The meta-model is a model of language that John Grinder and Richard Bandler developed by modelling the work of Virginia Satire. 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 generalization so that the deep structure can be recovered, to find out what the presenting problem is really about.
The 3 process for internalizing are:
Distortions: Are utterance 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 utterance 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?”
See also:What is NLP?