Can We Understand Therapy as an Exploration of Memory?

It may be that all effective therapies work by modifying memory in some way.

Reviewed by Devon Frye

Key points

• Memory is not just about our ability to recollect.
• Memory is the basis for how we relate to ourselves and navigate our lives.
• Emotional change in therapy may occur through a process of updating memories.
• Although the therapy landscape is diverse, all therapies arguably involve some aspect of memory modification.

Memory is much more than an archive of the past. It is the prism through which we see ourselves, others, and the world. It’s the connective tissue underlying what we say, think, and do. —Charan Ranganath

For most people, the word “memory” refers to our ability to recall things we learned or experienced in the past. But memory is much more than recollection. It is at play in every facet of our mental lives, helping us experience the here and now in a cohesive way.

Your sense of who you are and the tactics you use to navigate life are the products of neural records that comprise your memory stores. When you confront situations that resemble some aspect of your past, it triggers contextual remembering: your felt experience of the present moment in the present context. Even when you do not consciously recall your history, there is an element of remembering that dictates how each moment you experience feels.

Consider what happens when you walk into a museum: Perhaps a quiet contemplative state washes over you, and the many aspects of your mental self (i.e., your focus, mood, thoughts, desires, and actions) become coordinated to the space that now envelops you. In this place, you are hushed, curious, and open-minded.

Notice that you do not need to try to be this way. You simply stepped into it when you crossed the threshold of the gallery—when you entered the present context.

Although we may not notice the inner changes that occur when we move from one context to another, these changes are vital for living successfully. Can you picture yourself twerking in the gallery as if it were the dance floor at a nightclub? If you cringe at the thought of doing this, your memory is helping you navigate life in a contextualized way. This example illustrates two aspects of contextual remembering:

1. Your present experience is based on memory pathways that coordinate focus, mood, thoughts, desires, goals, and actions.
2. These pathways are context-dependent, creating patterns of feeling and being that are highly attuned to specific situations or triggers.

Sometimes the connection between the past and present is conscious. But often it is not, because contextual remembering is used to activate your operational instincts in the here and now, not to recall the past.

How is This Relevant to Therapy?

When you encounter emotional challenges in life, you are also experiencing contextual remembering. Your anxiety, stress, sadness, guilt, shame, et cetera are all preloaded in the memory stores guiding your operational instincts in the contexts that trigger those feelings.

Here's an example: Your boss gives you a blank stare as you speak during a meeting, and you experience a sudden rush of stress and shame. You blush, become self-conscious, shift in your seat, and begin rambling. All of this reflects your memory’s operational instincts as they are attuned to a very specific trigger. When patterns like this reoccur in a person’s life, therapy helps the person retrieve the underlying operational memories, examine them, and modify them.

What Types of Therapy Modify Problematic Operational Memories?

I argue that the answer is all of them. Indeed, I was inspired to write this out of a growing belief that all effective therapies work the same way, even though the theories and methods used in one approach can differ starkly from another.

In the last two decades, the expansion of the field of neuroscience has been unifying a once fragmented and competitive therapy landscape because our growing knowledge of the brain is helping us understand emotional change in more therapy-neutral terms. The unifying idea is that meaningful emotional change occurs when memory networks in the body are activated, processed, and rewired. All effective therapies facilitate this chain of events, even when it is not the expressed theory or focus of the approach.

I am not suggesting that all therapies are, or should be, the same in every respect. The diversity of therapy models and strategies that exist today is vital. Individuals have different life experiences, personalities, styles, and needs. And people do benefit more from one type of approach than another. But when the fit is right, the underlying healing processes are the same. This fact offers therapists and clients flexibility in how they do the work of transforming memories.

In summary, therapy can be seen as a conversation that draws out contextual memories—whether they are recent or forged long ago—so that they may be understood and rewired to facilitate calmness, contentment, social connection, esteem, mastery, flexibility, authenticity, and purpose. This process can help clients understand themselves with greater depth; provide an opportunity to test out new perspectives; create new experiences to transcend problematic patterns; give them a wider and more flexible range of responses to triggers; and ultimately, leave them with a clear sense of how to navigate the emotional challenges they face.

As these steps transpire during therapy, under the hood memory networks are being restitched to enable more lasting change. It is fortunate that there are so many different therapies available for achieving this aim and individuals have the opportunity to select an approach or style that is right for them.