THE META-STRATEGIES WITHIN RESILIENCE

Given the many, many variables within resilience (#4) and the stages of resilience (#5), you have to have several meta-strategies to handle each of the stages. That is, for each stage (set back, emotional roller-coaster, coping, mastering, and recovery) you have to have specific belief frames, identity frames, understanding frames, decision frames, etc. in order to navigate through that stage. It is not sufficient to merely have the right state or states within each stage, you have to have the right belief-system (beliefs and beliefs-about-beliefs) which will hold those state or states in place. This is another one of the great contributions of the Meta-States Model.

To start this process, elicit each of the stages and simply begin by asking meta-questions about each of the stages. For example, take the set-back stage itself. Considering that stage, now ask: What do you understand about the set-back? Is this normal or abnormal? Is this something you can expect in life, or is it completely unexpected? What do you believe about being set-back? What does it mean to you? How do you experience yourself as a person and in your identity when you are set-back? What decisions do you need to make given the set-back? Do you have permission to experience the set-back or do you fight and reject it? What do you expect when a set-back occurs? All of these italized words are meta-levels, also known as logical levels, and when you ask questions about them , you are asking a meta-question.

What then happens? What do you achieve by doing this? When you ask these meta-questions, the answers take you (or another person) into the realm of the person’s internal matrix of frames which informs your experience of that stage. It lets you explore in depth what you think consciously and what you are unconsciously thinking that’s setting the meaning frames that you are living by. This enables you to do some, literally, high-level information gathering about what a person understands, believes, expects, etc. about that stage. These make up the person’s frame of mind.

These frames of mind not only inform you and that person regarding the person’s rich inner landscape of consciousness, it also governs it. It self-organizes it. And if there’s any problem for you or another person in handling that stage, the frame is almost always the problem. The meta-questioning enables you to get to the frame, understand it, and then give you an opportunity to change it— reframe it, deframe it, outframe it, etc.

Now when you have done that with each of the stages, you have gathered intelligence about the person’s higher frames of mind about the whole process from suffering a set-back to bouncing-back in a resilient

way. But ... but is there any connection between each of the meta-levels of beliefs, understandings, expectations, etc.? Are there any commonalities between one meta-level set of beliefs and another’s?

This question takes us up-and-beyond the primary level strategies wherein we handle each of the stages. It takes us to a higher level where we can begin to consider meta-strategies. A meta-strategy would be a strategy that enables us to go from one stage to the next. And in terms of resilience, this is critical. “How do you know to go from the set-back stage to the emotional roller-coaster stage, or to the coping stage, or to the mastery stage, or to the “I’m back!” stage?” This is the question that I asked in 1994 that opened up the key to how to be resilient and to the presence of Meta-States.

If a person answers, “How I know to go from this stage to the next is I have an overall picture of all of the stages” then the person has just given you a larger-level, a meta-level, strategy. You can then explore more about the person’s understandings. “How many stages are there for you?” “What do you believe about moving through these stages?” “What do you believe about how long it will take you to do the ‘work’ in each stage and get to the end?” “Is there anything that could stop you from proceeding forward and getting through it all?” And so on.

“I believe that I will get through this!” one person says. That’s a high level belief about the process and about himself. “What enables you to get through it?” That will call forth information about how the process of knock-down and get-up works and factors that may play a role inside of it. “While you may not like the initiating experience of suffering a set-back, what do you believe or understand about such things happening?” That will give you much of the person’s philosophy of life. “Do you think the set- back was fair or unfair, or do you think it has nothing to do with fairness, it is just things that happen in the world?”

With that introduction to the meta-levels of consciousness that set the frames for how you think about set-backs and resilience, let’s now explore more personally what meta-level frames that are operational in the back of your mind that supports you being a resilient person or that undermines it. Here are some questions to consider: What do you understand about unpleasant and disturbing events? Do you think of them as a personal attack or as activities that occur? What do you believe about what causes them, what brings them about, and what they say about you? What are you expectations and assumptions when some “bad thing” happens to you? What meanings do you give to such an event? What criteria (or standards) do you use to evaluate the experience as “bad?” What do you permit to happen or not permit? Are there “bad things” that can and do happen to people and you have no permission within yourself for them to happen? What permissions do you need to give yourself so that you aren’t shocked or blown away if something bad happened? What are your understandings, beliefs, and decisions about how to cope with disasters or hardships? Where does your mind go in terms of what you can do to ameliorate the hurt?