Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Memory Reconsolidation in Psychotherapy

This book, “Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Memory Reconsolidation and the Psychotherapy of Transformational Change” penned by Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic and Laurel Hulley came to me in an unusual way:

My girlfriend said a guy she had dated before our relationship recommended it to her. This guy was growth-oriented, and naturally curious, I dove in.

It aligns strongly with my life-long interest in rapidly and efficiently changing the inner world. Removing road blocks.

We go through life and experience many different toxic situations, which lead to rules our brain constructs to protect us and then “blindly” follows.

An example from my own life:

My father called me “egoistic” in childhood, when I was focusing on protecting some of my own interests.

Today, this “egoistic” still haunts me in different ways. Let’s list a few:

a client from hell literally changed the contract which we had agreed upon, and included additional work, and punitive fees in case this work (which hadn’t been discussed before) would not be done. I signed anyways, without protesting, “to be a good person” … He proceeded to abuse the business relationship. I had to fight with myself, in order to keep working with him, despite the growing anger and frustration. I was only able to walk away, when he refused to give a link to a subcontractor I’ve worked with (and whose interests I tried to push), and on the other hand tried to walk with the subcontractor directly behind my back. Luckily, she let me know. I was able to see him as the abusive person he was, trying to squeeze me out, while essentially not even acting in the interests of this subcontractor.
I deleted my Facebook account, because I didn’t want to officially end the friendship with a guy who had been advising me against getting with a girl – and then tried to get with her himself, whilst also sharing details with me which he knew would hurt me. Again, I didn’t want to be “childish” or a “bad person” who removes the contact with a guy who is working against my interests … but instead chose to gave up all contacts I had.
I had issues firing an employee who was sick frequently. When she was working, her work results were good. But her sickness episodes were unpredictable, also unconnected to a single physical reason (at least not from my perspective). She had worked with me for four and a half years, and at least during the last two years she’s been sick for about 50 % of the work time. In addition to her annual leave, which she took in full. When I fired her, three other employees walked out on me. One employee who she was close friends with, and who had suffered the most by her absences due to spikes in work load; and two other employees who I had hired in order to upskill, and be able to transition this first employee into a role where she could cause more damage. I morally obsess over the question: was I allowed to fire her? Was it good? Should I have given her more advance warning? We did have a couple of conversations, but she also made it known to me, that my suggestion it might be a psychological issue hurt her very much. I didn’t bring it up again – and I’ve also learned a lesson as a manager, to not try to “help” people like that. Finally, I realized that she was a problem for the business – the business would die if I would continue to keep her on, as she was responsible for sales and working directly with customers. I am grateful to the many people in my circle of friends, who gave me advice on the situation and backed me up in kicking her out of my company. However, I still ruminate whether I did it in the right way … basically, whether I was a “good” person who fulfilled my responsibility.
I had stayed friends (and tried to continue to spark romantic interest) with at least two women who I was romantically interested in, but who rejected me – to be a good person, instead of someone who “just sees them as women”. For years. Hurting myself and my dating success during this time.
I reflect a lot on how not to hurt other people, to not damage trees, to not hurt blades of grass, etc. …

This book aims to give a practical guideline how to reshape such emotional drivers.

What is the origin of these drivers?

The brain creates these emotional connections as protective shields. We try to identify rules which will keep us safe. In this case, I don’t want to be rejected by my father, and stay safe. For that, I need to follow rules which he gives me. He gave me this rule, so I’m following it, and I will continue following it to stay safe … except that now it is leading to repeated bad results on many occasions, because it makes no difference between toxic situations and abusive people, and benign situations, where my benevolence (enforced by this rule) will not be abused.

What is the process?

The process consists of three parts:

Identifying the implicit rules – these are often coded in implicit memory, that is non-verbal memory
Reprogramming the rules
Testing for the success of the process

How do we identify the rules which are causing problems?

The book discusses an example patient story, let’s call him John. John has issues speaking up at meetings, he keeps his ideas to himself.

The therapist gives a guided process to John, and asks him to visualize a situation where he speaks up. John immediately reacts emotionally, and feels uneasy.

The therapist asks John (in this state), why he doesn’t want to speak up. John responds: “Speaking up would make me a self-centered arrogant idiot, like my father.”

Due to his own personal past, John associated self-confidence, and sharing with others with his father, who was universally disliked.

Why and how does reprogramming work? (the Word file)

Before going into how we can reprogram the rules, I would like to briefly summarize why this works:

A study has been done on rats, which led to a surprising result.

These rats were trained to associate a sound with an electric shock. When the sound was played, the rats would freeze in fear.

In the actual experiment, after playing the sound a substance (anisomycin) was given to them, which would prevent the synthesis of proteins.

On subsequent trials after this “administration trial”, the rats lost the fear completely. They still recognized the sound, but did not react with fear anymore.

The result of this rat study: brains reconsolidate memories, when they are triggered.

Here’s an analogy: when the memory is triggered, the brain opens a Word file, with the contents of the memory in it. You can now edit the memory, in a certain reconsolidation time window. The text talks about several hours, during which this editing is possible. After that time, the brain closes the Word file, saving it back to disk.

In practical terms this means we can (and do) edit the memories. If not guided properly, this might even make the memories stronger when they are reopened. This also accounts for people’s memory drifting, about what actually happened, and what it means. It also accounts for the emotional charge growing stronger on some memories over time, while others fade.

On a sidenote, this is not “overriding” the dysfunctional programs you’ve built over time, but completely deleting them. Often therapy is based on building “alternative” routes, and the patient has to support them with willpower. This system aims to not rely on such crutches which break under stress – but really solve the underlying driver. (Ideas like this, where it’s revolutionary and shifts things significantly, and is “against the grain of common wisdom” are like catnip to me).

How can we reprogram the rules?

For reprogramming the rules (called TRP – therapeutic reconsolidation process in the material) we need to follow the following sequence:

Trigger the memory – e.g. with a visualisation exercise (for the purposes of our exercise, the emotional brain can’t distinguish whether something is happening now and in reality, or is a visualisation)
Provide a vivid and clear counterexample, which can’t coexist with the emotional rule which was identified
Repeat this during the reconsolidation window

This process works, as you see, without drugs (like in the rat example), but with providing cognitive dissonance to our brain. The brain will be presented with clear, and conflicting evidence, which opposes it’s emotional rule. This evidence must be believable to the brain, so it doesn’t get filtered out. Note: This is very similar to the emotional processing tool. The text discusses that there are different therapeutic modalities which wrap around this particular process & different modalities are discussed and examples given.

Two practical examples:

For John, the therapist triggered the memory by having him bring up a situation, where he wants to speak up, but is afraid.

Now he has him think of situations, where colleagues of John shared their ideas, and received positive acknowledgement, instead of criticism and put-downs.

Repeatedly.

Another person, let’s call them Bob, had a daughter who lost a leg in a traffic accident. Bob wasn’t driving in this accident, but he kept blaming himself for the accident. The therapist was able to piece together that Bob was brought up with a maxim by his father, that “no bad things happen to people who are thoroughly prepared.”

Bob had internalized that maxim, and was applying it’s logical consequence: in case bad things happen to you, you haven’t prepared well enough. Bob was not able to let go, and accept that he couldn’t protect his family in all possible cases. He was feeling guilty that he hadn’t prepared well enough, that he hadn’t been able to protect his daughter.

The therapist triggered the memory, and then had Bob research actively about situations, where people prepared perfectly, but got negative results:

the Titanic, where a ship was perfectly built, according to the most recent ideas in technology, and had state of the art navigational equipment
athletes who had prepared for the Olympics or other events, who made a flawless performance, but were not given gold due to judgement errors on the side of the judges
and so on. (I personally would add inmates on death row, who were proven innocent later on – some of them only after execution)

How can we verify that the reprogramming worked?

In order to check that the reprogramming worked, we apply three principles for the verification step (Step V):

we try to retrigger the memory and emotional association – this should now not be possible anymore. The memory might still be present, but the emotional association should be gone. (“schema non-reactivation”)
the behavior which was previously blocked should now be effortless – unwanted patterns of emotion, behavior or thought that were generated by the old model disappear entirely. (“symptom cessation”)
the change should persist without the person needing to reinforce it regularly or any other work necessary. (“effortless permanence”)

Especially the 3rd point sounds very promising. These are called “markers of transformational change”.

Suggestions for me

Notebook LLM had suggestions for me – as I had mentioned the fear of competition competing away profits, and that it’s very hard to build a sustainable and profitable business:

look at situations where cooperation unlocked blue oceans of profits
consider whether this is also a convenient excuse for you not having success on the market, so you can face your father / have an explanation for him

I intend to indeed focus on researching, like in the Bob & therapist example above, to see and convince myself that there’s a lot of profits to be had in this.