Bruce Ecker argues that ‘emotional learnings’ generate the majority of unwanted behaviours, moods, emotions, and thoughts that cause distress and bring people to therapy. It was generally thought until recently that learnings that occurred during intense emotional activation – core beliefs and constructs formed in childhood – were locked into the brain for life.

However, since 2004, neuroscience has shown that a type of neuroplasticity called memory reconsolidation, allows emotional learning to be not just over-ridden but deleted by new learning. Transformational change occurs when new learning, in addition to creating new neural circuits, also unwires old learning. The new learning does not simply suppress and compete against the old learning, but nullifies and dissolves it. Transformational change contrasts with incremental change that involves management of symptoms. The reconsolidation process is at work when there is the lasting disappearance of a long-standing, learned, response pattern.

Emotional learnings are held in implicit (non-conscious) memory. These memories drive unwanted responses in mood, emotion, behaviour and thought, but the individual is unaware of possessing these learnings because they are held outside of awareness. These learnings hold not only the sensory data of an event and the emotions someone was experiencing at the time but also a constructed ‘mental model’ of how the world functions. This is a template or schema that is a generalising way of making sense of perception and emotion. These models are created and stored without awareness and does not the form of words. The emotional brain or limbic system uses this model to anticipate similar experiences in the future, recognising them as they start. Emotional memory, says Ecker, turns the past into an expectation of the future. These implicit knowings help us navigate our way in the world with efficiency. However, they can also carry forward the worst experiences from our past forward into the present (and our imagined future) as ‘felt emotional realities’.