Frame War!  We certainly have a war of frames when it comes to this story.  If you watch, read, or listen to the latest developments of the case here in early April, 2000, the events, news presses, motions in the courts and counter-motions, General Attorney Janet Reno and the INS statements about the son being reunited with his father, etc. you can see a Frame War on a larger level playing out before our eyes.  So we ask:

Who’s Right?

Who’s Wrong?

Who’s got the best solution?

Now as with most Frame Wars on most levels — dialogue, reason, and “seeking first to understand” seems to play a very small part of the ongoing frame war.  Accordingly, the “positioning” of various interest groups around the boy has made him increasingly (as most people recognize) a “political football.”   Suddenly, in spite of thousands and tens-of-thousands of other refugees and cases before the INS Elian has become an icon of these frames.

What I’ve noticed severely missing in all of the discussions and panels is that everybody jumps straight into content and almost no one deals with the larger and higher context.  That is, with the frames that people are using as filters through which to see this story.  And what results from this?

Mostly positioning.  I have heard very few true dialogues, dialogues which seemed reasoned and which you could characterize as involving thoughtful listening.  Almost all have been characterized by positioning, side-taking, arguing for a position.

Yet until we can, as a people, step back, examine our operating frames and talk about the values, criteria, and reasoning processes that lead us to conclusions all of our “talk” typically degenerates to monologues of Point and Counter-Point.  And so with most of the so-called “talk” shows, they so frequently degenerate into talking over each other and shouting at each other shows.  Sensational.  But not very productive.

Should we use the frame of Family First and a Father-son Relationship?

Should we use Political Freedom Frame?

Should we set the highest frame Castro’s (assumed) blackmailing?

Should we use Cuban Immigration Law?

Since the highest frame always governs, whatever we use (consciously or unconsciously) will dominate.  If we can’t even step back and talk about that then we will forever find ourselves in a fight at the level of details and never understand what informs and governs the thinking of those who differ.

I refer to the Gonzalez case, not to solve it or even to offer my own opinion (although like most people I certainly have my own).   I use it rather as a marvelous example of how lack of attention to the Frame Level locks people into talking without communicating, and positioning without dialoguing.  This prevents higher level understandings.  It prevents the harder work of thinking through the hierarchy of levels of frames and making hard decisions about which to privilege.

Most of us (I’m assuming) believe that:

• Father’s ought to have the ultimate right and responsibility over their families, especially over a child stranded in another country.
• Communism and Police States don’t offer the kind of opportunities a child would get in America.
• The mother was brave to risk fleeing Cuba and did so for her son.
• People ought to have their day in court.
• Psychological states should be considered when dealing with human relationships and emotions.
• People do use situations to forward their agendas.
• Abusive parents ought to be dealt with.
• The longer something like this goes on, the harder it is on everybody.
• Justice ought to be rendered swiftly.
• The best interests of a child ought to be considered.
• It’s not the USA’s role to police every family or every state in the world.
• There are good parents in bad countries, just as there are bad parents in good countries.

But which is the highest frame?  Which frame ought to be embedded and nestled inside of another?

My recommendations at this moment in time:

• Listen to the frame about this as people talk, argue, position, reason, passionately plea for this or that side.  Listen, in fact, for the purpose of detecting the operating frames that people use.
• Listen also to detect leverage points, that is, agreement frames and the nudges of transformation.  As a meaning-making Neuro-Semanticist, it will put your skills to the test. After all, NLP and Neuro-Semantics does apply to these kinds of everyday experiences.
• When you listen to any given interview does the person operate from just one frame or from many?  How are the frames organized and sequenced?  What determines that?
• How open-minded is the person to another point of view?

Monday, April 24, 2000
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

THE “TRAUMA” QUESTION & NEURO-SEMANTICS
WILL ELIAN BE TRAUMATIZED?

As we all know, our frames of mind (i.e. meta-states) govern what we see and hear and how we process information.  Depending on the frame that we bring to a subject (i.e., how we meta-state it), we can play all kinds of games.

In the Elian Gonzalez case (which seemed destined to stay in the news for months), we have a case of those who see it in terms of Family, Politics, Justice, Power, etc.  In the last few days, however, a new question has arisen–

Will Elian be traumatized by the Events of his taking from the relatives home and restored to his father?

I want to respond to this as a psychologist who has “expert” status in the court system here in dealing with family therapy and the custody of children and also (and more importantly) from the perspective of Neuro-Semantics.   Accordingly, we now need to ask some other Framing Questions:

• Will an event traumatize the boy?
• Do events, in and of themselves, carry the power to “traumatize” at all?
• What are the mechanisms in the human brain/ nervous system that creates this experience that we call “Trauma?”
• What role do beliefs, ideas,  values, understandings, etc. play in this?

Almost every psychologist I’ve seen interviewed on CNN, FOX, CBNS and the mainstream news programs have expressed the old Psychoanalytic Frame and Behavioral Frame — Events, in and of themselves, traumatized.  If you have had an experience you have to be traumatized.  It will show up in some symptom.  If we don’t see symptoms, it means that the person is “in denial,” repressing, not being true, etc.

From the NLP and especially the Neuro-Semantic standpoint, this is utter non-sense.

An event, any event, is but a trigger.  In and of itself, it has no “meaning.”  “Meaning” does not and cannot exist “out there.”  It all depends upon a person’s Frame — beliefs, meanings, understandings, etc.  Pick an event, any event …

• criticism, insult, rejection
• firing from a job, downsizing,
• economic distress, bankruptcy
• rape, molestation, robbery
• accidents, wars, fights, gangs
• divorce, death, sickness, etc.

Does Everybody respond to such negative and traumatic events in the very same way?
Do some people come through distressful events in a resilient way?
Are there such a phenomena as “children of survival” like those who grew up in a war zone (as in Lebanon) and came out without the internal strategy of “learned helplessness?”
Did every Vietnam vet suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?
Does everyone diagnosed with cancer role over, give up, and pine away?
Does everyone divorced, raped, or widowed become crippled emotionally?
Does every millionaire who files for bankruptcy lie down and never try again?

The power to formulate, program, and structure human experience  our thoughts, feelings, states, coping skills, mastery skills, future, etc. does not lie in events but in our frames of mind about the events, the meanings that we construct about the events.

Martin Seligman studied “Learned Helplessness” (1975) and identified the three “Ps” that govern this most unresourceful strategy that creates depression and non-resilience.

P — Personal: “It’s about ME”

P — Pervasive: “It affects EVERYTHING about me.”

P — Permanent: “It will LAST FOREVER…”

Later he discovered he and his associates could reverse the effects of learned helplessness by reversing these Frames… and so he came up with “Learned Optimism” (1990).  Change the Frame and you change the Game.

Will Elian be traumatized?

It all depends.

It depends upon the maps (frames) that his father and others helps him to set in his mind.  It depends upon the mapping that he buys and embraces.  It depends upon what he believes and what he wants to believe.

To set the Frame that he will, inevitably, inescapably, and without question, “be traumatized” is to — well, set that frame.  And frames (whether a primary state or meta-state) involves state dependency and operate as self-fulfilling prophecies or expectations.

Yet when a person seems to lack that awareness as most of the psychologist’s I’ve seen interviewed, they then blindly establish a frame.  I hope Juan Migil doesn’t listen to that and does not set that frame for Elian.  I hope that he sets other frames:

You are loved and valued.

You had quite a journey, what have you learned?

Things happen but they do not determine your future.

Children are “resilient” precisely because they do not have their frames set very well yet.  This gives tremendous power to parents and those who help set the frames for them.  After all, when we are 6 years old and have little understanding of the world, ourselves, and little ego strength to figure things out, we rely upon and are highly susceptible to the Frames that others set.

For me, if the relatives of Elian burdened that child with Political Frames, they did him a real injustice.  If they burdened him with “You need to Fulfill the Dying Request of your Mother” frame, they put him at a real disadvantage.

Is that what it’s all about?  A situation like this can be about almost anything– whatever someone wants to make this “about.”  This describes our meaning-making power.

Frame Wars in the News —
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Dear Sergio:

Thanks for the great questions and insights that you offered.  True enough, I provided much of the beginning presentation from the USA point of view.  We all live within various cultural, political, religious, philosophical frames and we also live within nested frames-within frames.

And of course, detecting where the line occurs between political frames and ideological frames is also one of choice in how we punctuate things.  I find it absolutely interesting that the Political frames between Republicans and Democrats in the USA seems to shift on the Elian Story.  Whereas Republics usually take the conservative view and hold up the ideology of Family First and Family Rights, the more liberal side of the continuum, the Democrats tend to raise that ideology on this one while the Republics tend to see it strictly in terms of Communism versus Capitalism; Police State versus Freedom, etc.

True enough, stepping outside of our own frame of reference and frame of mind about any of these levels and dimensions is very difficult.  And it does indeed evoke strong emotions…  the emotions, in fact, which in Frame Games I posit as actually within the arena of “The Game”  operates to keep us faithful to our beginning frame.

You have offered some great questions, Sergio!

1) How do we know that we’ve gathered all the relevant frames about a question orproblem?

2) How do we check on the accuracy of our frame descriptions?

3) How do we escape the frame contamination of individual and cultural values?

4) Is Frame Detection only for the Intellectual?

#1  Frame Detection.

This is an extensive subject… I have several chapters in the book on this and many, many pages of exercises in the Training Manual.  Higher frames do stand out so that they are salient.. And because they operate as Attractors in a Self-Organizing System … following “the energy” of a conversation whether in political debate, in therapy, or in dialogue with friends offers us a pretty dependable pathway.

So like Meta-Modeling what do you go for first when someone says, “I’m depressed.” Obviously we could start at the lower levels and get all of the unspecific verbs, nouns, and missing referents.  That gives some information.  But as I noted in both Spirit of NLP and The Secrets of Magic Bandler emphasized starting at the highest levels: Presuppositions, Cause-Effects, Complex Equivalences. So here.  Using the Model of Levels of Thought/Mind (which is the heart of Meta-States), we use the principle that the higher levels drive the lower levels.  So we go there first and follow the “energy” of a person’s passions, and implied values.

Such exploration is an art.  Whether with an individual in psychotherapy, an interviewer on TV, a modeler of cultural level structures, we eventually develop a “feel” and “intuition” for the pieces to go for that govern the experience.

#2  Accuracy.

We test it.  NLP calibration teaches us to check it out.  There are patterns about eye accessing cues but it doesn’t fit for everybody.  There’s always exceptions.

So here.  Reflecting a frame back, summarizing, checking the congruency between behaviors and beliefs, these give us a way to test things.

We begin from the presupposition: every behavior makes sense.  Given some frame, some understanding, some map then we backtrack it to the Frames.

#3  Frame Free?

I don’t think that’s possible.  We can practice the exercises that we use in Meta-States for “Losing your mind and coming to your senses” (Perls) but that’s only in order to gain a little bit of mental/emotional freedom for some new exploring.    None of us leave home without our frames.  We can’t.  Nor would we want to.

Which brings us to the first Exercise we do in Frame Games:  “QUALITY CONTROLLING OUR GAMES”  (the NLP process of running an Ecology Check on things).

#4  Is Frame Detection only for the Intellectual?

Depends on what you mean by “intellectual people.”  It does take “mind” and the exercising and working of the mind to do so.  It does not necessarily take the kind of “education” that we experience in school.  School education can even sabotage both Intelligence and Frame Detection.

I’ve already mentioned the “emotional” side of frames… the “feel” for the “energy” of the higher attractors that govern and self-organize our lives via beliefs.  There is so much more to be said about all of this.  Our next Frame Game Trainings in DC, Austin and Tampa  (April and May) will devote 3 full days to these concerns.

What frame games have you played today?

Did you have fun?

Did they serve you well?

Would you recommend them to your children?

What frame games would you have preferred to have played?

April 25, 2000

ELIAN: VICTIM OR PSYCHOLOGICAL HYPE?
By Journalist GinaMaria Jerome

Tampa, Florida:  In a recent forum, Dr. Michael Hall, noted author and behavioral psychologist, disputed the popular theory that the events resulting in the forcible taking of Elian Gonzalez would permanently traumatize the child.

“Almost every psychologist I’ve seen interviewed on CNN, FOX, CBNS, and other mainstream news programs (ABC, NBC, CBS) have expressed the old psychoanalytic frame and behavioralistic viewpoint, that events, in and of themselves, traumatize,” Hall said.

“Yet events by themselves, do not traumatize,” Hall continued. “You have to take the event and give it an interpretation that frames it in terms of the trauma being personal, permanent, and pervasive.”

According to Dr. Hall, the psychologists who are predicting a gloomy future for Elian as a child doomed for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and therefore highly-likely to suffer a major depression, are actually participating in making those experiences happen. This, Hall said, is because as things are framed with that point of view, they plant this style of interpretation of permanent trauma as a likely possibility.

Dr. Hall calls this notion “utter nonsense.”

Events, he explained, do not enter into the brain or mind — only the ‘thoughts’ of those events. The individual must then map their understandings, beliefs, meanings, and values about events. These are what Hall refers to as “frames,” such “frames of reference,” “frames of awareness,” “frames of mind.”   “As we ‘frame’ them,” Hall said, “so we play out those frames.  This puts the major emphasis on our frames of reference and frames of mind as the determinators of our responses.”

“Framing Elian as a ‘victim,'” Hall went on, “is actually an attempt to support and further what I call ‘The Victim Frame Game.’ It’s one of the most prominent psychological games we play these days. We’re essentially saying, ‘If I think of myself as a victim and can get others to view me as a victim, I can get all kinds of sympathy, be excused of my negative emotions and behaviors, and not be expected to take effective action.’ The current predications of Elian’s future status, could well be affected the negative frames being predicted by psychologists and others who erroneously accept these concepts.”

What Elian also has on his side, Hall points out, is his age.  “Children are resilient, precisely because they do not have their frames set very well yet,” Hall explained.  “This gives tremendous power to Elian’s parents and others who will help to set those frames. They can choose to buy into the popular theory that Elian was a victim and was abused as a political ping pong in a vicious game, or they can re-frame his reference to show the triumph over the situation.” Hall noted that other  “children of survival,” such as those who grew up in a war zone (as in Lebanon), have come out without the internal strategy of “learned helplessness.”

“Elian’s experiences can be re-framed in a similar way, making him all the stronger and better for having this experience” Hall said.

So will Elian be traumatized by all the events?  It all depends.  Dr. Hall says that “it all depends upon the maps and frames that his dad and other family members provide him as a positive way to interpret things, and it depends upon the learnings that Elian himself buys and embraces.”

Dr. Michael Hall’s books include Mind-Lines: Lines for Changing Minds, Figuring Out People, The Structure of Excellence, Dragon Slaying, Meta-States, and more than a dozen others, which have been translated into several languages.  An international trainer, author, and speaker, Dr. Hall has helped hundreds of people to overcome trauma, re-frame their lives, and create a powerful existence.

“WAKE UP, NEO!

THE MATRIX HAS YOU!”

The sci-fi movie hit of 1999, “The Matrix,” described life in the Twenty-Third Century, after the great war between humans and A.I. (Artificial Intelligence).  The Machines won.  As the movie opens, most humans are imprisoned in egg-like structures where they are harvested for their brain energy.  There’s a few who live on the outside, but only a few.  They are about the only ones who know “the truth.”  Everybody else lives in a computer-generated world.  This creates the illusion that they are living in New York City, Toronto, or Sydney in 1999.  They are not.  Actually, they are experiencing the electrical signals that cue their brains to represent the world of 1999.  The Matrix is sending them these signals.  It’s all an Alice in Wonderland world.  Their mind is in the Matrix of those representations.

To keep these humans occupied so that their brains stay activated and emits lots of energy, the Machines created a “1999 World” Matrix.  It’s richer and fuller than the holideck on the starship Enterprise.  This is what we call “Sensorama Land” in NLP—a rich, vivid, 3-D, close, in color, etc. world.  Electrical signals to their brain induce them into experiencing the sights, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes, etc. of life at the end of the Twentieth Century.  That’s why they have plugs up and down their spinal chord and on all of their major muscle groups.  It’s the ultimate in a computer generated virtual reality.  It was a hypnotic state with no exit.  Well, almost no exit (and that’s the story, of course!).

This “1999 Matrix,” however, was not the first Matrix.  The Machines had originally created the “Perfect World” Matrix.   It didn’t work.  The humans didn’t buy it.  And so, as Agent Smith said, “whole crops were lost.”   After that, the A.I. Machines set up the “1999 Software Matrix” to deceive and occupy the humans in order to keep their brains intensely activated as they harvested their energy.  Yet the 1999 Matrix is really a fictitious reality, presented as real, to create a false consciousness that will allow the Game to go on.

There were still some free humans.  Some lived in Zion, “the last human city,” and the others worked from hover crafts like the one Morpheus operated, the “Nebuchadnezzar.”   Being free from the Matrix, Morpheus and his crew could hack into it.  In that way, they could enter and exit it as they chose.  Yet they had to be careful.  Sentinel programs, the Agents, roamed the Matrix and had never been defeated by a hacker.

The Matrix of Our Minds

We too live in a matrix—a matrix of our frames.  Because we do not deal with the world (the territory) directly, but via our maps, we relate to the world via three mapping levels: neurological mapping, representational mapping, and conceptual mapping.

We relate to the world via our neurological maps, that is, the “perceptions” that emerge from the interaction of our sense receptors with the energy manifestations “out there.”   These seem so “real”, we can easily confuse what we “see” with what is truly out there.

We also relate to the world via our representational maps, that is, how we encode our internal movies of things using sights, sounds, sensations, smells, etc. (the NLP VAK model) and all the distinctions that we can make in the sensory systems (the NLP “submodality” model).

We relate to the world via our conceptual maps, that is, by the concepts, categories, beliefs, values, expectations, decisions, etc. that we bring to our thinking.  All of these frames of reference combine to create the matrix of the frames in our mind.  They comprise our “reality strategy”.  They give us our sense of the fabric of reality (subjectivity reality).  In NLP, these make up our Meta-Programs, Meta-States, and the domains that make up various logical levels.

Entering and Exiting “the 1999 Matrix”

At the beginning of the movie, a message appears on Anderson’s computer.  Trinity sent it.  The words quietly scrolled across the screen,  “Wake up Neo.   The Matrix has you.”

Our matrices also have us to the extent that we are not aware of the existence of our subjective world or matrix of frames.  Our Matrix has us to the degree that we are blind to our Frames.  We have partially inherited these frames from the cultures that we are born into and partly from the ones that we create.  This makes waking up and detecting our frames our highest priority.  NLP talks about this in terms of Korzybski’s classic statement, “the map is not the territory.” This allows us to distinguish the frames that we map from the “real world” out there.

In the movie, a particular feeling brought Neo (Neal Anderson) to Morpheus (the leader of the hackers).  It was the feeling that “something is wrong with the world.”  What created that feeling?  The fact that the frames and the software of the matrix did not support and promote human vitality, aliveness, or freedom.  This feeling emerged into a question in Neo’s mind.  He asked,  “What is the Matrix?”

The same happens for each of us.  We also experience our frames first and foremost in terms of our feelings and emotions.  For instance, those who play “The Blame Game” experience a very different set of feelings and intuitions from those who play “The Solution Game.”  Each frame (and all of the frames that they are embedded within) create a set of feelings, states, and behaviors.   And frequently it is the feeling that “there’s something wrong with my world” that makes us ready for a new game.  When you feel that, welcome that dissatisfaction.  It can open you to leaving that old matrix of frames.

Taking the Red Pill

After I conducted the Frame Games Workshop in Austin Texas, a good friend and NLP Master Practitioner, Addison Woods wrote me.  In an email he said, “The Frame Games training was an ‘experience ‘ analogous to taking the red pill.”

Ah, taking the red pill.

In the movie, Morpheus first greeted Neo (and others he had freed from the Matrix) by saying,

“It seems you’re feeling a bit like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole.  You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up.  You know that something is wrong with the world.  You can’t explain it, but you feel it, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”

Neo says, “The Matrix?”

Morpheus said, “Yes, the Matrix.  The world has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

“What truth?”

“That you were born into slavery, into a prison that you cannot see or smell…  A prison of the mind …   Unfortunately, no one can tell you what the Matrix is; you have to see it for yourself.”

In his invitation for Neo to see the Matrix for himself, Morpheus showed him two pills.  He held them out, a blue one and a red one.  “Take the Blue Pill,” he said, and “you will wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.”

“Take the red pill and you stay in Wonder Land, and I’ll show you how deep the Rabbit Hole goes.”

NLP and Neuro-Semantics is like that.  Taking the red pill opens our eyes and ears and feelings to the map/territory difference and we begin to discover the depth and height of the rabbit holes of our minds.  We begin discovering the cultural rabbit holes that we live in, the labyrinths of meaning.  It’s all a fictional bio-computer generated world.  We (and many, many of our ancestors) made it up.  It’s but a human construct —subjective experience, and it has a structure, we can even model it, and yet, in the end, it is just frames within frames within frames.  Maps.

Matrix Training

Once delivered from the Matrix, the crew prepared Neo to re-enter the 1999 Matrix.  Why?  So that he could learn to become “The One” —the one prophesied that would come.  He would be able to change the matrix at will and to eventually destroy it.  Morpheus and his crew used other computer programs (Training Matrices) in “the construct.”  The software set the frame: a sparing program, detecting agents program, jumping program, etc.

In the Jumping Tall Buildings Matrix, Morpheus invites Neo to jump from one skyscaper in New York City to another.

“I’m trying to free your mind…  Let it all go.  Fear. Doubt.  Disbelief.  Free your mind!”

This is also the challenge before us as we work within our frames of reference and frames of meaning.  When we are in the construct, they seem so real to us.  And as we believe in them, they are real to us—subjectively real.   We build (or inherit from our culture) our frames of reference in order to organize a consistent picture of the world.

Eric Fromm (1968), writing about another context and from the frame of psychoanalytic sociology, said:

“The human being… would indeed go mad if he did not find a frame of reference which permitted him to feel at home in the world in some form and to escape the experience of utter helplessness, disorientation, and uprootedness. … He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions.” (The Evolution of Hope, p. 63)

This is the wonder of our maps.  When we’re on the outside of our maps, when we look upon the maps of others—it is easy to recognize them as maps.  We sometimes feel surprised, “How could you ever believe that?”  But when we step inside them, when we step into the universe that our frames create, suddenly it becomes more difficult to remember that they are just maps, just the encodings of our mind.  They seem so real.  When inside the matrix of our frames, they signal our nervous system to make them real (to us).  We feel this in our body as our emotions.  If we only use our feelings, we become Frame Blind.

In NLP, the magic lies in stepping outside.  We do that in the “Phobia Cure” with the metaphor of a movie theater.  We do that in the “Time Line” metaphor, and we do it in many other meta-level jumps to higher states —higher states of mind.  And, of course, that’s what the Meta-States Model is all about.  This is how we “get an exit” from the Matrix— by Stepping Back, Stepping Up.

During the first time that Neo goes in, he can’t believe that the chair, his hair, etc. are not “real”.

Morpheus says, “What is real?”  Do you mean the electric signals sent and interpreted by your brain?”  Then he explains, “You’ve been living in a dream world.”

Actually, we all do.  We live in a “dream world” of our mind— hypnotized by the meanings and cultural inductions.  We too live in a computer generated world. The only difference is that ours is made by the bio-computer of our brain and neurology and it is comprised of such meta-phenomena that we call “beliefs, understandings, language,” etc.  Our cultural and conceptual programming creates the Frames that we live in— the Matrix of Frames that we call “reality.”

This highlights our nature as Matrix Makers.  We create frames and then play the games that the frames permit because that’s how our minds and nervous systems work.    Again, Fromm explains what today we call the Constructionist viewpoint about reality,

“Man not only has a mind and is in need of a frame of orientation which permits him to make some sense of and to structuralize the world around him; he has also a heart and a body which need to be tied emotionally to the world—to man and to nature.  The animal’s ties to the world are given, mediated by his instincts.  Man, set apart by his self-awareness and the capacity to feel lonely, would be a helpless bit of dust driven by the winds if he did not find emotional ties which satisfied his need to be related and unified with the world beyond his own person.” (pp. 67-68)

Discovering Our Powers to Transform the Matrix

In the scene where Neo meets the lady that they call “The Oracle.”  Located in what looked like a 1950s kitchen, she looked Neo over and said, “You have the gift, but it looks like you’re waiting for something.”

NLP operates with very similar ideas.  It operates from the presupposition that we have all the resources we need to enrich the world we live in.  If we suffer from an impoverished model of the world, the fault lies not in the world, but in our map of that world.  The Meta-Model was originally designed to elicit and coach in others a fuller linguistic model.  By meta-modeling, we invite people into new levels and quality of framing.  Why?  To get us to find our gifts and to “go for it!” with ferocity.

Later in the subway, after Trinity and Morpheus escape the Matrix, Agent Smith turns to confront Neo.  From outside the Matrix, Trinity yells, “Run, Neo, Run!” And then, when she sees Neo turn to take the agent on, she asks, “What is he doing?”

Morpheus says, “He is beginning to believe.”

Ah, belief!  It takes belief—belief that we can challenge and change our matrix.  That is, we have to utter a profound and strong “Yes!” to our desired frames in order to activate our own powers within whatever Matrix of Frames that we have created.   When we do that, we transform mere “thoughts” into a dynamic meta-phenomena that actually sends commands to the nervous system.  We create “beliefs.”  We create beliefs which then activate the Matrix World of our skills.

The Metaphor

Every metaphor can only take us so far.  And so it is with “The Matrix” metaphor.  In the movie, the actors could move in and out of the Matrix.  We do not have that choice.  Given the frame constructing nature of our mind and nervous system, we can only think, feel, act, and relate via some framework.  We have a different choice.  We only choose between various Matrices.

We have been born inside of a Matrix, a matrix of frames—of ideas and beliefs that have ever so subtly infiltrated our brains and that now run our programs.  As “time-binders” we are culturalized to various frames of mind.  We have no choice about that.  But we do have a choice about which Matrix we want to live in.  We do, that is, if we know about the Matrix and have developed the Matrix entering and exiting skills.  Then we too can master our Matrices.

Where did you get your current frames of mind, your points of view, your mental styles for perceiving things?  Did you invent them all on your own?  Of course not.  Most of them you just absorbed from your family and cultural environment. You sucked them in as you breathe in air—paying no attention at all to the frames that people, groups, culture, and language itself set for the working of your brain.  And, given whatever Matrix you entered into, that controls the games that you can now play.

All of the Games that we play in life spring from the higher frames that are set in our minds.  We learnedMatrices of Frame empower us to use our mental and emotional powers efficiently, other Matrices sabotage our effectiveness, manipulate the hell out of us, poison our emotions, and imprison us.   Only through Frame Awareness can we begin to develop  the skills to play mindfully and elegantly.  Otherwise, the Matrix will have us— will imprison us.  to play these Games and to play within the rules of the Game.  Some

However, once we become conscious of our map making, able to jump logical levels in a single bound, then we can detect frames, challenge them, shift them, transform them, set and solidify new ones, and layer frame upon frame to build up a Matrix World that’s a lot of fun to live in.  Then we become a Frame Game Master.   Then like Neo, we develop the power to change the Matrix of our Frames at will.  That’s when we can bend the fabric of our subjective “reality” to do us service in living richer, fuller, and more vibrant lives.  We can then keep opening up a whole world of possibilities as the deceptions and illusions are exposed, and as we reclaim our powers of Matrix Making.

Seeing the Matrix in Code

After being in the Matrix and learning to maneuver in the constructs, Neo happened into the central computer on the hover ship.  There he found Cypher who was watching the Matrix.  On the screens before him was a flow of numbers.  Now he was seeing the Matrix in code.

“You look at it in code?” he asked.

Cypher said, “I don’t even see the code.  You get used to it.  All I see is blond, brunet, and redhead.”

We do this in NLP and Neuro-Semantics when we learn to see and hear the structure of the frames and the way we encode our representations.  Apart from the code, we experience things as behaviors, emotions, talk.  Content.   But after we learn how to deal with structure, we can see and hear the codehaving us.  It gives us true choice and control— kind of like the promise in NLP that we will learn how to “run our own brains” and access our own highest resourceful states. as people talk, act, and emote.  This gives us a higher level of awareness of understanding.  This leads to frame mastery and frees us from frames

Summary

This introduces the newest developments in the Meta-States of Neuro-Semantics, the models that began with Frame Games and that now includes The Matrix Model.  In Frame Games trainings we enter the meta-zone of the Matrix of our frames in order to develop skills and learn patterns for working with the matrices of our minds.  It leads to frame game mastery where we can explicitly work with the embedded frames of mind.  The games (states, actions, emotions, talk—all of the actions and transactions) that our frames format and structure.

References

Fromm, Eric.  (1968).  The revolution of hope: Toward a humanized technology. New York: Bantam Books.

Hall, L. Michael. (2000 second edition).  Meta-States: Mastering your higher states of mind.  Grand Jct. CO: Neuro-Semantics.