Clients that come to coaching are usually suffering from such negative side effects. And they find their enduring defenses hard to change even when they rationally understand how behaving in such ways is sabotaging them and limiting their possibilities for effectiveness in life and work. Their current ways are rooted in emotional learnings, usually from their younger years, and not expressions of their rational understanding. As a result, their current ways display tenacity, resist change, and often undermine efforts to develop new ways of being.
Coaching clients are also usually suffering from a deficient sense of self. In my example, the events of my childhood, one of which was the feeling of being wrong and the overwhelming shame that accompanied that in 3rd grade, left me feeling a lack of self-worth. There are two kinds of autobiographical memories: episodic memories and personal semantics (Grilli & Ryan, 2020). Episodic memories are memories of particular events, like my example from 3rd grade. However, given time and more life experience, our memories often fade. What persists from our life experiences are personal semantics or self-images that represent identities abstracted, extracted, and accumulated from our past experiences like my lack of self-worth.
Developmental coaching is aimed at developing a fresh sense of self that is not deficient but instead capable of navigating the complex challenges of life. To do this, coaches must help clients release limiting emotional learnings such as well-intended but sabotaging defenses and create new emotional learnings through uncovering and embodying innate resourcefulness, creativity, and adaptive brilliance.
The Breakthrough of Memory Reconsolidation
Memory reconsolidation is the brain’s neuroplastic process for erasing and updating emotional learnings, like the often-unconscious conditioned behaviors that thwart self-development. According to Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic, and Laurel Hulley, the authors of Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation, who were the first to knowingly leverage memory reconsolidation in psychotherapy,
The true disappearance from memory of a learning that previously generated behavioral responses has the following signature features:
A specific emotional reaction abruptly can no longer be reactivated by cues and triggers that formerly did so or by other stressful situations.
Symptoms of behavior, emotion, somatics, or thought that were expressions of that emotional reaction also disappear permanently.
Non-recurrence of the emotional reactions and symptoms continues effortlessly and without counteractive or preventative measures of any kind (Ecker et al., 2012, p. 19).
Given these outcomes, it is not surprising that some psychotherapists are promoting the idea that memory reconsolidation is a universal integrating framework for psychotherapy (Ecker et al., 2012; Goldman & Fredrick-Keniston, 2020). Given my experience integrating memory reconsolidation into developmental coaching, I believe that memory reconsolidation can also be a common thread across various methods of developmental coaching where it is utilized.
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