Unlocking the Emotional Brain is a book about memory reconsolidation and its use in therapy.
The idea is: the experiences you have in life turn into “emotional learnings”. These are always adaptive in the moment, but the lessons learned may not be helpful in the future.
Typically a client shows up to therapy with a behaviour that they don’t like. The behaviour is a solution to an underlying, unacknowledged problem, belief in which is a result of some prior experience and its associated emotional learnings. Memory reconsolidation is a process of changing your understanding of the problem, usually by evaporating an underlying assumption that the problem rests on.
The process of memory reconsolidation can be used with many therapeutic frameworks, including EMDR, EFT, Gendlin, Hakomi, IFS, etc. The book uses Coherence Therapy because its structure lends itself well to illustrating the reconsolidation process, which is as follows:
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The client presents with a behaviour they don’t like. This is called a symptom.
Ted is a dropout who drifts through life and doesn’t get anything meaningful done.
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The therapist probes to understand the specifics of the symptom (behaviour), and what situation(s) trigger it.
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The therapist prompts the client to imagine being in the triggering situation, but the symptom not happening. This is referred to as “symptom deprivation”. Because the behaviour is a solution to a problem, constructing the situation without the solution makes the client uncomfortable, and they end up articulating the (hitherto unsurfaced, unacknowledged) problem.
Ted imagines receiving the Great At Job award, and a promotion. He gets wiggly and after some work identifies that he doesn’t want to make his father proud.
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The client is prompted to state, out loud, the tradeoff they’re making to solve the problem, e.g.:
“The most important thing to me is to get Dad to see that he was a shitty father. I’m willing to be a dropout and have a shitty life, just so he can see how badly he screwed up.”
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The client reminds themselves of the tradeoff they’re making as it comes up in everyday life. It’s important at this stage to not try to do anything about it; just make it be present and accept that that’s the strategy they’ve been trying. The continued attention primes the client to notice times the logic doesn’t hold, which the authors call a “mismatch”.
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Some part of the tradeoff is load-bearing: if you disprove it, the whole thing falls apart. Find or create a “disconfirmation” that does this, often a “mismatch”. If the tradeoff is if I do X, then bad Y will happen, so I have to do Z instead, then an instance of doing X and Y not happening could be it.
For Ted, it was “my Dad is a dick and will never apologize. This whole strategy will never work out.”
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Now the client has two things that feel true, but contradict: the statement of their original tradeoff, and the disconfirmation. Have them sit with the two feelings juxtaposed. Go back and forth between them.
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At some point they feel a shift: puke, laugh, cry, whatever. The situation has shifted: the problem has fallen away, so the behaviour no longer manifests in an attempt to solve it.
It’s possible that the same behaviour may have multiple underlying problems, in which case you repeat the process for each of them.
As I said up top, the book says that you can do memory reconsolidation inside many therapeutic frameworks. In particular there are many other ways than symptom deprivation to do the “discovery” step (step 2); and many ways of generating the disconfirmation - Gendlin enjoyers will have noticed the “felt shift”, for instance.
The book then starts talking about psychotherapy more broadly, picking a fight with attachment theory in particular and then getting specific in talking about how other therapies can implement memory reconsolidation. I put the book down at this point, having got what I wanted out of it.
One gripe I had with the book was that it keeps using the phrase “locked synapses”. It initially introduces this phrase by saying “[emotional] learnings formed in the presence of intense emotion … are locked into the brain by extraordinarily durable synapses, and it seemed as though the brain threw away the key”, and the idea is then used repeatedly, with absolutely no description of what it means for a synapse to be “locked”. I eventually concluded it was a metaphor, but it tripped me up every time.
Overall though I liked the book. I would recommend starting by reading Chapter 3; that’s where the good stuff is, and you don’t really need the material beforehand in order to understand it. If you’re interested you can move on to Chapter 4 from there and branch out.