Frame Wars in the News

Dear Sergio:

Thanks for the great questions and insights that you offered.  True enough, I provided much of the beginning presentation from the USA point of view.  We all live within various cultural, political, religious, philosophical frames and we also live within nested frames-within frames.

And of course, detecting where the line occurs between political frames and ideological frames is also one of choice in how we punctuate things.  I find it absolutely interesting that the Political frames between Republicans and Democrats in the USA seems to shift on the Elian Story.  Whereas Republics usually take the conservative view and hold up the ideology of Family First and Family Rights, the more liberal side of the continuum, the Democrats tend to raise that ideology on this one while the Republics tend to see it strictly in terms of Communism versus Capitalism; Police State versus Freedom, etc.

True enough, stepping outside of our own frame of reference and frame of mind about any of these levels and dimensions is very difficult.  And it does indeed evoke strong emotions…  the emotions, in fact, which in Frame Games I posit as actually within the arena of “The Game”  operates to keep us faithful to our beginning frame.

You have offered some great questions, Sergio!

1) How do we know that we’ve gathered all the relevant frames about a question orproblem?

2) How do we check on the accuracy of our frame descriptions?

3) How do we escape the frame contamination of individual and cultural values?

4) Is Frame Detection only for the Intellectual?

#1  Frame Detection.

This is an extensive subject… I have several chapters in the book on this and many, many pages of exercises in the Training Manual.  Higher frames do stand out so that they are salient.. And because they operate as Attractors in a Self-Organizing System … following “the energy” of a conversation whether in political debate, in therapy, or in dialogue with friends offers us a pretty dependable pathway.

So like Meta-Modeling what do you go for first when someone says, “I’m depressed.” Obviously we could start at the lower levels and get all of the unspecific verbs, nouns, and missing referents.  That gives some information.  But as I noted in both Spirit of NLP and The Secrets of Magic Bandler emphasized starting at the highest levels: Presuppositions, Cause-Effects, Complex Equivalences. So here.  Using the Model of Levels of Thought/Mind (which is the heart of Meta-States), we use the principle that the higher levels drive the lower levels.  So we go there first and follow the “energy” of a person’s passions, and implied values.

Such exploration is an art.  Whether with an individual in psychotherapy, an interviewer on TV, a modeler of cultural level structures, we eventually develop a “feel” and “intuition” for the pieces to go for that govern the experience.

#2  Accuracy.

We test it.  NLP calibration teaches us to check it out.  There are patterns about eye accessing cues but it doesn’t fit for everybody.  There’s always exceptions.

So here.  Reflecting a frame back, summarizing, checking the congruency between behaviors and beliefs, these give us a way to test things.

We begin from the presupposition: every behavior makes sense.  Given some frame, some understanding, some map then we backtrack it to the Frames.

#3  Frame Free?

I don’t think that’s possible.  We can practice the exercises that we use in Meta-States for “Losing your mind and coming to your senses” (Perls) but that’s only in order to gain a little bit of mental/emotional freedom for some new exploring.    None of us leave home without our frames.  We can’t.  Nor would we want to.

Which brings us to the first Exercise we do in Frame Games:  “QUALITY CONTROLLING OUR GAMES”  (the NLP process of running an Ecology Check on things).

#4  Is Frame Detection only for the Intellectual?

Depends on what you mean by “intellectual people.”  It does take “mind” and the exercising and working of the mind to do so.  It does not necessarily take the kind of “education” that we experience in school.  School education can even sabotage both Intelligence and Frame Detection.

I’ve already mentioned the “emotional” side of frames… the “feel” for the “energy” of the higher attractors that govern and self-organize our lives via beliefs.  There is so much more to be said about all of this.  Our next Frame Game Trainings in DC, Austin and Tampa  (April and May) will devote 3 full days to these concerns.

What frame games have you played today?

Did you have fun?

Did they serve you well?

Would you recommend them to your children?

What frame games would you have preferred to have played?