What is Emotional Resolution® (or EmRes®)?
We were all born with the physiological ability to permanently resolve our own emotional difficulties.
Most of us live our lives with an awareness of the burden negative emotional patterns create for us. Some of us try self-help, others turn to professional help, still others self-medicate. The burden may get intermittently lighter, but it stays with us and resurfaces with the next trigger. This leads to disruptive emotional patterns: anger, stress, jealousy, phobias, anxiety, shame, avoidance, to name a few. I am here to tell you that it does not have to be this way.
Neuroscientists are beginning to understand that the body is wired to permanently resolve dysfunctional and negative emotional patterns... if we only allow it do its natural job!
Each one of us has an innate biological capacity for self-emotional resolution.
From the understanding of this natural capacity, several protocols were designed to resolve disruptive emotional patterns and long-lasting trauma.
There are numerous theories about the origin and modulation of emotions. One unifying concept to all of these theories is that emotions are generated in subcortical brain centers in response to external stimuli. As early as the 1880’s, William James and Carl Lange posited their theory of emotion, in which they outlined how external stimuli elicit a set of physical responses which are processed by higher cognitive functions to yield to an emotion. Subsequent works by neuropsychologists such as James Papez further expanded on this theory, implicating the limbic system—the hypothalamus, anterior thalamic nucleus, hippocampus, and the cingulate gyrus—in creating affect, which was then processed by the cortical brain to produce behaviors or emotional symptoms.
The concept of the limbic system being the cradle for our emotional responses has proved to be obsolete by research from Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. Other contemporary work by Antonio Damasio incorporates the notion that sensory responses are at the core of emotions. In his “Somatic Marker Hypothesis”, Dr. Damasio describes somatic markers as the body’s sensory responses to external stimuli or circumstances that comprise an emotion.
What is a recurrent emotional difficulty?
This complex question has long intrigued neuroscientists. Nowadays, they agree that interoception is the key to emotions.
Interoception is the sum of all the physical sensations from our internal organs, tissues, hormonal signals, immune and inflammatory responses, and other processes in the body triggered by stimuli.
Emotions are crafted as our brain interprets this interoceptive data through our personal lens of personality, culture, and experience. Interoception constitutes a direct bridge, a precise “road map”, to the origin of our emotional difficulties.
Following our physical sensations consciously allows us to resolve disruptive emotional patterns. This precise process, which I call viscero-somatic quieting, serves as the base of Emotional Resolution. Viscero-somatic quieting connects you to the origin of an emotion through your physical sensations and modulates the unwanted emotional response permanently.
Where do these physical sensations come from?
From the current understanding in neuroscience, these sensations are obsolete predictions of the brain, based
on passed traumatic experiences.
These sensations were felt during very stressful events from our past. When the body is exposed to a situation holding similar details as one of these events, our brain is predicting what physical sensations we are about to experience.
Re-experiencing these sensations from a safe environment updates the outdated predictions from our brain.