If we grow up with every statement we hear containing meta-messages, we learn that *all* statements from *everyone* contain meta-messages.
If someone says "I made you a cuppa" and you immediately think "what does s/he want from me?", that's a meta-message that you're hearing inside your own head.
The search for meta-messages nearly killed my marriage. It's taken me years to get to where I don't hear them (except from people who always speak in code like that, and those people I've gotten really good at saying "If that's what you meant, you needed to say it so that I could understand you.") My husband and I both had to work very hard, even though he's not an ACoA (his family had other dysfunctions to make up for it), to get past hearing meta-messages.
Invariably, the conversation would go something like this:
me: benign comment on how cold it is out and does he want to get a coat?
him: so you're saying I'm not dressed well enough?
me: **gets sucked into argument about how that's not what I meant**
After a couple of years of therapy, that conversation changed to the following:
me: benign comment on how cold it is out and does he want to get a coat?
him: so you're saying I'm not dressed well enough?
me: "I didn't say that, you said that. If that's how you feel, I'm sorry to hear it."
Oh my! Did that one little tool ever change my life! I started using it with everyone - coworkers, other family members, people I barely knew - anyone who accused me of saying something I didn't say and didn't mean. Stops 'em dead in their tracks.
Conversely, saying it to yourself can stop YOU dead in your tracks of going down that thought path as well. You find yourself thinking "what he's really saying" or "what he really means is..." Remind yourself that he didn't say that, you did. And you have the option to chose to listen to what he said or to what you said. I normally followed this by asking WHY I was saying that to myself (there's usually an underlying reason).
This is probably the tool that made the biggest all-around difference in my life and my way of being in the world - both in telling other people that I refuse to accept responsibility for things I didn't say, and in terms of finding what was underneath my own interpretations of meta-messages.
Becoming aware of what I was doing helped me realize that the world as I believed it was was holding me hostage. The world as it really is was not the problem, it was my perception and interpretation of it.