Memory Reconsolidation

Some memories do more than tell us what happened. They teach us what to expect.

“I am not safe.”
“I will be abandoned.”
“My feelings are too much.”

These emotional learnings can continue to organize our reactions long after the original experience has passed.

Memory reconsolidation describes a process through which established emotional learning can become temporarily open to change. The old learning is first reactivated. Then something happens that contradicts what we expect. Researchers call this a prediction error or mismatch.

This process has been studied in neuroscience for decades, with modern reconsolidation research expanding rapidly since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Today, researchers and clinicians are exploring memory reconsolidation as one possible mechanism underlying lasting change in psychotherapy.

Experiential therapies may create these moments in different ways.

In Coherence Therapy, an old emotional knowing is deliberately juxtaposed with contradictory knowledge. In IFS, an exile may revisit an old experience while encountering the protection, compassion, or possibility that was missing then. In AEDP, painful emotional learning can be activated while something profoundly different is happening in the therapeutic relationship. Guided imagery can similarly bring new experiences into an old emotional scene through imagination.

The methods differ, but the underlying movement can be similar:

Bring the old learning alive.

Encounter something that could not have been true inside the old reality.

Let both experiences meet.

When reconsolidation occurs, we are not simply learning a better way to think about the past.

The old emotional learning itself can change.