By Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic, and Laurel Hilley - While most neuroscientists once believed that implicit memories, avoidance reactions, and rigid schemas were locked permanently in the brain’s synaptic pathways, brain research shows that, under certain conditions, we can not only unlock these neural pathways, but actually erase them and substitute new learning.

By Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley - There's a moment that we therapists savor above all. Before our eyes, a shift takes place and the client slips from the grip of a lifelong pattern. Three decades ago, we discovered that what distinguished the pivotal interactions was that we had completely stopped trying to counteract, override or prevent the client's debilitating difficulties.

By Bruce Ecker - Anxieties and panics aren't merely neurobiological dysfunctions. By heading straight into the core of meaning at the heart of symptoms, therapy becomes a place where a deeper sense of order replaces the apparent senselessness of presenting complaints, and clients awaken to areas of self that have control over what previously seemed utterly out of control.

What we clinicians have learned in recent years about the intricacies of the brain's implicit memory systems has certainly helped us better recognize the linkage between distressing or traumatic experiences and many of the previously puzzling symptoms clients bring to our offices. But now brain science is beginning ...

Sometimes panic and anxiety have no function—they aren’t the means of fulfilling a hidden purpose for the sufferer—yet in a different way, they’re still necessary to a coherent underlying pattern.

The coherence that underlies panic and severe anxiety disorder has a neurobiologically distinct form: flashbacks of unresolved, unconscious traumatic memory.

“Symptom coherence” is how we refer to the view that there always exists a well-defined, cogent set of personal themes and purposes that necessitate a symptom. The moment there no longer exists any purpose requiring a symptom, the person stops producing it. This view informed the development of a clinical methodology called Depth-Oriented Brief Therapy.

New research into the complexities of memory reconsolidation offers important clues about how we can make the most elusive of consulting room events—the deep, therapeutic breakthrough—a regular occurrence.

For the firs time, we're beginning to understand how to directly delete emotional meanings attributed to disturbing past events.

Findings about memory consolidation in the brain have opened up the possibility that transformational therapeutic change is more feasible than we previously believed.

To focus on the unconscious psychological roots of an individual's anxiety has become an anachronism. But how many of us, with a toolbox full of today's methods, reliably bring about a decisive cessation of our clients' intense anxiety and panic? In the first few years of my clinical career, I found that with standard methods I could often help clients mildly relieve their anxieties, but that I rarely achieved a radical reduction of symptoms. Yet there were occasional sessions in which I abandoned conventional clinical wisdom and tapped into a deep layer of personal meaning in the symptoms. When I did that, clients' symptoms often ceased from one session to the next, and never recurred. For several years, I systematically examined what was different about those sporadic sessions that yielded such profound change. What I found was a surprise.