Introduction to Submodalities

This post is a followup to my last post, NLP Accessing Cues and Representational Systems, in which I discussed how the little idiosyncrasies of our mental wiring lead to non-verbal behaviors which put on display some of the crazy processes that go on inside of our heads.
What necessarily follows from that is a discussion of Submodalities. So, if you haven't already, please read the previous post.

In the following video, Derren Brown toys with a woman's submodalities and uses his skills of state-elicitation and anchoring to first produce belief change (subtle, visible changes in her physiology mark the change in belief) and then mess with her perceptions. Read on and find out what is going on here.

VIDEO LINK http://youtu.be/UdlItEIj8bg

What are Sub Modalities? Previously, I discussed how different types of sensory information are stored and accessed in different Representational Systems through out the brain; visual information has its own representational system, as does auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory. These Representational Systems can be considered our modes of experience. Therefore,a Submodality is a quality of experience through a particular mode.

Using the Visual Representational System as our basis for discussion, we can talk about qualities of an image such as brightness, size, location in space, color, color saturation, translucency or opaqueness.. These are submodalities of the visual representation system (for some odd reason, NLP literature rarely uses the word "mode" here). Just as the representational systems we are using tend to be displayed in our body language and eye accessing cues , the words we tend to use show others how we as individuals favor certain representational systems over others.
In a discussion, one person may say "I see your point," while another person could say "I hear what you're saying." Submodalities come in the forms of verbs (see, smell, wrestle, burn), adjectives (sour, bright, near, small), and adverbs (bitterly, strongly, vividly).

To illustrate this further, try this exercise: Take some calm, slow, deep breaths for a few moments. Feel yourself really relaxing. Feel your brain slip into a lower gear, and allow your focus to deepen. Now once you are in this state, think of a time when you felt REALLY good (it can be dirty-- this is a private mental experience after all:-). Notice the different aspects of this representation in your mind. What are the images, sounds, smells, feelings? You may be smiling already, and that's great! But try this; make the image bigger, brighter, more vivid. Make the sounds richer and louder, and intensify the smells and feelings.... are you smiling bigger and brighter now? I bet you're feeling pretty good.

If you're like most people, the simple exercise above changed the state of your brain at least a little. It changed your emotions and physiology for the moment, and put you in a pretty good mood.There are many implications to this, but the one most interesting to me is how submodalities can be tinkered with in the therapeutic context to produce change in beliefs and behaviors.

The easiest way to explain this is to discuss phobias. With phobias, a person has had some sort of previous traumatic experience from which they go on to develop an irrational fear. Milton H. Erickson, father of modern hypnosis, once worked with a client who had a phobia of the color blue. Through hypnosis they found that the experience behind this phobia was that, as a child, the woman had witnessed the drowning of her sister, and when the rescuers pulled her sister's body from the water she was a horrifying fleshy shade of deep blue. This episode in the woman's history was so traumatizing that the processes of shock compartmentalized the experience in ways that her per-adolescent brain could deal with at the time. She came to forget/repress the most experience, the image of her sister, and the terror she felt, but as time went on she became fearful of the color blue. The color of her dead sister's skin came to represent that horrible experience and any time she saw blue she would panic. The closer the blue was to the shade of her sister's body, the stronger her sense of panic became. The submodality of blueness was intrinsically tied to her fear.

  When in this state of panic, as we've all heard, we get thrown into "Fight or Flight" mode. Joe Navarro, in his excellent guide to reading body language (which you should purchase and read NOW), What Every BODY is Saying, makes the point that in reality, an animal's options are Freeze, Flight, or Fight in that order (perhaps the topic of a future post on this blog). In this state of panic, our Sympathetic Nervous System becomes activated, our heart rate increases, our pupils dilate, airways expand, any bodily functions which don't immediately contribute to our survival are slowed down or stopped, and adrenaline and glucose are dumped into our blood supply for an instant energy boost. By this point, blood flow to our frontal lobes (that which makes us rational and human) has been tremendously restricted and the individual is unreachable by rational discussion. This is why people can spend DECADES in talk therapy calmly laying on a couch in a safe and comfortable room talking about their fear, but still panic whenever they're in the real world and are confronted with the object of their phobia. The fear response, like all emotional responses, bypasses the rational mind.

NLP is particularly effective in working through phobias quickly (often destroying phobias in just a few minutes). This can be accomplished in different ways, but the phobia cure will always involve working with an individual's representational systems and submodalities to change the way they process information. Here, the NLP practitioner discusses the object of the phobia with the client. Aspects of the panic are elicited by talking about the object of the phobia, and the different submodalities that the client uses to describe the object. These aspects of the panic can be "anchored" to a cue, such as a touch on the left knee (this is the old Pavlovian Conditioning you learned about in school). This is then put to the side and the NLP practitioner may then ask the client questions which will elicit a resourceful state, such as confidence and control. When the NLP practitioner senses a change in the client's state (by being sensitive to body language), the practitioner can anchor this resource state, for example, by touching the right knee. In further discussion the NLP practitioner may have the client change their submodalities associated with the object of the phobia, such as making associated images smaller, having the color drain out, framing them in a box, and shooting them off into the distance, while holding the anchor for the resource state. Then the client would be instructed to zoom up a bright and vivid picture of something tied to the resource state to replace the image of the phobic image. They would repeat this several times, all while holding the resource-state anchor. Surprisingly, this tends to be a very effective method for eliminating a phobia.

The way in which our own minds attribute and process submodalities is intrinsically tied in some way to our senses of "certainty and "reality," as Derren Brown has shown us. Through changing the way the woman uses submodalities for her subjective experience of not living up to her potential, the woman was finally able to feel the goal as being more within her grasp. By noticing where she placed her senses of "certainty" and "uncertainty" in her physical and cognitive space, Mr. Brown could use those spaces to alter the woman's perceptions further. It's quite amusing to see how he has the woman doubting that red is red and green is green, but he was just a clever and harmless magician, and it's easy to suspend our defenses in the name of good fun.

The question is, how often do others mess with YOUR submodalities to change the way you think?