Why You Feel the Same After Years of Therapy

The affective memory was never resolved, and nobody measured whether anything moved.

Why You Feel the Same by Allen Kanerva, Inspyrd

This piece is adapted from the INSPYRD library as part of the Affective Memory Resolution series.

If you are a highly traumatized or highly depressed or highly anxious person, you know how long you have suffered. I would bet you have tried several different treatments. And I am fairly confident the original diagnosis came from a family doctor, who, well intended, used your symptoms as the diagnostic for your mental suffering. Symptoms are critical. But there are psychometric tools that would have made that diagnosis better.

You and I both know that if you are stuck or struggling, whatever language you want to put to it, you are suffering. And there is a massive body of literature saying that when you suffer psycho-emotionally your sleep is impacted, and when your sleep is impacted long enough you start manifesting disease.

In the last article I opened with Dr. Martin Seligman, who described the state of psychotherapy in North America as not good enough. He said that in 2004. My point was that it is 2026 and it is still not good enough. I want to carry on with that theme.

Last time I used a broken arm. Instead of ordering an X-ray, setting the arm based on what the image showed, letting the requisite time pass, and re-imaging to confirm it had healed before physiotherapy, the doctor analyzed your symptoms. Pain meds for the pain. Sleep meds to help you sleep. The injury itself never addressed, and the degree of healing never measured.

By and large, that is how the current state of psychotherapy treats mental illness.

It feels that way because the affective memory was never resolved.

Every memory has a process of getting to resolution. A memory born out of a tragic event, where the amygdala was put on high alert and years or decades later is still scanning for a danger that no longer exists, that is an affective memory. You feel the same because the work you did, the therapy you were in, did not address that foundational layer.

So every day you pull that latent negative emotional charge into your current experience. Your amygdala scans for danger, keeps you on high alert, and floods you with cortisol, adrenaline, noradrenaline and other chemicals. The approach may also have had low efficacy structurally, it may have been delivered ineffectively, and progress was never measured along the way, so nothing was ever changed. So yes, the client is stuck, years of therapy later.

So why measure at all?

Because the modalities running greater than ninety percent efficacy with almost no recurrence have common themes running through them.

In our own work, in the field of Affective Memory Resolution, we know that when you target an affective memory from the past, one carrying a latent negative emotional charge that is being pulled into the present and denying the client their future, and you use a technique that includes visual-spatial tasking with short-term working memory, you get spectacular results. The results hold. Recurrence is very low.

The reason is that the technique invokes the reconsolidation of that memory into what I coin a coherent memory. A coherent memory can be recalled clearly, concisely and in detail, without any inappropriate or unwarranted negative emotional response.

You might ask what inappropriate or unwarranted means. Let me give you an example.

Any parent reading this will understand that nothing is more traumatizing than losing your child. I had that experience. I held my first son while he passed away, thirty-four years ago. And I can tell that story clearly, coherently and in detail, without any inappropriate or unwarranted negative emotion.

At Christmas we all think about him. On his birthday, I think about him. And yes, I would like to have a thirty-four-year-old son, and I do not.

The emotion is not gone. It is appropriate, it is warranted, and the event is in the past where it belongs. That is the driver.

So we need to measure the modalities that create that result, person by person. We do not want to only measure the failures. We want to measure what works, so that clients get directed to the modalities with high efficacy and limited, perhaps even no, recurrence.

If you want a lighter introduction to this work, the AMR app walks you through it experientially, and one-on-one work is available too.

About the Author

Allen Kanerva is a trauma intervention trainer and the founder of INSPYRD. A former Royal Canadian Air Force tactical helicopter pilot, UN peacekeeping course director, and co-author of Canadian humanitarian security policy work, he developed Affective Memory Resolution (AMR) and Visual-Spatial Tasking (VST), a clinical protocol for nervous-system-level trauma resolution grounded in Hebbian learning and memory reconsolidation research. He trains practitioners internationally in NLP, trauma intervention, and mechanism-first change work.

ORCID iD: 0009–0009–1297–3778

References

Holmes, E. A., James, E. L., Coode-Bate, T., & Deeprose, C. (2009). Can playing the computer game “Tetris” reduce the build-up of flashbacks for trauma? A proposal from cognitive science. PLOS ONE, 4(1), e4153. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004153

Nader, K., Schafe, G. E., & LeDoux, J. E. (2000). Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval. Nature, 406(6797), 722–726. https://doi.org/10.1038/35021052

Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). The new era of positive psychology [Address]. TED.