Bruce Ecker > Quotes

“Emotional memory converts the past into an expectation of the future, without our awareness, and that is both a blessing and a curse.”
― Bruce Ecker, Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation

“We have seen that when an emotional learning or schema is the
underlying cause of a therapy client’s presenting symptom, the
schema can be retrieved into direct, explicit experience and then
profoundly unlearned and dissolved by the same sequence of
experiences that neuroscientists identified in reconsolidation
research”
― bruce ecker, Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation

“A fundamental feature of the symptom coherence model of symptom production is the recognition that the suffering due to a functional symptom is actually the lesser of two evils - the other, greater evil being the suffering that is unconsciously expected from not having the symptom.”
― bruce ecker, Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation

“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

“Table 3.1 Steps of clinical process for using new learning to nullify or update an existing emotional learning”
― Bruce Ecker, Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation

“Memory research that supports a non-pathologizing, coherence-based model of symptom production in the wide range of cases where symptoms are generated by emotional memory. This is the central perspective of the Emotional Coherence Framework.”
― Bruce Ecker, Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation

“The central principle in Coherence Therapy is that far more symptoms are produced by emotional learnings than is generally recognized, and learning-driven symptoms exist entirely because they are adaptively and compelling necessary to have, according to at least one of a person's emotional implicit learnings for how to avoid suffering and have safety, well being or justice.”
― Bruce Ecker

“Memory research has established that learnings accompanied by strong emotion form neural circuits in subcortical implicit memory that are exceptionally durable, normally lasting a lifetime.”
― Bruce Ecker, Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation

“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