The Structure of Magic I: A Book about Language and Therapy

Down through the ages the power and wonder of practitioners of magic have been recorded in song and story. The presence of wizards, witches, sorcerers, shamen, and gurus has always been intriguing and awe inspiring to the average person. These people of power, wrapped in a cloak of secrecy, presented a striking contradiction to the common ways of dealing with the world. The spells and incantations they wove were feared beyond belief and, at the same time, sought constantly for the help they could provide. Whenever these people of power publicly performed their wonders, they would both shatter the concepts of reality of that time and place and present themselves as having something that was beyond learning. In modern time, the mantle of the wizard is most often placed upon those dynamic practitioners of psychotherapy who exceed the skill of other therapists by leaps and bounds, and whose work is so amazing to watch that it moves us with powerful emotions, disbelief, and utter confusion. Just as with all wizards of the ages of the earth whose knowledge was treasured and passed down from sage to sage — losing and adding pieces but retaining a basic structure — so, too, does the magic of these therapeutic wizards also have structure.

The most sophisticated study of human, rule-governed behavior is the study of human language systems. Specifically, a group of linguists known as transformational grammarians has developed a set of rules describing the forms which we use to represent and communicate our experience with language. Although transformational grammar is a young discipline (initiated in 1955), it has already had a profound effect on experimental psychology, especially modern learning theory. It has yet to have an impact on applied psychology. This book is designed to make the insights of transformational grammar available and usable to those people who work with complex human behavior.

The Structure of Choice

A number of people in the history of civilization have made this point — that there is an irreducible difference between the world and our experience of it. We as human beings do not operate directly on the world. Each of us creates a representation of the world in which we live — that is, we create a map or model which we use to generate our behavior. Our representation of the world determines to a large degree what our experience of the world will be, how we will perceive the world, what choices we will see available to us as we live in the world.

No two human beings have exactly the same experiences. The model that we create to guide us in the world iS based in part upon our experiences. Each of us may, then, create a different model of the world we share and thus come to live in a somewhat different reality.

We want to make two points here. First, there is a necessary difference between the world and any particular model or representation of the world. Second, the models of the world that each of us creates will themselves be different. There are a number of ways in which this can be demonstrated. For our purposes, we have divided them into three areas: neurological constraints, social constraints, and individual constraints.

One way in which our models of the world will necessarily differ from the world itself is that our nervous system systematically distorts and deletes whole portions of the real world. This has the effect of reducing the range of possible human experience as well as introducing differences between what is actually going on in the world and our experience of it. Our nervous system, then, initially determined genetically, constitutes the first set of filters which distinguish the world — the territory — from our representations of the world — the map.

The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and the nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated upon those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born — the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated record of other people's experience, the victim insofar as it confirms in him the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness, and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
— Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

A second way in which our experience of the world differs from the world itself is through the set of social constraints or filters (prescription glasses) — we refer to these as social genetic factors. By social genetics, we refer to all the categories or filters to which we are subject as members of a social system: our language, our accepted ways of perceiving, and all the socially agreed upon fictions.

Unlike our neurological genetic limitations, those introduced by the social genetic filters are easily overcome. This is most clearly demonstrated by the fact that we are able to speak more than one language — that is, we are able to use more than one set of social linguistic categories or filters to organize our experience, to serve as our representation of the world. For example, take the ordinary sentence: The book is blue. Blue is the name that we, as native speakers of English, have learned to use to describe our experience of a certain portion of the continuum of visible light. Misled by the structure of our language, we come to assume that blue is a property of the object that we refer to as book rather than being the name which we have given our sensation.

Notice that, in the case of the neurological constraints, in normal circumstances, the neurological filters are the same for all human beings — this is the common basis of experience that we share as members of the species. The social genetic filters are the same for the members of the same social-linguistic community but there are a large number of different social-linguistic communities. Thus, the second set of filters begins to distinguish us from each other as human beings. Our experiences begin to differ more radically, giving rise to more dramatically different representations of the world.

The third set of constraints — the individual constraints — are the basis for the most far-reaching differences among us as humans. By individual constraints we refer to all the representations we create as human beings based upon our unique personal history. Every human being has a set of experiences which constitute his own personal history and are as unique to him as are his fingerprints. Just as every person has a set of distinct fingerprints, so, too, does each person have novel experiences of growing up and living, and no two life histories will ever be identical. Again, though they may have similarities, at least some aspects are different and unique to each person. The models or maps that we create in the process of living are based upon our individual experiences, and, since some aspects of our experiences will be unique to us as a person, some parts of our model of the world will be singular to each of us. These uncommon ways each of us represents the world will constitute a set of interests, habits, likes, dislikes, and rules for behavior which are distinctly our own. These differences in our experiences will guarantee that each of us has a model of the world which in some way will be different from any other person's model of the world.

This third set of filters, the individual constraints, constitutes the basis for the profound differences among us as humans and the way we create models of the world. These differences in our models can either be ones that alter our prescriptions (socially given) in a way that enriches our experience and offers us more choices, or ones that impoverish our experience in a way that limits our ability to act effectively.

Our experience has been that, when people come to us in therapy, they typically come with pain, feeling themselves paralyzed, experiencing no choices or freedom of action in their lives. What we have found is not that the world is too limited or that there are no choices, but that these people block themselves from seeing those options and possibilities that are open to them since they are not available in their models of their world. Almost every human being in our culture in his life cycle has a number of periods of change and transition which he must negotiate. Different forms of psychotherapy have developed various categories for these important transition-crisis points. What's peculiar is that some people are able to negotiate these periods of change with little difficulty, experiencing these periods as times of intense energy and creativity. Other people, faced with the same challenges, experience these periods as times of dread and pain, periods to be endured, when their primary concern is simple survival. The difference between these two groups appears to us to be primarily that the people who respond creatively to and cope effectively with this stress are people who have a rich representation or model of their situation, one in which they perceive a wide range of options in choosing their actions. The other people experience themselves as having few options, none of which are attractive to them — the "natural loser" game. The question for us is: How is it possible for different human beings faced with the same world to have such different experiences? Our understanding is that this difference follows primarily from differences in the richness of their models. Thus, the question becomes: How is it possible for human beings to maintain an impoverished model which causes them pain in the face of a multi-valued, rich, and complex world?

In coming to understand how it is that some people continue to cause themselves pain and anguish, it has been important for us to realize that they are not bad, crazy, or sick. They are, in fact, making the best choices from those of which they are aware, that is, the best choices available in their own particular model. In other words, human beings' behavior, no matter how bizarre it may first appear to be, makes sense when it is seen in the context of the choices generated by their model. The difficulty is not that they are making the wrong choice, but that they do not have enough choices — they don't have a richly focused image of the world. The most pervasive paradox of the human condition which we see is that the processes which allow us to survive, grow, change, and experience joy are the same processes which allow us to maintain an impoverished model of the world — our ability to manipulate symbols, that is, to create models. So the processes which allow us to accomplish the most extraordinary and unique human activities are the same processes which block our further growth if we commit the error of mistaking the model for the reality. We can identify three general mechanisms by which we do this: Generalization, Deletion, and Distortion.

Generalization is the process by which elements or pieces of a person's model become detached from their original experience and come to represent the entire category of which the experience is an example. Our ability to generalize is essential to coping with the world. For example, it is useful for us to be able to generalize from the experience of being burned when we touch a hot stove to a rule that hot stoves are not to be touched. But to generalize this experience to a perception that stoves are dangerous and, therefore, to refuse to be in the same room with one is to limit unnecessarily our movement in the world. The point here is that the same rule will be useful or not, depending upon the context — that is, that there are no right generalizations, that each model must be evaluated in its context. Furthermore, this gives us a key to understanding human behavior that seems to us to be bizarre or inappropriate — that is, if we can see the person's behavior in the context in which it originated.

A second mechanism which we can use either to cope effectively or to defeat ourselves is Deletion. Deletion is a process by which we selectively pay attention to certain dimensions of our experience and exclude others. Take, for example, the ability that people have to filter out or exclude all other sound in a room full of people talking in order to listen to one particular person's voice. Using the same process, people are able to block themselves from hearing messages of caring from other people who are important to them. Deletion reduces the world to proportions which we feel capable of handling. The reduction may be useful in some contexts and yet be the source of pain for us in others.

The third modeling process is that of Distortion. Distortion is the process which allows us to make shifts in our experience of sensory data. Fantasy, for example, allows us to prepare for experiences which we may have before they occur. People will distort present reality when rehearsing a speech which they will later present. It is this process which has made possible all the artistic creations which we as humans have produced. A sky as represented in a painting by Van Gogh is possible only as Van Gogh was able to distort his perception of the time-place in which he was located at the moment of creation. Similarly, all the great novels, all the revolutionary discoveries of the sciences involve the ability to distort and misrepresent present reality. Using the same technique, people can limit the richness of their experience.

A person who has at some time in his life been rejected makes the generalization that he's not worth caring for. As his model has this generalization, he either deletes caring messages or he reinterprets these messages as insincere. As he is unaware of any caring messages from others, he is able to maintain the generalization that he isn't worth caring about. This description is an example of the classical positive feedback loop: the self-fulfilling prophecy, or forward feedback. A person's generalizations or expectations filter out and distort his experience to make it consistent with those expectations. As he has no experiences which challenge his generalizations, his expectations are confirmed and the cycle continues. In this way people maintain their impoverished models of the world.

The therapeutic "wizards" we described earlier come from various approaches to psychotherapy and use techniques that appear to be dramatically different. They describe the wonders they perform with terminologies so distinctive that their perceptions of what they do seem to have nothing in common. Many times we have watched these people working with someone and heard comments from onlookers which implied that these wizards of therapy make fantastic intuitive leaps which make their work incomprehensible. Yet, while the techniques of these wizards are different, they share one thing: They introduce changes in their clients' models which allow their clients more options in their behavior. What we see is that each of these wizards has a map or model for changing their clients' models of the world — i.e., a Meta-model — which allows them to effectively expand and enrich their clients' models in some way that makes the clients' lives richer and more worth living. Our purpose in this book is to present to you an explicit Meta-model, that is, a Meta-model which is learnable.

The Structure of Language

We as human beings use our language in two ways. We use it first of all to represent our experience — we call this activity reasoning, thinking, fantasying, rehearsing. When we are using language as a representational system, we are creating a model of our experience. This model of the world which we create by our representational use of language is based upon our perceptions of the world. Our perceptions are also partially determined by our model or representation in the ways we discussed in Chapter 1. Notice that, since we use language as a representational system, our linguistic representations are subject to the three universals of human modeling: Generalization, Deletion, and Distortion. Secondly, we use our language to communicate our model or representation of the world to each other. When we use our language to communicate, we call it talking, discussing, writing, lecturing, singing. When we are using our language for communication, we are presenting our model to others.

When humans communicate — when we talk, discuss, write — we usually are not conscious of the process of selecting words to represent our experience. We are almost never conscious of the way in which we order and structure the words we select. Language so fills our world that we move through it as a fish swims through water. Although we have little or no consciousness of the way in which we form our communication, our activity — the process of using language — is highly structured.

To say that our communication, our language, is a system is to say that it has structure, that there is some set of rules which identify which sequences of words will make sense, will represent a model of our experience. In other words, our behavior when creating a representation or when communicating is rule-governed behavior. Even though we are not normally aware of the structure in the process of representation and communication, that structure, the structure of language, can be understood in terms of regular patterns. Fortunately, there is a group of academicians who have made the discovery and explicit statement of these patterns the subject of their discipline — transformational grammar. In fact, transformational grammarians have developed the most complete and sophisticated explicit model of human, rule-governed behavior. The notion of human, rule-governed behavior is the key to understanding the way in which we as humans use our language.

We use language to represent and communicate our experience — language is a model of our world. What transformational grammarians have done is to develop a formal model of our language, a model of our model of our world, or, simply, a Meta-model.

Language serves as a representational system for our experiences. Our possible experiences as humans are tremendously rich and complex. If language is adequately to fulfill its function as a representational system, it must itself provide a rich and complex set of expressions to represent our possible experiences. Transformational grammarians have recognized that to approach the study of natural language systems by directly studying this rich and complex set of expressions would make their task overwhelming. They have chosen to study not the expressions themselves, but the rules for forming these expressions (syntax). Transformational grammarians make the simplifying assumption that the rules for forming this set of rich expressions can be studied independently of content.

What we are demonstrating here is that people have consistent intuitions about the language they speak. By consistent intuitions, we mean that the same person presented with the same group of words today and a year from now will make the same judgments about whether they are a well-formed sentence of his language. Furthermore, different native speakers will make the same judgments about whether the same group of words is a sentence or not. These abilities are a classic example of human, rule-governed behavior. Although we are not conscious of how we are able to behave consistently, nevertheless, we do.

Our ability and experience in using our language system to represent and communicate is so extensive that we are able to reflect on the process itself to the extent that we have consistent intuitions about that process. The purpose of the transformational model of language is to represent the patterns in the intuitions that we have about our language system. These intuitions are available to every native speaker of every language. The three major categories of linguistic intuitions which we have selected as relevant for our purposes are: Well-formedness, Constituent Structure, and Logical Semantic Relations.

Well-Formedness: The consistent judgments which native speakers make about whether or not groups of words are sentences of their language.
Constituent Structure: The consistent judgments that native speakers make about what goes together as a unit or constituent inside a sentence of their language.
Logical Semantic Relations: The consistent judgments which native speakers make about the logical relations reflected in the sentences of their language. These include: (1.) Completeness: Native speakers, when presented with a verb of their language, are able to determine how many and what kinds of things between which this verb connects or describes a relationship. (2.) Ambiguity: Native speakers recognize that a single sentence such as Investigating FBI agents can be dangerous or Maxine took Max's shirt off communicates two distinct meanings. (3.) Synonymy: Native speakers recognize that both of the following sentences have the same meaning or convey the same message. Sandy looked up the number. Sandy looked the number up. (4.) Referential Indices: Native speakers can determine whether a word or phrase picks out a particular object in their experience such as my car or whether it identifies a class of objects: cars. Furthermore, they make consistent judgments about whether two (or more) words refer to the same object or class, e.g., the words Jackson and himself in the sentence Jackson changed himself. (5.) Presuppositions: Native speakers can determine what the experience of the speaker is for him to say a sentence. For example, if I say the sentence My cat ran away you are entitled (have reason) to believe that, in my experience of the world, it's true that I have a cat.

We will describe how the consistent intuitions we identified about our language are represented in the Meta-model — the model of transformational grammar. Linguists using this model work to represent these intuitions which are available to every native speaker in an explicit way. Native speakers have two kinds of consistent intuitions about every sentence of their language. They are able to determine how the smaller units, such as words, go together to make up the sentence (intuitions about constituent structure) and also what a complete representation of the sentence would be (the completeness of the logical representation).

Within the transformational model, each sentence is analyzed at two levels of structure corresponding to two consistent kinds of intuitions which native speakers have: Surface Structure — in which their intuitions about constituent structure are given a tree structure representation — and Deep Structure — in which their intuitions about what a complete representation of the logical semantic relations is, are given. Since the model gives two representations for each sentence (Surface Structure and Deep Structure), linguists have the job of stating explicitly how these two levels are connected. The way in which they represent this connection is a process or derivation which is a series of transformations.

A transformation is an explicit statement of one kind of pattern which native speakers recognize among the sentences of their language. For example, compare the two sentences:
The woman bought the truck.
The truck was bought by the woman.
Native speakers recognize that, although these Surface Structures are different, the message communicated, or Deep Structures, of these two sentences is the same. The process by which these two sentences are derived from their common Deep Structure is called a derivation. A derivation is a series of transformations which connects the Deep Structure and the Surface Structure. The derivation of one of these two Surface Structures includes the transformation called the Passive Transformation.

Surface Structures may differ from their associated Deep Structure in two major ways:

The words may occur in a different order — Permutation Transformation
Parts of the complete logical semantic representation may fail to appear in Surface Structure — Deletion Transformation

What is important in this presentation is not the technical details nor the terminology that linguists have developed, but rather the fact that the intuitions available to each of us as a native speaker can be given a representation. Thus, the process of representation is itself represented. For example, the two major ways in which what we accept as a well-formed sentence can differ from its complete semantic representation is by distortion (Permutation Transformation or Nominalization) or removal of material (Deletion Transformation). As an example, each person who speaks English is able to consistently decide which groups of English words are well-formed sentences. This information is available to each of you. The transformational model represents this information. Thus, in the model, a group of words is said to be well formed if there is a series of transformations which convert the complete representation of Deep Structure into some Surface Structure.

The parts of the transformational model relevant for our purposes have been presented. Viewed together, they constitute a representation of the process that humans go through in representing their experience and communicating that representation. When humans wish to communicate their representation, their experience of the world, they form a complete linguistic representation of their experience; this is called the Deep Structure. As they begin to speak, they make a series of choices (transformations) about the form in which they will communicate their experience. These choices are not, in general, conscious choices.

Our behavior in making these choices is, however, regular and rule governed. The process of making this series of choices (a derivation) results in a Surface Structure — a sentence or sequence of words which we recognize as a well-formed group of words in our language. This Surface Structure itself can be viewed as a representation of the full linguistic representation — the Deep Structure. The transformations change the structure of the Deep Structure — either deleting or changing the word order — but do not change the semantic meaning.

The nervous system which is responsible for producing the representational system of language is the same nervous system by which human's produce every other model of the world — thinking, visual, kinesthetic, etc... The same principles of structure are operating in each of these systems. Thus, the formal principles which linguists have identified as part of the representational system called language provide an explicit approach to understanding any system of human modeling.

The Structure of Magic

The one feature that is present in all forms of therapy when they are successful is that the people in therapy change in some way. This change is given different names by different schools of therapy, such as: 1) fixing, 2) cure, 3) growth, 4) enlightenment, 5) behavior modification, etc. Whatever the name given the phenomenon, it somehow makes the person's experience richer and better. This is not surprising as every form of therapy claims to help people operate more successfully in the world. When people change, their experience and model of the world is different. No matter what their techniques, the different forms of therapy make it possible for people to change their model of the world and make some part of that model new. What we are offering here is not a new school of therapy, but rather a specific set of tools/techniques which are an explicit representation of what is already present to some degree in each form of therapy. The unique aspects of the Meta-model we are presenting are: first, that it is based on the intuitions already available to every native speaker, and second, it is an explicit model which is learnable.

In most forms of therapy (with the possible exclusion of some physical therapies) one of the things that goes on is a series of verbal transactions between the "client" and the "therapist." One of the common features of the therapeutic encounter is that the therapist tries to find out what the client has come to therapy for; what the client wants to change. In our terms, the therapist is attempting to find out what model of the world the client has. As clients communicate their models of the world, they do it in Surface Structures. These Surface Structures will contain deletions such as those described in the last chapter. The way that the client uses language to communicate his model/representation is subject to the universal processes of human modeling such as deletion.

The Surface Structure itself is a representation of the full linguistic representation from which it is derived — the Deep Structure. In the case wherein the linguistic process of deletion has occurred, the resulting verbal description — the Surface Structure — is necessarily missing for the therapist. This piece may also be missing from the client's conscious model of the world. If the model of the client's experience has pieces missing, it is impoverished. Impoverished models, as we stated before, imply limited options for behavior. As the missing pieces are recovered, the process of change in that person begins.

The first step is for the therapist to be able to determine whether the client's Surface Structure is a complete representation of the full linguistic representation from which it is derived — the Deep Structure. At this point in time, therapists either have a highly developed sense of intuitions based upon their experiences or they may use the explicit Meta-model to recover the missing pieces. In the Meta-model, the intuitions, which every native speaker of the language has, come into play. The client says: I'm scared. The therapist now checks his (or her) intuitions to determine whether the client's Surface Structure is complete. One way of doing this (we present this process in detail in the following chapters) is to ask yourself whether you can think of another well-formed sentence in English which has the same process word scare and more noun arguments than the client's Surface Structure with that same verb scare. If you can think of such a Surface Structure, then the client's Surface Structure is incomplete. Therapists are now faced with three broad options. They may accept the impoverished model, they may ask for the missing piece, or they may guess at it. The first option, accepting the impoverished model, presents the difficulty of making the process of therapy slow and tedious, as it places total responsibility for recovering the model's missing pieces on the client, who is there for assistance in this process in the first place. We are not suggesting that change is not possible in this process, but that it requires a longer period of time than is necessary. The second choice is for the therapist to ask for the piece that has been linguistically deleted:
C: I'm scared.
T: Of what?
Either the client supplies the material in his model that has been linguistically deleted and the therapist's understanding of that model becomes more complete, or the piece missing from the client's verbal expression is also missing from his model. Clients begin the process of self-discovery and change as they begin to work to fill in the missing pieces and become actively involved in this process of self-discovery — expanding themselves by expanding their model of the world.

Therapists have a third choice — they may, from long experience, have an intuition about what the missing piece is. They may choose to interpret or guess at the missing piece. We have no quarrel with this choice. There is, however, the danger that any form of interpretation or guessing may be inaccurate. We include a safeguard for the client in our Meta-model. The client tries the interpretation or guess by the therapist by generating a sentence — which includes that material and checks his intuitions to see whether it fits, makes sense, is an accurate representation of his model of the world. For example, the therapist may have a strong intuition that the client is scared of his father. His intuition may be based upon previous therapy or upon his recognition of a particular body posture or movement he has seen the client use at other times when the subject of his father has come up. In this case, the exchange may go:
C: I'm scared.
T: I want you to try saying this and see whether it fits for you: "My father scares me."

What he is asking the client to do here is to say the Surface Structure containing his guess or interpretation and see whether it fits the client's full representation, the Deep Structure. If this new Surface Structure containing the therapist's intuition about the identity of the deleted portion of the client's original Surface Structure fits the client's model, he will typically experience a certain sensation of congruity or recognition. If not, the Metamodel techniques are available as a guide for recovering the missing material which actually fits the client's model. The safeguard for the client's integrity is for the therapist to be sensitive to the client's intuitions and experience by having the client judge whether the therapist's guess is accurate for his model by saying the sentence and seeing whether it fits.

Deep Structures are fullest linguistic representations of the client's experience. They may differ from that experience in a number of ways which are already familiar to you. These are the three features which are common to all human modeling processes: Deletion, Distortion, and Generalization. These are the universal processes of human modeling — the way that people create any representation of their experience. The intuitions which are represented in the transformational model of language are special cases of these three principles; for example, sentences or Surface Structures which have no expressed subject are examples of the process of deletion. To develop an image of the model the client has, this missing piece has to be restored; the expression has to be reconnected with its source — its fullest representation. In the case of a Surface Structure, its source and fullest representation is the Deep Structure. In the case of the Deep Structure, the client's experiences are the source for the representation. While Deep Structure is the fullest linguistic representation, it is derived from a fuller, richer source — the sum total of the client's experiences. Not surprisingly, the same universal processes of human modeling which give us a systematic way of assisting the client in going from an impoverished Surface Structure to a complete linguistic representation — the Deep Structure — provides a systematic way of connecting the linguistic representation for that person to the set of full experiences from which the full linguistic representation is derived.

The therapist has succeeded in involving the client in recovering the Deep Structure — the full linguistic representation. The next step is to challenge that Deep Structure in such a way as to enrich it. The therapist has a number of choices at this point. The basic principle here is that people end up in pain, not because the world is not rich enough to allow them to satisfy their needs, but because their representation of the world is impoverished. Correspondingly, then, the strategy that we as therapists adopt is to connect the client with the world in some way which gives him a richer set of choices. In other words, since the client experiences pain by having created an impoverished representation of the world and forgetting that the representation is not the world, the therapist will assist the client in changing just in case he comes to behave in some way inconsistent with his model and thereby enriches his model. There are a number of ways of accomplishing this, many of which have been described in detail. The importance of clear sensory channels, the uncovering of patterns of coping with stress learned in the family system, the childhood traumas, the imposition of therapeutic double binds are all examples of the emphases which the various forms of psychotherapy have selected as their way of challenging the client's impoverished model. Whatever the schod of therapy and whatever its typical emphasis and form of treatment, when successful it characteristically involves two features:

A large amount of communication in the form of language.
A change in the client's representation/model of the world.

What we offer in our Meta-model relates directly to both of these features of successful therapy. Language is both a representational system and the means or process of communicating our representation of the world. The processes which we go through to communicate our experience are the same processes which we go through in creating our experience. Seen in this way, the recovery of the full Deep Structure from the Surface Structure corresponds to the uncovering of the client's full linguistic model of the world; the challenge to the client's Deep Structure is directly a challenge to the client's full linguistic representation. The same tools/ techniques apply to both.

For the therapist to challenge the Deep Structure is equivalent to demanding that the client mobilize his resources to reconnect his linguistic model with his world of experience. In other words, the therapist here is challenging the client's assumptions that his linguistic model is reality.

When human beings create their linguistic models of the world, they necessarily select and represent certain portions of the world and fail to select and represent others. Thus, one way in which the full linguistic representation — the Deep Structure — will differ from the experience which it represents is by being a reduced version of the client's full experience of the world. This reduction may, as we said before, be a useful reduction, or it may impoverish the model in such a way that it creates pain for that person. The techniques available to the therapist to assist the client in recovering portions of his experience which he did not represent in his model are many. In the area of combined verbal-non-verbal techniques, for example, the client might be asked to enact the specific situation from which he generalized and to describe his experience fully as he re-lives it — thus presenting the portion of his experience to which he had failed previously to give a linguistic representation. This re-connects the client with his experience and simultaneously provides the therapist with valuable content as well as an understanding of how the person typically represents his experiences. Again, our intention in this study is to focus on the linguistic techniques.

The therapist's task is to challenge deletions which are not useful; those which cause pain are ones which are associated with areas of impossibility, areas in which the client literally cannot see any choices other than ones which are unsatisfactory — ones which are painful. Typically, an area in which an impoverishing deletion has occurred is one in which the client's perception of his potential is limited — he seems to be blocked, stuck, doomed... The technique of recovering the full linguistic representation works and it is learnable, as there exists an explicit representation — the Deep Structure — with which the Surface Structure can be compared. This is essentially the process of comparinga representation (Surface Structure) with the full model from which it was derived — the Deep Structure. The Deep Structures themselves are derived from the full range of experience available to human beings. The Deep Structure is available to any native speaker by intuition. The world of experience is available to anyone willing to experience it. As therapists, we identify as a deletion from the client's model any option which we can imagine that we would have, or anyone whom we know would have, in the same situation.

We have identified a number of questions which are useful in assisting the client in expanding his model. When clients approach the limits of their models, they often say things such as:
I can't trust people.
It's impossible for me to trust people.
Now, since we as therapists know that either we ourselves have been able to trust others or we know someone who has succeeded in trusting someone else, we are aware that the world is rich enough to allow the client to come to trust people — it's that person's model which prevents it. The question for us then becomes: How is it that some people are able to trust others but our client is not? We get this directly by asking the client to explain the difference in his model which makes this impossible. That is, we ask:
What is it that stops you from trusting people?
or
What would happen if you trusted people?
A full answer to this question by the client will restore some of the deleted material. The client, of course, will respond in some Surface Structure. The therapist has the tools available for evaluating these verbal responses — the processes of restoring the Deep Structure, of focusing portions of the image which are unclear. These same tools serve the therapist in assisting the client to change by re-connecting the client with his experience. The therapist has a goal, using the techniques of the Meta-model, to gain a clear, fully focused image of the client's model which has a rich set of choices for the client in the areas in which the client has pain. The use of the question: What stops you from...? is crucial in re-connecting the client to his experience in such a way as to give him access to material which was formerly deleted and, therefore, not represented in his model.

By distortion, we refer to things which are represented in the client's model but are twisted in some way which limits his ability to act and increases his potential for pain. There are a number of ways in which the Deep Structure may be distorted from the world in such a way as to create pain.

One way in which people distort their model and cause themselves pain is by assigning outside of their control responsibilities which are within their control. Linguists have identified certain expressions semantically ill-formed. For example:
George forced Mary to weigh 114 pounds.
Their generalization is that people cannot legitimately be said to be able to cause other people to do things which are not within their voluntary control. We have generalized the notion of semantic ill-formedness to include sentences such as:
My husband makes me mad.
The therapist can identify this sentence as having the form: Some person causes some person to have some emotion. When the first person, the one doing the causing, is different from the person experiencing the anger, the sentence is said to be semantically ill-formed and unacceptable. The semantic ill-formedness of sentences of this type arises because it, literally, is not possible for one human being to create an emotion in another human being — thus, we reject sentences of this form. Sentences of this type, in fact, identify situations in which one person does some act and a second person responds by feeling a certain way. The point here is that, although the two events occur one after another, there is no necessary connection between the act of one person and the response of the other. Therefore, sentences of this type identify a model in which the client assigns responsibility for his emotions to people or forces outside his control. The act itself does not cause the emotion; rather, the emotion is a response generated from a model in which the client takes no responsibility for experiences which he could control.

What may at first appear to us as therapists as bizarre behavior or peculiar statements by clients will make sense to us in their models. To have a clear image of the client's model is to understand how that behavior or those statements make sense. This is equivalent to identifying the assumptions that the client is making in his model of the world. Assumptions in a model show up linguistically as presuppositions of the client's sentences. Presuppositions are what is necessarily true for the statements that the client makes to make sense (not to be true, but just to be meaningful) at all. One short-cut method for therapists to identify the portions of the client's model which are impoverished is to be able to recognize the presuppositions of the client's sentences. The client states:
I realize that my wife doesn't love me.
The therapist may respond by identifying the presupposition and challenge it directly by bringing the presupposition of the Surface Structure out into the open for examination and challenge. In order to understand the sentence at all, it is necessary for the therapist to accept the presuppositions:
Her husband doesn't love her.

There is an explicit test for what, if any, presuppositions a sentence has. The therapist takes the Surface Structure and forms a new sentence which is the same as the old one except that it has a negative word in it attached to the first verb — in this case the sentence:
I don't realize that my husband doesn't love me.
Then, the therapist simply asks himself whether the same sentence would have to be true in order for this new sentence to make sense. Any sentence which must be true for both the client's statement and the new statement, which was formed by the old statement plus the negative word, to make sense is a presupposition. Presuppositions are particularly insidious as they are not presented openly for consideration. They identify in the model some of the basic organizing principles which limit the client's experience.

What we are proposing here is that there is a subset of the well-formed sentences of English which we recognize as well formed in therapy. This set, the set of sentences which are well formed in therapy and acceptable to us as therapists, are sentences which:

Are well formed in English, and
Contain no transformational deletions or unexplored deletions in the portion of the model in which the client experiences no choice.
Contain no nominalizations (process-event).
Contain no words or phrases lacking referential indices.
Contain no verbs incompletely specified.
Contain no unexplored presuppositions in the portion of the model in which the client experiences no choice.
Contain no sentences which violate the semantic conditions of well-formedness.

By applying these well-formedness conditions to the client's Surface Structures, the therapist has an explicit strategy for inducing change in the client's model.

Incantations for Growth and Potential

As we introduce each specific linguistic phenomenon, we will identify which of these processes — Generalization, Deletion, or Distortion — is involved. The point is for you to come to recognize and obtain from the client communication which consists wholly of sentences which are well formed in therapy. You, as a native speaker, are able to determine which sentences are well formed in English; the following examples are designed to sharpen your ability to detect what is well formed in therapy — a subset of sentences that are well formed in English. We will present the material in two steps: recognition of what is well formed in therapy and what to do when you have identified in therapy a sentence which is not well formed.

The difference between what you, as a therapist, may understand the client's Surface Structure to imply and what that Surface Structure literally represents comes from you. Those elements that you, yourself, supply may or may not fit the client's model. There are a number of ways to determine whether what you supply is fitting for the client. Your skill as a therapist will increase as your skill in making this distinction increases.

DELETION

The purpose of recognizing deletions is to assist the client in restoring a fuller representation of his experiences. Deletion is a process which removes portions of the original experience (the world) or full linguistic representation (Deep Structure). The linguistic process of deletion is a transformational process — the result of deletion transformations — and a special case of the general modeling phenomenon of Deletion wherein the model we create is reduced with respect to the thing being modeled. Deep Structure is the full linguistic representation. The representation of this representation is the Surface Structure — the actual sentence that the client says to communicate his full linguistic model or Deep Structure. As native speakers of English, therapists have intuitions which allow them to determine whether the Surface Structure represents the full Deep Structure or not. Thus, by comparing the Surface Structure and the Deep Structure, the therapist can determine what is missing. Example:
(1) I'm confused.
The basic process word is the verb confuse. The verb confuse has the potential of occurring in sentences with two arguments or noun phrases — in sentences such as:
(2) I'm confused by people.
Since the verb confuse occurs in sentence (2) with two argument nouns (I and people), the therapist can conclude that Surface Structure (1) is not a full representation of the Deep Structure from which it was derived. In a step-by-step format, the procedure can be outlined as follows:

Step 1: Listen to the Surface Structure the client presents;
Step 2: Identify the verbs in that Surface Structure;
Step 3: Determine whether the verbs can occur in a sentence which is fuller — that is, has more arguments or noun phrases in it than the original.

If the second sentence has more argument nouns than the original Surface Structure presented by the client, the original Surface Structure is incomplete — a portion of the Deep Structure has been deleted. The first step in learning to recognize deletions is to identify sentences in which deletions have occurred. Thus, for example, sentence (3) is an essentially complete representation of its Deep Structure:
(3) George broke the chair.
On the other hand, sentence (4) is an incomplete representation of its Deep Structure:
(4) The chair was broken

Once the therapist has recognized that the Surface Structure the client has presented is incomplete, the next task is to help the client recover the deleted material. The most direct approach we are aware of is to ask specifically for what is missing. For example, the client says: I'm upset. The therapist recognizes that the Surface Structure is an incomplete representation of the Deep Structure from which it came.Specifically, it is a reduced version of a Deep Structure which has a fuller Surface Structure representation of the form:
I'm upset about someone/something.
Thus, to recover the missing material, the therapist asks:
Whom/what are you upset about?
or more simply
about whom/what?

We have identified three special classes of Deletions. These are special in the sense that we encounter them frequently in therapy, and the Surface Structure forms that they have can be identified directly.

Class I: Real Compared to What

Comparatives, as the name suggests, involve a comparison of (minimally) two distinct things. For example, the Surface Structure:
She is better for me than my mother.
includes both of the things compared (she and my mother). The class of Surface Structure which we characterize as involving the deletion of one term of the comparative construction includes, for example:
She is better for me.
where one term of the comparison has been deleted. This kind of deletion is also present in Surface Structures such as:
She is a better woman for me.
where the comparative adjective appears in front of the noun to which it applies.

In coping with this class of deletions, the therapist will be able to recover the deleted material using two simple questions:

For comparatives:
The comparative adjective, plus compared to what? e.g., more aggressive compared to what? or, funnier than what?

For superlatives:
The superlative, plus with respect to what? e.g., the best answer with respect to what? the most difficult with respect to what?

In a step-by-step format, the procedure is:

Step 1: Listen to the client, examining the client's Surface Structure for the grammatical markers of the comparative and superlative construction; i.e., Adjective plus er, more/less plus Adjective, Adjective plus est, most/least plus Adjective.
Step 2: In the case of comparatives occurring in the client's Surface Structuring, determine whether both terms that are being compared are present; in the case of superlatives, determine whether the reference set is present.
Step 3: For each deleted portion, recover the missing material by using the questions suggested above.

Class II: Clearly and Obviously

The second class of special deletions can be identified by ly adverbs occurring in the Surface Structures the client presents. For example, the client says:
Obviously, my parents dislike me.
or
My parents obviously dislike me.
Notice that these Surface Structures can be paraphrased by the sentence
It is obvious that my parents dislike me.
Once this form is available, the therapist can more easily identify what portion of the Deep Structure has been deleted. Specifically, in the example, the therapist asks
To whom is it obvious?

Surface Structure adverbs which end in ly are often the result of deletions of the arguments of a Deep Structure process word or verb. The paraphrase test can be used by the therapist to develop his intuitions in recognizing these adverbs. The test we offer is that, when you encounter an adverb ending with ly, attempt to paraphrase the sentence in which it appears by:

Deleting the ly from the Surface Structure adverb and placing it in the front of the new Surface Structure you are creating.
Add the phrase it-is in front of the former adverb.
Ask yourself whether this new Surface Structure means the same thing as the client's original Surface Structure.

If the new sentence is synonymous with the client's original, then the adverb is derived from a Deep Structure verb and deletion is involved. Now, by applying the principles used in recovering missing material to this new Surface Structure, the full Deep Structure representation can be recovered.

Once the therapist has identified the adverbs that have been derived from Deep Structure verbs by paraphrasing the client's original Surface Structure, he may apply the methods for recovering deleted material to the Surface Structure paraphrase. In a step-by-step procedure, therapists can handle this particular class of deletion by:

Step 1: Listen to the client's Surface Structure for ly adverbs.
Step 2: Apply the paraphrase test to each ly adverb.
Step 3: If the paraphrase test works, examine the new Surface Structure.
Step 4: Apply the normal methods for recovering the deleted material.

Class III: Modal Operators

The third class of special deletions is particularly important in recovering material which has been deleted in going from the client's experience to his full linguistic representation — Deep Structure. These Surface Structures often involve rules or generalizations that the clients have developed in their models. For example, the client says:
I have to take other people's feelings into account.
or
One must take other people's feelings into account.
or
It is necessary to take other people's feelings into account.

You will be able to identify a number of deletions in each of these Surface Structures on the basis of the principles and exercises we have already presented (e.g., feelings about whom/what?). The deletion we want to draw your attention to here, however, is a larger scale deletion. These Surface Structures make the claim that something must occur — they immediately suggest to us the question, "Or what?" In other words, for us, as therapists, to come to understand the client's model clearly, we must know the consequences to the client of failing to do what the client's Surface Structure claims is necessary. Thus, the therapist may ask:
Or what will happen?
or, in a more expanded form
What would happen if you failed to ___?
where you substitute the appropriate part of the client's original Surface Structure in the ___. Specifically, using the above as an example, the client says
One must take other people's feelings into account.
The therapist may respond,
Or what will happen?
or, more fully,
What would happen if you failed to take other people's feelings into account?

DISTORTION — NOMINALIZATIONS

The linguistic process of nominalization is one way the general modeling process of Distortion occurs in natural language systems. The purpose of recognizing nominalizations is to assist the client in re-connecting his linguistic model with the ongoing dynamic processes of life. Specifically, reversing nominalizations assists the client in coming to see that what he had considered an event, finished and beyond his control, is an ongoing process which can be changed. The linguistic process of nominalization is a complex transformational process whereby a process word or verb in the Deep Structure appears as an event word, or noun, in the Surface Structure. The first step in reversing nominalizations is to recognize them. Therapists, as native speakers, may use their intuitions to identify which elements of the Surface Structure are, in fact, nominalizations. For example, in the Surface Structure,
I regret my decision to return home.
the event word or noun decision is a nominalization. This means that in the Deep Structure representation there appeared a process word or verb, in this case the verb decide.
I regret that I'm deciding to return home.
True nouns will not fit into the blank in the phrase an ongoing ___, in a well-formed way. For example, the true nouns chair, kite, lamp, fern, etc., do not fit in a well-formed way — an ongoing chair, an ongoing kite, etc. However, nouns such as decision, marriage, failure, derived from Deep Structure verbs, do fit — an ongoing decision, an ongoing marriage, etc. Thus, therapists may train their intuitions using this simple test. In a step-by-step format, the therapist may recognize nominalizations by:

Step 1: Listen to the Surface Structure presented by the client.
Step 2: For each of the elements of the Surface Structure which is not a process word or verb, ask yourself whether it describes some event which is actually a process in the world, or ask yourself whether there is some verb which sounds/looks like it and is close to it in meaning.
Step 3: Test to see whether the event word fits into the blank in the syntactic frame, an ongoing ___

For each non-verb occurring in the client's Surface Structure which either describes an event which you can associate with a process or for which you can find a verb which is close in sound/appearance and meaning, a nominalization has occurred.

We are aware that we have a number of choices when we encounter nominalizations. We may choose to question the nominalization directly. For example, given the Surface Structure:
The decision to return home bothers me.
we may directly challenge the idea that the decision is an irrevocable, fixed and finished event from which the client has disassociated himself by asking,
Is there any way that you can imagine changing your decision?
or, again,
What is it that prevents you from changing your decision?
or, again,
What would happen if you reconsidered and decided not to return home?

In each of these cases, the therapist's questions require a response by the client which involves his taking some responsibility for the process of deciding. In any event, the therapist's questioning helps the client to re-connect his linguistic model of the world with the ongoing processes which are present there.

GENERALIZATION

One of the universal processes which occur when humans create models of their experiences is that of Generalization. Generalization may impoverish the client's model by causing loss of the detail and richness of their original experiences. Thus, generalization prevents them from making distinctions which would give them a fuller set of choices in coping with any particular situation. At the same time, the generalization expands the specific painful experience to the level of being persecuted by the universe (an insurmountable obstacle to coping). For example, the specific painful experience "Lois doesn't like me" generalizes to "Women don't like me." The purpose of challenging the client's generalizations is to:

Re-connect the client's model with his experience.
Reduce the insurmountable obstacles which result from generalizations to something definite with which he can begin to cope.
Insure detail and richness are present in the client's model, thus creating choices based on distinctions which were not previously available.

Linguistically, we are aware of two important ways which we use to identify the generalizations in the client's model. At the same time, these provide us with a vehicle for challenging these generalizations. These are the processes of:

Checking for referential indices for nouns and event words;
Checking for fully specified verbs and process words.

Referential Indices

For example, in the Surface Structure
People push me around.
the noun people carries no referential index and, therefore, fails to identify anything specific in the client's experience. On the other hand, the sentence
My father pushes me around.
contains two nouns (my father and me), both bearing a referential index which identifies somethingspecific in the client's model. Again, a step-by-step procedure is available.

Step 1: Listen to the client's Surface Structure, identifying each non-processword.
Step 2: For each of these, ask yourself whether it picks out a specific person or thing in the world.

If the word or phrase fails to pick out a specific person or thing, then the therapist has identified a generalization in the client's model.

Once the therapist has identified the words and phrases without referential indices, it is quite easy to ask for these. Only two questions are required:
Who, specifically?
What, specifically?
In requiring the client to supply referential indices by answering these questions, the client re-connects the generalizations in his model with his experiences.

Universal quantifiers, and words and phrases containing them, have no referential index. We use a special form of challenge for the universal quantifier and words and phrases containing it. For example, the Surface Structure presented before:
Nobody pays any attention to what I say.
may be challenged as we suggested before or with the challenge:
You mean to tell me that NOBODY EVER pays attention to you AT ALL?
What we are doing here is emphasizing the generalization described by the client's universal quantifier by exaggerating it both by voice quality and by inserting additional universal quantifiers in the client's original Surface Structure. This challenge identifies and emphasizes a generalization in the client's model. At the same time, this form of challenge asks clients if there are any exceptions to their generalizations. A single exception to the generalization starts the client on the process of assigning referential indices and insures the detail and richness in the client's model necessary to have a variety of options for coping.
C: Nobody pays any attention to what I say.
T: Do you mean to tell me that NOBODY EVER pays attention to you AT ALL?
C: Well, not exactly.
T: OK, then; who, specifically, doesn't pay attention to you?

Once the therapist has identified a generalization it can be challenged in several ways.

(a) As mentioned in the section on universal quantifiers, generalizations can be challenged by emphasizing the universal nature of the claim by the Surface Structure by inserting universal quantifiers into that Surface Structure. The therapist now asks the client to check the new generalization explicit in this Surface Structure against his experience. For example, the client says:
C: It's impossible to trust anyone.
T: It's always impossible for anyone to trust anyone?
The purpose of the therapist's challenge to the generalization is to re-connect the client's generalization with the client's experience. The therapist has other options in the way that he may challenge the client's generalizations.

(b) Since the purpose of challenging the client's generalizations is to re-connect the client's representation with his experience, one very direct challenge is, literally, to ask the client whether he has had an experience which contradicts his own generalization. For example, the client says:
C: It's impossible to trust anyone.
T: Have you ever had the experience of trusting someone?
or
Have you ever trusted anyone?
Notice that, linguistically, the therapist is doing several things: Relativizing the generalization to the client's experience by shifting the referential index from no index (the missing indirect object of the predicate impossible [i.e., impossible for whom?] and the missing subject of the verb trust) to linguistic forms carrying the client's referential index (i.e., you).

(c) A third way of challenging generalizations of this form is to ask the client whether he can imagine an experience which would contradict the generalization. The client says:
C: It's impossible to trust anyone.
T: Can you imagine any circumstance in which you could trust someone?
or,
Can you fantasize a situation in which you could trust someone?
Once the client has succeeded in imagining or fantasizing a situation which contradicts the generalization, the therapist may assist the client in opening up this part of his model by asking what the difference between the client's experience and the client's fantasy is, or what prevents the client from achieving the fantasy.

Incompletely Specified Verbs

The second form of generalization which occurs in natural language systems is that of verbs which are not completely specified. For example, in the Surface Structures,
My mother hurt me.
My sister kicked me.
My friend touched me on the cheek with her lips.
the image presented is increasingly more specific and clear. So, in the first, the mother referred to may have caused some physical hurt or the hurt may have been "psychological"; she may have done it with a knife or a word or a gesture, ... all of this is left incompletely specified. In the next sentence, the sister mentioned may have kicked the speaker with her left or her right foot, but it is specified to have been her foot; where the speaker was kicked is left unspecified. In the third example, the image presented is even more specified — the way the friend mentioned made contact is stated (touched with her lips) and the place on the speaker's body where contact was made is also specified (on the cheek). Notice, however, that the duration of the contact, the roughness or gentleness, are left unspecified.

Since every verb is to some degree incompletely specified, we suggest the following procedure:

Step 1: Listen to the client's Surface Structure, identifying the process words or verbs.
Step 2: Ask yourself whether the image presented by the verb in its sentence is clear enough for you to visualize the actual sequence of events being described.

If the therapist finds that the image he has from the verb and the accompanying words and phrases of the client's Surface Structure is not clear enough to visualize the actual sequence of events being described, then he should ask for a more completely specified verb. The question available to the therapist to clarify the poorly focused image is:
How, specifically, did X ___ Y?
where X = the subject of the incompletely specified verb and Y = the incompletely specified verb plus the remainder of the client's original Surface Structure. For example, given the Surface Structure
Susan hurt me.
the therapist asks for a more fully specified image with the question
How, specifically, did Susan hurt you?

PRESUPPOSITIONS

Presuppositions are one linguistic reflex of the process of Distortion. The therapist's purpose in recognizing presuppositions is to assist the client in identifying those basic assumptions which impoverish his model and limit his options in coping. Linguistically, these basic assumptions show up as presuppositions of the client's Surface Structures. For example, to make sense out of the Surface Structure
I'm afraid that my son is turning out to be as lazy as my husband.
the therapist has to accept as true the situation expressed by the sentence presupposed by this sentence. Specifically,
My husband is lazy.

Notice that this last Surface Structure, the presupposition of the one before, does not appear directly as any part of the sentence which presupposes it. Linguists have developed a test for determining what the presuppositions of any given sentence are. Adopted for the Meta-model they are

Step 1: Listen for the main process word or verb in the client's Surface Structure — call this Sentence A.
Step 2: Create a new Surface Structure by introducing the negative word in the client's original Surface Structure on the main verb — call this Sentence B.
Step 3: Ask yourself what must be true for both A and B to make sense.

All of the things (expressed in the form of other sentences) which must be true for both A and B to make sense are the presuppositions of the client's original sentence. Specifically, in the case of the sentence,
I'm afraid that my son is turning out to be as lazy as my husband.
by introducing the negative on the main verb (afraid), the therapist creates a second sentence,
I'm not afraid that my son is turning out to be as lazy as my husband.
The point here is that, for the therapist to make sense out of this new Surface Structure, it must be true that
My husband is lazy.
Since both the client's original Surface Structure and the new Surface Structure formed from it by introducing the negative element require that this last sentence be true, this last Surface Structure is the presupposition of the client's original sentence.

Having identified the presuppositions of the client's Surface Structures, the therapist may now challenge them. Due to the complexity of the presuppositions, the therapist has a number of choices.

The therapist may present the client with the presupposition implicit in his original Surface Structure directly. In doing this, the therapist can ask the client to explore this presupposition, using the other well-formed-in-therapy conditions. For example, the client says, I'm afraid that my son is turning out to be as lazy as my husband. The therapist identifies the presupposition My husband is lazy. and presents it to the client, asking her how, specifically, her husband is lazy. The client responds with another Surface Structure which the therapist evaluates for well-formedness-in-therapy.
The therapist may decide to accept the presupposition and apply the well-formed-in-therapy condition to the client's original Surface Structure, asking to specify the verb, recover the deleted material, etc.

SEMANTIC WELL-FORMEDNESS

The purpose of recognizing sentences which are semantically ill formed is to assist the client in identifying the portions of his model which are distorted in some way that impoverishes the experiences which are available to him. Typically, these impoverishing distortions take the form of limiting the client's options in some way that reduces the client's ability to act. We have identified some frequently occurring classes of semantic ill-formedness which we typically encounter in therapy.

Cause and Effect

This class of semantically ill-formed Surface Structures involves the belief on the part of the speaker that one person (or set of circumstances) may perform some action which necessarily causes some other person to experience some emotion or inner state. Typically, the person experiencing this emotion or inner state is portrayed as having no choice in responding the way he does. For example, the client says,
My wife makes me feel angry.
Notice that this Surface Structure presents a vague image in which one human being (identified as My wife) performs some action (unspecified) which necessarily causes some other person (identified as me) to experience some emotion (anger).

We will now present a set of Surface Structures, all of which are semantically ill formed in the way we have been discussing. This is to assist you in training your intuitions to recognize examples of this type of semantic ill-formedness.
She compels me to be jealous.
You always make me feel happy.
He forced me to feel bad.
She causes me a lot of pain.
Your writing on the wall bothers me.
Their crying irritates me.

In addition to Surface Structures which are of these two general forms, there are others which have a different form but have the same meaning relationships. For example, the Surface Structure
She depresses me.
carries the same meaning relationship as the Surface Structure
She makes me feel depressed.

In fact, to assist therapists in training their intuitions to recognize semantically ill-formed Surface Structures of this type, this paraphrase test can be used. Specifically, if the Surface Structure the client presents can be translated from
X Verb Y
where X and Y are nouns with different referential indices into the general form
X Verb (cause) Y Verb (feel experience) Adjective (emotion or inner state)
where the adjective is a form related to the verb in the client's original Surface Structure and the new Surface Structure means the same as the client's original Surface Structure, then the Surface Structure is semantically ill formed. As an additional example, the client says,
You bore me.
To apply the paraphrase test, move the verb in this Surface Structure to the end of the new Surface Structure and put the verb cause or make in its original position, and insert the verb feel or experience, yielding,
You make me feel bored.
The question now is whether this new Surface Structure and the client's original mean the same thing. In this case, they do, and the client's original Surface Structure is identified as being semantically ill formed.

In addition to the forms of Surface Structures which we have presented involving ways that the client experiences having no choice, we have found it useful in teaching other therapists in training to hear the cue word but. This conjunction but, which translates in many of its uses logically as and not, functions to identify what the client considers the reasons or conditions which make something he wants impossible or which make something he doesn't want necessary. For example, the client says:
I want to leave home but my father is sick.
When we hear Surface Structures of this form, we understand the client to be identifying a cause-effect relationship in his model of the world. Thus, we call Surface Structures of this general form Implied Causatives.
X but Y
In the specific example above, the client is reporting what is a necessary causal connection in his model, namely, that his father's being sick prevents him from leaving home. The portion of the Surface Structure represented by X identifies something the client wants (i.e., to leave home) and the portion represented by Y identifies the condition or reason (i.e., my father is sick) that the client is blocked from getting X.

Therapists have at least the following three choices in coping with Implied Causatives.

(a) Accept the cause-effect relationship and ask if it is always that way. For example, the client says:
I don't want to get angry but she is always blaming me.
The therapist may respond:
Do you always get mad when she blames you?
The client will often recognize times when she has blamed him and he has not gotten angry. This opens up the possibility of determining what the difference is between those times and when her blaming "automatically makes" the client angry.

(b) Accept the cause-effect relationship and ask the client to specify this relationship of Implied Causative more fully. To the client's Surface Structure above, the therapist may respond:
How, specifically, does her blaming you make you angry?
The therapist continues to ask for specifics until he has a clear image of the process of Implied Causation as represented in the client's model.

(c) Challenge the cause-effect relationship. One direct way of doing this which we have found useful is to feed back a Surface Structure which reverses the relationship. For example, the client says:
I don't want to get angry but she's always blaming me.
The therapist may respond:
Then, if she didn't blame you, you wouldn't become angry, is that true?
or, the client says:
I want to leave home but my father is sick.
The therapist may respond:
Then, if your father weren't sick, you would leave home, right?
This technique amounts to asking the client to reverse the condition in his model which is preventing him from achieving what he wants, or to reverse or remove the conditions in his model which are forcing him to do something he doesn't want to do and then asking whether this reversal gives him what he wants.

Mind Reading

This class of semantically ill-formed Surface Structures involves the belief on the part of the speaker that one person can know what another person is thinking and feeling without a direct communication on the part of the second person. For example, the client says:
Everybody in the group thinks that I'm taking up too much time.
Notice that the speaker is claiming to know the contents of the minds of all of the people in the group.

Another less obvious example of this same class is Surface Structures which presuppose that some person is able to read another's mind. For example,
If she loved me, she would always do what I would like her to do.
I'm disappointed that you didn't take my feelings into account.

In our experience, Surface Structures which include Cause and Effect and Mind-Reading identify portions of the client's model in which impoverishing distortions have occurred. In Cause and Effect Surface Structures, the clients feel that they literally have no choice, that their emotions are determined by forces outside of themselves. In Mind-Reading Surface Structures, the clients have little choice as they have already decided what the other people involved think and feel. Therefore, they respond on the level of their assumptions about what these others think and feel when, in fact, their assumptions about the others' thoughts and feelings may be invalid. Conversely, in Cause and Effect, the client may come to feel guilty or, at least, responsible for "causing" some emotional response in another. In Mind-Reading clients may systematically fail to express their thoughts and feelings, making the assumption that others are able to know what they are thinking and feeling. We are not suggesting that it is impossible for one human being to come to know what another is thinking and feeling but that we want to know exactly by what process this occurs. Since it is highly improbable that one human being can directly read another's mind, we want details about how this information was transferred. We view this as being very important, as in our experience the client's assumed ability to read another's mind and the client's assumptions that another can read his mind is the source of vast amounts of inter-personal difficulties, miscommunication and its accompanying pain. Even less probable from our experience is the ability of one person to directly and necessarily cause an emotion in another human being. Therefore, we label all Surface Structures of these forms semantically ill formed until the process by which what they claim is true is made explicit, and the Surface Structures representingthis process are themselves well formed in therapy. The therapist asks for an explicit account of the process implied by Surface Structures of these two classes essentially by the question how? As before, in the section on incompletely specified verbs, the therapist is satisfied only when he has a clearly focused image of the process being described. This process might proceed as follows:

C: Henry makes me angry.
T: How, specifically, does Henry make you angry?
C: He never considers my feelings.
The therapist has at least the following choices:
(a) What feelings, specifically?
(b) How do you know that he never considers your feelings?
The therapist chooses to ask (b) and the client responds
C: Because he stays out so late every night.
The therapist now has at least the following choices:
(a) Does Henry's staying out at night always make you angry?
(b) Does Henry's staying out at night always mean that he never considers your feelings?
The client's subsequent Surface Structures are subjected to the well-formed-in-therapy conditions by the therapist.

Each of the specific sections presented detail steps for you to go through in order to sharpen your intuitions regarding well formed in therapy. All that is required is that you read carefully and apply the step-by-step procedures outlined, and that you have access to some set of Surface Structures. The step-by-step procedures are presented here; the set of Surface Structures to which you may apply these techniques is available wherever people are talking. One specific way of obtaining Surface Structures to use in applying these techniques is to use your own internal voice (inner dialogue) as a source. We suggest that, initially, you use a tape recorder and tape your internal voice by speaking it out loud. Then use the tape as a source for applying the well-formed-in-therapy conditions. After you have had some practice in this, you may simply become aware of the inner dialogue and apply the conditions directly to these sentences without going through a tape recorder. This technique will provide you with a limitless source of sentences which you can use to train yourself. We cannot overemphasize the need to practice and familiarize yourself with all of the material in Chapter Four. The step-by-step procedure makes this material learnable; whether or not you specifically learn this material will depend upon your willingness to practice. While the step-by-step procedure may at first feel somewhat artificial, after some practice it will become unnecessary for you to proceed in this manner. That is, after training yourself using these explicit methods, you will be able to operate in a rule-governed way, applying the well-formed-in-therapy conditions, without any need to be aware of the step-by-step procedures.

On Becoming a Sorcerer's Apprentice

People who come to us in therapy typically have pain in their lives and experience little or no choice in matters which they consider important. All therapies are confronted with the problem of responding adequately to such people. Responding adequately in this context means to us assisting in changing the client's experience in some way which enriches it. Rarely do therapies accomplish this by changing the world. Their approach, then, is typically to change the client's experience of the world. People do not operate directly on the world, but operate necessarily on the world through their perception or model of the world. Therapies, then, characteristically operate to change the client's model of the world and consequently the client's behavior and experiences.

We have two major goals in this final chapter:

We will select and present a number of these techniques from different forms of psychotherapy; in each case, we will demonstrate how these techniques implicitly challenge and expand the client's model. Thus, they share with the explicit Meta-model we have presented here the goal of operating directly on the client's representation of the world.
We will show how these techniques link up with the explicit steps in our Meta-model in a way which indicates when their use is appropriate.

We will call the Deep Structure the reference structure for the sentence, or Surface Structure, which we hear from our clients. It is the reference structure in the sense that the Deep Structure is the source from which the Surface Structure sentence is derived. The Deep Structure is the fullest linguistic representation of the world, but it is not the world itself. The Deep Structure itself is derived from a fuller and richer source. The reference structure for the Deep Structure is the sum total of all of the client's experiences of the world. The processes which specify what happens between the Deep Structure and the Surface Structure are the three universal processesof human modeling, the rules of representation themselves: Generalization, Deletion, and Distortion. These general processes have specific names and forms within the Metamodel which we have created with the concepts and mechanics suggested by the transformational model of language; for example, referential indices, deletion transformations and, semantic wellformedness conditions. These same three general processes of modeling determine the way that Deep Structures are derived from their source — the client's experience of the world. We suggest that the same set of specific concepts and mechanisms will continue to guide us in recovering the reference structure for the Deep Structure.

The reference structure for the full linguistic representation of Deep Structure is the full range of human experience. As humans, we can be certain that each experience that we have will include certain elements or components. For the purpose of understanding these components of the reference structure for Deep Structure, we can divide them into two categories: the sensations which originate in the world, and the contribution which we make with our nervous systems to these sensations as we receive and process them, organizing them into the reference structure for the linguistic Deep Structures of our language. The exact nature of the sensations which arise in the world are not directly knowable as we use our nervous systems to model the world, even reaching out with our receptor systems, setting and calibrating them (the concept of forward feedback) in accordance with the expectations which we derive from our present model of the world. The model which we create is, of course, subject to certain constraints imposed by the world — if my model is too divergent from the world, it will not serve me as an adequate guide for my behavior in the world. Again, the way that the model each of us develops will differ from the world is in the choices (normally, not conscious) which we make as we employ the three principles of modeling. This makes it possible for each of us to entertain a different model of the world and yet live in the same real world.

While we have not yet developed an explicit structure for the range of human experience, we have some suggestions about what some of the necessary components of that reference structure will be. In addition to the check for the five senses, we have found it useful to employ a set of categories developed by Virginia Satir in her dynamic work in family systems and communication postures. Satir organizes the reference structure into three major components:

The context — what is happening in the world (i.e., in the client's representation of the world);
The client's feelings about what is happening in the world (as represented);
The client's perceptions of what others are feeling about what is happening in the world (as represented).

We are aware that, while the client's reports of feelings about what is happening will occur in the form of Surface Structures which are subject to the techniques of the Meta-model, we have not emphasized this as a necessary component of a well-formed Deep Structure. The client's feelings about what is happening in the world are, however, a necessary component of any well-formed reference structure. In other, words, therapists may be sure that the reference structure is incomplete, or, in the terms we have developed in this book, not well formed, if the client's feelings are not represented in the reference structure. This is equivalent to saying that human emotions are a necessary component of human experience.

An additional and very potent question suggests itself. This new question, which is characteristic of Satir's work, is: "How do you feel about your feelings about what is happening?" Consider this question in the light of the Meta-model. This is essentially a request on the part of the therapist for the client to say how he feels about his reference structure — his model of the world — focusing specifically on his feelings about the image that he has of himself in his model. This, then, is an explicit way of directly approaching what is called in many therapies the client's self-esteem — a very potent area of the client's reference structure and one closely connected with the possibility of change for that person.

These particular categories and techniques of Satir's offer a beginning to determine the set of the minimum necessary components for completeness of the well-formed-in-therapy reference structures. In observing extremely effective therapists, such as Satir, we have identified other types of categories which we offer as part of the set of minimum components which must be present for a reference structure to be well formed with respect to completeness, another way of checking for completeness in the client's reference structures. These include:

The way the client is representing his past experiences in the present — these are often in the form of rules about his behavior;
The way the client is representing his present experience in the present — that is, what the client is aware of now;
The way the client is representing his possible future experiences in the present — that is, his expectations of what he expects the outcome of his behavior will be.

Notice that the four initial components presented by Satir (client's feelings, others' feelings, the context, client's feelings about his feelings) will occur as components of each of these three representations — the past, the present, and the future — as the client is representing them now. We have found these categories very useful in organizing our model and behavior in therapy in attempting to assist clients in developing complete reference structures.

For the remainder of this chapter we will select and discuss a number of techniques from different forms of psychotherapy. It is not our intention to teach these techniques here. Rather, in each case, we will show how the technique, as presently used, implicitly challenges the client's representation of the world, and how each of these techniques may be integrated with the Meta-model.

Guided Fantasy — A Journey into the Unknown

By guided fantasy we refer to the process in which clients use their imagination to create a new experience for themselves. The purpose of guided fantasy is to create an experience for the client which, at least in part if not in its entirety, has not been previously represented in his model. Thus, guided fantasies are most appropriately used when the client's representation is too impoverished to offer an adequate number of choices for coping in this area. Most typically, these are cases where the client is either in a situation or feels that he will be in a situation in which he hasn't sufficient representation in his model to respond in a way that he thinks is adequate. Often, the client experiences a great deal of uncertainty and fear about the resolution of these situations. For example, a client feels blocked from expressing his feelings of softness and tenderness toward his son. He has never expressed these feelings and is very apprehensive about what will happen if he does, although he has no clear idea of what that happening might be. Here, we may choose to use a guided fantasy technique — having the client create by fantasy the experience which he both wants and fears. This experience will serve as a reference structure for the client, assisting him in overcoming his fear and ultimately giving him more choice in this area of his life. Guided fantasy, then, serves as a tool for the therapist in accomplishing two things:

It provides the client with an experience which is the basis for a representation in his model where previously there had been either no representation or inadequate representation. This provides him with a guide for future behavior and coping in this area;
It provides the therapist with an experience which the therapist can use to challenge the client's presently impoverished model.

Since guided fantasy is the creation of a reference structure, tne therapist may wish to use the necessary components of a complete reference structure suggested previously in guiding the client's fantasy. Specifically, for example, the therapist may, by questioning, direct the client to report on his feelings at different points in the fantasy, or direct the client's attention to one or more of the five senses to insure a complete reference structure emerges in the client's fantasy.

We have found, in our experience, that guided fantasies often take the form of a metaphor rather than a direct representation of the "problem" that the client first identifies. For example, a client comes to a therapy session complaining that she is unable to get angry at someone with whom she works. Using the Meta-model techniques, we discover that the client also feels unable to express anger at her father and husband, and, in fact, she is unable to identify anyone at whom she feels she could express anger. There are a number of techniques available in the Meta-model to challenge this generalization; however, guided fantasy is particularly appropriate for situations in which the client has little or no representations in his model for such experiences. If, through the technique of guided fantasy, the client succeeds in expressing anger at someone in his fantasy (it doesn't matter whom), then he will have created a new reference structure which contradicts the generalization in his model. Often, once the client has successfully generated reference structures which contradict the generalization in his model, the generalization disappears, and the problems that were a result of the generalization also disappear or are reduced.

Therapeutic Double Binds

By therapeutic double binds we mean situations, imposed upon the client by the therapist, in which any response by the client will be an experience, or reference structure, which lies outside the client's model of the world. Thus, therapeutic double binds implicitly challenge the client's model by forcing him into an experience which contradicts the impoverishing limitations of his model. This experience then comes to serve as a reference structure which expands the client's model of the world.

One of the ways in which we have found therapeutic double binds particularly useful is in the area referred to by many therapies as homework. By homework we mean contracts which we make with the clients in which they agree to perform certain actions between therapeutic sessions. In the area of therapeutic double binds in homework, a client in a therapy session uncovered the generalization that
I can't try anything new because I might fail.
When the therapist, using Meta-model techniques, asked what would happen if she did try something new and failed, she replied that she wasn't sure, but that it would be very bad. She expressed a great deal of fear of the consequences of failing at something new and again stated that it was impossible, therefore, for her to try something new. At this point, the therapist decided to impose a therapeutic double bind and use the time between sessions for carrying out this bind. He made a contract with her that she would, each day between this session and the next, try something new and fail at it. Again, notice the structure of the situation created by this demand by the therapist of the client:

The client has the generalization in her model I can't fail at anything new;
The therapist structures a double bind with the contract Each day, between this session and the next, you will try something new and fail at it;
Notice the choices available to the client: (a) She can try something new each day between this session and the next and fail at it, thus fulfilling the contract, or (b) She can fail to fulfill the contract, itself a new experience;
Whichever situation occurs, the client will have an experience which will contradict her generalization and give her a reference structure which increases the amount of her choices available in the world as represented in her model.

Other Maps for the Same Territory

One of the most powerful skills which we exercise as communicators and therapists is our ability to represent and communicate our experiences in any of the representational systems which we have available as humans. Further, experienced therapists will recognize the power of assisting clients in shifting their'representational systems. For example, a client states that she has a severe headache. This is equivalent to the client's informing the therapist that she has represented some specific experience kinesthetically in a way which is causing her pain. One very powerful choice which the therapist has is to have her shift representational systems. Specifically, assuming that the therapist has already identified that the client has a highly developed ability to represent her experiences visually, the therapist tells the client to close her eyes and describe the specifics of the headache, at the same time forming a clearly focused image of the headache. There are variations of this which the therapist may employ to assist the client in achieving a visual representation. For example, he may have the client breathe deeply and, once a rhythm of breathing has been established, have the client exhale the headache forcefully onto a chair in front of her, creating a visual image there. The outcome of this shift of representational system is assisting the client in representing her experience in a representational system in which she will not cause herself pain. The power of the technique of shifting the client's experiences from one representational system to another can hardly be overestimated.

Congruity

Different portions of a person's reference structure can be expressed by different representational systems. These may occur simultaneously. There are two logical possibilities when two distinct representational systems are expressing different portions of the person's reference structure simultaneously. First, the portion of the person's reference structure which one representational system is expressing fits with the portion of the person's reference structure which the other representational system is expressing. We refer to this situation as a consistent double message, or congruity or congruent communication by the person involved. Secondly, the portion of the reference structure which one representational system is expressing does not fit with the portion of the reference structure which the other representational system is expressing. We refer to this situation as an inconsistent double message, incongruity or incongruent communication. For example, if, in a therapeutic session, the client is sitting calmly in a chair and speaking with a quiet, controlled voice, and states
I am really furious — God damn it, I'm not going to stand for this.
we have a classic example of an inconsistent double message or incongruent communication. The digital system (language) and an analogical system (body and voice quality) do not match.

Notice that, in each of the techniques which we have presented in this chapter thus far, the overall strategy that the therapist has adopted is that specified explicitly by the Metamodel, to challenge and expand the impoverished portions of the client's model. Characteristically, this takes the form of either recovering (enactment) or creating (guided fantasy) therapeutic double binds, a reference structure which contradicts and, therefore, challenges the limiting generalizations in the client's model. In this case, the incongruent communication is, itself, an indicator of the two portions of a person's inconsistent reference structure, two generalizations which can serve as contradictory reference structures for each other. The therapist's strategy here is to bring the two contradictory generalizations into contact. This can be most directly accomplished by bringing these generalizations into the same representational system.

The Structure of Magic I: A Book about Language and Therapy - by Richard Bandler, John Grinder

The Structure of Choice

The Structure of Language

The Structure of Magic

Incantations for Growth and Potential

On Becoming a Sorcerer's Apprentice

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