There are two types of change: incremental change, which is often slow and takes more effort to maintain, and transformational change, which can happen in a moment and is effortless to maintain. Given the benefits of the latter, this video outlines how to facilitate transformational change in therapy and in our own personal growth work.
We'll explore how an understanding of the neuroscience and therapuetic techniques of transformational change, as outlined by Bruce Ecker's Coherence Therapy, can help us to make our unconscious beliefs more conscious, and then how to pair these beliefs with experiences which disconfirm or challenge (and hopefully update!) our view of reality.
While transformational change happens in a single moment, that isn't to say it is easy. We have to be a bit strategic. Why? Because for transformational change to occur, the brain must be confronted with two very specific sources of information simultaneously.
First, what what did we learn about reality in the past. This is called reactivation. In order to reactivate the schema stored in implicit memory we must help our client to emotionally experience the learnings and memories from the past. This emotional is required to become aware of our brain's deepest beliefs about how the world works (our schemas) and to open these neural nets up for rewiring. This is not an easy task since what our brain most fervently believes is often completely unconscious to us. That's why it can be so helpful to have a skilled therapist trained in transformational therapy techniques to facilitate this reactivation process.
The second step is to notice examples from our current experience that don't align with the old map of reality that we developed in childhood. This process is called disconfirmation. When a deeply felt schema from our past is juxtaposed against a disconfirming experience from our present then the brain is forced to rewrite the schema in order to resolve this contradiction. Through updating our outdated beliefs about reality we can alter the behaviors that derive from these old beliefs and achieve deep and lasting change.