The concept of submodalities had been part of NLP since the late 1970′s, but they were presented primarily as a way of enhancing experiences. Although association / dissociation was the key element in many of the more effective standard NLP patterns that had been taught for years, it was not clearly described as a submodality shift.

It was only in 1983 that Richard Bandler explicitly began to reveal the structure of submodalities in general. He taught how submodality shifts could be used to change habits (swish pattern ), change beliefs, and create motivation or understanding, and how submodality thresholds could be used to break locked-in patterns like compulsions, or to lock in new changes.

In short, he outlined how submodalities comprise one way of understanding the underlying structure of all experience. Bandler and Grinder constructed the Representational Systems of the VAK modalities with their qualities (“submodalities”). This provided a language for describing & modeling human experiences.

The concept of submodalities arose in the field of neuro-linguistic programming, explaining that human beings ‘code’ internal experiences using aspects of their different senses.