Neuro-linguistic programming was developed in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who modelled successful therapists, including Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls. Most influential was the work of Erickson, the father of modern hypnotherapy, who demonstrated that the unconscious can be utilized without formal trance to make permanent changes very quickly.

NLP is a movement that encompasses strategies and techniques to reprogramme the brain using close observation of the individual's unconscious responses and knowledge of how the brain encodes experience.

NLP is a movement rather than a specific methodology, and so is difficult to define. The name itself refers to the ability of words to transform our experience by working on our neurology. There are several main elements to NLP.

(1) The meta-model. This refers to the questions addressed to the problem itself. No problem is well-formed. That is to say, any problem has inherent contradictions and does not stand up to scrutiny. Meta-model questions expose the problem and help to begin to break it down. A well-defined problem is already a problem in crisis with itself.

(2) Representational systems and submodalities. We see, hear and feel, providing our faculties are working, but most of us have a preferred representational system. Some of us will make judgements, for example, on how something appears to us; we will be most influenced by how we see the situation. (They may often uses phrases such as, that looks good; I get the picture.) These people are primarily visual. Others make judgements according to how something sounds to them. (I hear what you're saying; I like the sound of that.) They are auditory. Others still are inclined to make judgements according to how something feels to them. (That feels right; I was moved.) They are kinaesthetic.

The eyes express how someone is thinking at a given moment. When a person looks up, they are visualizing; and when they look to the side, they are thinking of sounds. When most right-handed people look to their left, they are recalling; when they look to the right, they are constructing or inventing. Looking down to the left indicates a person is talking to himself or herself. Looking down to the right indicates a person is accessing their emotional state.

Not only does every memory comprise things we see, hear and feel, but these experiences can be broken down further, into how we see, hear or feel something. For example, how bright it that memory; is it moving or still; black and white or colour; framed or panoramic? These distinctions are called submodalities. They are useful because the way you see something (for example) dictates the way you feel about it. We can change our perception of something by playing with submodalities.

(3) The third major element of NLP is the therapeutic principle that the unconscious will communicate directly with the unconscious mind - or indeed with the therapist. I can ask your unconscious mind questions and it will answer either by giving you a specific feeling or thought, or by giving a signal that I can perceive, such as having a finger lifting automatically for yes and for no. You don't need to be hypnotized in order to engage in this communication.

(4) Time-lines. Tad James discovered that most of us code our past and future experience spatially, enabling us to order our experience chronologically, and to plan for the future. A good proportion of westerners will order their past by having it stretch out in front of them at approximately a 45-degree angle to their left, as the future unfolds at a 45-degree angle to their right. Some people who are very bad at planning haven't got a time-line for the future at all. By adjusting time-lines, or creating them for those people without them, our perception of the present, past and future can be altered. Putting events into the time-line makes them more likely to happen. And we can go into the past, along the time-line, and make adjustments to our perception of experiences (our experiences only exist in the form of perceptions).

The presuppositions of NLP

The map is not the territory. This means that our perception of reality is not reality itself, just as a map is not the territory it represents. What's more, all we can ever have is an interpretation of reality. If we're not happy, it's not reality that is at fault, it's our perception of it. We must change our map.