as background to what that statement brings up for me is that the "feelings can lie" stuff has been really big in recent years in the Christian counselling circle particularly; so much so that now there are people emerging from that background who are coming out saying things like they were abused by their therapist or church for being on the receiving end of those comments and how it minimised their feelings and made them doubt themselves. I was taught along those lines also; for example ... if I feel scared when I'm in a safe environment then my feelings "must" be lying and I should listen to the truth which is i'm safe and not the lies which is that there is something to be scared about. Like you said with the cognitive thoughts; then there is the line of thinking which suggests that ok; i'm in a safe environment but my thinking is remembering a past time of abuse (as one example) and has triggered the feeling responses to that so that it's my thinking that is "off" and once I change that my feelings will also change as in, acknowledging I'm safe, remembering that in my thinking and seeing how then I feel more secure. But then, that gets muddled when I'm in the safe environment; my thinking is on something totally unrelated eg. focused on a lecture, on a tv show etc and yet my feelings are still coming up as scared --- but; how do we know what is going on in our subconcious minds? eg. is there a smell that triggered us that we don't realise; a sound, it could be anything but for some reason we are responding to it. Then the feeling instead of being a "lie" might be a clue - a clue that something is happening and we are responding even though we may not be sure what it is. That all sounds so jumbled up; but then to me the thoughts, feelings, experiences, subconcious and concious thoughts are jumbled and often not easy to untangle. Not sure where the pre-verbal part comes in; but that may be connected or it could be some other trigger going on that you just weren't aware of at any concious level