Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation

by Bruce Ecker

consists largely of implicit memory of emotional learnings formed and stored by the subcortical limbic system and the right cortical hemisphere.

Early life experiences within primary attachment relationships create potent emotional learnings

The swiftness with which deep, decisive, lasting change occurs through the therapeutic reconsolidation process

Clarity and ongoing mindfulness regarding the client’s specific

far more symptoms are produced by emotional learnings than is generally recognized,

mode—through the creation of discovery experiences.

What unconscious, learned emotional knowledge was making it necessary for Richard to generate self-doubt at work?

symptom deprivation

the therapist focused primarily on eliciting attributed meaning as well as the emotional quality of the experience.

The client has been guided to “bump into,” notice, and reveal to the therapist previously unconscious constructs, knowings, feelings, and purposes that strongly require his chronic self-doubting and the insecure, unconfident feeling that this self-doubting generates.

subjective immersion in the symptom-requiring schema,

present-moment live experience

the suffering due to a functional symptom is actually the lesser of two

learned emotional knowledge that is the emotional truth of the symptom

Not all presented symptoms are functional,

A functionless symptom is produced because it is an inevitable result or by-product of a functional (but possibly unpresented)

the therapist must be an emotionally safe presence and communicate genuine, empathetic understanding and full acceptance of the

emerging emotional truth of how and why the symptom actually feels necessary to have.

to follow a graduated process of small enough steps

to limit the intensity of emotional accessing to levels that are not destabilizing or overwhelming.

It is best practice to ask the client after each further segment of experiential work,

detect any incipient destabilization or problematic reactions, and take measures to ensure safety and stability.

integration experiences,

which are simply repeated experiences of the discovered material both during and between sessions.

Fullest emotional deepening occurs in the integration

What matters is for the client repeatedly to have a bodily experience of the emotional realness of the discovered

limbic language

comfort on the therapist’s part in being in the presence of the client’s emotional experiencing, as well as use of softer voice tones, slower pacing, and silences to facilitate emotional deepening in areas of vulnerability.

The therapist guides the client simply to stay in touch with, and keep having experiences of, the symptom-requiring emotional truth, embracing and integrating the schema into conscious awareness just as it is

“Once you have arrived at the symptom’s emotional truth, stay there. Pitch a tent. Set up camp right there

to return, in his imagination, to the moments of a recent occurrence of his self-doubting, self-invalidating self-talk at work, and simply to add onto that self-talk an overt statement

a guided, persistent practice of mindfulness of the specific emotional learnings

memory of original experiences:

mental model

The problem:

The solution:

The therapist therefore now began Step C, the search for contradictory knowledge that could then be used in the transformation sequence, Steps

Those juxtaposition experiences are the actual moments in which profound change occurs—the radical clearing away of troubled emotional learning with contradictory knowledge.

simultaneously experiencing the pro-symptom schema side by side with the sharply contradictory knowledge, with both knowings feeling vividly real,

This edgy experiential

dissonance can be viewed as an enriched extension of the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance

This experiential way of verifying transformation by confirming the markers of erasure is an important final step in Coherence Therapy’s methodology.

Using active, focused, experiential methods, usually this transformation resistance work on a single schema is accomplished in a small number of sessions.

identification of the client’s presenting problems or symptoms described in concrete, experiential specifics (Step A).

The next step consists of drawing into explicit awareness the implicit emotional learnings underlying and maintaining the symptoms (Step B).

identification of contradictory

knowledge that is emotionally real to the client

first the symptom-generating learning or knowledge is re-evoked and reactivated (Step 1).

Then, concurrently, the contradictory knowledge is activated (Step 2)

for a mismatch experience of two knowings, side by side, both of which ca...