Hey, deserving listeners, I get a lot of emails from agents asking me to have authors and other prominent figures on the podcast and I will skim them and will say, I don't know, that doesn't really look that interesting to me, but I got an email from an agent saying that there's an individual named Dr. Lane who wrote a book about how psychotherapy, how therapy and how brain science is the way I'd put it come together and I'm often thinking along those lines, but

I'm not an expert in that. And so I thought I would double dip this experience by sharing you this interview, but I'm also personally interested in learning from Dr. Lane. Welcome to the podcast Dr. Lane. Thank you so much. Deleted to be here with you. So you wrote a book. Tell us tell us the name of this book.

The book is titled Neuroscience of Enduring Change, Implications for Psychotherapy. I am actually a senior editor with Linne Del. So it's an edited book with, I believe, 16 chapters and I've wrote and co-wrote a few of the chapters, but very involved in the entire process.

Interesting. It's about neuroscience and therapy. What's the main bullet points that you can share?

Well, the main bullet point I would say is that psychotherapy started over a century ago with Freud and Freud had the dream that someday we would understand the mind based on neuroscience in the 20th century neuroscience wasn't developed enough to really meaningfully inform how we did psychotherapy, but things have changed now.

And I think that we can, you know, base how we do psychotherapy, at least in part on growing understanding of neuroscience. And so I think that we have the opportunity to potentially be more effective with clinicians and have more enduring results as a consequence of this newer understanding.

And for the therapist out there listening, what could you share with them in terms of the science that would help them with clients?

You know, there are over 500 different kinds of psychotherapy and, you know, there are all these different theories, but there's been an effort to really think about what the foundational fundamentals are of psychotherapy and how it works.

We have a much improved and advanced understanding of memory and different kinds of memory processes and how they interact with emotion.

I think that fundamentally, psychotherapy involves a kind of learning process and there are basically three ways of altering memory for clinical purposes.

So one way which is highlighted in our book is called memory reconsolidation, which means taking old memories that are problematic, right, and changing them, changing the memories.

Memories can be updated and modified and so that they don't revert back. So that's mechanism number one, a second important mechanism is extinction or suppression of problematic learning, and that does have benefits, but the benefits may not be as enduring because the old learning is still there.

It's just that the old learning has been suppressed through inhibitory mechanisms, and then there's a third type of learning, which is new learning that competes with the old learning and over time, as you practice it, it, you know, takes over.

So I found it very clarifying to think of it that way and also to realize that emotion plays a really, really important role in all of this because

we can't remember everything, but we need to remember what's important and the motion of the natural mechanism for identifying what's important.

Yeah, and colors the way we perceive and remember and remember things.

So let me just bounce off my conceptualization of therapy, and then I think I know where it fits into those three aspects of memory, but you tell me.

So I have, I'm an integrative therapist, I love theory, and I incorporate all the major theories in my approach, and when I teach my students, and I have boiled everything down to two pillars of therapy.

One is self-awareness, and two is what I'm calling corrective experiences, which is an idea from succulent and lytic or psychodynamic therapy, but it could be, you could raise it differently, like learning or something.

And with self-awareness, in terms of what you're saying, it's in terms of learning, you can learn, oh, I have an impulse to, you know, when I have a bad day at work, and I'm upset about something, I have an impulse to go to a negative place in my head, I have an impulse to drink myself, you know, to numb out at night, I have an impulse to withdraw from people.

But I've learned through self-awareness that that actually doesn't work for me, and so I am going to do something different.

And then, so that's self-awareness, you know, in a nutshell, and then corrective experience is, for example, someone grew up with a lot of abandonment growing up, and they learned that humans, particularly close to them, are going to abandon them, and that they are abandonable, they can't trust other people, people are going to hurt them.

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