This article is a slightly edited version of the podcast (audio at the bottom of this page).
Many therapy clients can speak at length about their history. They can describe their patterns. They can even identify the origins of their difficulties. They may understand themselves very well. And yet, they remain stuck.
So insight, by itself, does not produce change. Something does not shift simply because it has been named or explained. Change happens when an experience touches you deeply enough that, afterward, things are no longer quite the same.
I want to talk about that process. It is often called memory reconsolidation. The term comes from neuroscience. Neuroscientists use it because they study how memories are stored and how neural connections can be updated. The word points to a reconfiguration at the level of the brain. As a therapist, I find another phrase more evocative of what we do. That phrase is “corrective emotional experience.”
To understand what this means, it helps to begin with a wider frame.
Living beings are built to adapt.
We do not exist in a void. We exist in interaction. We need air, food, contact. And interaction always brings friction. There are problems, demands, challenges. The entire history of life can be seen as a history of adaptation to those challenges. At the scale of species, we call that evolution. At the scale of a lifetime, we call it development. And at the scale of a single day, it is the constant, mostly unconscious work of adjusting to whatever we encounter.
Coping mechanisms are part of this adaptive process. They are improvised solutions to real problems. They use whatever internal and external resources were available at the time. They work, at least somewhat, and at least for a while. So these patterns are not necessarily pathology. They are attempts to adapt.
The difficulty begins when the patterns become rigid. What was once a solution in one context gets carried forward into contexts where it no longer fits. If nothing in the person’s experience challenges that pattern, there is no reason for it to change. By default, we keep doing what we have learned to do.
When a maladaptive pattern persists, it is not very helpful to say that the person is stuck or broken. That framing does not move us toward change. What opens new horizons is recognizing that the person has not yet had an experience strong enough, or deep enough, to update the pattern.
So how does change actually happen?
A corrective experience disproves a previous assumption about yourself or about the world. It opens a new possibility for functioning. For example, someone may carry the implicit conviction, “I will inevitably fail.” A new experience can contradict that. Not in theory, but in lived reality. It can open a new possibility.
We’re not talking about “I am sure to succeed” but “I have a shot at it.” And that is a big change.
You cannot reach that level simply by discussing ideas. Conceptual understanding is not enough. The experience has to reach you at a gut level. It has to disrupt the old model of the world that was formed under pressure.
I sometimes think of it this way. If iron has been forged into a particular shape, you cannot reshape it unless you first heat it enough to soften it. The structure has to loosen before it can take on a new form.
There is, however, a complicating factor. Safety is necessary. Without safety, any disruption or challenge simply triggers shutdown, avoidance, or retraumatization. Nothing useful happens in that state.
So safety is not optional. At the same time, safety by itself is not sufficient. If the therapeutic environment offers warmth, acceptance, and a consistent relationship, but never includes a genuine emotional encounter, a challenge, then the old pattern has no reason to revise itself. The person may feel better. They may develop valuable insights about their history or their psychology. But the underlying pattern will probably remain intact.
What is required is both safety and challenge. There needs to be a safe enough environment, and within it, a real contact with the emotion that lies at the root of the pattern.
Emotion is not the enemy of therapeutic work. It is the entry point.
If we stay at the level of talking about experience, therapy can remain there indefinitely. It becomes a conversation about life, rather than a lived experience in the present moment. And in that case, the kind of structural change people are seeking may not occur.
So what does emotion actually do in this process? Emotion is not important simply because it makes the session feel intense or meaningful. It is important because emotion is the driver for adaptation. Emotion is what moves you to action.
Behind many maladaptive patterns, there is fear. The pattern was originally created in response to a perceived danger. It persists because the fear persists. From the client’s perspective, at a gut level, the pattern has emotional logic. It is a response to a signal that says, “This situation is dangerous.” The pattern functions as a way of avoiding danger.
For the therapist, this has practical implications. The rigidity, the avoidance, the self-protection that a client presents are not obstacles to be overcome. They are information. They point toward what is being protected, and why.
Our task is not to convince the client that the danger is illusory. It is to create conditions in which the client can encounter the fear in a new way: in a context that is sufficiently different from the original situation to allow new learning. When that takes place, change can happen.
The emotional charge that has been held around a memory or a pattern is activated. But this time, it is met with something that does not confirm the original fear but challenges it. In that moment, the implicit learning can shift.
The shift is not an abstraction. As the client, you experience as a bodily felt sense. From the outside, as the therapist, you can track bodily manifestations of the shift. Something loosens. Something settles. There may be a sigh. These are external manifestations of the felt shift in the client.
The earlier events that had led to creating the maladaptive pattern are not erased from memory. What changes is the charge around situations that echo these earlier events. The sense of ongoing danger diminishes. The nervous system no longer has to mobilize in the same way.
What, then, is the therapist’s role in all of this?
We are not robots carrying out a technical procedure called memory reconsolidation. We are human beings, and our role is to build an environment in which a natural updating process can occur. An ecosystem that fosters the natural process of adapting.
This ecosystem has two qualities that must coexist. There must be enough challenge to create the possibility of a disruption of rigid patterns. And there must be enough safety for the client to remain present and engaged.
The point of safety is to give the client enough space to feel the emotion rather than bounce away from it. Only then can the client learn, at a gut level, that the situation can have a different outcome despite what the emotion is signaling.
This can be difficult for us therapists. When something becomes emotionally charged, we may feel the impulse to relieve the tension, to normalize, to reassure, or to redirect.
Of course, it is often appropriate to shield clients from very intense experiences. But, sometimes, the shielding results in missing the moment when staying with the experience would allow something new to emerge. And so, it is useful for us to examine whether our tendency to shield clients from intensity has to do with our own discomfort with intensity.
I am not advocating for turning therapy into a bootcamp or an extreme sport. For one thing, not every client comes with us seeking transformational change. Some come to process events, to be witnessed, or to think aloud in the presence of another person. And, even for those clients who seek deep change, we should err on the side of safety rather than risk pushing them too much too soon.
With all these caveats in mind, we need to keep our eyes on what makes the process of change work. It doesn’t happen by just talking about experience. It happens through experiencing: Experiencing, in real time, something that contradicts the old expectation.
How does this work out in practice?
It comes down to tracking moment-by-moment experience, the client’s as well as our own. We do this to monitor safety and adjust as needed, walking the fine line between safety and complacency. Reminding ourselves that the ecosystem we want to foster is not the absence of challenge, but a challenge that the client can manage.
Keeping our focus on tracking moment-by-moment experience keeps us focused on the ongoing process. Not just the words, but the embodied process as it shows up though any subtle bodily manifestations of something shifting.
We keep reminding ourselves that we are in the midst of a living process. Even when it feels like nothing much is happening, we refocus on tracking whatever may be happening. Including, at times, the heavy stillness of the space, if this is the form that the living process is taking here and now.
A simple way to do this is to voice that we are slowing down, pausing, taking a moment to take in the situation. Words to that effect. Simple words that validate staying with the not-knowing, or with uncomfortable feelings, and giving that a chance to shift organically. This helps both therapist and client stay engaged with the process of change as it unfolds.
If we expect the process of change to happen with a big drumroll, we are likely to miss it. Instead, we cultivate our ability to stay in tune with the subtleties of embodied experience so that we may recognize change as it happens and, in so doing, build momentum for it, moment by moment.
The article above is a slightly edited version of the podcast below.
Podcast: Download (15.9MB)
