EMDR, Trauma and Memory Reconsolidation - an interview with Dr. James Alexander
Channel: Experiential Psychotherapy Training
Date: 2022-03-25

In this 4th interview of the IEP series, Vincent Ryan, Integrative Psychotherapist (IACP), Cork, Ireland, interviews James Alexander, Ph.D., Lismore, Australia, about how he uses EMDR to activate Memory Reconsolidation in the treatment of trauma and the publication of his recently published book: “Tendrils of Trauma”.

James Alexander decided to become a psychologist within two years being nearly killed by a drunk driver in a car accident as an 18 year old- his motivation was to help similarly traumatised people. He initially trained in counselling psychology, and later obtained a PhD in clinical health psychology, and has been practicing as a psychologist for more than 30 years. He is the author of three books:- The Hidden Psychology of Pain: the use of understanding to heal chronic pain; Getting the Zs You Want; sleep sense in the 21st century; and just released, Tendrils of Trauma; leaving home in 1981. The third of these is a phenomenological case study of trauma and its on-gong reverberations across the course of James Alexander's adult life- a personal memoir, demonstrating  how traumatic experience can wrap itself around every aspect of one's life, interspersed with what science is currently telling us about recovery from trauma. One reviewer described it as "where Jack Karourak's On The Road meets Bessel van Der Kolk". He describes himself as primarily an EMDR practitioner, and continues working with psychological trauma and chronic pain in NSW, Australia.

Website URL
https://www.drjamesalexander-psychologist.com

(Quoted from EMDR.com): "Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy treatment that was originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories (Shapiro, 1989a, 1989b). Shapiro’s (2001) Adaptive Information Processing model posits that EMDR therapy facilitates the accessing and processing of traumatic memories and other adverse life experience to bring these to an adaptive resolution. After successful treatment with EMDR therapy, affective distress is relieved, negative beliefs are reformulated, and physiological arousal is reduced. During EMDR therapy the client attends to emotionally disturbing material in brief sequential doses while simultaneously focusing on an external stimulus. Therapist directed lateral eye movements are the most commonly used external stimulus but a variety of other stimuli including hand-tapping and audio stimulation are often used (Shapiro, 1991). 

Memory Reconsolidation:
Memory consolidation is a category of processes that stabilize a memory trace after its initial acquisition.[1] A memory trace is a change in the nervous system caused by memorizing something. Consolidation is distinguished into two specific processes. The first, synaptic consolidation, which is thought to correspond to late-phase long-term potentiation,[2] occurs on a small scale in the synaptic connections and neural circuits within the first few hours after learning. The second process is systems consolidation, occurring on a much larger scale in the brain, rendering hippocampus-dependent memories independent of the hippocampus over a period of weeks to years. Recently, a third process has become the focus of research, reconsolidation, in which previously consolidated memories can be made labile again through reactivation of the memory trace.[3][4]

The process of how this can be brought about through psychotherapy has been detailed in the book "Unlocking the Emotional Brain" (Ecker, Ticic and Hulley, 2012): 
In Unlocking the Emotional Brain, authors Ecker, Ticic and Hulley equip readers to carry out focused, empathic therapy using the process found by researchers to induce memory reconsolidation, the recently discovered and only known process for actually unlocking emotional memory at the synaptic level. Emotional memory's tenacity is the familiar bane of therapists, and researchers have long believed that emotional memory forms indelible learning. Reconsolidation has overturned these views. It allows new learning to erase, not just suppress, the deep, unconscious, intensely problematic emotional learnings that form during childhood or in later tribulations and generate most of the symptoms that bring people to therapy. Readers will learn methods that precisely eliminate unwanted, ingrained emotional responses―whether moods, behaviors or thought patterns―causing no loss of ordinary narrative memory, while restoring clients' well-being. Numerous case examples show the versatile use of this process in AEDP, Coherence Therapy, EFT, EMDR and IPNB.