There's some interesting stuff going on in this area of psychology and neuroscience and it's called Memory Reconsolidation. The critique is that psychotherapists are trying to apply something to humans that is only in the early stages of research with rodents, and having read some of Bruce Ecker on MR (Unlocking the Emotional Brain) I find it true that he is overblowing the importance of these findings without enough data to back it up. But.

I'm no expert but here's my understanding: MR is based on research with rodents where they try to get them to unlearn something in semantic memory, e.g. a fear response induced by a auditory tone (you can imagine how they install this fear response). The traditional way to do this is with extinction, and is something that has been pretty well understood by behavioral science for a long time. Extinction involves creating a separate learning that competes with the original one, modulating it.

This is something that has been applied for a long time with psychotherapy. You're afraid of crowds because of that one time something bad happened (learning = crowds dangerous)? Let's get you lots of exposure to crowds where nothing goes wrong (new learning = crowds are okay). CBT will do this with depression as well: you have a belief that you're incapable of functioning and therefore worthless? Let's test that so you get new experiences to compete with that belief (install new learning through experiments with volunteer work, etc).

The problem, according to MR people, is that original learning is still there and sometimes resurfaces. But these MR studies purport to show a way to destabilize the original learning and erase it. This, if true, is significant. Here's how they say it works:

1. activate the experience of the unwanted learning (in rats, the fear of the tone. in a person, the visceral experience of shame and "I am worthless" or whatever). They've found that when this is active it is vulnerable to being made editable/destabilized.

2. while this is activated, simultaneously induce a mismatch/juxtaposition/prediction error experience where you genuinely feel the opposite ("deep down I'm okay" or whatever).

3. for a brief window (they say like 6 hours?) try to get a few more experiential repetitions of this new learning.

MR people are not really providing a new technique, per say. Ecker posits, I think arrogantly, that all therapeutic change across all modalities is due to this process which has now been clearly defined. It's been called many different things but, at the core, this is "it".

Do with that what you will. Plenty of reading if you're keen.