YOUR TALK:

YOUR PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

 

To assert that your talk reveals your thinking (#40) is to identify the
field of study called Psycho-Linguistics.  While this field uses the
language of linguistics and grammar, it is not strictly about linguistics
and grammar.  It is about how the way you talk reflects your inner
psychology.  This describes the very same phenomenon that the phrase
neuro-linguistics also refers to.  It refers to what your linguistics does
inside your neurology, how it influences the neurons in your brain and body,
and how that puts you into various states.

 

What does all of that mean?  It means that NLP is not about linguistics and
grammar per se, but rather about the effect of language within the human
person.  And while many people get turned off with regard to the Meta-Model
of Language, NLP's first model, that is typically because the trainer did
not understand it him or herself and did not know how to train it.
Accordingly, in many NLP schools, the Meta-Model is mentioned and then
quickly passed over thereby conveying the idea that it is not that
important.  But it is.

 

Actually, the opposite is true.  I could easily make an argument that the
most important model in NLP is the Meta-Model of Language.  Once upon a
time, Richard Bandler himself made that argument.  He said that "everything
that had been created in NLP was created with the Meta-Model."  How about
that!  In fact, it was that statement in 1989 that made me question my own
understanding of the Meta-Model.  It challenged me because I could not
explain how the Meta-Model would have been at the heart of creating
everything in NLP.  And, I wanted to know.

 

Consequently that sent me on a several year study of the Meta-Model.  It
also sent me to my first studies in Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics and
from that, I collected seven linguistic distinctions from Korzybski's work
that should have been included in the original Meta-Model but were not.  In
adding those, I called the result The Extended Meta-Model.  That's now in
the book, Communication Magic (2001).

 

Now psycho-linguistics or neuro-linguistics refers to one of the most basic
and essential mechanisms in human experience-how we think and how our
thinking generates our "sense of reality," that is, our model of the world.
To think is to use various "languages."  First, we think using the sensory
representational systems of seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting.
This thinking is without words.  Next we add words, that's the
meta-representational system and the first words are sensory-based words.
Words enable you and I to create categories, classifications, concepts, etc.
and these then become our thinking templates or perceptual filters.  This
shifts to a higher level of thinking-conceptual and evaluative thinking.

 

As you do any of these kinds of thinking, you send signals to your body how
to feel and what to do.  In other words, this is how you "program" yourself
so that you can do whatever you do.  You program yourself for how to feed
yourself, walk, run, ride a bike, dress yourself, read, write, do math, use
a computer, etc.  Your programming for how to be, and how to function as
you, is a function of your neuro-linguistics and neuro-semantics.

 

This means that the language you speak is an important determinant of how
you think.  And as you think, so you feel, respond, speak, and behave.  Your
linguistics in all of its multiple forms organizes your thinking processes.
Even a single word can operate an organizing structure for your thinking. 

 

For example, if you mis-use the word "race" to designate different ethnic
groups, you thereby program yourself to see and distinguish different
"races."  It is actually a mis-use of the word because there is only one
human race on this planet.  We are all members of that one and singular
race.  We are not different species.  If you talk about "the human race" and
include every single person in that category, you have no room for racism or
being a racist.  Then you will be color-blind as Martin Luther King, Jr.
described in his "I Have a Dream" speech.  Given this, all of the non-sense
today about racism is a self-generated problem that can disappear very
quickly when we change our languaging.

 

Amazing, isn't it?  Words program the mind.  The way you talk organizes what
we call your "personality."  No wonder Neuro-Semantics, as an upgraded
version of NLP, focuses so much on cleaning up your thinking so that you can
speak with more clarity and precision and so you can then live with more
truth and compassion.

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

(970) 523-7877

meta@acsol.net  

 WOKE THINKING SICKNESS

 

While the content of what is called Woke claims to care about social
justice, it only cares for justice for a few, not for everyone.
Originating from the "Black Lives Matter" movement, Woke thinking lacks
almost any common sense.  The first un-common sense thing that came out of
it was the defunding the police movement.  Now just a few years later, we
see many of the people who jumped on that bandwagon reversing themselves.
Why?  Because the rate of crime has been sky-rocketing, because mobs of
people rob businesses in daylight, and because the hands of police have been
tied so that they fear protecting the public

 

However, above and beyond the ideological contents of Woke is Woke thinking,
and that's the real problem.  Because Woke thinking is driven by an
ideology, and as with every ideology, that thinking is inherently biased by
its unspoken assumptions.  Consequently Woke thinking is not scientific, not
realistic, and not rational.  Rather than true thinking, it is "agenda
thinking."  When you start with an agenda, in this case a political agenda
based in Marxism and Socialism, that's why it is nearly impossible to reason
with a woke thinker.  Like every ideological thinking, woke thinking doesn't
seek the truth, but to prostyle in order to gain followers to the Woke cult.

 


Now if you use your brain well, and if you think in the way that thinking is
designed to be used, then you use it to grasp as best you can the
"territory" of the world.  Grasping it enables you to map it.  That's what
thinking is-your mental mapping of what you construe is present and how it
works.  You do that in order to navigate that territory.

 

If effective thinking puts in touch with reality, it is the means and design
of science.  It is the scientific attitude.  When we do science effectively,
we discern what is there, how it works, how to manage it, etc.  You consider
all sides, tests the validity of statements, keep your hypotheses open for
adjustment as new information arises, etc.

 

But Woke thinking does not do any of that.  For example, in biology we know
that there are two sexes and only two.  Every biologist knows that.  There
are males and females and everybody either has a penis or a vagina.  That's
the sexual facts.  For the term "gender," we generally use it as a synonym,
although "gender" also carries with it the cultural ideas of what each
gender is like, and how in any given culture we raise boys and girls.  But
today Woke thinking presents a mental map that in no way relates to reality.


 

Now regarding these facts, people within every culture develops views about
masculinity and femininity-beliefs, understandings, assumptions, etc.  These
views make up each person's psychology about males and females as concepts.
When these are framed in extreme opposition to each other, while there may
be clarity about male and female roles in a culture, there's usually also
unnecessary conflict between the sexes.  Then men aren't allowed to cry, to
be tender, to nurture, to admit weakness, etc.  Then women are not allowed
ot be angry, speak up for themselves, establish firm boundaries, say no,
etc.  Of course, these "problems" are problems of our framing and especially
cultural framing, not of reality.

 

Sexual and gender identities are functions of framing and meaning-making.
As an identity, what you think about being male or female depends on your
beliefs, understandings, permitting, forbidding, framing, etc.  If you are a
biological male and "feel like a woman" that's a psychological issue, not a
biological one.  If you're a biological female and "feel like a man" your
psychology is off.  Your biology is a given, you are either male or female.
If you have a problem with that, the problem lies not in your biology but in
your mind and emotions.  So trying to "solve" a psychological problem
biologically is a living "outside-in" approach, and will not be very
satisfactory.  And as such, it is a superficial and shallow "solution." 

 

While it is certainly possible to change one's sexual features, something
accomplished by surgery, hormone therapy, etc., chopping off breasts and
penises and reconstructing sexual parts is irreversible.  Because of that,
as a psychologist, I say that no child, adolescent, or even young adult
ought to ever make that choice.  After all, any decision that is
irreversible ought to be reserved for a time in life after the brain has
full matured -which is in the mid-30s.

 


And once a biological man has made all of the changes to become a woman, he
should never be allowed to compete in women's sports.  Let them invent some
transgender league of their own.  Women have fought long and hard for their
own leagues and for respect of their sports.  That should not be thrown away
to men who want to be women.  Everybody knows that gives them an unfair
advantage and, in the long run, will destroy women's sports.

 

Now when you try to reason with a Woke thinker, to have a rational
conversation, you'll discover the sickness of their agenda thinking.  Woke
thinking seeks to shut up anyone who disagrees.  Woke thinking bars
conservatives from college campuses and disserters from boardrooms.  Why?
Because the Woke thinker has a "religion" to promote.  That person will
argue by calling names, using labels ("racists" is their favorite),
generalizations, emotionally associating you with extreme examples-forms of
cognitive distortions and fallacies.  Their use of language itself is sick,
it is the doublespeak that Orwell described in his novel, 1984.

 

As Neuro-Semanticists, we think about how people think because as a person
thinks, so one reasons, emotes, communicates, acts, etc.  The inner game of
thinking governs all of the outer games of acting and relating.  That's why
we have to address thinking first.

 

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., Executive Director

Neuro-Semantics

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA