Unlocking the Emotional Brain Quotes

“If those emotions cannot yet be tolerated by the client, access to the underlying schema is also blocked. Therefore, making those emotions workable for the client to feel is necessary in order to then access the underlying schema, bring conscious awareness to it, and subject it to disconfirmation and unlearning. Facilitating direct experience of previously blocked emotion tends, in itself, to alleviate certain symptoms, and has been shown to correlate strongly with positive therapeutic outcome (e.g., Elliott et al., 2003; Missirlian et al., 2005), but will not by itself achieve transformational change unless, in addition, the underlying schema undergoes disconfirmation.”
― Bruce Ecker, Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Memory Reconsolidation and the Psychotherapy of Transformational Change

“In counteractive change, building up a new, preferred response requires great numbers of repetitions of the new response over time, accompanied by mindful attention to choosing the new response each time, in order to establish and strengthen the neural linkages required. The need for many repetitions reflects the principle that “neurons that fire together, wire together,” which is the popular formulation of Hebb's law. In contrast, transformational change through the unlearning sequence does not rely on extensive repetition over time to effect profound change. MR does not occur through the type of synaptic plasticity described by Hebb's law. The swiftness with which deep, decisive, lasting change occurs through the MR mechanism challenges traditional notions of the time required for major therapeutic effects to come about. It seems worth repeating here that effective new learning of any kind creates brain change in the form of new neural connections; but it is only when new learning also nullifies and replaces old learning that transformational change occurs, rather than counteractive change, and this is what the unlearning sequence achieves through MR: learning that drives unlearning.”
― Bruce Ecker, Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Memory Reconsolidation and the Psychotherapy of Transformational Change