How to Get The Most Out of Therapy and Experience Lasting Change
You won’t get far in therapy if you do not work with all three of your memory centers.
By Karla S. Hardin, MS LPC-S
Do you know why therapy doesn’t work for most people?
I read a survey not long ago that said almost 80% of therapists don’t feel like they are really helping their clients get the change they want. Of course, there are many variables here – but the hope in going to therapy is to actually get somewhere and see real and lasting change.
I believe the reason most people don’t see fundamental change from therapy and most therapists feel defeated in their clients’ results is that therapy hasn’t been complete.
To understand what I mean by complete you need to first understand how we store and process the hurts, losses, and the hard hits in life. You also need to understand how your neurobiology and physiology play in to how you cope with all the hard hits and stressors in your life.
First of all, you must remember your body is your first line of defense to keep you safe. Because let’s face it – if I am at risk to die nothing else matters – my emotions, my relationships or my happiness.
This is so important because when ANY threat comes towards us – physically, emotionally or relationally our Body’s first instinct is to keep us safe at any cost.
Therefore, one of our most helpful defense mechanisms we have is our memory.
Our memory serves to alert us to potential danger based on things we have encountered in our past that have threatened or harmed us.
What most of us do not know is that we have 3 primary memory centers.
3 places you store memory:
Our mid brain contains two of the centers:
1. Our cognitive memory is stored in our hippocampus.
The Hippocampus stores the facts and details. This memory doesn’t start until around age 3yrs old.
2. Our emotional memory is stored in our amygdala.
The amygdala stores all the feelings as a result of the threats and events of harm. This memory actually starts in utero.
3. The Third memory center is our body: it stores procedural memory.
This memory is stored in sensations, smells, sounds and all these serve to alert us to potential harm and danger. This memory is instinctual and the first to detect danger even before your cognitive and emotional memory.
This explains why we can smell certain things and immediately feel our body shift into high alert as it is tuned into the potential of threat.
All three of these memories are actively influencing everything you do EVERY DAY –ALL DAY.
These memory centers as you can imagine store primarily negative memories. Why you ask? Because only negative things generally pose a threat. So, this explains why some people seem to only see the negative in life – they are consciously listening to all these memories.
One more thing you need to know:
The body and brain can both trigger and alert one another to threat. This bi-directional influence is key to understanding why people stay stuck and don’t feel like they get the change they want in their lives.
For therapy to make a difference and get you out of longstanding patterns and cycles it must work with all three memory centers.
Traditionally therapists work with one memory center or at the most two.
COGNITIVE MEMORY
Traditional therapy generally starts with the cognitive memory and helps you begin to see and tell the story of your life more accurately. All the hurts and losses when we were under age 13 yrs. were seen through your child’s perspective which generally sees themselves as the cause of all problems. Children’s concrete thinking at those ages causes them not to see the facts correctly.
Talk therapy is very helpful at reconstructing a more truthful narrative which is a part of resolving those painful memories that influence us in or present.
But cognitive restructuring alone is not enough to break patterns and cycles.
EMOTIONAL MEMORY
Traditional therapy in the last twenty years has worked more with the emotional memory by new therapy approaches such as Emotion Focused Therapy to address the unresolved emotions that can easily get triggered in relationships.
What neuroscience has revealed is that when children have overwhelming emotions due to fear and threat in their younger years, and they were not able to escape the situation, their brain would automatically disconnect them from feeling these strong emotions by storing them in the body.
In order to not stay stuck in our lives and relationships we need to reprocess the emotions that we never got to when they happened so that they can metabolize, and we can return to feeling our feelings safely. Not all therapists are trained how to do this so sometimes that is why people are still stuck and don’t see the change they want.
PROCEDURAL MEMORY
Traditional therapy is generally uniformed about the necessity of, and the skill set needed to work with procedural memory of the body. Most therapists do know the importance of how the body influences mood and relationships as they will check in on things like sleep, exercise, and good nutrition and even the importance of diaphragmic breathing.
But it is just now that the research that has been done over the last 30 years is beginning to be understood on how the body’s memory can trigger the brain into defense even though the emotional and cognitive memory have been restructured and reprocessed.
To work with the procedural memory of the body, the body must relearn through having a different physiological experience than it experienced through the time of threat or harm. Somatic therapists and other body workers are trained in assisting the body to release and relearn new physiological experiences to replace the ones formed in threat.
So, HERE is why so many people stay stuck and therapists feel like they don’t make a significant difference:
Most people don’t get to complete the full therapeutic process.
They may have done cognitive memory restructuring or emotional memory re-processing, but the majority have never done the relearning and reexperiencing of the procedural memory.
Simply stated: If even one of the memory centers has not been addressed it can totally derail the healing in the other memory centers by starting a negative feedback loop.
And you get discouraged because you keep thinking, doing, or feeling the same things you have always felt.
Final thoughts: If you have tried therapy and haven’t seen the results you wanted –look at the three memory centers and see if you see which one or more still need work.
Also, consider going to a Hardwired to Heal workshop where we equip you to working with all three memories.
Last, check out our free downloads which offer helps in all three memory centers on our resources page.
Karla Hardin is a Licensed Professional Counselor Supervisor, Workshop Developer, Facilitator, and Trauma Specialist for Hardin Life Resources
Click below to SHARE with a friend or Subscribe for more tips: