Functional Psychotherapy: Or, How I Learned to Stop Kowtowing to Defenses and Love Reconsolidation
Key takeaway: I developed Functional Psychotherapy as an integrative, non-pathologizing model of therapy. I treat symptoms as meaningful signals rather than problems to eliminate, and use memory reconsolidation to create bottom-up, lasting change instead of surface-level coping.
So what do you do instead of kowtowing to defenses?
Short answer: you meet the defense head-on instead of waiting for it to soften. You challenge the client directly, introduce an experience that doesn't fit their old story, and let the mismatch between what they believe and what they just felt do the rest. That's the mechanism behind memory reconsolidation — once an old belief gets activated and contradicted at the same time, the brain updates it. No amount of gentle patience does that on its own.
But first, a story…
From the start of my career, I was hooked on therapy. People, their stories, the challenge of unlocking their struggles—it all fascinated me. Therapy was like solving a complex, intimate puzzle, where the act of working through it together wasn’t just interesting—it was life-changing.
So, naturally, I wanted to do as much of it as possible.
Early on, I felt constrained by the limits imposed by supervisors—some protective, some skeptical of my therapeutic verve—though a few recognized my passion and let me loose. However, once licensed, I wasted no time diving into the deep end. I took on a full private practice caseload in addition to my position at an inpatient psychiatric hospital.
I was exactly where I wanted to be.
The Challenge: Depth vs. Speed
That said, inpatient trauma-focused therapy was my first love. I wanted the cases no one else did—the ones others wrote off as “too complicated” or dismissed as “crazy.” Because, as I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t believe anyone is crazy and I believe everyone can get better.
So, that belief fueled me and I pursued it relentlessly. Those clients who were genuinely interested in therapy and who were putting in the effort to change their lives, I would see for therapy every day for as long as they were admitted.
But therein lay the problem: the average inpatient stay was only five to seven days.
And, the standard playbook for short-term treatment involved CBT worksheets, coping skills, and surface-level stabilization. While those approaches have their place, they weren’t how I saw real transformation happening.
So I had a riddle to solve: How do I do deep, meaningful, life-changing therapy in a few days?
Experimenting With Defenses
I started to push.
Instead of waiting for clients to slowly trust me, I tested what would happen if I met their defenses head-on. What if I challenged them now? What if I leaned in instead of waiting for resistance to fade?
It turned out, people responded to that. Sometimes, within our first few minutes of meeting. Literally, like, five minutes in.
And I got feedback: They liked that I wasn’t just nodding along. They liked that I wasn’t afraid to challenge them.
So I kept going.
I pulled a lot from some long forgotten names in the field, folks like Carl Whitaker, Salvador Minuchin, Jay Haley, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Milton Erickson (ahem, mostly Erickson). Their use of paradox, humor, and radical authenticity inspired me. These folks were mavericks. Maybe I could be a maverick, too.
I began taking risks and swinging for the fences. Often enough it landed. When it didn’t, I didn’t like it, and yet I learned to be okay with it and pick up the pieces and do the repair work. And most of the time, the therapeutic relationship was okay and we worked it out. Frequently, we were stronger for it. Trust grew. Quickly.
And yet… clients still resisted.
Not in the usual ways. Not by avoiding sessions or shutting down. It was something more subtle. A clinging to old narratives, even when they wanted to change.
I kept coming back to a paradox I couldn’t quite untangle:
Why do people hold onto painful beliefs, even when they know those beliefs are harming them?
Then it hit me:
We have a bias toward being agreed with—even when what they’re agreeing with is negative.
The Incongruence of Self-Perception
I started breaking it down.
We naturally resist invalidation, even when it’s healthy. Likewise, we feel validated—even relieved—when someone confirms our worst beliefs about ourselves.
It’s easier to hold onto pain we recognize than to embrace a truth that feels foreign.
Consider a person who believes they’re worthless:
If I say, You’re a good person, their instinct is to reject it.
If I say, You’re worthless, they may not like it, but some part of them feels an odd sense of congruence.
Because it fits. It matches their internal narrative.
This is where the opportunity for change lies.
The key is to lean into the discomfort of healthy invalidations and reject the soothing familiarity of unhealthy validations.
So I started running experiments.
The “Darth Vader Experiment”
One day, with a particularly self-critical client, I had an idea:
Therapist: Repeat after me.
Client: Fine.
Therapist: Darth Vader was a decent person.
Client: Uh, okay… "Darth Vader was a decent person."
Therapist: Great. Now, say: "I am a decent person."
Client: (shaking head, resolutely) Uh uh. Nope.
Therapist: Huh! Isn’t that interesting?
They had no problem repeating an absurd statement about Darth Vader, but they physically recoiled at saying something positive about themselves. Interesting, indeed.
This wasn’t an isolated case. Again and again, people would accept ridiculous statements while rejecting simple, kind truths about themselves. The resistance wasn’t to words—it was to experiencing an invalidation of their self-concept. Because to speak is to have an experience and it’s a much more personal one than passively listening to someone else say it.
So I pushed harder.
I brought in more experiential methods—two-chair work, paradox, humor, and direct challenges to entrenched beliefs. And I found that when clients managed to push through that discomfort, something incredible happened.
They didn’t just believe new things. They felt them.
They didn’t just see the world differently—they moved through it differently.
And it stuck.
I’d see them in the next session, and their old way of thinking was just… gone. No effort to maintain it. No mental tug-of-war. Just a fundamental shift.
It was like a memory rewrite.
The Science Behind the Shift
Then I found the missing piece: I read about something called “memory reconsolidation” (for a detailed review, see some of Ecker’s critical work integrating reconsolidation theory into psychotherapy, here and here).
It turns out that I had, without realizing it, tapped into one of the brain’s most powerful mechanisms for change.
Here’s how it works:
Reactivate the old memory or belief. (Bring the negative self-concept into awareness.)
Introduce a mismatch experience. (Force the client into an uncomfortable-yet-undeniable contradiction.)
Juxtapose the two. (Hold both realities at once: I have always believed X and I just experienced Y.)
The brain then does the work on its own. When an entrenched belief is activated and contradicted by a new, unexpected experience, the old belief becomes unstable. The brain updates the memory.
And when that happens, change isn’t something people work on.
It’s something that just is.
The Birth of Functional Psychotherapy
Once I understood the neuroscience, everything clicked.
This was how I could do deep, life-changing therapy quickly.
This was why people had those sudden, unshakable breakthroughs: We were destabilizing old learnings and updating them in light of these new experiences.
And, I realized it’s why some depth therapies fail (they reactivate without creating mismatch) and some CBT methods fall short (they introduce mismatch but don’t fully reactivate the underlying emotional experience).
Or, when they do succeed, it may be incidental: Because the sequence of experiences required to facilitate reconsolidation just-so-happened to have occurred, as most theories aren’t explicitly facilitating the necessary and sufficient conditions for reconsolidation, as outlined by Ecker.
In sum, these experiences led to my formulation of Functional Psychotherapy—a model built on:
Challenging defenses directly (because trust isn’t always a prerequisite for deep work).
Leaning into discomfort (because rejecting unhealthy validations is key).
Using memory reconsolidation (because experience rewrites the story).
An integrative theorythat responsively draws on different methods to meet the unique demands of each therapeutic situation and client problem-set (e.g., for some clients, attachment or identity or negative self-talk is the core issue while, for others, they are irrelevant)
How does Functional Psychotherapy compare to Coherence Therapy?
If you know Bruce Ecker's Coherence Therapy, you'll recognize the underlying science — we're both drawing on the same memory reconsolidation research. The difference is in the vehicle, not the destination. Coherence Therapy works that process through a defined discovery protocol; Functional Psychotherapy treats the mismatch experience as something you can generate from almost any theoretical direction — psychodynamic, somatic, strategic, existential — whatever the client and the moment call for. The reconsolidation sequence stays constant. How I get a client there changes case to case, sometimes session to session.
The Dodo Effect, Revisited
There's a well-known finding in outcome research called the dodo effect, coined by psychologist Saul Rosenzweig in 1936 after the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland, who ends a chaotic race by declaring "everybody has won, and all must have prizes." Rosenzweig argued most therapies produced roughly equal results, usually credited to shared "common factors" like empathy and alliance rather than technique. That's the predominant belief in the field.
I'd disagree.
I think different schools tie because, without naming it, they're all finding separate doors into the same reconsolidation sequence—same destination, different vehicle. But none are explicitly navigating the process with the reconsolidation sequence in mind. So, sometimes they land on it and sometimes they don't. None does so consistently, regularly, and intentionally.
When reconsolidation is your navigational rubric, though, you know that if you can facilitate the right conditions to help people face their fears and reconstrue them through experience, change will occur.
Just this: the client and therapist each have to be willing to swing for the fences. Even the symptoms themselves are part of that puzzle—meaningful signals, not malfunctions to eliminate. I try to bring this insight to my work with therapists, too—many of whom, I've found, were the parentified kid long before they were the clinician.
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