Memory reconsolidation hypnosis: what neuroscience offers

Anyone who works with hypnosis knows the moment. A client comes in with a fear or a reaction that has shaped their life for years. After a session, something has shifted, and the old trigger no longer has the same pull. How is that possible? For Melissa Tiers, clinical hypnotist and author from the USA, one of the most useful answers comes from neuroscience: memory reconsolidation. This article looks at what memory reconsolidation hypnosis means, what research suggests and where its limits are.

A brain that keeps changing

For a long time, the adult brain was seen as largely fixed. That picture has changed. Neuroscience now describes a brain that keeps adapting throughout life.

A well-known phrase captures one basic principle: “Neurons that fire together wire together.” When the same pattern is repeated, the connections behind it grow stronger. Familiar patterns can also lose their shape when new ones are practiced often enough. In Melissa Tiers’ view, this is what happens when clients practice self-hypnosis: with every repetition, they strengthen new connections in their brain.

Tiers also points out that the mind is not only located in the brain. Signal substances are produced throughout the body, and most of the body’s serotonin, for example, is produced in the gut. Candace Pert, the researcher who discovered the opiate receptor, put it this way: “Our body is our subconscious.”

But repetition does not explain everything. What about the changes practitioners sometimes see after a single session? That question kept Tiers busy for a long time. The answer she found is memory reconsolidation.

What memory reconsolidation is

When we remember something, we do not simply play back a recording. The memory is reactivated, and for a short time it can become changeable again before it is stored anew. Researchers call this process reconsolidation.

Put simply, every time a memory is recalled, it can also be updated a little. From an evolutionary point of view, this makes sense. A brain that keeps adjusting what it has stored to a changing environment helps us survive. It also leads to a paradox that Tiers describes: the surest way to keep a memory unchanged is not to remember it.

In recent years, a growing number of studies have looked at how this plasticity can be used in therapy. Research suggests that even emotional memories formed early in life, in deeper regions of the brain and outside of conscious awareness, can be modified under the right conditions. These early memories often form the basis of what we believe about ourselves, about our safety and about what we are capable of.

Why emotional learning matters

Bruce Ecker describes this in his 2015 article “Memory reconsolidation understood and misunderstood.” For nearly a century, research had concluded that emotional learning in the brain’s subcortical regions is preserved for life. The discovery that such learning can be erased was, in his view, something of a game changer.

Ecker gives an example. A young child who is snapped at by angry parents every time they express a need learns to stop expressing needs or grief, and even to stop feeling them. The child learns to expect neither understanding nor comfort from others. This learning can happen entirely in the implicit memory system, without conscious thought or words. The child adapts in order to suffer as little as possible in the family.

Years later, the same pattern can shape the adult’s life at great personal cost, without the person ever being aware of it. According to Ecker, the neural circuits behind such learning lie mainly in subcortical areas of implicit memory, where emotional and procedural knowledge is stored. They do not lie mainly in the areas of explicit memory, where conscious, autobiographical knowledge is stored (Schore, 2003).

That is why insight alone often does not change these patterns. They were not learned with words, and words alone rarely reach them.

Memory reconsolidation hypnosis: the conditions for change

According to Tiers, reconsolidation needs two conditions.

First, the emotional memory has to be activated. There are several ways in: through a behavior, an emotion or a body sensation connected to the old experience. When the neural network behind it is active, the memory becomes changeable again, as if it had been lifted out and made unstable for a moment.

Second, there has to be a mismatch. Neuroscience calls this a prediction error. The brain expects the old outcome, and something different happens. When a client who used to feel fear in a certain situation experiences a completely different reaction to the same trigger while the memory is active, the brain has a reason to update what it stored.

This also explains why reliving a painful memory is not enough. When clients recall a difficult experience with the same emotions and nothing changes, the memory can become even more firmly anchored. That is the opposite of what anyone wants. Without an emotional shift, there is no reconsolidation.

Why hypnosis is well suited

This is where hypnosis comes in. In hypnosis, emotional memories are easier to reach, and a hypnotist can guide the client toward a new experience while the old one is active. In Tiers’ view, the specific style of hypnosis matters less than one thing: that the emotional response to the trigger shifts, and shifts clearly. In her courses, she shows hypnotists how to involve different areas of the brain more strategically, so that changes generalize beyond a single situation.

For OMNI hypnotherapists, this connects to a familiar principle: working at the cause. In regression, the client returns to the experience where a pattern began and can experience it from a new, safer perspective. Memory reconsolidation offers one possible explanation for why this kind of work can have lasting effects.

It also clarifies how hypnotherapy changes memories. The facts of the past stay the same. What can change is their emotional charge, and with it the reaction they trigger today.

What research does and does not say

Research on memory reconsolidation is promising, and it is still developing. Much of it comes from laboratory studies, and how best to apply it in therapy is an open question. Research suggests that reconsolidation plays a role in how emotional memories change, but it does not guarantee a result in any single session.

Reconsolidation is also only one piece of the neuroscience of hypnosis. Other research looks at what happens in the brain during hypnosis itself, such as the HypnoScience® project with the University of Zurich.

For practitioners, all of this means staying curious and staying honest. Reconsolidation does not turn hypnosis into a miracle cure. It helps explain why emotional change sometimes happens quickly, and it gives a clearer idea of the conditions that make it more likely. Where clients live with trauma or a mental health condition, hypnosis complements professional treatment. It does not replace it.

About Melissa Tiers

Melissa Tiers is a clinical hypnotist and author from the USA. She describes herself as something of a research junkie, always looking for ideas she can bring into her hypnosis practice. More at melissatiers.com.

Your next step: if you want to learn how to work at the cause of emotional patterns, see Module 3: OMNI Hypnotherapist (online). You learn R2C and Fix it® and the complete OMNI hypnotherapy process.

Sources

Ecker, B. (2015). Memory reconsolidation understood and misunderstood.

On the erasure of emotional learning: Clem & Huganir, 2010; Debiec, Díaz-Mataix, Bush, Doyère & LeDoux, 2010; Díaz-Mataix, Debiec, LeDoux & Doyère, 2011; Jarome et al., 2012.

On the earlier view that emotional learning is indelible: LeDoux, Romanski & Xagoraris, 1989; Milner, Squire & Kandel, 1998.

On implicit and explicit memory: Schore, 2003.