In developing each edition of EBT training programs for therapists, I ask myself, "What is EBT?"
In the past, the answer was more scientific. It's self-directed, professionally-facilitated positive neuroplasticity of the stress response.
Yes, but what is it really?
My mind goes to: It's a way for each of us to unlock our potential to be healthy, happy, and give back to the world in a way that makes our lives complete.
There again, what does that really mean?
Yet as stress overload becomes our daily physiologic diet, those stock answers border on annoying. We know that Freud was right; it's the unconscious memory system that shapes our responses and the emergent effect of all our wires that brings us our sense of self.
With the latest upgrade of the method and app, the unconscious memory system is fast becoming so accessible that the method way well go mainstream.
It's not that the unconscious mind hasn't been available for rewiring before. Prayer, meditation, or just the daily pondering of our circumstances will do it. Yet, in my own habit of putting anything that "bothers" me through the Cycle Tool and becoming not quite unimpressed but definitely secure that I will discover what hairbrained, unreasonable expectation stored in my unconscious was responsible for it. Then, fixing it or at least putting my mind to rest that I understand myself a little better.
In explaining EBT to therapists, I say it is the tools to self-regulate and reconsolidate faulty wires, and train patients in using it – and doing a lot of that rewiring themselves.
However, with the latest version of the app, people are catching on to how to use EBT effectively much faster. I think we are close to having an app that will enable everyday targeted rewiring of overreactions, unwanted moods, and disconnected states, empowering people to take care of their unconscious mind, much like they do their oral health or fitness routine.
The meaning of that borders on chilling. What does it mean that we have significant control over our resiliency pathways, so that if we choose, we could experience joy regardless of circumstance?
The cognitive therapy world got it right in some ways, saying, we are what we think about, but what we focus on is part of a circuit. If that wire is a homeostatic, health-promoting, resilient circuit, then emotions are low, and stress chemicals do not bother us. However, if what we are thinking borders on anything distorted, maladaptive or harmful, it is the symptom of the activation of one of those allostatic, disease-promoting reactive circuits, that's a different story.
Now we can recognize what physiologic state we are in and, if those stress wires are ruling us, we can beat them back a bit and even switch them off in a couple of minutes. With the EBT skill set in our organic "pocket" we can be about as happy and perhaps even as healthy as we want to be.
It seems that EBT is evolving quickly, as more people "catch" the desire to become an EBTer. In an intensive group today, the members spoke about the changes they had seen in themselves – we are only three weeks into the intensive. A new member, who was still in the "Basics" course when she started, shared that after rewiring her Food Circuit and Mood Circuit, she felt as if her entire life experience had changed.
I had seen her change in real time, in our daily group, so when she shared that, it rang true and I went to Brain State 4. If she could change so quickly, are we at the start of a shift in what to expect from life? In the last two years, the method sharpened the skills on both ends of the stress continuum – boosting bliss, love, and virtues and bearing down on trauma, grinding it up and spitting it out.
Maybe this new EBT, which EBT Medical Director Michele Welling, MD calls "EBT3.0" is going to reset personal control over health, happiness, quality of life and perhaps even more aspects of how we live. We know about AI and how it is changing our world. What if we distributed EBT like AI is being distributed? If we change our emotional world by rewiring the circuits that control everything important, maybe we would have a chance of saving the planet and living in peace and love.
That's an idea to think about . . . and to sit with and feel my feelings. I hope you will, and who knows what could happen if we prioritize cultivating an EBT Practice and find ways to amplify our capacity to step into our unconscious mind and rewire it?