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

by Bruce Ecker

For that purpose of guiding truly experiential work, there is a style of phrasing that is particularly effective for verbalizing the retrieved emotional truth of the symptom—the style used in the overt statement offered to Richard above: “Feeling any confidence means I’m arrogant, self-centered, and totally insensitive like Dad, and people will hate me for it, so I’ve got to never feel confident, ever.” That style of vivid, present tense, first-person, emotionally candid, highly specific phrasing for naming one’s living knowledge of what is at stake, what one’s vulnerabilities are, and what measures are therefore urgently necessary, is called limbic language in Coherence Therapy, referring to the brain’s limbic system, the major seat of emotional implicit memory.