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I USED THE TERM “INCANTATIONS” in The Structure of Magic I to describe the use of language in change-work for a very good reason. Words—as occultists, philosophers, psychologists, and writers know all too well—have magical effects. When I invite clients to “sit for a spell,” the ambiguity is deliberate. I want them to begin to be open to the possibility of change—and to the fact that the change may seem magical; often, it is.

One important aspect to helping people change is making sure they feel you understand their problem, then to move them as quickly as possible from their problem state to the solution you have prepared for them. Words are the primary means by which you can help create this kind of change.

Watching Virginia Satir work, I noticed that she tended to reflect her clients’ sensory predicates—those words and phrases that signify which of the five senses is dominant at the time of speaking.

Someone might say: “I just feel everything’s getting on top of me and I can’t move forward or back. I just don’t see a way through this.” She would reply: “I feel the weight of your problems is stopping you from finding your direction, and the best route you can take isn’t clear yet…”

She did this intuitively and achieved really close connections with her clients.

On the other hand, I often observed therapists who had no concept of the sensory preferences of their clients and just spoke the same way to everybody they met. In response to “I’m weighed down by all my problems,” a less enlightened therapist might respond, “Well, you need to listen to what I’m saying so you can see some light at the end of the tunnel.” These therapists were talking a different language from their clients, and their clients felt as if they were somehow not being listened to or understood.

Couples sometimes end up in trouble by not recognizing these differences. One person—the visual partner—might express love in the form of gifts and flowers, but the other—the auditory partner—still feels neglected because the words “I love you” are never actually spoken out loud.

Once you have successfully matched the other person’s preferred sensory system, you can begin to lead them in new directions, to increase their ability to process effectively and make enduring change. We do not want the subject to stay stuck in one processing mode; this lack of flexibility landed the person in trouble in the first place.

One of my objections to the Montessori method was just this. Originally, when a kinesthetic child was identified, he was taught only by kinesthetic methods. Likewise, visual children were taught only visually, and auditory children were taught strictly by auditory methods, thereby stunting their growth and possibilities. They were stuck on one channel, whereas real learning involves crossing into other sensory channels to optimize an individual’s potential.

Expanding a client’s experience by expanding the limits of his or her subjective model is central to the methods adopted by all the truly effective therapists and teachers I have studied. Other characteristics of effective therapists and teachers include:

 They tend to be proactive and directed toward outcomes rather than formalized in their approach.

 Their sensory acuity is well developed and they respond to the patient in the moment, rather than invoking a concept of what should be done.

 They demonstrate behavioral flexibility, trying different approaches, and work toward developing the same quality in their clients.

 They share a belief—not necessarily made explicit—that the structure of the client’s problem is more significant for making change than its content.

 They see problem clients as a challenge and an opportunity to learn.

 They regard the client’s condition as an attempt to deal with a problem, rather than a sign that the client is broken or stuck.

 They have certain unconscious or intuitive skills and behavior patterns in common.

Among these commonalities was the kind of questions they asked. Somehow these people seemed to have the ability to ask questions that put the client on the way to recovery. When we analyzed the effective therapists and teachers, we found that they focused less on gaining more information about the possible origins of the problem, and they paid more attention to helping the client retrieve deleted, distorted, and generalized information. In this way, the client was able to reconfigure her or his internal map. The syntactic distinctions, published as the Meta Model in Volume I of The Structure of Magic, were intended to explore the under lying, full sensory representation (the deep structure) of the thoughts and utterances (the surface structure) made after information had been filtered out by the processes of deletion, distortion, and generalization. A simplified version of the model is laid out in Resource File 4 (page 311), and I suggest you spend some time studying and practicing the different patterns and their challenges. The section that follows is intended to give a feeling for what is possible with mastery of the model.

Over the years, some people have come to see the Meta Model as a form of therapy, possibly because the book included a transcript of a therapy session, identifying a client’s violations of the Meta Model together with the therapist’s challenges. But the Meta Model has nothing to do with therapy. It is a powerful, recursive, linguistic pattern used to uncover quality information. That’s why, when I use the Meta Model, I always ask for the biggest chunk of information first. I start the opposite way to that laid out in The Structure of Magic I.

The purpose of the Meta Model is to be meticulous, to ask the kind of questions that will help you find out how somebody’s problem works so that you make sure you alter just the problem, and not everything else in the person’s life.

Somebody comes in and says, “I’m depressed.”

I challenge the generalization (the Universal Quantifier) within the statement by asking, “Every moment of every single day? Even in the shower?”

They might admit, “Well, not always.”

I then ask, “So how do you know when to be depressed?”

Some people respond, “I’m depressed whenever I have spare time.”

With the Meta Model as a tool, there’s no reason to quit. I ask, “How do you know when it’s spare?”

They say, “Because my mind races…”

“Ah, the racing mind,” I go. Now I start to get quality information. I ask, “When your mind is racing, what exactly is it doing?” and this is where all the details emerge of how the subject is creating the experience: pictures going by, voices yakking away, feelings slopping from here to there, or any combination.

What actually happens with this approach is that you’re defining the experience as volitional instead of outside the person’s control. You say things like: “So if you make a picture of X, then you say that to yourself Y, then you feel Z…” This is all process, and once expressed as a process, it presupposes that the process is open to change.

If we accept the other way of saying things, “I have depression” or “The problem is my frustration,” the speaker has taken a verb and turned it into a noun (nominalization), and in so doing has also deleted information such as the fact that he’s making the pictures, saying those negative things in his head, and feeling those bad feelings.

Every sentence has a lost performative (an indication as to who is responsible for the action being complained of), and as soon as you restore that performative, you’re returning responsibility and power to the client. I use the phrase, “So, what you’re saying to me is…,” to restore the lost performative.

They might say: “I’m not happy” and claim they’ve “never really” been happy.

I can choose to challenge them by questioning the “never,” or I can say something like: “So, you’re saying to me that you can never be happy.”

They’ll say, “Well, yes.”

I’ll ask, “And how do you know that?”—because they’re making a comment about their state of mind, not about the nature of reality.

They’ll usually respond: “Well, I just know it, because…”

I’ll say: “No, no, I don’t want to know why. I want to know how you know.”

They’ll say something like, “Well, because I’ve never really been happy.”

I’ll follow up with: “Well, if you’ve never tried something, how do you know whether you like it or not? Maybe happiness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe really happy people are actually miserable. They could be just pretending. It could all be a big con.”

Then they say, “Okay, I know because I’ve had moments when I’ve been happy.”

I say, “Ahh, so there have been moments. What was that like?”

Using the Meta Model requires a certain amount of finesse and elegance. Just asking the questions by rote is not going to get the results you want. There should always be the presupposition of change in the language you use. For example, often, as I’m bringing someone out of trance, I tell them to “go back and remember this bad feeling for the last time.” Nobody ever questions it. I say: “Have you got it?”

They say, “It’s really hard now.”

I say, “Work at it more.”

Now, whether they get the feeling back a little or a lot doesn’t matter. They’ve already accepted the presupposition that the bad feeling can and will be felt “for the last time.”

Meta Model questions are designed to gather information. You can think of the model itself as a sword that chops up meaning. It slices things out, sorting what works from what doesn’t, always moving toward whatever outcome you want.

So, whatever it is they want, your message is, “Okay, we chop away all the things that won’t get you there.”

People will tell you they want something like “being comfortable about public speaking.” The presupposition in there, right to start with, is that what they’re asking for is a good thing. You could challenge what the Meta Model calls the Universal Quantifier by asking, “Are you saying you want to fall asleep in front of your audiences?”

They’ll say, “No, of course not. No, maybe, it’s…I’d like people to admire me.”

You might respond, “For no particular reason? You want them to just to hang around obsessively admiring you?”

They’ll say, “Wow, no. I don’t want that, I want…”

You slice away the nonsense until finally they explain, “Look, okay, so, I want to be relaxed, but alert. I want to engage my audience’s attention and see that they’re enjoying themselves,” and so on.

Then they realize they’ve been going inside, seeing themselves terrified, sweating, voice cracking, everybody in the audience laughing, and you say: “Good plan. That’ll get you into the right state.”

Not only do they see that their old behavior was not a good plan, but that they’ve been doing it habitually and also unconsciously. By asking the Meta Model questions, you bring their behavior up into consciousness, make it move a little slower, then start slicing away the nonsense. It tells you everything you need to know, including what to do next.

One of my favorite cases, which I wrote about in Magic in Action, involved a woman who had psychotic episodes whenever anyone she was expecting to meet was late. She’d been in therapy for eight years, had three different therapists that I knew about, and whenever anyone asked her why she had these responses, she’d say, “I don’t know.”

But when the woman said, “I have a problem I’m too close to,” I knew the solution was to push away the pictures. She was making pictures of horrible road accidents that became progressively closer, bigger, and more detailed, until she smelled the burning metal and felt the warm blood spattering on her skin. That would scare anyone. She let me know that we needed to push the images out, make them less and less distinct until they disappeared. We did, and it worked, all in a fifteen-minute session.