Functional Psychotherapy: Or, How I Learned to Stop Kowtowing to Defenses and Love Reconsolidation
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 “Hitler Experiment”
One day, with a particularly self-critical client, I had an idea:
Therapist: Repeat after me.
Client: Fine.
Therapist: Hitler was a decent person.
Client: Uh, okay… "Hitler 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 Hitler, 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 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 theory that 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 are the core issue whilst, for others, they are irrelevant)
I now know people change, if I can facilitate the right conditions to help them face their fears and reconstrue them, through experience.
In fact, they will.
We’ve both just got to be willing to swing for the fences.
