Cause and effect
A relatively common human experience is one in which we each believe that our internal emotional states (how we feel) are a direct effect of the actions of others or the effect of other external conditions such as the weather or the news on television.
In other words people's experience is often distorted, leading them to treat their internal emotional states i.e. happiness, sadness, anger, frustration etc. as a necessary effect of some external cause and something over which they have no choice, no control and even no responsibility. They put the cause of their state outside of themselves. People often express this phenomenon vocally with words like - 'See what you did! You made me so angry!'.
The next Meta Model pattern, the Cause and Effect pattern, challenges these beliefs directly by causing the speaker to examine in more detail the relationship between the internal representation they observe i.e. their emotional state and the external stimulus which they believe to be the direct cause of that state.
If you’ve ever said something like:-
- You make me angry
- My job is stressing me out
- This awful weather is making me feel miserable
- Seeing you on the stage filled me with pride
then your world model has been to some degree impoverished by the belief that your emotional state is directly caused by external forces.
A great question from Richard Bandler's book Using Your Brain For A Change that fits this subject matter neatly is 'Who's driving the bus?'.
Bandler goes on to say, 'Most people are prisoners of their own brains. It's as if they are chained to the last seat of the bus and someone else is driving. I want you to learn to drive your own bus'.
One need only refer to the NLP Communication Model to remember that while it may be a response to stimuli both internal and external, our state is internally generated and therefore internally controlled.
There is no mechanism by which external triggers can directly cause us to feel one way or another. As the Presuppositions of NLP state – we control our own mind and therefore our results.
When we hear a Cause and Effect statement from another person, or even in our own internal dialogue we can challenge it directly. Appropriate responses to the examples above include:-
- How does what I’m doing cause you to choose to feel angry?
- How do you decide when to feel stressed at work?
- It must be awful to need the weather to change before you can change your mood.
- When did you know it was the right time to feel as if you were filled with pride?
Each of these responses acknowledges the speaker’s internal state and at the same time points out that they are in control of all the input channels and output channels that give rise to that state.
A person who has learned to recognise that they are in control of their own emotional state has greater flexibility and more options available to them from which to choose how to respond more usefully.
Or as Bandler might say - once you remember that it's you driving your bus, the choice of destination is yours and yours alone.
(This recognition, increased flexibility and control is also the subject of the concept of Emotional Intelligence or EI.)