The SSR framework organizes the proposed process into four overlapping phases:

1. Co-activation and Early Salience Shaping. When a client is actively engaged with painful emotional material, modulated visual input enters the same experiential field. The brain processes this input alongside the emotional content, influencing which aspects of the distressing material feel most immediate and urgent — shaping the emotional field from the very start of engagement.

2. Precision Reweighting and Mismatch. Distressing emotional patterns often feel inevitable — the brain predicts that pain will escalate along a familiar trajectory. Small but meaningful deviations in sensory input can introduce tolerable mismatches into that otherwise rigid sequence. The client remains present with the material, but it no longer unfolds along exactly the same predictive track.

3. Body Re-coding and Salience Regulation. Those shifts begin registering in the body. Many emotional patterns are maintained not just by memories or beliefs, but by a recurrent bodily expectancy — tightening, dread, physiological cascade. Sensory modulation may help alter that expected bodily trajectory toward greater autonomic stability, without requiring the client to disengage from the emotional content.

4. Integration, Insight, and Updating. With salience and bodily regulation more stable, the conditions emerge for broader change — reflective distance, autobiographical reorganization, and lasting adaptive shifts. Insight, in this view, is not imposed from outside; it emerges when the earlier phases have created the neurobiological conditions that make it possible.