[Neurons] 2016 "Neurons" #16 The Strategy of Resilience

Sun Apr 10 23:40:26 EDT 2016

From: L. Michael Hall

2016 "Neurons" Meta Reflections - #16

April 11, 2016

Resilience: The Art of Bouncing Back #2

THE STRATEGY OF RESILIENCE

When I first thought about the state of resilience in 1990, I assumed it was
a primary state.  I mostly assumed that because I had no other distinction
about states.  I did not know about meta-states or gestalt states, so it was
natural to assume that the subjective experience of resilience was like
every other state that I knew about.  That explains why I studied resilience
from the NLP perspective of the steps that result in the state of
resilience.

And, at first everything was fine.  As I interviewed people, asking, "Who
had been to an emotional and personal hell and you are back?" I began to put
together how they did that.  That was in the early 1990s and there was very
little about Resilience and almost nothing under that term.  What I did find
was the stages of grief that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross had mapped out- that when
a person goes through a severe grief, the person goes through the stages of
denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.  There was also the
literature on those who had experienced Hitler's holocaust and survived,
especially Franks biography, Man's Search for Meaning.

Whatever the step-back that a person experienced, I found that the process
of bouncing back was typically one that took a fairly long time (many years)
and that involved pretty predictable stages of development.  As I began to
map this out, I recognized that were numerous states were involved, that a
person would go into those states to process the hurt, disappointment, or
trauma.  Eventually, I set out a "strategy" for how to "go for it again."
And it was that theme and title that I presented at the NLP Conference in
September of 1994.

By then I had also read Korzybski's Science and Sanity a couple of times,
had written a series of articles on the linguistic distinctions in General
Semantics that Bandler and Grinder had missed or skipped.  I had also read
Bateson's Steps toward an Ecology of Mind (1972) several times.  It was
those studies that prepared me for the surprise I was about to experience at
the Conference.

At the Conference, I had a large group, some 60 people attended Go For It-
Again!  The Strategy of Resilience.  After an introduction to the idea of
resilience, I invited someone up front to demonstrate how I elicited a
person's strategy of resilience.  My invitation question was, "Who has been
to hell and you are back again?"  Several raised their hands and the man I
picked had been through divorce, business bankruptcy, and a health crisis.
It sounded like a hellish experience to me.  "And you are back?"  Yes.
"Fully back?  Back into the zest of life?"  Yes.  "Great, I want to know how
you have done that."

>From there I began the interview.  I got the details of when and where the
set back occurred, what happened then, the stages of grief he went through,
when he moved on to accepting, then coping with life, and when he moved into
not merely coping, but mastering life's challenges, and when he finally came
to the place where he felt that he was back.   Getting the overall steps and
stages, I then reviewed with him how he moved from one stage to the next.
What was he thinking?  What beliefs supported him?  What did he do
practically that assisted?  What challenges he had to deal with, etc.?  At
one point, as he was describing moving from one stage to the next, I asked,
"How did you know that you could move to the next?"  What he answered was
both surprising, unexpected, and opened up the whole realm of what became
the Meta-States Model:

"I just knew that I would get through it.  It was as if I had a state about
my state that kept me going forward, that it was just a matter of time."

At that point, I asked, "How did you know that?" Now I don't exactly
remember what happened then.   Either he made the following statement or I
did.  It all became confused in my mind because after the statement a
thousand thoughts raced through my head.  Sop either he said, "I have a
state about my state, a meta-state," or I said, "So it is a state about the
first state, a meta-state."  I can no longer sort out who actually said the
words "meta-state."

What exploded in my head at that moment was a picture that was in the form
of a diagram.  It was a diagram of a higher-level state governing,
controlling, monitoring, framing a lower-level state.  It was at that moment
that all of the lights and bells of an insight went off inside.  Suddenly
the phrase "meta-state" brought together all of the studies in Korzybski and
Bateson that I had been studying for years and, just as suddenly, it all
made sense.  In that instant, the Meta-States Model was born.

Suddenly, also, my understanding of resilience changed.  For four years I
had been assuming that resilience was a regular state, a primary state, a
state that you could set an anchor for and trigger it when you wanted it.
Not so.  As a meta-state, this meant that resilience involved layers of
states.  This now explained the very structure of a complex state and
especially a state that does not occur in a single moment of time, but that
occurs through time and over time.  Resilience is not just one thing, it is
many things- a set of beliefs, a set of values, a set of actions during the
various stages that the resilience person goes through and experiences.

This created the first distinction in states, the difference between a
primary state and a meta-state. A primary state is a state about something
out there beyond one's self, one's nervous system whereas a meta-state is
about one's experience.  It is your thoughts-and-feelings about what you
experience in your body and which eventually begins to temper, texture, and
qualify what you experience in your body.  Later I would discover yet
another kind of state, a gestalt state, made up of multiple meta-states and
partaking of the system's property of emergence so that the gestalt state is
"more than and different from the sum of the parts."

NLP enables us to understand the primary states of fear and anger, stress
and relaxation, aversion and attraction, love and hate (or apathy), joy and
sadness, etc.  Meta-States enables us now to understand complex states that
are not easily located in the body- resilience, self-esteem, forgiveness,
leadership, magnanimity, proactivity, responsibility, etc.  And it is these
higher-level meta-states that describe the uniqueness of human experiences.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

               Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

               1 970-523-7877 

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