MEMORY RECONSOLIDATION
What is stopping you from achieving the results you want (by yourself)?
Memory reconsolidation is the brain’s natural, neural process that can produce transformational change: the full, permanent elimination of an acquired behavior or emotional response. It is the brain’s innate process for fundamentally revising an existing learning and the acquired behavioral responses and/or state of mind maintained by that learning. (Ecker, 2015)
Among the many types of learning and the many types of memory, the type responsible for the great majority of the problems and symptoms that bring people to psychotherapy is implicit emotional learning—especially the implicit learning of vulnerabilities and sufferings that are urgent to avoid, and how to avoid them. These learnings form usually with no awareness of learning anything, and they form in the presence of strong emotion, which greatly enhances their power and durability.
For example, if a small child consistently receives frightening anger from a parent in response to the child expressing needs, the child learns not to express or even feel needs or distress and not to expect understanding or comfort from others. This learning can occur with no representation in conscious thoughts or conceptualization, entirely in the implicit learning system. The child configures him- or herself according to this adaptive learning in order to minimize suffering in that family environment. Later in life, however, this same learned pattern has life-shaping, extremely costly personal consequences. The learnings in this example are very well-defined, yet they form and operate with no conscious awareness of the learned pattern or its self-protective, coherent emotional purpose and necessity. From outside of awareness these learnings shape the child’s and later the adult’s behavior, so the individual is completely unaware of living according to these specific learnings. The neural circuits encoding these learnings are mainly in subcortical regions of implicit memory that store implicit, tacit, emotionally urgent, procedural knowledge, not mainly in neocortical regions of explicit memory that store conscious, episodic, autobiographical, declarative knowledge.
In the reconsolidation process, a target learning is first rendered revisable at the level of its neural encoding, and then revision of its encoding is brought about either through new learning or chemical agents. Through suitably designed new learning, the target learning’s manifestation can be strengthened, weakened, altered in its details, or completely nullified and canceled (erased). Erasure through new learning during the reconsolidation process is the true unlearning of the target learning. When erasure through new learning is carried out in psychotherapy, the client experiences a profound release from the grip of a distressing acquired response.
The ability to identify mental schemata that underpin unwanted behaviours in therapy and bring them into conscious awareness is a vital step toward transformative change. Causing implicit emotional logic (schema) to become explicit and to juxtapose it with a contrasting experience can cause the original learning to become unstable and able to be changed. This is in stark contrast to constructing a new and opposing schema to an existing way of thinking, whereby two schemas are in competition with one another. Transformation takes place when the original learning is completely modified so that the neural connections of the original logic no longer exist, but are replaced with a new logic.
Watching a client transform from states of angst to enlightenment is exhilarating for a psychotherapist. Even more thrilling are those rare “Aha!” moments when a certain realisation clicks into place, releases the client from the shackles of an imprisoning belief and liberates him or her toward change. We’ve all had those eureka experiences in our sessions, but why do they seem so elusive? Do people really make lasting change after they’ve had such epiphanies? More importantly, what can you do when the therapy process seems stuck and absolutely no flashes of insight are coming? Is there a certain set of conditions that seems to facilitate therapeutic breakthroughs in sessions? I believe that there is. It all starts with understanding the process of memory reconsolidation and engaging the emotional brain in a way that promotes positive shifts and ignites new neural networks. Since the dawn of time, humankind has attempted to tame passion with reason, usually with limited success. Plato compared balancing emotion and reason to a small charioteer attempting to steer two horses running in opposite directions. Centuries later, albeit during the “Age of Reason”, philosopher David Hume concluded, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (Hume, 1738–1739/2014, Book 2, Part 3, Section 3). Even modern neuroscientists acknowledge the futility of attempting to control emotions with rationality, as neuroscientist Joe LeDoux sings with his band, the Amygdaloids (2007): “An emotional brain is a hard thing to tame / It just won’t stay in its place / Every time I think I got it / It gives me another face.”
Armstrong, C. (2014). Creative memory reconsolidation. The Neuropsychotherapist, 8, 8-20. doi: 10.12744/tnpt(8)008-020
