NLP has been called the study of subjective experience. Its central contention is that people operate from and respond to their "construction" of their experiences rather than from a single external "reality". They have their own unique models or maps of the world and each one is different from every other. All such "maps" are valid whilst no map is fully able to represent the "territory" or external reality itself.

NLP has a theoretical basis the core of which is that it is a way of thinking about people which has proved practical and effective in a wide range of applications, contexts and situations. It is not held to be "true", but it is taken as a useful model. The model itself is organic and changes as new applications are explored. It is broadly based and draws on concepts from many areas of psychology and psychotherapy. Early influences stem from the Gestalt "school", the family therapy of Virginia Satire, Ericksonian brief therapy, and humanistic psychology. There are also clear links with the fields of systems theory, behavioural psychology and linguistics, especially the works of Bateson, Watzlawick, Korzybsky and Chomsky.

NLP addresses the issues of creating expectations which cannot sensibly be realised. To do this there is a great deal of emphasis placed on the concept of "ecology" in the personal and corporate change work in NLP. The changes sought must be fully representative of the whole person or system, and not just a part that may be fanciful {albeit also creative} or careless of the potential adverse consequences of change.

The NLP approach is "reflexive" in that therapists seek to make their own psychological processes explicit and to understand these in terms of the theoretical model on which their therapeutic approach is based. The essential remedial and generative model for change is NLP. In NLP it is stated that PRESENT STATE + RESOURCES = DESIRED STATE. Where the resources are "enabling states" drawn from client's own experience.

The NLP psychotherapist and counsellor seeks to help the client to identify the desired state and then achieve it using his or her own internal resources. This can involve the client in changing limiting beliefs, acquiring new beliefs, and / or gaining insights into patterns of behaviour, thereby enabling more choices. Whilst the client's personal history is taken as relevant to his or her present state, the emphasis is on how he or she constructs that state from experiences past and present rather than on why. In general this is taken to be a process of "deletion" in which some experiences are ignored, "generalisation" in which universal rules are inferred from individual sets of experiences, and "distortion" in which connections are made between experiences, the intensity or quality of which may be heightened or diminished by internal processing. "Experiences" are highly varied but they can finally be described in terms of past and present sensory inputs modified by deletion, generalisation and distortion. That is to say, that at any one time, an individual has access to external sensory inputs through the visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, abstract, gustatory and olfactory channels and to internal constructions {memories, with or without deletion and distortion, and synthesised fantasies} which can be described in terms of the same basic five senses. The particular "construction" actually experienced depends on the extent of distortion and deletion in each of the ten categories {five internal and five external}.

The "meaning" ascribed to the experience depends on the extent of generalisation or distortion applied to it. Change takes place in the present and is experienced in the future. Understanding the "past" as a means to achieve change, is in effect understanding the present construction of the past. Cybernetics and systems theory provide a metaphor for the NLP model of personality. It is seen as being one where the person is driven by cognitive patterns of experience rather than by cause and effect chains. NLP psychotherapy is typically brief compared with some other types of psychotherapy. Furthermore because NLP is generative as well as remedial, work with an NLP therapist or counsellor can move on from dealing with past limitations to future performance in order to achieve personal and professional goals.