Coherence Therapy

The Key to Therapeutic Breakthroughs

Bruce Ecker, LMFT and Sara K. Bridges, Ph.D.

A remarkable process of transformational change discovered by brain researchers—known as memory reconsolidation—appears to lie at the heart of true therapeutic breakthroughs and can now be recognized in diverse psychotherapies. In this workshop, you'll learn how to apply the steps of the reconsolidation process clinically to free clients from entrenched reactions, old attachment patterns, and longstanding emotional wounds. You'll discover how the locked, underlying emotional learnings are retrieved, unlocked, and dissolved by new learning. The result is a deeply felt transformational shift. A live demonstration and a session video will show you how the process is facilitated in Coherence Therapy.

Coherence Therapy and the Cessation of Chronic Symptomology:

Clinical and Neuropsychological Processes

Bruce Ecker, LMFT

University of California, Berkeley, Clinical Science Department

Clinical Colloquium Series

November 2007

This talk spells out the close correspondences between Coherence Therapy's model and methods of profound change and the brain's process of memory reconsolidating recently discovered by neuroscientists. Session recordings illustrate a well-defined, built-in process that therapists can foster to make transformational shifts a regular occurrence in day-to-day clinical practice. Emphasis in this succinct presentation is more on the science than the art of Coherence Therapy.

The Effectiveness of Psychotherapy

Bruce Ecker, LMFT

Keynote Address

12th Biennial Conference of the Constructivist Psychology Network

University of California, San Marcos, July 2006

The many meta-analyses of psychotherapy efficacy studies have shown that with investigator bias taken into account, all studied therapies have essentially the same, modest level of efficacy, equal to that of placebo therapies. This talk offers a new, paradigm-shifting explanation of the observed cap on efficacy and how it could be surpassed. A potential master key to a new level of therapeutic effectiveness is the concept of emotional coherence, the view that a therapy client's presenting symptom is a coherent expression of the person's existing, learned, implicit constructions of self and world, not a "disorder." This talk explains why the coherence-focused therapy co-developed by the speaker could be expected to break the longstanding effectiveness barrier. This optimistic expectation is based on both extensive clinical observations as well as neuroscience research findings on memory reconsolidation, the brain's built-in process for dissolving the neural encoding of implicit emotional learnings and the responses they maintain.