In their quest to alleviate suffering, medical doctors may have dulled the very instrument of healing: feeling itself.
This is a 5-minute video overview:
For the past five decades, antidepressants SSRIs benzodiazepines, or stimulants like Adderal have been prescribed as frontline treatments for depression, anxiety, and trauma-related disorders to over 50 million American aged 12 and older. For some, they offer a necessary lifeline—steadying mood and reducing overwhelming symptoms. But for many others, the cost of that stability is quieter and more dangerous: a slow erosion of emotional access. And when it comes to healing trauma, that cost may be too high.
Here’s the paradox: memory reconsolidation—the brain’s built-in mechanism for updating and transforming emotional learnings—requires feeling. Not just remembering what happened, but activating the emotional charge that makes that memory relevant. If that emotional circuitry doesn’t light up—because it’s numbed, blunted, or pharmacologically suppressed—the brain never enters the reconsolidation window. The door to deep change stays shut.
This isn’t an attack on medication. It’s a call for precision, humility, and a return to the obvious: the human nervous system must participate in its own healing. When we treat emotion as a symptom to be silenced rather than a signal to be metabolized, we turn pain into pathology and resilience into compliance. The emotional flattening we see in modern psychiatry echoes what Orwell warned about in 1984.
And it obscures something even more fundamental: there is no depression without causation. Whether the source is trauma, loss, disconnection, systemic harm, or the slow drip of unmet needs, depression is never random. It is a signal that is often buried, often tangled, but never baseless. When we numb the signal, we lose the thread. We may quiet the symptoms, but we also silence the story that needs to be heard.
Forty years ago, we didn’t have therapies that could reliably rewrite traumatic emotional learnings. Today we do. The modalities that consistently produce real, lasting change—RTM, EMDR, Coherence Therapy, The Havening Technique, Clean Language and many other new approaches—all share one mechanism: they activate the emotional memory and simultaneously introduce mismatch.
That’s what opens the reconsolidation window. And that’s where transformation happens.
This clarity also exposes a problem: traditional cognitive-based approaches like CBT—and CBT combined with antidepressants—have shown weak long-term results with depression and other entrenched emotional states. Why? Because CBT teaches management, coping, reframing… not emotional updating. It doesn’t rewrite the old learning. It works around it.
Memory reconsolidation isn’t just a theory—it’s biology. It says:
if you can feel it, you can change it.
But if you can’t feel it—if emotional salience is flattened—then the brain has no reason to revise anything. The old learning persists. The wound remains sealed, not healed.
So we have to ask:
Are we helping people feel better, or helping them feel less?
Are we supporting transformation, or sedation?
The future of mental health must be integrative, not either/or. Medication may have a short-term role, but it must serve the healing process—not replace it. And healing, at its core, is emotional. It requires presence, not just prescriptions.
Because a person who can’t feel… can’t heal.
We stand at a crossroads. The tools of the past offered containment. The tools of today offer transformation. But only if we let the nervous system speak.
Ironically, we may now have too many effective therapies. The public is overwhelmed. Physicians are overwhelmed. Most people still think therapy means “talking about your problems.”
That story is outdated.
Let’s mark the therapies that actually heal at the level of emotional memory.
Add “(MR)” to the name — Memory Reconsolidation.
Let the public see the distinction.
Let insurers stop gatekeeping based on outdated cognitive models.
If it rewires emotional learning, it should be covered. Period.
It’s time for a movement.
https://clintmatheny.com/how-antidepressants-actually-work/
Clint77090@gmail.Com