Memory Reconsolidation simply means that the emotional brain (and the nervous system) have an opportunity to finish that Fight-or-Flight response. This means that the brain can finally experience an ending, and the nervous system gets to complete the reaction that has been stuck or frozen since it began.
ETT accomplishes this completion through guided imagery exercises. The guided imagery allows the emotional brain to give whatever ending it chooses to events, and discard the emotions that have been linked to that moment ever since, and carried forward into the present day.
Neuroscience has found (and this is very recent work) that once the emotional brain is open, we have a “window” of up to about 5 hours to go in and update a memory. The guided imagery exercises used in ETT work like data that updates the emotional brain. They supply the emotional brain with new information. The brain can then recognize that the old events are over, and this lifts or reduces much of the linked emotional charge. Once the charge is reduced, and the events are filed as simply “old events,” the emotional responses are no longer linked to the past. We no longer “overreact,” or “get triggered” in situations that might have seemed similar to the brain.
The next blog will be the final in this Introduction to Emotional Triggers Treatment (ETT) series, and we will look at how this approach differs from others.