Bad stuff happens to everyone. The challenge is how we respond. Â Some respond in ways that empowers them.
Others respond in ways that can be disempowering and the effects can last a lifetime.
Phobias, breakups, traumas of every kind can leave an emotional scar that people are unable to get over. Â In the past, the solution was either drugs or therapy. Â The therapy was long and the drugs were...drugs.
Now we have a breakthrough.
You can change the emotional meaning of a memory without drugs and without years of therapy.
How is this possible? Â By activating an innate process in the brain called memory reconsolidation.
Our brains have a way of having an emotional imprint become hard wired into our systems. Â For example, if you smell vomit or hearing someone gagging, it's going to also cause you to feel like puking.
Why?
Your biological nature is to survive.
Whatever worked for you in the past, your body will do the next time because it continued your survival.
This is one way we learn unconsciously and quickly.
Memory Reconsolidation and Rewriting Emotional Meaning
However, there are times when this learned response pattern can actually be detrimental. Â For example, PTSD or a phobia or a traumatic experience. Â If a person gets into a car accident, they are going to feel highly cautious about getting into a car again because their body would have learned, linked and stored that cars are dangerous. Â The quick program would be that cars = danger. Â But that's not true, even though the brain and body have emotionally learned this. Â This is a problem because cars do not equal danger. Â When the function of memory and response becomes a dysfunction, this is a challenge because it is about reprogramming something that has been learned from an experience. Â So how can you use a better experience to graft into the old memory?
So when a person has to get into a car again, they're going to automatically feel tension or anxiety about getting in a vehicle.  That's natures way of keeping you safe and it does an amazing job of it.  Lots of people have this type of one-shot learning experience where something that is highly charged with emotion can become embedded in our neurology in a way that makes some things very hard to forget.  But since the brain learned very quickly, there is a way to turn on this same process to have it update those memory files so that things can be unlearned and then relearned in a better way. That process is called memory reconsolidation.
