Bruce Ecker, LMFT — Contributor

Bruce Ecker, M.A., L.M.F.T. is co-originator of Coherence Therapy and a founding director of the Coherence Psychology Institute. He is coauthor of many clinical publications including the volumes Depth Oriented Brief Therapy: How To Be Brief When You Were Trained To Be Deep and Vice Versa and the Coherence Therapy Practice Manual and Training Guide. He is a frequent presenter at major psychotherapy conferences and an internationally sought clinical trainer who has taught in graduate programs for many years. He has been in independent psychotherapy practice in the San Francisco area for over 25 years, prior to which he was a research physicist for fourteen years.

The central theme of Ecker's clinical career has been the clarification of the ingredients of profound therapeutic change. Giving equal emphasis to both a compassionate understanding of "emotional truth" and to rigorous, scientific thinking has led him and clinical collaborator Laurel Hulley to identify a natural, core process of profound change across a wide range of clients' symptoms, issues and personalities. The approach, known as Coherence Therapy, is at once deep, efficient, and steeped in respect for the individual.

In 2005, Ecker began studying current research in the neuroscience of learning and memory, reasoning that something corresponding to the core, phenomenological process he and Hulley had identified should be apparent on the neurological level if that process is truly an inherent feature of the mind and brain, as he believed.

It emerged that brain research in the new field of memory reconsolidation is yielding corroboration of Ecker's hypothesis that the profound changes observed in Coherence Therapy correspond, on the neurobiological level, to actual erasure of neurally encoded emotional learnings. If confirmed by rigorous, controlled studies yet to be performed, this would be a significant step of unifying our understanding of how subjective, emotional processes and neural, biomolecular processes function in tandem, interdependently, for emotional growth and change.

Ecker now divides his time between his therapy practice, the training of therapists in Coherence Therapy through the Coherence Psychology Institute, and writing and lecturing on the emerging new clinical paradigm of profound therapeutic change through the reconsolidation process.


The following are Bruce's contributions to MentalHelp.Net

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