What is the Meta-Model?

The Meta-Model is a model of language that John Grinder and Richard Bandler developed by modelling the work of Virginia Satir. It is a very powerful model for recognising deletions, distortions and generalizations in a person’s language to help recover the deep structure behind the surface structure utterance.

It also gives a model on challenging these deletions, distortions and generalizations so that the deep structure can be recovered, to find out what the presenting problem is really about.

The 3 Processes for Internalizing

Distortions: Are utterances where there is a distortion to the truth. E.g. “She doesn’t like me” is a distortion and is classified in the model as a Mind Read. It is challenged by “How do you know?”

Generalizations: Are utterances where the person experiences one thing and extends this to all things of a similar nature and then creates a belief. “Nobody can run a mile in under 4 minutes” Challenged by either challenging the belief, repeating the generalization, or postulate an opposite frame, e.g. “What would happen if someone did?” or “What?, Nobody?”

Deletions: Recover lost information. E.g. “She hurt me”, might be challenged with “How specifically?”