Memory Reconsolidation: Key To Transformational Change

The major influence on being able to reprogram the brain is to have improved emotional responses to conditioned stimuli (flashbacks of problems, stress responses linked from associative conditioning). This is about changing the subconscious programmed meaning of things.

This is known as memory reconsolidation and it is the biggest advancement in transformational therapy.

Bruce Ecker books on memory reconsolidation:

Psychotherapist and author Bruce Ecker, discussing his work on eliminating symptoms at their roots using memory reconsolidation. Bruce Ecker, M.A. and licensed marriage family therapist is co-originator of coherence therapy and co-author of Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation.

He has also written a depth oriented brief therapy How To Be Brief When You Were Trained To Be Deep and Vice Versa, as well as the book The Coherence Therapy Practice Manual and Training Guide and the forthcoming Manual of Juxtaposition Experiences: How to Create Transformational Change Using Disconfirming Knowledge in Coherence Therapy. He is in private practice near San Francisco, California and has taught in clinical graduate programs for many years. His publications and conference presentations since 2006 describe how therapists can make use of the new neuroscience of memory reconsolidation to bring about deep transformational change regularly and consistently.

Ecker: "The book went through a series of evolutions until we finally came to the form it now has. So yes it was quite a project for all three of us. It was about three years of evolving the book and then about a full year of intensive writing so yes, and about twenty years of developing our clinical know how in using this process have poured into this book. So really we’ve tried to make it an embodiment of quite a comprehensive, new and very advanced body of knowledge.

Reconsolidation means that the synapses of a target emotional learning are unlocked for a limited time of about five hours which allows new learning to directly rewrite and erase the target learning and then the target learning actually no longer exists. It allows new learning to directly erase existing learning and that’s the ideal form of therapeutic chance. And according to current neuroscience, only the reconsolidation process allows new learning to eliminate an existing unwanted learning.

If you don't first launch this reconsolidation process and unlock those synapses that store the target learning, then new learning just sets up separately and competes with the existing unwanted learning and the new learning seldom wins that competition for long because the unwanted learning is always emotionally very powerful or urgent. So relapses occur. There’s quite a few research studied published by neuroscientists demonstrating a window of about five hours. The synapses have relocked and the target learning is no longer susceptible to change. But up to something under six hours, that’s why I say five hours, the target memory is changeable thanks to the reconsolidation process.

In 2005 we began a systematic intensive study in reading of original neuroscience research articles in neuroscience journals searching for whether we could find some established neurological mechanism that might clearly correspond to this sequence of experiences that we had identified that was always associated with these powerful transformational change events that we would observe in our sessions. About ten years earlier, well more than ten years earlier, in the early nineties we had come to this sequence of experiences which became coherence therapy because we had identified that it’s this sequence of experiences that appear to be always happening when our clients would have profound change events where they describe a deep and emotionally felt and bodily felt shift and long standing symptoms would cease to happen. So in, well it was 2005 when we decided, you know, we need to see if there’s a neurological mechanism that could make sense of this sequence of experiences on that neurobiological level. And we found reconsolidation in the research literature as part of that search and so ever since late 2005 I have been intensively studying neuroscience reconsolidation research articles so I’ve studied, you know, many dozens, very closely. I’m a former research scientist myself.

I was a physicist long long ago. For about fourteen years I was a research physicist so I’m right at home with, you know, digging in to the details.I’ve immersed myself in, and this, the reconsolidation research is very very complex. There’s a lot of subtlety. It took me five, six years until, really until we began writing this book about a year and a half ago now, to finally iron out all the wrinkles and confusions that were so easy to have in understanding this material. And then we just poured again, poured this understanding we’ve come to through this intensive study, into the book. Chapter two of the book in particular, if you’ve noticed, is where we condense, again hopefully in a very readable form, an explanation of the research and what it means for psychotherapy."
-Bruce Ecker from Interview at Shrink Rap Radio

'Memory reconsolidation is the only known process and type of neuroplasticity that can produce the abrupt, permanent disappearance of a strong, longstanding, involuntary emotional and/or behavioral response, with no further counteractive measures required'.- Bruce Ecker, the Neurotherapist magazine-pg 15.

As controversial as this is, there are still some misconceptions about memory reconsolidation as to how this works and what it can really do.

Bruce Ecker was interviewed about memory reconsolidation with David Van Nuys Ph.D. which you can access below.

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/interview-bruce-ecker-lmft/id218827921?i=1000059373147&mt=2