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

by Bruce Ecker

The I’m in memory practice is a specialized form of mindfulness applied for bringing implicit memory into explicit awareness. It is often highly useful for facilitating the integration and transformation of emotional implicit memory containing traumatic levels of severe distress, including complex trauma within attachment relationships as well as trauma in other areas. The technique has been shaped into the particular experiential form described above for use in Coherence Therapy, but the essence of the practice—maintaining mindful recognition of being in a triggered state of reactivated emotional memory—has its origins in the human potential and self-awareness movement of the 1970s, to the best of our knowledge. The most obvious effect of this practice, as Regina demonstrated, is to spare oneself the experience of unknowingly projecting the reactivated memory of suffering onto the present external situation and suffering the present situation as if the original raw ordeal were happening again. That would be immersion in a flashback (retriggered traumatic memory) without awareness of it as a flashback. Instead, the I’m in memory practice utilizes each such episode of reactivation for further, mindful integration of the retriggered emotional memory, which in turn allows retrieval of meanings, constructs, and models formed and learned in the original sufferings. These then become targets for disconfirmation and dissolution in juxtaposition experiences, completing the therape...