How to Have a Breakthrough: Memory Reconsolidation

“Imposter syndrome never goes away; you just learn to live with it.”

“I think I’ll always feel this anxiety; I just need to practice taking action anyway.”

There are a lot of coaches out there who would beam to hear you say something like this. They would think, you have reasonable expectations, and you’re willing to put in the work.

But when I hear these beliefs, I think, more is possible. We can aim higher. There is such a thing as a breakthrough.

We used to think unlearning was impossible

Until around the year 2000, neuroscientists believed that when a memory was consolidated into long-term memory, it was there to stay. This is true of all kinds of memory, but I’m interested in the emotional learnings that drive our feelings and defense mechanisms. For instance, a learning like “if I make even one mistake, I’m worthless” could drive perfectionism and play a role in imposter syndrome.

Under this theory, if you wanted to feel and behave differently, you couldn’t unlearn “if I make even one mistake, I’m worthless,” but you could create a new learning, “I’m okay even if I make mistakes,” and try to turn the volume down on the first learning and up on the second one.

This is done through a process called extinction. Let’s think about a really simple example: If you train subjects that a blue light means they’re about to get shocked, then extinction training means repeatedly showing them a blue light without shocking them. This creates a new learning, “blue light is safe” that out-competes the old “blue light is dangerous” learning.

But extinction has limitations. The old “blue light is dangerous” learning still exists, and its volume can get turned back up in three different ways:

• Renewal: when the blue light is experienced in a new context, the fear comes back.
• Reinstatement: when the subjects are shocked even without the blue light, the fear of the blue light comes back.
• Spontaneous recovery: a long time after the extinction training, the fear comes back.

One summer while I was away at an internship, I built the habit of working out 4 times a week. When I came back to grad school, I went right back to my old sedentary ways. Have you ever watched a new habit fall apart as soon as your context changed or you got stressed out? This is why.

But unlearning is possible

Fortunately, there’s another way to change our emotional learnings. Nader, Schafe, and Le Doux (2000) showed that a memory that has been “set in stone” can be made editable again under the right circumstances. They took a special step that we’ll discuss in the next section, and then gave rats a drug that prevents the consolidation of new memories for a while, but has no effect on old, consolidated memories. Yet, the memory went away.

But drugs aren’t required, and it works on humans. Schiller et al. (2010) and Agren et al. (2012) have found that if you train people to fear a certain visual cue, and then you do a special step before giving them extinction training, they will not be subject to renewal, reinstatement, or spontaneous recovery. So it looks like instead of extinction, they actually got an edited memory.

In other words, here are two ways to unlearn a fear:

The ability to change an old memory in place rather than merely compete with it is now known as memory reconsolidation. Note that while the “danger” learning is gone, the autobiographical memory (“I was trained to fear blue light yesterday”) is unaffected.

What is that special step?

Neuroscientists are still hard at work learning all the factors that make memory reconsolidation work or fail to work in the lab. But Pedreira, Pérez-Cuesta, and Maldonado (2004) showed that the basic requirements for the special step are:

1. A reactivation of the target memory
2. A surprise

For instance, Agren et al. (2012) used the blue light shown for a longer than usual period of time (surprising) and not paired with a shock (even more surprising). There’s some evidence that the difference between this surprising reactivation and regular extinction training is that the surprising reactivation is shorter (Cassini et al, 2017).

But then it got even better. Liu et al (2014) found that if you give people a surprising reactivation of the shock instead of the blue light, and then do extinction training with the blue light, people can unlearn fear of all cues associated with the shock, not just the blue light.

Translating this into real life

Hopefully, no one has trained you to associate blue lights with electric shocks. So how can we use this information to help you?

The Coherence Psychology Institute has translated this process into Coherence Therapy and Coherence Coaching, which I’ve completed Level 1 training in. Because neuroscientists are still working out the details, and therapy and coaching are so much more complex than experimental manipulations, we can’t know for sure that what they do is an exact translation of what happens in the above experiments. But what they do seems to work, so until we know more neuroscience, it’s a great model.

They hold that the key is to activate the “schema” of the memory and then put that schema in contact with surprising evidence. I find that using parts work, this becomes even more clear. How can we tell that we’ve activated a schema? By talking to a part that states that belief! And how do we know the surprising information has reached the schema? Because the part gets surprised!

Time and again, my clients will report a mind-boggling moment after a part of them takes in new information. They often say the part’s “mind is blown,” that it “feels really weird,” and that it “needs time to sink in.” I suspect this mind-boggle is the subjective experience of memory deconsolidation.

Case Study: Rearranging My Brain Furniture

My witty client Chris C. refers to the mind-boggle moment as “rearranging my brain furniture.” She most recently had one of these moments when she was talking to me about feeling freaked out about an upcoming doctor’s appointment that could bring a variety of kinds of bad news. 

A part of her was hard at work imagining every possible outcome, and planning what to do in each scenario. It was so hard at work, in fact, that it didn’t want to waste time with anything else, including talking to us! If we had waltzed in and told the part that worrying isn’t helpful, the part would have 100% ignored us.

This is what Yvonne Agazarian calls a “barrier condition,” where information can’t travel from one part of your mind to another. On one hand, you know that worrying won’t change your future. On the other hand, one small but highly determined part of you feels that worrying is absolutely essential. The key is to make that barrier permeable so that all of you can make use of your most up-to-date information.

Parts work is excellent at that. When we listen to, validate, appreciate, and empathize with parts, they reliably soften and lower their walls. 

By being patient and respectful with this worrying part, we were able to get a little time to talk to it. It ended up letting in the idea (which Chris was already well aware of) that Chris could simply use her problem-solving skills after finding out what was wrong (if anything), instead of before. 

When the part received this information, it wasn’t mad, and it didn’t argue, but it did have a mind-boggle moment. Chris said it felt weird and needed time to let it sink in. She felt her brain furniture being rearranged.

Editing the Memory

So, we seem to know how to do the deconsolidation step. What about the editing step?

The protocol from those simple experiments on Pavlovian conditioning would suggest that the client should repeatedly think about the life situation that was previously scaring them (their “blue light”), and allow them to repeatedly notice that they don’t feel their usual reaction (their “lack of electric shock”).

This is similar to a step in my main coaching method, Aletheia Coaching, called Circling Back, where we ask the client how the life situation they brought to coaching occurs to them now.

Ecker and Vaz (2022), from the Coherence Psychology Institute, instead suggest that the old belief and new belief should be repeatedly juxtaposed. 

I often do both for good measure. Both Aletheia and Coherence Psychology report great results. So, let’s check back in with Chris!

The Change

I asked Chris if her overthinking had come back, and she said no. She actually hadn’t gotten answers from that doctor’s appointment and needed to wait for even more appointments. But even so, she wasn’t worrying: “I’m so fine about it, I didn’t even notice until you asked!”

She didn’t say, “every time I start to freak out again, I do what you taught me!” Or, “I’m practicing thinking positive!” She didn’t even have to think about it.

What would you be freed up to focus on if you didn’t have to talk yourself out of unnecessary feelings and unhelpful habits over and over again forever?

What this means for you

There are a couple things I hope you take away from this:

Transformation is possible!

You don’t have to settle for coping with the status quo for the rest of your life. 

Don’t get me wrong; you will feel scared again. You will feel every emotion again. That’s how it should be; emotions are part of life. 

But you can feel emotions in response to what’s true right now, instead of feeling emotions based on old ideas that got walled off from new knowledge. We can lower that wall and let the emotional sides of you benefit from your common sense.

It’s also not one quick fix. We typically have to lower each wall individually, and there may be multiple walls that make up a whole experience like imposter syndrome or procrastination. Practicing skills is useful along the way. It’s just important to know these walls can be lowered so that you don’t cut yourself off from possibilities.

Don’t fight yourself!

Many of us have been taught how to handle ourselves based on the old paradigm that considers true unlearning to be impossible. This makes us afraid to listen to any problematic parts of ourselves, lest we accidentally turn up the volume on their unhelpful beliefs. And when we do come into contact with them, we try to argue with them, to strengthen our helpful belief over the unhelpful one.

But arguing makes them strengthen that wall! What actually works is to listen, and even validate their good intentions, so that they soften and become more open-minded.

Want help?

Listening and validating a part’s good intentions is easier said than done. It relies on being in the right frame of mind, where you can be genuinely open-hearted towards a part of you that causes you suffering. It’s common to feel frustrated, resentful, or judgmental towards the part rather than open-hearted.

That’s one reason that this work is so much easier to do with a skilled guide than alone. I have a plethora of techniques to help you get into the right frame of mind, and I do my own work so that I can stay in that frame of mind with you.

If you’re interested, book a free consultation to chat with me about the pattern in your life that you’d like to change.