# NLP fundamentals

NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) was developed in the 1970s by Richard
Bandler and John Grinder by modeling effective therapists (Virginia Satir,
Fritz Perls, Milton Erickson). It offers models for how people structure
subjective experience.

**Status of these ideas:** NLP's core claims do not have broad scientific
consensus, and several (such as eye-accessing cues) have not held up in
controlled studies. Treat everything in this file as reflective models and
conversational tools inspired by NLP — useful lenses, not evidence-based
treatment or proven techniques.

## Key presuppositions (working assumptions)

- The map is not the territory.
- People respond to their map of reality, not reality itself.
- There is no failure, only feedback.
- Every behavior has a positive intention in some context.
- People already have the resources they need, or can create them.
- The meaning of communication is the response it elicits.

These are adopted as useful stances, not truth claims.

## The Meta-Model

A set of language patterns for recovering information deleted, distorted, or
generalized in speech. Examples:

- **Deletion**: "I'm afraid." → "Afraid of what, specifically?"
- **Unspecified verb**: "He rejected me." → "How, specifically, did he reject you?"
- **Universal quantifier**: "I always fail." → "Always? Every single time?"
- **Modal operator**: "I can't speak up." → "What would happen if you did?"
- **Nominalization**: "Our communication is bad." → "How are you communicating?"
- **Mind reading**: "She thinks I'm useless." → "How do you know she thinks that?"

The Meta-Model turns vague, limiting maps into specific, workable ones.

## Representational systems and submodalities

Experience is coded in sensory systems (visual, auditory, kinesthetic).
Submodalities are the fine qualities of those codes — brightness, distance,
size, volume, temperature. Shifting submodalities (e.g. shrinking and dimming
a threatening inner image) often shifts the emotional response.

## Anchoring

Associating a state with a stimulus (a touch, word, or image) so the state can
be re-accessed deliberately. Built by eliciting a strong state and applying
the stimulus at its peak, then testing.

## Well-formed outcomes

Goals stated positively, within the person's control, sensory-specific,
context-bound, and ecological (checked against the wider system of the
person's life): "What do you want? How will you know you have it? What might
it cost you?"
