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

In Unlocking the Emotional Brain, authors Ecker, Ticic, and Hulley equip readers to carry out focused, empathic therapy using the potent process of memory reconsolidation, the recently discovered and only known process for actually unlocking emotional memory at the synaptic level. The Routledge classic edition includes a new preface from the authors describing the book’s widespread impact on psychotherapy since its initial publication.

Emotional memory's tenacity is the familiar bane of therapists, and researchers had long believed that emotional memory forms indelible learning. Reconsolidation has overturned these views. It allows new learning to truly nullify, not just suppress, the deep, intensely problematic emotional learnings that form, outside of awareness, 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 responses―whether moods, behaviors, or thought patterns―causing 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 the Coherence Therapy Practice Manual and Training Guide and Depth Oriented Brief Therapy: How to Be Brief When You Were Trained to Be Deep and Vice Versa. Ecker is codirector of the Coherence Psychology Institute, has taught graduate courses for many years, is an internationally prominent conference speaker, and has been in private practice since 1986. Hulley is director of education and paradigm development of the Coherence Psychology Institute and cofounder 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 clinical supervision and training of trauma therapists. She has conducted clinical workshops internationally, 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.