NLP

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Certainty

The following is a very interesting exchange between Richard Bandler and someone who is very sure about something.

B: Are you sure?P: Yes.
B: Are you sure you're sure?P: Yes.
B: Are you sure enough to be UNSURE?P: Yes.
B: OK, Let's talk.

Before reading further, I strongly recommend that you think of something that you are very certain about, and find someone else to ask you this set of questions about your certainty, so that you have a concrete personal experience of their impact. At the very least, close your eyes and imagine that someone else asks you these questions, and take the time to carefully notice your response to each one, so that you can experience their effect on you.
And for those of you who teach modeling, or do modeling, this is an excellent small opportunity to do some of it. Although Bandler's exchange is brief, and concise, it is quite interesting to explore its structure.
Now that you have an experience of it, I would like to characterize this pattern as I understand it, which requires a short journey up through logical levels.
Level 1. There is a situation X. X is an event in more or less sensory-based, "reality," what Paul Watzlawick has called "first-order reality." This is something that everyone can usually pretty much agree on, such as a job interview, or a critical comment. This level is often called the environment, and it is something that often we don't have too much control over. Certain unpleasant events happen to us from time to time, and we don't always have the choice of avoiding them or ignoring them.
Level 2. The person then thinks about the situation X in a particular way and characterizes / evaluates it, for instance, "This X is scary." This is a meta-response, and the state is a meta-state about X. This is what Paul Watzlawick has called "second-order reality." This is where people may differ wildly, particularly if they are from different cultures, and it is at this level where many conflicts and problems (and many solutions) exist.
The person could just as well conclude that X is "boring" or "exciting," or "challenging," or is an opportunity to "learn more about their Buddha nature," etc. The person's response will depend on the understanding that they apply to the event, and changing this understanding through content reframing can make a huge difference in the person's experience.
Level 3. The person has a degree of certainty about the meta-response. "I know this is scary." This is a meta-response about a meta-response (a meta-meta-response, with corresponding meta-meta-state). We could call this "third-order reality," which is even more distant from sensory experience than second-order reality, and even more troublesome and dangerous. Plenty of problems (and solutions) also occur at this level.
Many people who come for therapy appear to suffer from uncertainty: "I don't know what to do". "I'm not sure if this is the right thing to do". "Lifehas no meaning". But you can also think of this as resulting from other certainties. "I know that wouldn't work", "I know she hates me", "I know I can't succeed", etc. Since these certainties will make it difficult for the person to consider other understandings at level 2, it can often be very useful to reduce certainty.
Someone who is phobic of airplanes, and someone who is not, may be making exactly the same images of flaming death and destruction. The difference is that the images of the non-phobic include some representation of the small probability of the crash, as well as its possibility. This could be either a certainty of its unlikeliness, or a very great uncertainty about its happening. However, a phobic person is experientially certain that it will happen, no matter what s/he says intellectually.
What makes it difficult to work with a paranoid is not just that s/he thinks that others are plotting against him/her, but that s/he is certain that this is occuring, and is unwilling to question it and consider other possibilities.
Another aspect of a person's certainty is that others may suffer from it as much or more than the person who is certain. Think of all the deaths, persecutions, misery and destruction around the globe that have resulted from the certainty of religious prophets and institutions, revolutionaries, and politicians - all of whom are totally convinced that they were right.
Each of us has a way to assess experience and provide us with a measure of how certain we are about it. This has often been called a person's "convincer strategy". The exploration of the variety of ways that people use to convince themselves of something is also relevant to the topic of certainty, but this article will only discuss the result of the operation of the convincer strategy.

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