**⏺️ With:** [[Missing Experience]] **\#️⃣ Tags:** #Psychotherapy #Healing #Developmental > **🌱 Planted:** Mon 14 July 2025 --- ***Memory Reconsolidation is the key to long-lasting transformation.*** Neuroscientists have long believed that once we learn something emotionally, as in implicit beliefs like "I'm not enough" or "I can't trust anyone", these learnings are permanently encoded into our brains. This belief is what has shaped most of our approaches to Psychotherapy and self-development with the focus usually being on building new responses to counteract old patterns. Yet, we know through the understanding of how [[Change Without Force#Living Systems|Living Systems]] unfold and the [[Paradox of Change]] that this type of change is rarely long lasting or transformational. Plus, we also know that modalities which try to evoke change in this way, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), are often not effective therapeutically. These approaches tend to ignore the fact that our [[Core Material]] (the material which [[Organisation of Experience|Organises Our Experience]]) holds [[Missing Experience|Missing Experiences]] that occurred during our early developmental years when our [[Developmental Needs]] weren't adequately met. In other words, these approaches are often blind to the emotional truths that we hold at the core of our beings and instead of working with them directly, they try to fix or correct them instead. Thankfully, this understanding changed. In 2004, brain neuroplasticity researchers found that the brain can actually erase or edit existing emotional learnings through a process called **Memory Reconsolidation**[^1]. By the early 2000s, a modality known as Coherence Therapy, developed by Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley, incorporated this new understanding with powerful results. Memory Reconsolidation was thereafter recognised as the brain's innate mechanism for updating previously learned information carried in memory, capable of full unlearning and nullification (neuroplasticity). In addition, it was recognised that long-lasting transformational change in **any** therapeutic modality leverages Memory Reconsolidation, irrespective of the techniques used[^2]. # How Memory Reconsolidation Works The brain has specific requirements for opening the memory reconsolidation window, which is a roughly five-hour period when emotional memories become malleable and can be edited and updated. This takes place through a three-step process[^2]: ![[Memory Reconsolidation.png]] **1. Reactivation** - An existing emotional memory gets activated and becomes present in awareness. This might happen when triggered (like in [[Emotional Flashbacks]]) or when accessing the original feeling/experience through inner work or therapy. **2. Mismatch** - At the same time the old memory is active, a new experience that contradicts the original learned memory is introduced. This creates an experiential mismatch which unlocks the memory and makes it malleable. **3. New Experiences** - Up to 6 hours after the mismatch [^2], new experiences and practices can actually rewrite the original emotional memory. If the new experience is a complete mismatch then the old memory is rewritten. If it's partial, the old memory is edited and updated. This is exactly what happens when we integrate [[Missing Experience|Missing Experiences]]. When we finally receive the nourishment or support that was missing, whether that's through therapy, relationships, or [[Parts Work]], we're creating the experiential mismatch that allows our [[Nervous System]] to update the old conclusions and beliefs we have about ourselves, others and the world. It also explains why simply talking about our problems or brute forcing new practices and habits into our lives in the name of [[Self-Improvement vs Self-Unfoldment|self-improvement]] isn't enough for long-lasting change. > [!tip] > You can actually put this knowledge into practice! Let's say you're in therapy and you access an old, perhaps emotionally charged memory. You work with this Somtically or in [[Parts Work]] and something shifts. Whatever the shift was (or experiential mismatch), you can reinforce it by consciously making effort to do a new practice or behaviour within the 6 hour window. In practice, this might look like checking in with a [[Parts#Hurt Parts|Hurt Part]] you met and soothed, and then providing that Part with more nourishment later (whether with someone else or even solo). # See Also - Modalities that leverage Memory Reconsolidation: [[Hakomi Method]], [[Aletheia Coaching]]. - #Later The Amygdala and Hippocampus are involved in memory reconsolidating of emotionally charged, fear and thread-based memories. [^1]: [Mismatch between what is expected and what actually occurs triggers memory reconsolidation or extinction - PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15466312/) [^2]: [[Neuroscience of Enduring Change by Richard Lane & Lynn Nadel]]