Change versus the record of change

We agree with Lane et al.'s model of how affective arousal and memory reconsolidation is related to the process of change. The process of memory reconsolidation is like moving a bookmark of self-awareness forward as one progresses in therapy and memories change and are re-storied. This is essential but more is needed: A memory model fails to explain how the story itself “gets written.” Alexithymia (“no words for feelings”) describes clients' difficulties in identifying and elaborating their emotional experience. Other clients fail to regulate negative affect, or are simply less reflective on their experience (i.e., less psychologically minded). Still others have difficulty shifting between different emotional states (affects and meanings) that are activated by a presenting situation. These obstacles to mental health are arguably unrelated to painful memories as such, as are the executive abilities that are drawn on when working through painful experiences.

Some changes are not attributable to memory

Client improvements in psychotherapy reflect not only narrative or memory revisions (explicit or implicit, as Lane et al. discuss), but also new creative ways of engaging with emerging experience. Process research has shown that skill in emotional processing at the onset of therapy is not as critical to the successful treatment of depression as the client's aptitude for increasing this ability during therapy (Pos et al. Reference Pos, Greenberg, Goldman and Korman2003). Similarly, alexithymia is conceptualized as a trait deficit in the cognitive processing of emotional experience and therefore presents therapists with a difficult challenge (Ogrodniczuk et al. Reference Ogrodniczuk, Piper and Joyce2011). However, one of the few treatment studies to examine it as an outcome observed a 68% reduction in the number of clients meeting criteria for alexithymia post-treatment (cited in Paivio & Pascual-Leone Reference Paivio and Pascual-Leone2010). Findings on changes to processing styles such as these are difficult to explain using only a model of memory processes and affective arousal.

Another line of research shows that transforming painfully maladaptive emotion is not just a process of generating new or more positive experiences, but rather one of evoking another feeling in parallel, and in contrast to, the maladaptive feeling (Greenberg Reference Greenberg2002; Pascual-Leone & Greenberg Reference Pascual-Leone and Greenberg2007). As Fredrickson (Reference Fredrickson2001) has observed, key components of “positive” emotions are incompatible with “negative” emotion and the effects of a negative emotion are not “replaced” but rather “undone” (i.e., dialectically elaborated) by positive emotions. Lane et al. observe that emotional arousal is an important ingredient in this process, and the co-activation of contrasting emotional networks will form new facets of the revised memory. However, memory reconsolidation does not, by itself, explain how inherently contradicting emotional experiences can be brought together to synthesize a different, healthy and internally coherent, emotional state.

Emotional processing occurs whether or not participants are encouraged to work with their own memories. A study on expressive writing randomly assigned trauma survivors either to write about their real experiences or to write about some fictional trauma-experience that was not their own (based on related narratives). Even so, both groups enjoyed similar positive changes, significantly greater than those of a control (Greenberg et al. Reference Greenberg, Wortman and Stone1996). Given the effect cannot be explained in terms of explicit re-appraisals, Lane et al. have attributed such findings to changes in implicit memory. However, there was no advantage to working directly with one's own painful memories, which suggests that working through emotional problems in general might be the main developmental factor.

Emotion processing is a kind of problem solving

Becoming more emotionally aware, more insightful, or more emotionally flexible, or gaining emotion-regulation skills, cannot be explained by transformations in memory, without referring to new emotion and new executive skills. In short, engaging an old memory to modify it is different from engaging an old memory with the use of new executive skills. The framework of the target article is married to empirical research on memory; but here, memory is essentially taken as the product of associative learning. However, without emotional problem solving that brings truly novel solutions, memory and learning by themselves may not clarify personal (i.e., emotional and cognitive) existential learning (Greenberg & Pascual-Leone Reference Greenberg and Pascual-Leone2001; Pascual-Leone & Johnson Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Dai and Sternberg2004). Emotional change in psychotherapy pertains to subjective (or better meta-subjective) problem solving and the concurrent constructivist learning of these insights. Working through moments of emotional pain (i.e., relationship break-ups, major disappointments, or simply feeling overwhelmed) are emotion-laden tasks. After all, these are emotional problems, not memory problems; and as such they represent fuzzy constructivist puzzles that are often resolved through categorically novel solutions in functioning (Pascual-Leone et al. Reference Pascual-Leone, Greenberg, Pascual-Leone, Lutz and Knox2014; Pascual-Leone et al., in press). This aspect of emotional change is overlooked when researchers or clinicians focus on the contents of therapeutic changes (i.e., new narratives, less dysfunctional beliefs, productive emotions), without also considering the operative mental processes a client needed to manipulate those objects of experience.

Thus, solving emotional problems demands working in a manner that goes beyond experience itself. Subjective experience can be understood as “personal data” that (as Lane et al. claim) is encoded, consolidated, and reconsolidated in memory. In contrast, meta-subjective is a term for describing a higher level of self-reflective processing, which must be deployed to clarify and internally negotiate painful experience (Pascual-Leone Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson and Erneling1997; Reference Pascual-Leone2013). Thus, using a meta-subjective perspective instead of a simpler observer's point of view, clients dynamically develop emotional problem-solving models of their own change. This internal dialectical process attempts to coordinate incongruent facets of meaning (subjective feelings, past event, and future possibilities). Resolving personal difficulties is not just information processing. Resolving emotional problems requires the use of effortful mental attention, with its activation, inhibition, and executive functions – all operating on the ongoing flow of emotional arousal (Greenberg & Pascual-Leone Reference Greenberg, Pascual-Leone, Neimeyer and Mahoney1995; Pascual-Leone & Johnson Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Dai and Sternberg2004). This process depends on, but is not reducible to, remembering things differently. A memory model explains the accumulation of how progress is updated but it does not explain the actual mechanism of generating new emotional experiences or insights: For that, emotional problem-solving processes are also needed.