Coherence Therapy

Transformational change is the complete and lasting disappearance of an unwanted state of mind, behavior, and/or somatic disturbance, and also the associated theme of emotional distress, with no ongoing effort needed for maintaining this liberating shift. The analyses listed above support the hypothesis that transformational change is always the result of profound unlearning through the memory reconsolidation (MR) process.

Numerous laboratory studies have established that the brain requires a certain set of experiences for MR to be induced and for a target learning to be nullified through profound unlearning.  As carried out in psychotherapy, the required set of experiences is known as the therapeutic reconsolidation process or TRP (Ecker, Ticic, & Hulley, 2012, 2024).

Many systems of psychotherapy carry out the TRP to bring about transformational change, even though the conceptual frameworks of most therapy systems make no explicit reference to MR or its requirements (with the exception of Coherence Therapy, which follows the process closely and explicitly).

Whenever transformational change occurs in any form of therapy (or outside of therapy), the necessary set of experiences must have occurred, whether or not the therapist or counselor was aware of them or has any knowledge of MR or the TRP.

The list above identifies therapy systems that have at least one published case example showing in detail how the TRP is implemented by the system's methodology.

Many other systems of therapy also fulfill the TRP and produce transformational change, but a fine-grain account has not yet been mapped out and presented.  This list will grow as more such mappings are published.  In this way, we are documenting how the TRP can serve as a framework of psychotherapy unification and integration that gives practitioners of different systems a shared map and vocabulary of therapeutic action.  For extended discussion of that framework of psychotherapy unification, see Chapter 6 in Ecker et al. (2024) and Ecker and Bridges (2020).
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Ecker, B. (2021, November 19). Reconsolidation behavioral updating of human emotional memory: A comprehensive review and unified analysis of successes, replication failures, and clinical translation. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/atz3m

Ecker, B., & Bridges, S. K. (2020). How the science of memory reconsolidation advances the effectiveness and unification of psychotherapy. Clinical Social Work Journal, 48(3), 287–300. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-020-00754-z

Ecker, B., Ticic, R., & Hulley, L. (2024). Unlocking the emotional brain: Memory reconsolidation and the psychotherapy of transformational change (2nd Edition). New York, NY and Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Ecker, B., Ticic, R., & Hulley, L. (2012). Unlocking the emotional brain: Eliminating symptoms at their roots using memory reconsolidation. (1st Edition). New York, NY and Abingdon, UK: Routledge.