A Pragmatic Guide To Communication & Change.pdf - NLP Info Centre

the linguistic level (see Chapter III), we are operating on a person's 4-tuple at the level
of social constraints. At the level of individual constraints, we assist people in
understanding how their models of the world are dysfunctional, how they are causing
unnecessary pain and hardship in their lives, or how they block the awareness of
alternative thoughts, feelings or actions.
Ultimately, any learning or therapeutic experience that is successful becomes a part of
a person's personal history. Filed into his Memory Box, the new model will begin to
shape thinking and perception in new, positive, and healthy ways.
It is important to point out, as did Bundler and Grinder,''' that this discussion of
constraints on the model building processes is not meant to be a comprehensive
presentation, nor is it meant to imply that there are distinct divisions between the three
constraints. They actually overlap. The purpose of this book is to present the reader with
models for perceiving, predicting, and influencing behavior. They are useful for these
purposes even though they are inaccurate: A model merely represents what it is
modeling.
Complex Equivalents
One example of overlapping constraints concerns lan. guage. One to the influence of
neurological and individual constraints, internal representations of language (social
constraints) are different for everybody. For every word learned, everyone has a
somewhat different internal experience. These specific experiences associated with words
are called complex equiualents.'" Usually the subtleties between people's understanding
of words are irrelevant. However, there are words that sometimes lead to misunderstanding
between people. Words like loue, relationship, partnership, fear, power, trust,
respect, and any expressions linked with a person's perception of himself and the
environment are critical to the process of communication, as the example below
demonstrates.
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interpretation of personality based on a knowledge of that individual's personal history.
Individual constraints, the third in the series discussed here, are the direct result of
personal experiences. Taken as a whole, they are what form a person's historical
background.
Individual constraints are based on both neurological and social constraints, the two
underlying filters of experience. As a person continues tloe process of construction and
modification of his model of the world, it is individual constraints that form the fabric of
his belief and value systems. They play an important part in what makes up the "rose" in a
person's "rose-colored glasses." It is personal history in part that explains why a ghetto
youth is less likely to score as high on the Stanford-Binet intelligence test as a youngster
from an "upper class" family. These constraints also account for part of the diversity of
scores on tests like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.
Important to our understanding of individual models of the world is the concept of
internally generated stimuli. As previously mentioned, for every moment in time, we
create a 4-tupte of experience. This includes the parameters of visual experience (V);
feelings, which include tactile, proprioceptive, and somatic experiences (K); the
experience of sound (A); and smell and taste, also known as olfactory and gustatory
experience (OG). We also have an immense collection of stored experiences, called
memories. These memories can be manipulated, shuffled, and reorganized in very