Articles by Bob Bodenhamer & L. Michael Hall

Bob Bodenhamer, D.Min.
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Pour la traduction française, cliquez ici (PDF)

Once you discover the fantastic realization that we can put mind-body states on top of each other to create a meta-relationship between one thought, feeling, or physiology to another and that doing such creates our frames of mind, then the questions about the art of meta-stating arise.

• How do we apply or bring one state to bear upon another state?
• How can we engage in the cognitive process of meta-stating?
• How do we practically meta-state so that we create embedded frames of mind that give us new and expanded perspectives?
• How can we create the most fabulous states to improve the very quality of our lives?

 

How to Apply One State to Another State

In the field of Neuro-Semantics people express the layering of states in the following ways:

“Now apply this resource state to this other state.”

“How does this resource state transform and enrich this problem state as you bring this state to bear on this other state?”

What are we actually doing when we make these statements? These terms and questions are all seeking to establish a meta-relationship between states. When we first elicit a state of mind, feeling, and body and apply it to another, we are seeking to put it at a meta or higher level to the other. The X resource now sets a frame for the Y target state. X could be joy and delight and fun and Y could be earnest commitment. When we apply one to the other, we create joyful commitment or fun engagement. The X and Y in the following statements give clue to the meta-structures that we’re working with.

 

Bring it (X) to bear upon the other (Y).

 

What happens when you bring “joy” to bear upon “earnest commitment?”

Relate this one (X) to the other one (Y).

 

What happens when you relate “joy” to “earnest commitment?”

When you perceive or feel in terms of courage (X, or another other resourceful state), how does that transform your perceptions and feelings (Y)?

 

When you perceive or feel “joyful,” how does that transform and enrich “earnest commitment?”

With this X resource in mind, now notice Y state or situation.

 

With “joy” in mind, now notice “earnest commitment.” How does joy change your experience of “earnest commitment?”

As you adopt this higher perceptive (X) about Y, notice how you feel.

 

As you adopt the higher perspective of “joy,” notice how you feel about “earnest commitment?”

Now in your mind, rise up to X and let it transform Y.

 

Now, in your mind, just rise up to “joy” and let it transform “earnest commitment.”

Frame that thought or state (Y) with this higher or more powerful resource (X).

 

Frame your thought of “earnest commitment” with this higher and more powerful resource of “joy.” When you do that, what happens to “earnest commitment?”

Embed this problematic feeling (Y) inside of this feeling (X).

 

Why don’t you just embed “earnest commitment” with the higher level feeling of “joy.” Wouldn’t that be much better?

Applying Courage and Faith to Stuttering

 

In speaking with Jim (a client who stutters), he said that before he called me he was anxious about the call. He was worried that I would be thinking that he should be further along with the fluency then he was. This is typical. People who stutter typically worry about what others think about their speech. Of course, it’s not only people who stutter who think this way. We all do. Stutterers do not have a monopoly on such thinking. We are all in plenteous company with that worry.

When we care too much about what others think, and fail to draw the line between what we are responsible for and who we are responsible to (a foundational Neuro-Semantic pattern), we slide into co-dependent thinking. That’s when we begin to assume responsibility for another. Because the Responsibility To/For distinction is a more advanced thinking pattern, we all miss this distinction at times and so suffer from confusing the two. It is a part of being human. We learn it in childhood in normal cognitive development.

My client told me that in some areas of life he was experiencing much more fluency. When he did stutter, it wasn’t as important of a problem to him as it had been previously. He was coming to the place where he was truly giving himself permission to stutter without feeling bad about himself. “It is really not blocking; it is more stumbling.” For me this is an example of how a person’s speech improves once we stop identifying ourselves with how we talk.

He said that in some contexts he would work up a lot of anxiety over an upcoming conversation as he did with me. I considered what I could expect from him as a result of the therapy given his fear that he could not (or was not) improving in some contexts where he was still blocking and stuttering.

He explained that in some contexts he was able to reframe this problem, yet in others he was not able to reframe things to adopt a better perspective. I asked him how he was doing it in the successful situations. He said that he would reframe the old fears with the thoughts:

“I give myself permission to be vulnerable.”

“I give myself permission to feel who I am and not to think about other people’s feelings. I can do this without being selfish.”

“I am not going to judge other people by guessing what they may be thinking about me and deprive them of knowing who I am.”

The last one was a powerful reframe for him. Having uncovered these resource states in previous sessions, Jim was now finding them most helpful in the present situation. Desiring to build on these resource states and to apply them to the problem at hand about his fear regarding my expectations, I asked him a key question in Neuro-Semantics, a modeling question, “How were you able to apply the above frames of mind to the old fears?” We don’t only identify what to do, but even more importantly, how to do it.

He explained how he would create a picture representing the resource state and put it right out in front of him. Then, he would place a visual picture that represented the problem state behind the picture of the resource state. With that setup, he would then bring the picture of the problem state into (and sometimes through) the resource state. From this procedure he could:

1) See or reframe the problem state “through” the eyes of the resource state.

2) “Mesh” the two together resulting to create a new layered reframe.

3) Reduce or nullify the problem state in creating a more positive perceptive.

I thought this strategy was eloquent and effective. If you are familiar with NLP, this describes one form of the Swish Pattern.¹ So what happened with the situation between Jim and myself? The picture he had of his anticipatory anxiety that he would not meet my expectations was of the two of us together and he heard himself saying to himself,

“Bob will think I should be further along than I am. Bob has helped others quicker than he has helped me. I am not progressing fast enough.”

This was his sound track. Does this sound familiar? Use that and you can work up a good state of anticipatory anxiety. Then once it is embodied in your gut, torso, throat and jaws, you can create a full fledged blocking of speech. When he brought that image forward and meshed it with his resource image, the meaning totally changed. He said, “It is just two guys talking.”

What about his speech? He became fluent … perfectly fluent. At the beginning our session he was having difficulty speaking, stuttering quite a bit but not blocking. At the end of the session, he was speaking in a very fluent way. He will be taking today’s learning and he will be practicing it to “install” it much deeper. Because it is one thing to speak fluently with your therapist; it is another to speak fluently with your peers. Now is the time for practicing which he does very well with fantastic results.

In the Training Manual entitled Mastering Blocking and Stuttering: A Handbook for Gaining Fluency, I described the process of how to apply the resource states of courage or faith to the fear of blocking in speech.

1) Identify and access target state for change.

 

What happens when you apply courage or faith to the fear of blocking and stuttering? If you’re having trouble, then first fully entertain the state of fearing blocking and stuttering. Good. Now, put that thought-emotional state aside for a moment.

2) Identify and access a resourceful state.

 

Now access a state of courage or of faith and apply the courage or faith to the fear of blocking and stuttering.

3) Identify the structure of the “application.”

 

How do you apply one state to another? Some people apply one thought to another by simply using the words and language. Others prefer to take a visual image of both states and do it visually by moving the resource image of faith or courage to the image of blocking or stuttering. Yet others prefer to do it kinesthetically as they will move the feeling of courage or faith into the location of the feeling of fear. In every one of these instances, we create the meta-state structure of courageous fear or faithful fear.

4) Quality Control the end result.

 

How does this fit for you? How does it fit for the ecology of your health, relationships, projects, values, identity, etc.?
Does it empower you as a person? Does it enhance your life?
Is it realistic, useful, practical, desirable, etc.?

Summary

 

• Applying or bringing one state to bear upon state is something we all naturally and easily do. That’s how we create our frames of mind and attitudes. Yet we usually do so without conscious awareness or direction. It just happens.

 

• Now, however, we can take charge of this mental-emotional process and create the frames and attitudes that we want. Now we can meta-state for ourselves super-charged attitudes that will empower our performances and desired outcomes.

 

End Notes:

^1. The Swish Pattern directionalizes your brain and teaches it to how to go to a more resourceful awareness. In the Mastering Blocking and Stuttering training manual it is on page 158. You can read about that manual at:

http://www.neurosemantics.com/Books/Mastering_Stuttering.htm

 

 

Authors:

 

Bob G. Bodenhamer, D.Min. and L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. are the co-developers of Neuro-Semantics. Dr. Bodenhamer has been working and modeling in fluency of speech with and for people who stutter during the last 18 months. Out of that has come several success stories as he has used the Meta-States model to invite them to bring highly resourceful states to their primary state of anxiety or fear. For more about the application of meta-stating to stuttering, see the web site and the  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/neurosemanticsofstuttering/ e-group.

 

Neuro-Semantics is about how the meanings in our mind become embodied in our very neurology and so our unconscious default programs for how to think, feel, act, and speak. Neuro-Semantics is also about transforming such meanings to those that are much more life enhancing and empowering for people. See www.neurosemantics.com

Pour la traduction française, cliquez ici (PDF)

The subjective experience of stuttering occurs as a speech pattern when we begin to say something, but then feels “tied up” and unable to express ourselves in an easy and spontaneous way. Sometimes it feels as if we have two or more competing ideas or feelings fighting for dominance, each interrupting the other. At other times, it feels as if we’re fighting against a state of stress and anxiety. We all experience this from time to time. And yet we do not identify ourselves as “stutterers,” or think of stuttering as a particular problem. Yet others do.

Stuttering, for some people, involves a long established speech habit. For whatever reason, the experience of speaking in a non-fluent way has become one’s very style of speaking. To create this phenomenon, a person has to give lots of attention and mental-and-emotional energy to the non-fluency.

Of course this reveals a meta-level (or meta-state) structure: awareness of non-fluency, dislike and negative evaluation of the non-fluency, defining “self” in terms of this experience (“I am a stutterer”), and trying hard to not speak with non-fluency, in other words, hesitating in the hesitating.

• How can NLP effectively respond to stuttering?
• What patterns, insights, and processes in NLP can we apply to the experience of stuttering that will access the magic of transformation for those who suffer from stuttering?

Exploring the Structure of the Non-Fluency

 

Typically, the linguistic experience of stuttering involves a person accessing a state of stress and feeling that stress about speaking. This becomes especially true with regard to being put on the spot, pressured to speak, pronouncing a difficult term, presenting an idea that might not be well-accepted, feeling unprepared, etc. This implicates the role that stress plays in the experience of stuttering. This seems especially true when it involves the self-imposed stress of judging that we should not stutter or that stuttering is “bad.” In this, the more stress, the more pronounced the stuttering. In this we recognize a meta-level structure, the more we dislike and negatively judge the stuttering, the more likely the stuttering.

“Stress” here refers to a psychological state wherein we think-and-feel that a situation is threatening, dangerous, or overwhelming. In the representing of these ideas, the automatic nervous system gets cued into the Fight/Flight or General Arousal Syndrome which then activates our whole organism for survival. When we do this, it obviously affects muscle tension, breathing, and other facets of physiology affecting how we use our body, throat, vocal chords, etc. for speaking. This sets the foundation for problems with stuttering.

Yet to become truly proficient at stuttering, something more is needed. Speaking with tension in one’s voice and non-fluently alone does not lock in stuttering as a habit. To do that, we have to go meta and set a frame of judgment that we really “should not” do this. We have to taboo and prohibit non-fluency.

As we outframe our non-fluent talk with judgment, negative evaluation, dislike, self-contempt, embarrassment, etc., we give more and more psychic energy to it. This kind of negating (Command Negation) has a paradoxical effect. It makes things worst. It brings the non-fluency more and more into our mind. We mark it out even more. We punctuate it as an experience and an experience which we do not tolerate. We highlight and solidify the experience. Here we send a demanding order to ourselves:

“Do not stutter… do not hesitate in speaking. … Do not make a fool of yourself by stumbling over your words.”

Now this kind of negating will almost always amplify the very thing we’re trying to make go away. Of course, not all negations work this way. But Command Negations do. In The Structure of Excellence (1999), we have described seven other kinds of negations, some which provide us very effective ways to actually negate things so that they truly go away.

For stuttering, we begin with a state of stress as we define our speaking as dangerous if we do not speak “correctly.” We access a primary state of stress. After that, we layer yet another state of stress about the first state. We stress ourselves that we should not stutter, that it is “bad,” that it shows ourselves as inadequate, etc. In this way, we meta-state ourselves into self-judgment about non-fluency. We make a big deal over the non-fluent talk and punctuate it as something to become very conscious about. Yet, paradoxically, the more we punctuate it, the more self-conscious we become of it. We call “stuttering” into existence in this way.

Stuttering as a Skill and Accomplishment

 

In working with numerous clients with “stuttering,” Bob says that without exception, in every single person, he has found the anticipatory fear of stuttering precedes the physical act of stuttering in speech.

When I (BB) met Clint, he had problems pronouncing words that started with consonants. With words that started with vowels, he had no problem. With great mental exertion, Clint would plan what he was going to say in order to avoid words that may cause him to stutter. So he constantly, with great mental anguish, thought ahead and planned carefully what he was going to say to avoid the experience of self-conscious stuttering. Talk about a state of painful self-consciousness. Of course, this became a vicious loop. As a result, it created the anxiety and in him, first at the primary level, then at meta-levels as he brought stressful thoughts back onto himself. It all began with a fear the fear of an idea. He feared the idea of standing and reading in front of a class or a group. He feared that he would not be fluent. Therefore he became hyper-vigilant about choosing his words carefully.

He said, “I have to pronounce all of the words ahead of time in my mind as I speak.”

“Clint,” I said, “you really work hard at this!”

“Yes, I do.”

“Can you imagine what it would be like if you used all these energies to focus on the persons you’re speaking to rather than on your own self-consciousness regarding how you are saying it? What would happen if you devoted this much work and energy to that?”

From our experience in working with people who stutter, the anticipatory anxiety itself (a meta-state structure) significantly contributes to causing an actual constriction of the muscles around the larynx. This constriction prohibits the free flow of air through the larynx. The literature on stuttering confirms this.

Because Clint had real problems saying words that began with the letter m, I asked him to say multiple motors motivate us. Each time he repeated this phrase, he would stutter on the first “m” in multiple, yet once he got started, he would flow through the other two “m” words without any problem.

In NLP and Neuro-Semantics we readily recognize this mind-body or neuro-linguistic relationship. As the mind accesses states, attributes meanings, and layers thought upon thought, it evokes various muscular responses the mind-muscle connection.

Knowing this, I (Bob) directed Clint to begin forcing air through his larynx before saying “multiple,” This made a big difference. As air flowed through his throat, he begin speaking the word “multiple.” This time he did so without stuttering. When this happened, I explained that this procedure relaxed the larynx muscles and allowed him to speak without stuttering. I also informed him that before we would finish the session, I had high hopes that we could eliminate the cause of the anxiety and stress so he wouldn’t even have to worry with doing this.

The General Semantics of Stuttering

 

Wendell Johnson (1946/1989) has an extensive presentation of stuttering from the General Semantics model. In his classic book, People in Quandaries, he speaks about the social construction of stuttering. He spoke about this as our semantic environment in his seventeenth chapter, “The Indians Have No Word for It.”

As a linguist and psychologist who worked with speaking disorders, Johnson described stuttering as having the structure of “hesitating to hesitate,” or “hesitating to speak in a non-fluent” way. This negative meta-state describes a frame of prohibition and rejection over the non-fluent talk. In all of the Native American cultures that Johnson studied, he never found a single case of stuttering.

The only Native Americans that he found who did stutter had been raised in a white culture. There the parents followed their cultural programming and punctuated the experience of not speaking with perfect fluency (the natural state of children learning to speak and adults for that matter!). They marked it out. They anchored it. They set a frame to not speak hesitatingly.

This made the children aware of the non-fluency and invited them to dislike it, try to stop it, condemn it, forbid it, taboo it, etc. This did not occur in the Indian cultures. They never noticed the non-fluency. They attached no significance to its presence and so it did not “exist” for them, it was not “real” in that culture.

This describes the seeming paradoxical nature of installing a meta-frame of negation. To install “Don’t hesitate” over the normal process of talking highlights hesitancy and gets us into a self-consciousness of it. If we then attach pain to this (the psychic pain of embarrassment, inadequacy, mockery, etc.), then we have an energy system that amplifies the effect.

The Structure of Speaking with Ease and Fluency

 

If we do not stutter and hesitate when we speak, how do we speak? What is the opposite of stuttering?

The opposite is to calmly speak which usually enables us to speak smoothly and gracefully and when we are searching for words, nervous about the impression we’re making, unsure of the content or language of what we want to say we calmly speak in a non-fluent way without making much of a deal about it. The opposite of the behavior of hesitating, blocking, and stuttering is to just speak, to do as in as relaxed manner as possible and to breathe fully as we do so.

What does all of this presuppose? It presupposes that we will be operate from the frames of mind that empower and enable these kinds of states, namely feeling relaxed, calm, at ease with self, un-self-consciousness, etc.

To set these kinds of frames we have to take away the prohibitions, taboos, and inhibitions. We have to take away the dangers and threats that set off the psychological stress. As we set such frames, this gives the diaphragm and the larynx muscles permission just to relax and allow for the free flow of air and speech.

Even earlier, Viktor Frankl addressed this by using “paradoxical injunction.” He would provide instructions for clients to “speak with lots of hesitations,” and to purposefully stutter. This presupposes that we have “the stuttering” rather than the stuttering having us.

The Drop Down Meta-Stating Technique for Stuttering

 

In the following case study, Bob illustrates how to use the meta-stating process of moving outside of all negative frames and to invite a client to drop down through emotion after emotion until he drops into a Void of Nothingness, and then to drop through that. This depth metaphor essentially lets us drop down through the old frames that created the problem and then to drop into higher level resources. We can then use these meta-frames to apply (or bring to bear upon) to the experience.

Clint, a single young man of 30, had stuttered for years. With a college degree in English, he plans to teach at the college level. He will soon enter graduate school.

I (BB) began the therapeutic process by first meta-modeling the trigger that set off the stuttering. This involved “difficult” words, especially those that began with a consonant. When Clint thought about speaking difficult words, he would say to himself, “Oh, gosh, I’ve got to say this next word,” and then would come the “block.” When he then experienced this “block,” his neck muscles constricted.

As it turned out, the “block” involved a negative kinesthetic in his stomach. He called this feeling “dread.” Interestingly, Clint had already devised a kinesthetic strategy to overcome this. Once he got the feeling of dread, he would do something physical, like flip a pen in his hand. Or, if the block was especially strong, he would slap his knee very hard. By doing something physical, he could then “get the word out.” The physical act relaxed the muscles.

Given this, I had him access a relaxed state. From there I meta-stated him with that resourceful state of calm relaxation. In the process I drew a diagram illustrating the concept of Meta-States, and how they work. With his sharp mind, Clint grasped it immediately.

As he accessed a calm and relaxed state, he said, “With this feeling, the block of that dread feeling has no power to make me stutter.”

I asked about the visual images of his relaxed meta-state. He said it was just above his head in a panoramic fashion. So I next asked Clint, “What happens when you bring that relaxed state to bear on your state of dread?”

“Well, Bob, it would invalidate it.”

We repeated this process a few times and it did make some differences. Yet the resulting testing of Clint’s speaking did not satisfy me. I asked him to repeat the phrase, “Multiple motors motive me.” He stumbled again on the first word. He was pleased about how much it had diminished, but I wanted it to vanish entirely.

So I had him access his kinesthetic of “feeling of dread” which operated as his cue for stuttering. He located the “feeling of dread” in his stomach. Since a negative kinesthetic like this usually responds well to The Drop Down Through Technique (see Time-Lining, 1997), I asked him to drop down through the feeling of dread to the emotion below it.

He went immediately into the Void.

I then asked him to drop down through the Nothingness. “And what is out the other side?”

“I can see a pool of water.”

I suggested that he drop into the pool of water. “And now that you have dropped into the pool of water, describe what you feel being present in the pool of water.”

In describe the meaning of that meta-state, he used the words, “free and cool.”

That did it. That was the meta-state resource that he needed. So I kept accessing the state of feeling totally free and cool in him, and as I did, suggesting that he bring those feelings to bear on the feeling of dread that he had about speaking.

“Where is the dread now in the cool pool?”

“It is disappearing, I can see it far off. It is going. I see it above me and it is going away.”

So I prompted, “Let it go away.”

And he did.

I broke state and we began talking about something else. We did, Clint went on for tem or fifteen minutes talking in a very relaxed way. He did not stuttered one time. In our small talk, I spoke to him about NLP and described what the model offers. He kept right on talking without ever stuttering. So I anchored the cool pool and then had him anchor it in so he could recall it at will.

When he left, he knew that he had gained control over the stuttering. For years, he had exerted lots of mental and emotional energy continuously to control it. He now realized that he was free to use his mind for creativity rather than worrying about stuttering.

Summary

 

• Behaviors come out of states. The speech behavior of stuttering similarly arises from certain states and meta-states. As an expression of state dependency, stuttering makes perfect sense and functions as a highly developed skill. But it is not a very useful one. Nor does it enhance life. By transforming the state and by accessing more empowering states and meta-level structures, the experience can change for good.
• Here we have applied neuro-linguistic states and meta-states to stuttering. Additionally, a person could look for limiting beliefs that support the stuttering and transform them into empowering beliefs. A person could use the Swish Pattern to enable the one stuttering to step into “the Me for Whom that is no longer a problem.” Time-lining, collapsing of anchors, and reframing providing some other useful processes.

 

Did you like this article? Then read From Stuttering to Stability: A Case Study by Linda Rounds with Bob Bodenhamer, D. Min. for another case study of Linda’s overcoming a long term stuttering disability.

 

Also, Rising Up to Drop-Down Through: The Art of Dropping-Down Through Experiences; Even Stuttering While Rising Higher by Bobby G. Bodenhamer, D. Min. and L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

References:

 

Hall, Michael; Bodenhamer, Bobby (1999). The structure of excellence: Unmasking the meta-levels of submodalities. Grand Jct. CO: E.T. Publications.

Johnson, Wendell. (1946/ 1989). People in quandaries: The semantics of personal adjustment. San Francisco, CA: International Society for General Semantics.

Lederer, Debra; Hall, Michael. (1999). Instant relaxation: Stress reduction for work, home, and life. Wales, UK: Crown House Publications.