The Controls You Never Knew You Had
Think of something that makes you feel genuinely enthusiastic and energised. Notice the internal picture that arises — whether it is clear or vague, close or distant, bright or muted, moving or still. Now think of something that you find tedious or draining. The internal picture is almost certainly different — the qualities have changed even if you were not consciously aware of changing them.
These qualities — the brightness, distance, size, colour, movement and location of internal images; the volume, tempo, tone and direction of internal sounds; the intensity, location and quality of internal feelings — are what NLP calls submodalities. They are the hidden controls of emotional experience, operating largely below conscious awareness, shaping how everything feels.
Once you understand how submodalities work, you gain access to a level of emotional self-regulation that most people never knew existed.
The Three Representational Systems
NLP identifies three primary representational systems through which humans process experience:
- Visual (V) — internal pictures, images, mental movies. The submodalities include brightness, contrast, focus, distance, size, colour vs. black and white, location, and whether the image is associated (seen through your own eyes) or dissociated (seen from the outside).
- Auditory (A) — internal sounds and voices. Submodalities include volume, tempo, pitch, rhythm, location, tone and whether sounds are internal (inside the head) or external.
- Kinaesthetic (K) — internal feelings and physical sensations. Submodalities include intensity, location in the body, texture, temperature, pressure, movement and duration.
Most experiences are coded primarily in one system, with the others providing supporting information. Understanding which system is primary for a given experience is the first step in working with it.
Why Submodalities Matter: The Critical Submodalities
Not all submodalities are equally influential. For each person, in each representational system, there are critical submodalities — the specific qualities that, when changed, produce the most significant shift in emotional response. Identifying these is one of the key skills in advanced NLP practice.
For most people, the critical visual submodalities are brightness and distance. Making an image brighter and closer tends to increase emotional intensity; making it dimmer and more distant reduces it. But this is not universal — for some people, the critical submodality is size; for others, it is whether the image is in colour or black and white. Skilled practitioners test systematically to find the critical submodalities for each individual.
"Change the submodalities and you change the experience. Change the experience and you change the behaviour. This is not philosophy — it is practical neurology." — Richard Bandler
Practical Applications: What You Can Change
The range of applications for submodality work is remarkably broad:
- Reducing the intensity of difficult emotions — anxiety, grief, anger, shame. Push the image further away, dim it, reduce the sound, move the feeling lower in the body and let it drain downward.
- Increasing motivation — make the internal representation of a desired goal brighter, larger, more colourful and closer. Add compelling sounds and positive feelings. Notice how the draw toward it increases.
- Changing the emotional charge of memories — draining the emotional intensity from painful memories by systematically adjusting their submodalities, making them smaller, dimmer, more distant and less vivid.
- Collapsing anchors — simultaneously firing a positive anchor and a negative anchor to neutralise the negative response.
- Belief change — comparing the submodalities of a strong belief with those of a limiting belief, then changing the limiting belief's submodalities to match those of the strong belief.
Think of something you believe strongly — your own name, for example. Notice the qualities of the internal representation. Now think of something you once believed but no longer do. Notice how the submodalities differ. The "doubt" representation is usually less vivid, more distant or different in some key quality. This is what a limiting belief change aims to achieve.
The Swish Pattern: Submodalities in Action
The Swish pattern is perhaps the most elegant application of submodality principles. It uses a specific rapid visual movement to install a new, preferred representation in place of an unwanted habitual response — essentially rewiring the link between a trigger and its associated state.
The pattern works because the nervous system responds to submodality contrasts rather than content. The rapid, compelling movement from the unwanted state to the desired state, repeated multiple times, creates a new neural pathway that becomes stronger with each repetition. The old pathway atrophies through disuse.
Submodalities and Belief Change
One of the most profound applications of submodality work is in changing limiting beliefs. Research into the neurology of belief suggests that beliefs are not stored as propositions but as patterns of neural activation — and those patterns have submodality qualities just like any other internal representation.
By comparing the submodalities of a strong, empowering belief with those of a limiting belief, and then systematically changing the limiting belief's submodalities to match those of the strong belief, it becomes possible to change not just the content of what someone believes, but the certainty with which they hold it. This is belief change at the structural level — faster, more thorough and more lasting than purely cognitive approaches.
