I know it is long...but worth the read...
neuroplasticity on the couch - does psychotherapy physically change your brain?

Norman Doidge: People have often thought that you know real treatments are always biological and involve drugs etc. and that talk therapy is just that, it's just talk, mere talk. But we now have really important work of psychoanalytical therapies, cognitive behaviour therapy, inter-personal therapy which of kind of grows out of psychoanalytical therapy that shows that patients come in with brains in certain states of wiring and after these interventions, their brains are rewired. So psychotherapy is every bit as biological as the use of medicines and I would say in a certain respect more precise at times.

people often say what's the use of talking about the past. Well sometimes it can be counter-productive but often it's
productive because when we've had an early childhood trauma development doesn't stop, it proceeds at a pace but in a slightly distorted way. And those old damaged networks are still there, I describe in detail a case of a man who came to me in his late 50s who couldn't form any relationships and he had trouble with alcohol, he couldn't be faithful to people he cared about. And we traced it back to the death of his mother when he was I think about 26 months old. Well it turned out all of those events were registered in his brain but they were kind of obscured by later development.

Unmasking basically means there were pathways laid down earlier on that are no longer used as extensively but they are still there

One of the things we know, and this is a very important point, in general about neuroplastic change, we've discovered that when you remembered something you revivify a particular network and it enters a state—it goes from being kind of consolidated and difficult to change to once remembered a more plastic state again. And so we now understand why it's important to remember, we know that we know the chemical pathways that are involved, and this is in some ways very promising because there are new treatments, many treatments now where we treat post-traumatic stress disorder which is a great example of a disorder that teaches us about plasticity. Someone is doing fine then they get in a car accident or someone holds them up and they have a kind of nervous breakdown, to use a very old fashioned term, which actually I think makes a lot of sense.They can't function well nervously and they can't separate past from present and so on and so forth. And we get them in a very safe condition and in all sorts of different ways we then try to get them to remember the aspects of the accident piece by piece and while they are remembering in a safe place they can begin to rewire their brains and put it behind them. Link..........
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