Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation

by Bruce Ecker

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Neuroscience research since 2004 has shown that the brain does indeed have a key to those locked synapses: a type of neuro-plasticity known as memory reconsolidation, which, when launched by a certain series of experiences, actually unlocks the synapses of a target emotional learning, allowing it to be not merely overridden but actually nullified and deleted by new learning.

New learning always creates new neural circuits, but it is only when new learning also unwires old learning that transformational change occurs, and this is precisely what the therapeutic reconsolidation process achieves. The process fulfills the brain’s requirements for allowing a new learning to rewrite and erase an old, unwanted learning—and not merely suppress and compete against the old learning. The result is transformational change, as distinct from incremental change and ongoing symptom management.

As later chapters cover in detail, emotional learning usually consists of much more than stored memory of the “raw data” of what one’s senses were registering and what emotions one was experiencing during an original experience. Also learned—that is, stored in implicit memory—is a constructed mental model of how the world functions, a template or schema that is the individual’s sense-making generalization of the raw data of perception and emotion. This model is created and stored with no awareness of doing so. It does not exist in words, but is no less well-defined or coherent for that. The emotional brain then uses this model or schema for self-protectively anticipating similar experiences in the future and recognizing them instantly when they begin (or seem) to occur. Emotional memory converts the past into an expectation of the future, without our awareness, and that is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because we rely daily on emotional implicit memory to navigate us through all sorts of situations without having to go through the relatively slow, labor-intensive process of figuring out, conceptually and verbally, what to do; we simply know what to do and we know it quickly. It is easy to take for granted the amazing efficiency and speed with which we access and are guided by a truly vast library of implicit knowings. Yet our emotional implicit memory is also a curse because it makes the worst experiences in our past persist as felt emotional realities in t...

We easily see in discussing this man that what seemed and felt so real to him about the world was not an external reality at all, but rather a vivid illusion or mirage maintained by his own implicit constructs in emotional memory. It hardly seems an exaggeration to regard the limbic brain’s power to create emotional reality as a kind of magic that immerses one in a potent spell that feels absolutely real and would last for a lifetime.

The emotional brain’s completely nonverbal, implicit yet highly specific meaning-making and modeling of the world is innate and begins very early in life.

Bringing these underlying learnings into awareness makes it unmistakably apparent to the client, on a deeply felt level, that the symptom exists as part of adaptive, coherent strivings.

The brain is working as evolution apparently shaped it to do when, decades after the formation of such emotional knowledge, this tacit knowledge is triggered in response to current perceptual cues and launches behaviors and emotions according to the original adaptive learning.

Deletion of the emotional learning underlying a particular symptom eliminates that symptom down to its emotional roots.

Selection pressures during evolution apparently crafted the brain such that any learning that occurs in the presence of strong emotion becomes stored in specialized subcortical implicit memory circuits that are exceptionally durable

Selection pressures during evolution apparently crafted the brain such that any learning that occurs in the presence of strong emotion becomes stored in specialized subcortical implicit memory circuits that are exceptionally durable

The strategy of counteracting predominates in the psychotherapy field and is carried out by a wide range of methods, such as the various forms of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), solution-focused therapy, and the positive therapies.

Reactivating a memory is only the first of two steps needed to put the memory into a condition of being ready to be replaced by new learning. The needed second step is a perception or experience that mismatches the target memory, in the form of either a salient novelty or an outright contradiction. Only after those two steps will the memory be updated by a learning experience that occurs next.

reconsolidation is triggered by a violation of expectation based upon prior learning, whether such a violation is qualitative (the outcome not occurring at all) or quantitative (the magnitude of the outcome not being fully predicted).

“the existence of a prediction error signal [from some brain region] might be a crucial pre-requisite for reconsolidation to be triggered

As of this writing, this is the only behavioral process known to neuroscience that achieves true eradication of an emotional learning, and it does so through the only known form of neuroplasticity capable of unlocking the synapses maintaining an existing learning: memory reconsolidation.

Some of the examples will show that it is often extremely useful to take advantage of the fact that the emotional brain hardly distinguishes between imagined and physically enacted experiences

Finding mismatch material means finding living knowledge available to the client from past or present experience that contradicts the target learning and can therefore serve as new learning that eradicates the target learning.

Researchers have made significant progress in delineating the detailed epigenetic markers and corresponding changes in gene expression in the brain that result from, for example, experiences that induce depression or attachment insecurity and distress

We suggest that depression- or insecurity-generating experiences, for instance, may drive epigenetic molecular tagging not directly but through the long-lasting negative meanings and constructs that these experiences set up in implicit memory (even in animals). It is these chronically operating, implicit, subjective meanings, we propose, that drive emotional and behavioral responses which, in turn, drive the epigenetic tagging process in a top-down manner.

However, as reconsolidation and memory erasure enter more and more into clinicians’ thinking and practices, and therapists repeatedly witness a symptom such as long-term depression or anxiety attacks ceasing permanently as a result of a process known to bring about erasure of emotional learnings, psychological causation will speak for itself compellingly, particularly when this is observed for many different kinds of symptoms

Regularly regarding one’s own knowledge and abilities as invalid or inadequate is a common form of low self-worth. Therapists are well acquainted with the great prevalence as well as the exceptional tenacity of low self-worth in its many forms. It is largely immune to conventional types of therapy, including counteractive or “positive” approaches, in which relapses of low self-worth often occur. As we will see, Coherence Therapy’s effectiveness in this area is due to its focus on finding the unique underlying emotional learnings according to which it is adaptively necessary to go into negative thoughts and feelings toward oneself. Those symptom-requiring learnings are then the target for dissolution by the transformation sequence.

A symptom-requiring emotional learning is a schema that is usually largely if not entirely implicit (outside of awareness) at the start of therapy, but it proves to be coherent, well defined and efficiently findable. It also proves to be dissolvable by the transformation sequence (Steps 1–2–3 of the therapeutic reconsolidation process), as the work with Richard will show. Symptom coherence implies that as soon as each emotional learning maintaining a symptom has been dissolved, the symptom ceases and its non-recurrence is thereafter effortless, without any preventive measures. We have observed this with our clients many hundreds of times.

The discovery work needs to be primarily experiential—as distinct from the “talking about” mode—through the creation of discovery experiences. In each discovery experience, the client has an actual subjective encounter with the implicit emotional meanings and knowings coherently generating the symptom, and in this way becomes aware of this material directly and accurately, not through speculation, interpretation or theorizing.

This is an example of symptom deprivation, one of several basic techniques often useful for the discovery work. If a client’s symptom occurs in a particular situation because it is actually necessary in some unrecognized way, then having the client imagine being in that situation without the symptom is likely to give rise to some specific dilemma or distress, which the client normally avoids, unconsciously, by producing the symptom. The specific dilemma that arises when deprived of the symptom begins to reveal the client’s unconscious knowledge of how, why, and when to produce the symptom in order to avoid suffering that particular distress.

A fundamental feature of the symptom coherence model of symptom production is the recognition that the suffering due to a functional symptom is actually the lesser of two evils—the other, greater evil being the suffering that is unconsciously expected from not having the symptom. Those are the two sufferings, as they are called in Coherence Therapy; the client’s emotional brain has full knowledge of them both and compels the production of the symptom in order to avoid the even worse suffering expected from being without the symptom.

The client has become aware of the learned emotional knowledge that is the emotional truth of the symptom—a phrase used almost synonymously with the phrases pro-symptom position, symptom-requiring schema, and symptom-generating emotional learnings. This is new awareness of a major formative theme in the client’s life, and it makes sense of the symptom in a whole new, non-pathologizing way.

Clients often express strong relief over realizing that the symptom’s existence is part of a coherent, sensible response to what they actually experienced in life and does not mean they are defective, irrational, weak, and so forth.

Not all presented symptoms are functional, however. Some are revealed in the course of discovery work to be functionless. A functionless symptom is produced because it is an inevitable result or by-product of a functional (but possibly unpresented) symptom—such as loneliness that results from the functional, unpresented symptom of avoiding relationships with people in order to be safe from abandonment, or anxiety that results from the functional, unpresented symptom of never asserting boundaries in order to be safe from a punitive withdrawal of love. Coherence Therapy is a movement into underlying causes, so i...

As we are seeing with Richard, this discovery process deepens emotionally directly into quite tender territory and areas of vulnerability. In order for the client to open to this process, the therapist must be an emotionally safe presence and communicate genuine, empathetic understanding and full acceptance of the emerging emotional truth of how and why the symptom actually feels necessary to have. A sustained focusing of empathy on that material is a specialized, primary use of empathy in Coherence Therapy; thus it has its own name: coherence empathy.

We have found that in general practice, most Coherence Therapy clients have no problem holding the emotional experiences that develop in the course of the work. For some, however, care must be taken to follow a graduated process of small enough steps into the emerging material to limit the intensity of emotional accessing to levels that are not destabilizing or overwhelming.

The therapist therefore pursued integration, Coherence Therapy’s next phase, through the creation of integration experiences, which are simply repeated experiences of the discovered material both during and between sessions. Stable integration into everyday awareness completes the retrieval of a symptom-requiring schema from implicit memory into explicit awareness

Fullest emotional deepening occurs in the integration work. In that segment, notice that the therapist, in expressing coherence empathy, made comments reflecting Richard’s own purpose and agency in producing his symptom of self-doubting. The therapist was simply making explicit the key elements that had already emerged in the prior discovery experience, not imposing an interpretation or getting ahead of Richard’s own recognition of emotional truth.

The client’s explicit, experiential recognition of his or her own purpose and agency behind a symptom is a key milestone of retrieval in the integration phase and key marker of integration.

The essence of an integration experience lies in having the client again speak from and within the felt emotional reality of the pro-symptom position, expressing it as his or her own emotional truth. What matters is for the client repeatedly to have a bodily experience of the emotional realness of the discovered material—not necessarily a cathartic, dramatic, or intense experience, but an unmistakably embodied, authentic one.

For that purpose of guiding truly experiential work, there is a style of phrasing that is particularly effective for verbalizing the retrieved emotional truth of the symptom—the style used in the overt statement offered to Richard above: “Feeling any confidence means I’m arrogant, self-centered, and totally insensitive like Dad, and people will hate me for it, so I’ve got to never feel confident, ever.” That style of vivid, present tense, first-person, emotionally candid, highly specific phrasing for naming one’s living knowledge of what is at stake, what one’s vulnerabilities are, and what measures are therefore urgently necessary, is called limbic language in Coherence Therapy, referring to the brain’s limbic system, the major seat of emotional implicit memory.

Emotionally deep experiential work requires, in addition to limbic language, comfort on the therapist’s part in being in the presence of the client’s emotional experiencing, as well as use of softer voice tones, slower pacing, and silences to facilitate emotional deepening in areas of vulnerability.

Perhaps most importantly, the deep retrieval work in Coherence Therapy requires the therapist to refrain from following any counteractive reflex—the urge to apply immediately all possible influence against the newly found pro-symptom schema to correct it, refute it, fix it, override it, avoid it, disconnect from it, or manage it, believing that this could yield lasting change.

the coherence-focused approach follows a completely non-counteractive process of integration: The therapist guides the client simply to stay in touch with, and keep having experiences of, the symptom-requiring emotional truth, embracing and integrating the schema into conscious awareness just as it is. The integration motto in this approach is, “Once you have arrived at the symptom’s emotional truth, stay there. Pitch a tent. Set up camp right there”

The client’s integration work in Coherence Therapy is a guided, persistent practice of mindfulness of the specific emotional learnings that have been brought into the foreground of awareness from the implicit background.

The therapist works to build up the client’s mindfulness as well as an unreserved acceptance of his or her own symptom-requiring emotional knowledge. This embracing of the very material causing all the trouble is exactly what it seems, a straightforward process of integration, not a paradoxical intervention.

As is characteristic of the modular, schematic, and hierarchical manner in which the brain organizes and retrieves knowledge (Eichenbaum, 2004; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986; Toomey & Ecker, 2007), the client’s mental model operates as a multi-component whole, so integration of a pro-symptom schema or position is not complete, as a rule, until all of its components have been experienced emotionally and, while being experienced, verbalized accurately by the client, and then incorporated into everyday awareness.

Our mapping of symptom-generating mental models in terms of problem- and solution-defining sections is a phenomenological finding that is strongly consistent with many previous writings and findings in the field of phenomenology

We have been describing a synthesis that combines well-established phenomenological principles with advanced knowledge of the subjective, structural and neurobiological processes of emotional learning and unlearning. This synthesis is a defining feature of the Emotional Coherence Framework, which serves as the guiding conceptual framework for Coherence Therapy.

The erasure of an emotional learning is the dissolution of certain constructs in use by the emotional brain, and this dissolution occurs only when these constructs receive such a direct and decisive disconfirmation through vivid new experience that the emotional brain itself recognizes and accepts the disconfirmation of its own constructs. In those moments of disconfirmation, what had seemed real is finally recognized as being only one’s own fallible constructs. Only upon their experiential disconfirmation are the constructs that make up emotional learnings recognized by the individual as constructs, rather than reality. The result of construct dissolution is a fundamental change in one’s experience and perception of the world. Something that seemed self-evidently true about the world no longer seems true at all.

This “constructivist” understanding of learning, meaning-making and change is extremely valuable for working with mental models in psychotherapy, in our experience, and is another defi...

Here we cover only the pathway that developed with Richard, the one we call an opposite current experience. It often happens that experiences in daily life provide living knowledge that is contradictory of a person’s pro-symptom model, but because this model is normally unconscious, compartmentalized, and sealed off from contact with other knowings, the contradictory knowledge is not recognized as contradicting anything, use is not made of it, and the fleeting opportunity passes. However, when such an opportunity develops at the point in Coherence Therapy where the client’s pro-symptom model is well retrieved and unsealed, as it was for Richard at this juncture, the client feels and notices the significance of the contradictory experience and the therapist can make highly effective use of it,

Those juxtaposition experiences are the actual moments in which profound change occurs—the radical clearing away of troubled emotional learning with contradictory knowledge. Each juxtaposition experience consists of simultaneously experiencing the pro-symptom schema side by side with the sharply contradictory knowledge, with both knowings feeling vividly real, yet both cannot possibly be true. For the client, holding two utterly contradictory but equally real-feeling personal truths simultaneously is a peculiar experience, yet it is the experience required in order for new learning to nullify and replace old learning.

This edgy experiential dissonance can be viewed as an enriched extension of the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). Reconsolidation research tells us that in these repeated juxtaposition experiences, the contradictory knowledge serves as new learning that rewrites and replaces the pro-symptom constructs.

For facilitating a successful juxtaposition experience, the client must be guided into feeling open to attending to both of the mutually incompatible knowings, and the therapist’s welcoming attitude toward both is crucial for this. In contrast, any attempt by the therapist to use the contradictory knowledge to show the incorrectness of the pro-symptom knowledge would be unwelcoming and suppressive of the pro-symptom schema. Then neither genuine juxtaposition nor synaptic unlocking nor transformational change would occur, because juxtaposition creates the required mismatch only if both knowings are experienced as true and the dissonant impossibility of that is keenly felt.