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What Are Submodalities

What submodalities are in Giovanni Ceroni's NLP: analog and digital, visual, auditory and kinesthetic categories, and how to use them for change.

It's like fitting the right lenses onto a pair of binoculars. The objects were already there. Now you actually see them.

What it is

Submodalities are the building blocks of mental representations: the specific details of images, sounds and sensations with which the mind encodes every experience. They're what makes a memory vivid, a dream intense, or a fear paralyzing — the details that, once changed, change the very quality of the internal experience. In a sense, every person is a director continuously making their own internal film, and submodalities are the technical tools that film gets shot with: framing, brightness, volume, distance.

This concept leads to a further fundamental NLP presupposition: the ability to change the process by which you experience reality is often more useful than trying to change its content. By changing the submodalities associated with a memory or event, you can reduce its unhelpful emotional impact, changing the associated sensations, perceptions and mood as a result.

Why it matters

Submodalities matter because they offer direct, concrete access to the structure of experience, rather than just its content. Knowing them lets you understand how mental representations influence thought and behavior, and learning to manipulate them through precise techniques lets you customize your inner experience, creating a more positive, motivating inner world. When what you think changes, what you feel changes, and as a result, what you're able to do changes too.

How it works

There are two types of submodalities. Analog ones are adjustable on a scale of intensity — speed, brightness, volume — and can be changed gradually. Digital ones instead work like an on/off switch — color or black and white, associated or dissociated image, still or moving — with no middle ground possible.

Submodalities are grouped into categories depending on the representational system involved: visual (brightness, color, shape, size, distance, movement, perspective), auditory (volume, pitch, rhythm, timbre, location in space), kinesthetic (temperature, pressure, texture, location in the body), olfactory (smell, intensity) and gustatory (taste, intensity). By intensifying the submodalities associated with a positive experience — making an image bigger, brighter, closer — you can increase its motivating impact; by reducing those of a negative experience — pushing it away, blurring it, shrinking it — you can reduce its emotional impact.

There are several techniques based on submodalities. Visualization consists of imagining your mental representations in detail and manipulating them at will, to make them more appealing or motivating. The swish quickly replaces a negative image with a positive one, working on submodalities to leave behind a limiting behavior. The submodality stack consists of piling up several positive experiences, imagining each as a card with its own color, size and texture, to create an increasingly powerful deck of resources. The circle of excellence creates a visual representation of a desired ideal state, working on the positive submodalities tied to it, particularly useful for facing challenges or exams.

Submodalities integrate naturally with other NLP techniques: in reframing, they change the submodalities associated with an event to place it in a different perspective; in timeline work, they change the submodalities associated with specific events along the personal timeline; in overcoming phobias, they shrink the object of fear, making it smaller, more distant, blurrier; in boosting motivation, they intensify the submodalities of a desired goal, making it bigger, brighter, closer; in improving performance, they optimize the mental representations tied to a specific task; in managing stress, they reduce the submodalities of stressful events, making them smaller, more distant, colder; in boosting creativity, they make the creative process more fluid, expansive and colorful in the internal representation.

A practical technique for de-powering a disturbing memory, when a client reports having "the image of that thing always right there, in front of my eyes," consists of guiding them to work directly on the submodalities of the image: pushing it away, shrinking it, blurring its details, until it becomes hard to bring back with the same intensity as before. The same work can be done on a disturbing inner voice, acting on its auditory submodalities (volume, distance, tone).

Common mistakes

A common mistake is thinking that changing the submodalities of an experience is the same as "pretending" the memory doesn't exist: in reality you're working on the structure through which the experience is represented, not denying it. A second mistake is applying submodality techniques without first precisely eliciting that specific person's actual submodalities, applying a generic template instead of the individual's real one. A third mistake is expecting immediate, permanent results after a single attempt, when in many cases working on submodalities requires practice and repeated exercise.

Practical example

A person reports constantly having in mind the image of a mistake made in public, which comes back to them vividly every time they have to speak in front of others. Working on the submodalities of that image — progressively pushing it further away, shrinking its size, blurring its colors until it turns black and white — the emotional intensity tied to the memory noticeably decreases, without the memory of the fact itself being denied or removed.

Applications

Working on submodalities applies to coaching for overcoming limiting memories, mental preparation for exams and performance, stress management, boosting motivation toward a goal, and as a technical foundation for many other NLP change techniques, like the swish, anchoring and reframing.

Frequently asked questions

What are submodalities in NLP? They're the building-block details with which the mind encodes an experience in the form of images, sounds and sensations: brightness, distance, volume, tone, temperature, and so on.

What's the difference between analog and digital submodalities? Analog ones are gradually adjustable on a scale of intensity (like brightness), while digital ones work like an on/off switch, with no middle ground (like associated or dissociated image).

How can you reduce the emotional impact of a negative memory? By changing its submodalities: pushing the image away, shrinking it, blurring its details, or lowering the volume of any associated sounds, until its perceived emotional intensity decreases.

What is the submodality-based swish technique? It's a technique that quickly replaces a negative image with a positive one, working on the submodalities of both to make the positive image more appealing and accessible, helping leave behind a limiting behavior.

Are submodalities the same for everyone? No. Every person has specific submodalities tied to their own experiences, which is why the first step of every technique is "eliciting," meaning precisely identifying, that person's real submodalities, before working on them.

Related concepts

What Is an Internal State, Emotions in NLP, What Is an Anchor, How to Remove Negative Anchors, The Swish Technique, Reframing.

Go deeper

Submodalities, with the complete techniques and practical application examples, are presented in the chapter of the same name in Volume II of "The Invisible Blade".

Giovanni Ceroni

Mental Coach and author of the La Lama Invisibile / The Invisible Blade series.