Bruce Ecker - Unlocking the Emotional Brain

Eckers, Ticics, and Hulleys Unlocking the Emotional Brain, like some earlier classics, draws from, adapts, and integrates the very best of the best currently available concepts and techniques into a powerful and accessible psychotherapeutic method. What sets this book apart is how these elements are mixed, matched, and delivered to each individual client. Packaged in a highly engaging read, psychotherapists of all sorts will find many resources which will enhance as well as ease their work.

Babette Rothschild, MSW, LCSW
Author of The Body Remembers:
The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment

Read this book and you will never do therapy in the same way again! These authors show you how to do effective therapy rooted in the science of the mind. A well designed book that provides practical examples that allow the reader to learn the important concepts without needing medical training.

Jon Carlson, PsyD, EdD, ABPP
Distinguished Professor, Psychology & Counseling, Governors State
University, and co-author of Creative Breakthroughs in Therapy

This book is a major contribution to the field, and a must read for any therapist interested in the process of transformation and healing. Beautifully written, the authors present an elegant integration of neuroscientific findings and psychotherapy technique, resulting in a step by step method for relieving longstanding symptoms and suffering. Even the most seasoned clinician will be inspired to learn from these masters.

Patricia Coughlin Della Selva, PhD
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, UNM School of Medicine and author of
Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy: Theory and Technique

This is a refreshing and audacious book that throws open the doors and blows the dust from the corners of clinical practice. By offering a virtually theory-free methodology for transforming emotional memory, the authors do more than add a startlingly effective process to the repertoire of every clinician. They build powerful alliances across clinical approaches, and make a powerful case for respecting the clients current symptoms as adaptive and rooted in sense-making.

Ann Weiser Cornell, PhD
Author of Focusing in Clinical Practice: The Essence of Change

Imagine the founders of diverse therapy methodologies discussing how they achieve deep, lasting, transformational change and agreeing its due to one basic process. Building on state-of-the-art neuroscience to identify that core process, the authors develop an approach that is theory-free, nonpathologizing, empathic, experiential, phenomenological, and nonspeculative, and that hones therapy while not cramping the therapists unique contributionan integrationists dream!

Hanna Levenson, PhD
Author of. Brief Dynamic Therapy

Why do symptom complexes and negative narratives often persist, and how can therapists help clients get free of them? In this well-written book, the authors have provided a transtheoretical, effective and efficient approach, nicely grounded in recent neuroscience, for deep, transformational change in pernicious emotional implicit learnings across a wide variety of presenting problems and situations. This is a significant breakthrough book that deserves careful study. I recommend it most highly!

Michael F. Hoyt, PhD
Author of Brief Psychotherapies: Principles and Practices
and editor of The Handbook of Constructive Therapies

This is a unique, creative, and insightful book that shows how to utilize experiential methods to promote personal transformation. The authors back up their approach by showing how it fits with recent neuropsychological findings on how the brain can alter and even eliminate old painful memories. This book is on the forefront of books that are using neuropsychological findings to illuminate psychotherapy.

Arthur C. Bohart, PhD
Professor Emeritus, California State University, Dominguez Hills,
and coauthor of How Clients Make Therapy Work:
The Process of Active Self-Healing.

Drawing on the latest developments in neuroscience, Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic and Laurel Hulley provide an innovative approach to psychotherapy that is very much of the 21st century. In this book filled with both ground-breaking neuroscience and provocative case examples, they describe how to tap into the reconsolidation process in therapy. If you want to know whats happening that is new in psychotherapy, this is the place to start.

Jay Lebow, PhD
Clinical professor of Psychology, Northwestern University
and editor of Family Process

Psychotherapy that regularly yields liberating, lasting change was, in the last century, a futuristic vision, but it has now become reality, thanks to a convergence of remarkable advances in clinical knowledge and brain science. In Unlocking the Emotional Brain, authors Ecker, Ticic, and Hulley equip readers to carry out focused, empathic therapy using the process found by researchers to induce memory reconsolidation, the recently discovered and only known process for actually unlocking emotional memory at the synaptic level. Emotional memorys tenacity is the familiar bane of therapists, and researchers have long believed that emotional memory forms indelible learning. Reconsolidation has overturned these views. It allows new learning to erase, not just suppress, the deep, unconscious, intensely problematic emotional learnings that form during childhood or in later tribulations and generate most of the symptoms that bring people to therapy. Readers will learn methods that precisely eliminate unwanted, ingrained emotional responseswhether moods, behaviors or thought patternscausing no loss of ordinary narrative memory, while restoring clients well-being. Numerous case examples show the versatile use of this process in AEDP, Coherence Therapy, EFT, EMDR, and IPNB.

Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley are the originators of Coherence Therapy and coauthors of Depth Oriented Brief Therapy: How to Be Brief When You Were Trained to Be Deepand Vice Versa, the Coherence Therapy Practice Manual and Training Guide, and the Manual of Juxtaposition Experiences: How to Create Transformational Change Using Disconfirming Knowledge in Coherence Therapy. Ecker is codirector of the Coherence Psychology Institute, has taught for many years in graduate programs, and has been in private practice near San Francisco since 1986. Hulley is director of education and paradigm development of the Coherence Psychology Institute and co-founder of the Julia Morgan Middle School for Girls in Oakland, California.

Robin Ticic is director of training and development of the Coherence Psychology Institute and is in private practice near Cologne, Germany, specializing in trauma therapy and clinical supervision of trauma therapists. She has served as a psychologist for the Psychotraumatology Institute of the University of Cologne for many years, provides a low-fee counseling service for parents, and is author of the parenting guide How to Connect with Your Child, published in English and German.

First published 2012
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2012 Taylor & Francis

The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.