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Glossary

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Satir Categories
The five body postures and language styles indicating specific ways of communicating: leveler, blamer, placater, computer and distracter, described by Virginia Satir.
Second Position
Relating to the second Perceptual Position: Second Position is usually someone else's point of view. (First Position is our own point of view, Third position is the point of view of a dissociated observer.)
Secondary Gain
Where some seemingly negative or problematic behavior actually carries out some positive function at some other level. For example, smoking may help a person to relax or help them fit a particular self-image.
 
 
 
 
 
Sensory Acuity
This relates to observational skills. Having Sensory Acuity means that we can notice things about our client’s physiology that most people would not notice.
Sensory-Based Description
Is describing someone’s verifiable external behavior in a way that does not include any evaluations, but in a way that just relates the specific physiology. E.G.: “She is happy,” is (in NLP terminology) an hallucination. A sensory based description would be, her lips are curved upward at the end, and her face is symmetrical.
State
The total ongoing mental and physical conditions from which a person is acting. It relates to our internal emotional condition. I.E.: A happy state, a sad state, a motivated state, a resourceful state, etc. In NLP we believe that the state determines our results, and so we are careful to be in resourceful states of excellence.
Strategy
A specific sequence of internal and external representations that leads to a particular outcome.
Submodalities
These are distinctions (or subsets) that are part of each representational system that encode and give meaning to our experiences. E.G.: A picture may be in Black & White or Color, may be a Movie or a Still, may be focused or defocused – these are visual Submodalities.
Surface Structure
This is a linguistic term meaning the structure of our communication, which generally leaves out the completeness of the Deep Structure. The process is Deletion, Generalization and Distortion. (See also Deep Structure.)
Snatches
The process of overlap between two representational systems, characterized by phenomena like "see-feel" circuits, in which a person derives feelings from what they see, and "hear-feel" circuits, in which a person gets feelings from what they hear. Any two sensory modalities may be linked together.
Syntactic Ambiguity
Where it is impossible to tell from the syntax of a sentence the meaning of a certain word. Often created by adding “ing” to a verb, as in “Hypnotizing Hypnotists can be easy.”