your emotional life: our mission
SOME FURTHER NOTES ABOUT CLINICAL AFFECTOLOGY AND ECR THERAPY
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"The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mood of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change; for happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up."
- Charles Langbridge Morgan
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In the ECR – Emotional Core Reframing – Professional Practitioner Training Program that has been in existence for several years, one of the mandatory readings for that course is Daniel Stern's "The Interpersonal World of the Infant." We trainers have never seen so many people affected by this book's implications, particularly in the realm of understanding that "as a parent, maybe I didn't do anything wrong after all," and "we had no control over the context of the early emotional learnings of our kids (if what Stern says is true)!"
To try to put this into a narrative that won't take 100 pages is a great task, but we'll try, because it's important in our understanding of why the study of affectology can indeed be so important to parenting. And why it means so much to us as people struggling to figure out if there's something in our early past that isn't quite "appropriate" … something that may have been traumatic (but we're not quite sure).
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Suggestion: if you're not overly interested in academic qualifiers, you might like to just go straight to the Core Point Conclusion below, (title in Blue) because the text between here and there is rather technically-oriented.
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Stern has devoted his whole life and career to research into what is the emotional landscape of the infant child - before narrative; the preverbal history of learning and emotional framing that stays with us into adulthood - at least in part if not wholly (affective neuroscientists call this 'trace initiating responses').
As a part of the theory component in the course mentioned above, we have included a significant study into Stern's work and the propositions that it presents us with - propositions that, once we consider the "likelihood" carefully, many affectologists encase in the cloak of either fact or commonsense proposition.
Most significant are the issues of "amodalism" and "R.I.G."s. From the time that the infant is able to register any sensorial experience (much of the research points to around 23 or 24 weeks into gestation) until she or he is able to start processing information cognitively (with words in the mind), the global reception of "feeling" experienced by that child is registered AMODALLY; that is, she or he does not segregate information into the five senses as do we adults. The "feeling" of experience is accepted and registered as a cocktail of signals with an inability to segregate those signals into visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory or kinesthetic modes.
Stern and his contemporaries have concluded that the preverbal infant also receives signals of experience in what have been called "RIGs"- Registrations of Interactions that are Generalized. This proposes that the "general event structures" of amodalism are registered at brain (mind) level as neuroencodings (memories) and are mere generalized interpretations of the interactions that the preverbal infant has with its environment.
This means that much of what that infant experiences during a vast period of its preverbal developmental phase of life is likely to be interpreted and misinterpreted in a way that does not correlate with how an adult would view the same episodes and events. A totally benign experience can be registered as being traumatic because the pre-cognitive infant has misinterpreted the events of the time. And, in any event, the experience is sensorially experienced amodally - that is, experienced as a generalized non-rational global pseudo-event.
What this means is that during this so-important developmental time in life - the preverbal phase - our affective neuro-encodings (at limbic brain level) are most likely to be the result of a complete misinterpretation of the reality of any episode or event. In other words: CHAOS! ... and our professional culture spends wasted time and money trying to unravel that which cannot be unraveled.
So what?
Well, this is actually an important aspect of the primal emotional memories that we build on to develop our emotional sense of self. As empirical creatures, people don't abandon earlier learnings, particular at those infant levels. Each memory and emotional (affect) response that's experienced and learned builds on the last one, and on and on, until we develop our emotional subpersonality that has causality based in non-cognitive and misinterpretive structures. The everyday unconscious bridging patterns that "trace" to early life emotional learnings remain static, and defy change through acts of rational and conscious will or analysis.
This speaks to the way in which every human being, child, adolescent and adult "owns" a dynamic, to a lesser or greater degree, that reverts to infant emotional (affect) encodings. This constitutes a variety of aspects of our lives that we like to say are "our inner self," our "sense of self," our "emotional sub-personality," and particularly, in a somewhat clumsy but apt metaphor, "the child within."
Core Point Conclusion
Our culture has been hell-bent on a mode of "understanding" the subtleties of the emotional mind because it has only those tools that require rational observation in order to effect change. But neuroscience is showing us that we lay down our subconscious emotional learnings at a preverbal time that defies rationalization because the experiences that build those learnings are not discernable under adult constructs.
This means that as adults, we can experience low-level "spillovers" or trace responses from that emotional matrix, but to understand its constituency is futile because it has been formed in a chaotic way. The implications of this are enormous when we note that our whole cultural structure is built around an "understand it before you can fix it" paradigm.
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What does this have to do with "parenting?"
Everything. As a matter of fact, it is an across-the-board revolutionary ideology. The notion of the building of an "invisible unconscious table of emotional reactions that cannot be defined or verbalized" is not new to neuroscience.
It's firmly ensconced in the research and writings of such luminaries as Goleman, LeDoux and Damasio. But, even if scientific investigation has shown that the limbic brain stores initial emotional material in a non-verbal and non-cognitive context, what happened to the investigations of the means by which "therapy" can help people to make a difference?
Well, nothing! We seem as a society to go blindly ahead ignoring and denying the obvious: - that if our most important emotional learnings are indefinable, we must abandon two important tenets of psychology, or at least, affective psychology; and those tenets are,
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(1) that any conscious, verbally and cognitively oriented memories are to be trusted as being authentic in attending to "core, root causes"; and
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(2) that those supposedly authentic memories are to be experienced consciously and "worked on" from a conscious rational adult perspective.
We now know that this is often futile. The adult defining perspective and the sets of random and misinterpreted infant learnings - out of which we are perhaps still acting - simply do not match.
But the path to change for us and our children is close at hand. All is not lost, just because psychotherapy has no tools to deal with that which cannot be spoken. For over a century, Eastern methods of attention to human change have been effective in bringing about non-analytical modulation to people's feeling and mood states.
In relation to "where did this come from," we must view our children in much less analytical lights than ever before.
Infants from disadvantaged backgrounds, and even uncaring parents do NOT necessarily grow up with emotional deficits and personalities that we so often "think" would be the product of that background. Infants from the "perfect" loving family environment, on the other hand, do not necessarily grow to be the perfectly balanced and emotionally integrated adult that that early life environment would indicate.
Correct us if we're wrong! And haven't you ever wondered why that may be?
Reflect on the words gone before in this article and know that the early emotional life of infants can spawn emotional learnings (that stay with the individual) most often based on misinterpretation of the emotional investment in the event. In adult or later child life, there's a straight and direct time-line to what is not a rational base to our early affect encodings. Mothers often wonder what the hell they may have "done wrong" in the raising of an infant, when in fact, they may have done absolutely nothing "wrong."
Children may puzzle about their own personality traits that our society tells us should be the product of disadvantaged and abusive infancy, but their parents are loving and supportive, and always have been.
Chaos! Randomness! However one toils over the "right" and most supportive and loving ways to provide the "perfect" environment for their infants, things always go amiss in the early affect encoding process.
But, let's not beat the breast too much about that. While the facts surrounding early preverbal development show us that we as parents have no control over our infants' ways in which they might interpret or misinterpret everyday experiences, it doesn't mean that all is lost forever! The development of a truly affect-oriented therapy that side-steps cognitive and narrative (autobiographical) reporting and focuses specifically on learned affect (emotion) in a way intended to modulate that emotion, heralds the beginning of a new era in emotion-related therapy. That therapy is Emotional Core Reframing - ECR.
"Affectology"
For years, the study of affective neuroscience has been paralleled by the field of affectology, an Australian development that has taken over two decades to optimally actualize.
This field looks at the aspects of "the invisible self" - the emotional sub-personality - and how it has huge influence in our daily lives, from the way in which we conduct our business relationships, employment and financial decisions, to the less strident aspects of family life, our partner relationships, our relationships with our children, siblings and parents, our sexual selves, and our manner of pursuit of the perfect past-time, whatever that may be for us. We now even know for certain that subtle emotional aspects of our lives have a strong influence on many physical diseases and problems. That's no news, but it's "sure" news.
Academic and humanistic philosopher, Ian White, whose journey started decades ago in a Japanese Zen monastery, has led this home-grown affectology movement.
"Where Science and Philosophy Meet"
In Zen philosophy, people are already perfect. They need no wisdom other than that already given. Contrary to the belief that Zen has any religious connotations, it actually presents as a perfect fit with modern scientific studies and research as to what makes up our emotional selves and how very little "experts and gurus" have to offer us to bring about positive changes to our lives. This applies to our emotional selves as well as our rational business lives.
So, the marriage of this philosophy and the scientifically proven existence of a "nonverbal feeling self," has bred a new, yet highly developed method for bringing about change to your emotional being. Facts about your perfection as a person gel well with the good old Aussie notion of "stand firm and discover how to fix it yourself!"
"ECR – Emotional Core Reframing”
White's approach is called ECR, an outgrowth of affectology - a term deriving from affect, the technical word describing "human feeling and emotion that can not necessarily be verbalized." Within three sessions, this revolutionary and elegant therapy guides you to a more mature use of feelings and emotions that have been learned at early developmental times in your life without the trauma and drama of bringing all that old memory-based material up to a conscious level of mind. White and his practitioners eschew the notion that immediacy is called for, and encourage a slow release – a realignment – of old habitual responses over a period of time.
With a wry smile, White says, "Osmacote, the slow release fertilizer, has got it right! ... and even as you sleep."
ECR is not one of those therapies suddenly sprouted from other movements; it's the ultimate in self-help therapy, based on these many years of research and scientific feedback study. "Affect and emotional re-arrangement" is a given right, not a privilege just for those who want to see the distance through months and months of "therapy."
"Sitting easy in your life" is the same as "feeling comfortable in your own skin," a common term that relates to the quality of the relationship you have with yourself
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"When it comes to you, only one person has all the answers - and that's YOU; but not the 'you' that's doing the talking!"
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Sometimes we decide or know that there's something about ourselves that we feel we need to change. That recognition is a good start, but then whom do we turn to when we are experiencing psychological, behavioural or emotional problems or difficulties?
There are many different therapies and techniques available for us to choose from, both mainstream and 'alternative'. In many cases people will see their doctor and possibly be referred to a specialist. With this choice, as well as almost all the 'alternative' options available, the first thing we'll be asked to do is to describe our symptoms and try and explain what is wrong. We hope that the therapist or practitioner will then be able to use her or his knowledge, expertise and experience to help solve our problems.
However, this is the dilemma. Throughout our lives, all our feelings and emotions are influenced by our experiences and what we learned in the pre-verbal and pre-conscious-memory stages of early development - our own unique 'emotional matrix'.
We can do our best to try and describe our surface symptoms or problems, but trying to consciously reveal the underlying affect cause is basically impossible. And when we can't consciously explain why we react, respond or feel the way we do, how can any another person ever accurately understand our emotional problems, let alone work out our individual emotional matrix or earliest emotional experiences?
Our Emotional Matrix
In our day-to-day lives as adults, we mostly rely on and trust the logical, reasoning and conscious parts of our minds. At a stage in our childhood we develop the ability to think things through, solve problems rationally and learn how to understand what is going on in the world around us.
From then on we learn to mainly rely and depend on this ability.
But when it comes to our emotions and feelings, as children, teenagers and adults alike, we find that our emotional reactions seem to be driven by something deeper or beneath our logical, rational self. Although we are instantly aware of the feelings or emotions we have in response to situations and events, we experience these automatically and immediately without thinking them through, or even being able to think them through.
Some neuroscientists are referring to this as the "amygdala click;" the way in which those emotional response memories are triggered at an unconscious level and hijack all reason.
The familiar statements "I don't know why I got so angry", "I'm not sure why I feel so sad" or "I can't help how I am feeling" and many others, all confirm that our emotional reactions are driven by something other than our reasoning minds and conscious will. If this were not the case, we would all be able to just consciously control or change any uncomfortable feelings or emotional reactions. We'd just "think ourselves better!"
In our infant years we can only interpret things around us through our feelings and emotions, we have no other choice.
So by the time any of us are able to talk, think or develop conscious memories, we have already learned how to respond to the world at the emotional or affect (feeling and emotional) level. This is a protective mechanism and it's unavoidable. These early experiences and learnings form the basis for our own unique emotional matrix that unconsciously influences all our future emotional responses and reactions.
This goes a long way towards explaining why we have so much difficulty in identifying and describing the real causes of our emotional discomforts and why we can't just consciously change how we feel and respond. "I've talked all about it, tried to analyze and understand it but it hasn't changed how I feel."
Over the past decade or two, science has been catching up with the reality about human emotions and the existence of our own very individual and unknowable emotional matrix.
Various independent researchers have been instrumental in alerting the world to the fact that our talking selves, our conscious perceptions and our reasoning minds play very little part in our actual ability to resolve our emotional problems.
This knowledge has steered the development of a very different therapeutic approach called 'affectology', a revolutionary approach based on a thorough understanding of how we learn, develop and maintain our subconscious emotional matrix, and how this understanding can be used to help us privately and permanently resolve our emotional problems, without the difficulty and pain of trying to talk about them.
Affectology and ECR
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"Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought."
- Sir William Osler
"Look wise, say nothing, and be silent. Thought was given to conceal feeling."
- Ian White
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Most mainstream therapies rely on professional diagnosis and analysis to arrive at an in-the-present version of what is wrong with a person. This can take any number of sessions, followed by either medication or various techniques to try and treat the identified symptoms. Also, many problems are seen as 'disorders' or 'conditions' that the sufferer can do little about, without external "expert" advice.
But what if there was an approach that focused directly on the underlying affect (feeling or emotional) cause of the problem? One where you didn't talk about your surface symptoms, personal history or past experiences. One that focuses on your feelings and acknowledges that at some level, you already "know" the true causes of your problems (and only you could ever truly "know"). An approach to therapy that understands that you already have the resources needed to bring about positive change and simply aims to guide you in doing that. One that involves just three contact sessions, that help your subconscious, self-correcting resources back onto the right track.
Developed by Australian academic and psychotherapist Ian White over many years, this is the unique, revolutionary and highly effective approach used in affectology and ECR Therapy and is the much-needed move away from the second-hand interpretation and analysis of the other therapies. It is the result of a new understanding of the nature of the human emotional matrix; that is, how we learned to unconsciously respond to things at feeling and emotional level. This new scientifically based view of how people develop and maintain their emotional problems now provides the means for people to privately and permanently resolve them.
'Affectology' is the term coined by White to describe the field of study that investigates how we learn and develop affect (feeling and emotional) patterns very early in life, that form our underlying emotional matrix or 'sense of self', and how that influences all our future emotional responses and reactions. It makes a clear distinction from 'psychology', a field that has concentrated on the 'thinking processes', rather than the 'feeling' self.
ECR (Emotional Core Reframing) is the practical application of affectology. Its training program is run under the auspices of the Sydney-based School of Affectology, of which Ian White is the Principal, and the Euro-Scandin School of Affectology in Sweden.
How we learn our emotions and feelings
Just as we are not consciously aware of most of what goes on within our physical bodies, our minds are also constantly processing thoughts, memories and feelings at subconscious levels.
Affective neuroscience securely posits that we feel emotions (as infants) long before we are able to consciously think and we began to learn our initial feeling (or emotional) responses at this subconscious level.
Our early feeling level reactions were formed without conscious thought, reason or logic because we had not yet developed the ability to consciously think about or analyze what we were responding to.
Research shows that we repetitively respond to things throughout our lives the way we first learned to respond in our childhood and even earlier, in our pre-verbal infanthood. See this for more on perseveration and state-dependence.
We store our first ever feeling experiences (fear, love, discomfort pleasure, trauma, joy and all our range of emotions) and unconsciously learn, almost immediately, which feeling or emotional reactions get the best results, therefore 'rationalizing' that we should develop and maintain these reactions as though time stood still.
Significantly, we can't ever remember what our first feeling responses were, because we did not have the capacity to develop conscious memories of them at the time they were learned.
We build our "emotional matrix" or personal response patterns (emotional personality) based on early feeling learnings that are stored subconsciously, beneath our ability to recall and understand. We unconsciously "memory-trace" or "bridge" back to these primary encodings in order for them to be continuously repeated.
As we mature, some of these automatic response patterns may be altered or adjusted to suit our development, while others are not.
Well-learned and entrenched early feeling level reactions, that are no longer useful or protective, can form the basis for and influence the development of the uncomfortable feelings, physical symptoms or uncontrollable behaviours that we may experience in later life.
This is particularly relevant for people who have experienced traumatic events and seemingly developed problematic symptoms, conditions or behaviour as a result.
It is never an event that is the real cause of problems, but rather our learned emotional response that we unconsciously apply to that event. This explains how two people can experience the same traumatic situation or similar sort of situation, and why one can develop significant long-term problems while the other may be relatively unaffected.
Nothing, including any amount of therapy, will ever change the fact that a person experienced a certain event. What can be changed is the person's learned emotional response pattern that is doing the damage and maintaining the problematic symptoms, conditions or behaviour.
By their very nature, early feeling level learnings and reactions are not revealed to the conscious mind, they are automatic and reflexive. Because they are unconsciously learned and maintained they can not be affected by conscious efforts to identify, analyze, understand or change them.
They can however be privately re-assessed and permanently resolved by the subconscious mind.
About The Therapy - "Mind Over Chatter"
From the moment you decide to undertake ECR, what you can expect is likely to be very different to any other therapy you've experienced in the past.
ECR is about helping your subconscious mind learn how to respond to things differently than before. It seeks to deal with the real cause of your problems. So don't be surprised if your practitioner seems to discourage discussion of any presenting symptoms that may have unconsciously developed from that cause.
Unlike the sessions in most other therapies, your ECR Practitioner will do most of the talking and this approach only ever involves three contact sessions. It may be that you will participate in an online preparatory module that allows you to absorb the information in your own time and way.
In preparatory work, either one-on-one or by online module, you are helped to fully understand a number of very important facts. Why this work is about your feelings and not your thoughts or any particular event in your life. How we all have the ability to change unconscious affect (feeling or emotional) response patterns by privately re-assessing old outdated affect learnings. And why you must do this in the privacy of your subconscious mind without any intervention from the practitioner, other than a skilful guidance through this inner process.
Once you are comfortable with all this, your practitioner will introduce you to the 'inner work' or quite simply 'assisted self-attention'. This introduction is designed to show you how easy this is, as "self-attention" is a natural state available to us all with a little guidance.
Session two and three mainly involve this subconscious 'inner re-learning work', with no emphasis on "experiencing past events". It's a fact that we are all constantly taking on information at levels we're not consciously aware of; just look at the effect advertising and marketing have on us at times! It doesn't matter what you consciously think happens during these sessions, what is really important is what happens afterwards, as a result of the subconscious communication and learning that took place.
This three-session format has proven through therapy feedback research to get the best results. Change can sometimes take a little time, so your practitioner will not be pressuring you for information about what you've experienced during your sessions. He or she understands that the session-work is just the very beginning of an ongoing process of subconscious change that you will experience in your own way and one that allows for continuous improvement.
You will be encouraged to simply allow that to gently go ahead and let it happen, without consciously thinking too much about it.
Many people come along to ECR sessions after hearing about the experiences and successful outcomes of others. The thing to keep firmly in mind is that no two people are exactly the same. Even those that appear to have the same symptoms will have different underlying affect (feeling or emotional) causes. Therefore, every individual must be allowed to resolve their own inner conflicts within the privacy of their own emotional mind. And this needs to be done without the conscious burden of expecting they'll have the same experience as someone else.
No two experiences of therapy are alike and no two paths to wellness are alike. This is why ECR outcomes can be so varied between different people. Your experience both during and after the sessions may be profound or subtle, immediate or gradual, recalled or below the level of awareness, or a combination of these. It's best to just let the process happen and wait and see, rather than putting conscious pressure on yourself to experience "something" in particular.
This is one of the reasons an ECR practitioner doesn't pressure you for information about how things are going during your sessions. If positive change did rely on you having to have "something" happen that you can consciously recall and explain, then therapy sessions could go on indefinitely. Research and feedback from ex-clients has shown that only three contact sessions are needed to begin an ongoing process of subconscious change and it's not necessary for anything in particular to be consciously experienced during those sessions for that to occur.
Sometimes it is the very people who think that "nothing" happened during their sessions that are the most surprised by their success over time and the positive changes they make to the way they feel and respond. Other people ask if they will have to re-do their sessions if other problems arise in the future. The answer to this question is no.
ECR helps you learn how to unconsciously reassess your earliest experiences and how suitable the affect responses you developed from them are now. This process only needs to be learned once. It can be a complex task dealing with well-entrenched patterns you've been repeating for years. But as you are doing this work and changing at a deep affect level, it has an ongoing effect into how you feel about yourself, all areas of your life and your past. This work is a way of dealing with your surface symptoms by permanently resolving the cause.
The nature of subconscious change, how it is experienced and how long it takes very much depends on the individual and the complexities of their own emotional matrix (how they learned to unconsciously respond to things at an emotional level).
About Ian White
From a formal monastic background in Zen therapy and mindfulness meditation teaching, Ian White has moved through many years of application of "private" therapy to his current position as Principal of the School of Affectology. He trained in Morita Therapy and has taught meditation in Zen and Taoist mindfulness traditions for 28 years.
Until 1993 he was a Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University (A.N.U.), at which time he moved from Canberra to establish therapy practices in Sydney, and continue with research into the neuro-psychological aspects of psychosomatics and the development of emotional sub-personalities.
He has been instrumental in the successful application of ECR programs with executives looking to improve decision-making and communication skills, futures trading market operators seeking to improve performance, artists needing to "get unstuck" from creative blocks, and Olympic level sportsmen and sportswomen looking to achieve peak performance.
He has a particular interest in and concern for the emotional well-being of the youth of today, particularly related to the burgeoning incidence of depression and suicide in teens, and the (seemingly) socially-endorsed drugging of school kids with amphetamines and SSRI antidepressants.
Ian is the Director of the original International Centre for Subconscious-mind Training and Research (I.C.S.T.R.) and Principal of the School of Affectology and the Euro-Scandin School of Affectology (Sweden).
He is a member of the Advisory Council of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry (ISEPP), U.S.A.
You can contact Ian White on 61+2+4571 3902 or email at
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"We have not inherited the Earth from our ancestors, we have borrowed it from our children."
- From "The Truth" (a novel)
by Peter James
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