TRP (Tilling the Soil)

Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process

Bruce Ecker giving us a lens/insight into how to more reliably produce a transformational change in therapy

one of the forefront people to dive into the science of memory reconsolidation and begin thinking about what it can teach us in terms of how to produce more reliable results with clients, deeper results

He calls it the therapeutic reconsolidation process (trp)

they saw the well defined sequence of experiences, or set of experiences
that always were there right before a major breakthrough
where the clients major longstanding symptom or problem pattern disappears
and the underlying distressed schema - or version of reality/core beliefs
also are fully depotentiated
no longer feel real at all

basically the creation of the juxtaposition experience

in which the client is experiencing the underlying schema/core beliefs
bodily, affectively as-well as cognitively
and is also experiencing their own
unmistakeable knowing/perception/experience
that contradicts the reality and disconfirms the reality of that schema/those core beliefs
that juxtaposition, both at once, is the key

by 2000 they had gotten the knack for organizing therapy to aim for that starting from the first session

they were getting transformational change pretty reliably

what's more fulfilling for a therapist than to create that level of change for clients?
it's wonderful

they were happy with their work and wanting to share the good news about how there is a well defined way to do that

he began to wonder whether or not the neuroscience world had discovered anything that corresponds to this process

because it's such a well defined process
and it creates such a distinct wonderful effect
this must exist in the brain
it cannot just be a made up thing

They began a search through the literature, going through hundreds of studies and articles. Nothing matched. That was, until he was on vacation with his wife in a motel down in California. Unable to stop the search, it was late at night that Bruce was still looking through the internet, not finding anything. He got into bed and began falling asleep before an internal voice shouted at him to go back to the computer, waking Bruce up and pulling him back to the screen. Looking through the articles he had navigated in the hours prior, there it was. Unmistakable. Published just a year earlier, titled "Mismatch Between What Is Expected and What Actually Occurs Triggers Memory Reconsolidation or Extinction - PMC"

Memory reconsolidation is a very broad versatile mechanism.
Imagine discovering electricity when it was first discovered.
"What is this strange thing"
If you were to say it's to heat up a room
that's only one of it's thousands of possible applications / forms of instantiation

memory reconsolidation is the brains mechanism for making a locked stable piece of learning, of any kind, open up, get unlocked, and get modified. Modified in any way. Strengthened, weakened, details change, some other piece of learning grafted onto it

There is one particular process that creates transformational change of emotional learnings

It's the process of creating that juxtaposition

Where you activate the target emotional learning, and co-activate a contradictory knowledge (not just some tweak of some kind) , but a contradictory knowing.

Therapists can use any methods, any systems, if they understand that this set of experiences is what creates the breakthrough for transformational change to happen. Therapists can shape the use of their preferred methods/systems to create this set of experiences. It also gives therapists who use very different systems a common map, a shared map. They can understand each others systems as an alternate way to create these experiences. It's also very integrative. In Bruce's clinical experience, he would feel very disoriented when he would change from one system to another. He starts to realize that because of the conditions of this patient, he wants to try something else mid-session which would be more appropriate. For example, starting to realize he wants to try in an aadp manner, or a somatic manner, or an NLP manner, because that would fit better
TO make that switch It would feel jarring, discontinuous , disorienting for him, maybe upsetting for the client
But now he is based in the core process of memory reconsolidation
from that point of view
the different modalities
look to him like different alternative options
for facilitating the same experience
there is continuity
it is seamless
when switching to a different type of method from a different system in order to optimally carry out that one process
they named that process the clinical therapeutic reconsolidation process

A juxtaposition experience is a technique used in Coherence Therapy to help clients unlearn and rewrite emotional learning that generates symptoms. It involves helping a client feel two different things that are both real but cannot be true at the same time. The goal is to help the client unlearn the emotional schema that generates symptoms by creating a contradictory experience.