Bruce Ecker writes that the emotional brain makes meaning in ways that are implicit and nonverbal. This ability to make models of the world is innate and present in 3-month-old infants who have expectations of their environment and respond accordingly. Psychotherapy seeks to bring the underlying learnings that drive symptoms into explicit awareness. Ecker argues that is that emotional right-brain and subcortical brain structures are adaptive and coherent, based on the real-life experience of a person. Symptoms have a positive adaptive purpose based on a person’s past experience. Emotional knowledge, formed early in life, can be re-triggered decades later by cues in the environment. This is how the brain is evolved to function. These templates are strategies for avoiding suffering and maintaining well-being.