Originality is overrated and usually fake. The founders of NLP never claimed to have invented a psychology. They claimed something stranger and more useful: that excellence leaves traces, that the traces can be copied, and that the copy can be taught. The field's first and best thefts came from three therapists, and the honest account of what was taken from each is a better introduction to NLP than any technique demo.
From Fritz Perls: the confrontation grammar
Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy, ran sessions like a heat-seeking instrument: find where the client's words, voice and body disagreed, and put the conflict on the table, now. Watch the filmed sessions Bandler and Grinder worked from and the extractable skeleton is clear: stay in the here-and-now, force present-tense ownership ("I" not "one"), refuse the client's escape routes into explanation, put energy into the avoidance itself.
From him, the early field took its confrontation syntax and, more importantly, a proof of concept: a method could be run on structure without sharing the client's theory of why it hurts. What it took less of: Perls's clinical instincts about when to push and when to shut up, which is why early NLP practitioners running Gestalt patterns could be so unpleasant to watch.
From Virginia Satir: the precision questions
Satir worked families like an engineer with perfect pitch for language. Her questions reopened every compression: who exactly, how specifically, says who. Her reframes relocated meaning without moving a word. And underneath it all ran a systematic optimism: the family was a system that could be re-tuned, not a verdict.
From her, the field took the Meta Model, its first formal tool: the question set that recovers deleted specifics, challenges invented rules, and re-sizes promoted generalizations. She was also the most generous of the three exemplars toward the young men coding her, lending her collaboration at the start. What the codification thinned out: the warmth that made her questions survivable, which is why any honest NLP curriculum has to bolt the humanity back on explicitly. Her mechanics are documented here and the human story here.
From Milton Erickson: the other direction
Erickson, the hypnotherapist, did the opposite of Perls. Where confrontation confronted, Erickson's indirect style slid past defences: stories that carried instructions, permissive vagueness that let the listener fill the content, suggestions embedded where evaluation would not find them. He met people inside their own model of the world and moved it from within.
From him came the Milton Model: the pattern set for artfully vague, permissive, assumption-laden language, plus the deep NLP habit of pacing before leading. His clinical patience and long case-by-case craft did not transfer well, which the field has been slow to admit. The story of his methods is here.
What the theft actually produced
Notice what Bandler and Grinder did and did not take. They did not take theories: Perls's Gestalt theory, Satir's family systems framework, Erickson's hypnotism lore all stayed mostly with their owners. They took the observable procedure, the what, and skipped the why. That is both the genius and the original sin of NLP. Genius, because procedure transfers; the Meta Model can be taught in weeks where Satir's twenty years of intuition cannot. Original sin, because a procedure stripped of its inventor's judgment is a power tool without a guard, and the field's ethics problems start exactly there.
There is a second debt, less advertised: the linguistics. Grinder's transformational grammar background supplied the formal categories the observations got sorted into. The field is a collaboration between someone who could see and someone who could name. Neither alone gets there.
The inheritance, honestly stated
Every NLP technique you will encounter descends from these three thefts plus the modelling method that made them. That method, find the excellent person, code the structure, teach the structure, is the field's real content, which is why modelling itself sits at the centre of how we teach, and why the Spirit of NLP programme is built around a modelling project rather than a technique inventory.
Also in this lineage: the two geniuses who couldn't explain themselves, the early history, and who kept building after the founders.
Steal from the best. Credit them. Improve the copy. That is not a scandal, that is the entire method.