THE STRATEGY OF RESILIENCE

When I first thought about the state of resilience in 1990, I assumed it was a primary state. I mostly assumed that because I had no other distinction about states. I did not know about meta-states or gestalt states, so it was natural to assume that the subjective experience of resilience was like every other state that I knew about. That explains why I studied resilience from the NLP perspective of the steps that result in the state of resilience.

And, at first everything was fine. As I interviewed people, asking, “Who had been to an emotional and personal hell and you are back?” I began to put together how they did that. That was in the early 1990s and there was very little about Resilience and almost nothing under that term. What I did find was the stages of grief that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross had mapped out— that when a person goes through a severe grief, the person goes through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. There was also the literature on those who had experienced Hitler’s holocaust and survived, especially Franks biography, Man’s Search for Meaning.

Whatever the step-back that a person experienced, I found that the process of bouncing back was typically one that took a fairly long time (many years) and that involved pretty predictable stages of development. As I began to map this out, I recognized that were numerous states were involved, that a person would go into those states to process the hurt, disappointment, or trauma. Eventually, I set out a “strategy” for how to “go for it again.” And it was that theme and title that I presented at the NLP Conference in September of 1994.

By then I had also read Korzybski’s Science and Sanity a couple of times, had written a series of articles on the linguistic distinctions in General Semantics that Bandler and Grinder had missed or skipped. I had also read Bateson’s Steps toward an Ecology of Mind (1972) several times. It was those studies that prepared me for the surprise I was about to experience at the Conference.

At the Conference, I had a large group, some 60 people attended Go For It— Again! The Strategy of Resilience. After an introduction to the idea of resilience, I invited someone up front to demonstrate how I elicited a person’s strategy of resilience. My invitation question was, “Who has been to hell and you are back again?” Several raised their hands and the man I picked had been through divorce, business bankruptcy, and a health crisis. It sounded like a hellish experience to me. “And you are back?” Yes. “Fully back? Back into the zest of life?” Yes. “Great, I want to know how you have done that.”

From there I began the interview. I got the details of when and where the set back occurred, what happened then, the stages of grief he went through, when he moved on to accepting, then coping with life, and when he moved into not merely coping, but mastering life’s challenges, and when he finally

came to the place where he felt that he was back. Getting the overall steps and stages, I then reviewed with him how he moved from one stage to the next. What was he thinking? What beliefs supported him? What did he do practically that assisted? What challenges he had to deal with, etc.? At one point, as he was describing moving from one stage to the next, I asked, “How did you know that you could move to the next?” What he answered was both surprising, unexpected, and opened up the whole realm of what became the Meta-States Model: “I just knew that I would get through it. It was as if I had a state about my state that kept me going forward, that it was just a matter of time.”

At that point, I asked, “How did you know that?” Now I don’t exactly remember what happened then. Either he made the following statement or I did. It all became confused in my mind because after the statement a thousand thoughts raced through my head. Sop either he said, “I have a state about my state, a meta-state,” or I said, “So it is a state about the first state, a meta-state.” I can no longer sort out who actually said the words “meta-state.”

What exploded in my head at that moment was a picture that was in the form of a diagram. It was a diagram of a higher-level state governing, controlling, monitoring, framing a lower-level state. It was at that moment that all of the lights and bells of an insight went off inside. Suddenly the phrase “meta- state” brought together all of the studies in Korzybski and Bateson that I had been studying for years and, just as suddenly, it all made sense. In that instant, the Meta-States Model was born.

Suddenly, also, my understanding of resilience changed. For four years I had been assuming that resilience was a regular state, a primary state, a state that you could set an anchor for and trigger it when you wanted it. Not so. As a meta-state, this meant that resilience involved layers of states. This now explained the very structure of a complex state and especially a state that does not occur in a single moment of time, but that occurs through time and over time. Resilience is not just one thing, it is many things— a set of beliefs, a set of values, a set of actions during the various stages that the resilience person goes through and experiences.

This created the first distinction in states, the difference between a primary state and a meta-state. A primary state is a state about something out there beyond one’s self, one’s nervous system whereas a meta-state is about one’s experience. It is your thoughts-and-feelings about what you experience in your body and which eventually begins to temper, texture, and qualify what you experience in your body. Later I would discover yet another kind of state, a gestalt state, made up of multiple meta-states and partaking of the system’s property of emergence so that the gestalt state is “more than and different from the sum of the parts.”

NLP enables us to understand the primary states of fear and anger, stress and relaxation, aversion and attraction, love and hate (or apathy), joy and sadness, etc. Meta-States enables us now to understand complex states that are not easily located in the body— resilience, self-esteem, forgiveness, leadership, magnanimity, proactivity, responsibility, etc. And it is these higher-level meta-states that describe the uniqueness of human experiences.