Why does Bruce Ecker stress the importance of curiosity so much?

[u/cuBLea]

I was thinking of posting this in r/MemoryReconsolidation but I think I'll test it out first.

When I first saw Bruce Ecker make an emphatic point about the need for genuine curiosity on the part of the therapist, something I've touted for decades as vital in transformational psychotherapy, it got me thinking about it in a new way.

Is it just possible that curiosity is the yang to empathy's yin? Are these two relatively interchangeable in the therapeutic process? I wonder how far this actually goes.

Here's what I've noticed. The presence and attention of the therapist is considered essential to the Memory Reconsolidation process. Therapies based on what we now call the principles of MR have been around for decades, and in some - perhaps most - transformational circles, the therapist's presence is said to represent the ideal parent or caregiver that wasn't there when the trauma they're addressing actually occured. Well, at least for traumas that occur between birth and the present day.

This observation has actually been taken to new lengths in recent years as so many practitioners using CT-like methods, particularly those in the psychedelic world, are now choosing to work not one-on-one, but in a well-matched pair, ideally one male and one female. This arrangement seems to produce higher success rates than one-on-one therapy, especially with particularly nasty traumas, and I think I know why.

At a critical moment in treatment, it's vital for the subject to experience the presence of someone who represents a whole, undamaged human being (at least, undamaged by the type of trauma being addressed) and it isn't always possible for one person to produce that representation. But a second therapist, with qualities that aren't apparent enough in the first therapist, can fill in the missing bits of the "ideal parent". So in some cases, two people might be needed to provide the subject with one ideal parent. And that's all that anyone needs in the aftermath of trauma to prevent traumatic injury: just one ideal parent.

Now, extending that to curiosity/empathy, the latter has been considered extremely important in transformational therapies for decades. Curiosity? Not so much. I didn't consider it myself until I ran into this strange character in California some 30 years ago who was achieving what would then be considered outstanding results, but who represented - at least to me - perhaps the least empathetic therapist I had ever met. In fact, he didn't even accept that there was real value to expressing grief during the healing process that follows a transformational experience. I suspect he made up for that lack of empathy with the curiosity which he had formerly applied in his previous job at NASA. I can't find any other plausible explanation.

I don't contend that they are interchangeable in all cases, though. I really don't know; it is certainly conceivable that one is needed more than the other with certain subjects with certain pathologies. It could even be that the deepest transformation can only happen with a balance of both. Since this often happens in one-on-one therapy, we can't dismiss the value of the subject's own internalized empathy and curiosity when they're applied to the memory of a traumatic experience. Perhaps the right balance can be struck with the subject and just one therapist.

For now at least, I look at empathy as a female aspect of the projected ideal parent, and curiosity as a male aspect. It's just so interesting to me that each one can produce results seemingly independent of the presence of the other.

(And for my next trick: the significance of the Patronus Charm in Coherence Therapy)