Since starting my adult working life in 1971, I’ve done a lot of different stuff, including check out chick, sandwich shop assistant (I quit when the boss told me the eggs were still runny because I’d cooked them too long), roof inspector, small business entrepreneur, etc etc. But mostly, from age 18 to about 35, I trained and worked as a teacher in schools and colleges, and then as an independent consultant/trainer.

Of course psychology is an important part of teacher training and I probably should’ve gone straight into psychology instead of teaching because it really is my first love. In the late 80s my teaching work began to involve more and more pastoral care and my fascination with psychology went into overdrive.

I dug into all kinds of schools starting with Freud (who I thought was full of it) moved on to Jung and Adler and then the behaviourists. I also, embarrassingly, went full steam ahead into the wild and woolly world of woo – attempting to find some theory or framework which actually stood up to scrutiny and which ”worked” in terms of reliably and consistently achieving significant results for clients. I was so fortunate to have really great mentors, including a very experienced psychiatric nurse, and my friend Allen Gomes, a PhD Psychologist.

The more I read, the more I was disappointed at the fairly extreme lack of efficacy of psychoanalysis, CBT, etc etc. I felt surely there must be something out there which did work, and believe it or not I found the clues amongst the putrid mess that was woo. This included ”thought field therapy” (thank you Monica Pignotti for bringing down that steaming pile), ”emotional freedom techniques”, BSFF and a host of others too numerous to list here.

I experienced dramatic and satisfying outcomes, for myself personally and also working with my clients. And so I believed the BS theories behind the mechanism driving the change. Meridians, anyone?

But. Around the year 2000 I became aware that the theoretical bases I’d been fed were pure and utter bunk and had been roundly and soundly debunked. I learned about research design and analysis and I began to see that very many claims made in psychological papers were not warranted. I saw that the vast array of worthless papers included conventional interventions as well as junk such as EFT, ACT, acupuncture and others.

This was when I began to design and run my own clinical trials: clinical depression in the moderate-to-severe range, chronic pain without adequate explanatory pathology, and academic and behavioural performance of children deemed ”at risk”. At this point I was asked to become a registered supervisor with the Australian Counselling Association, on the basis of my clinical work and my research papers.

So my question became ”What’s really happening here when people do make these dramatic changes”. The answer quickly became obvious. The one and only thing these techniques did, when applied with skill, was to extinguish conditioned responses. (They certainly didn’t cure cancer, heal the family cat, or cause the computer to stop malfunctioning – believe it or not some of the wilder claims.) So my next question was ”What’s the mechanism for this rapid and robust extinction of conditioned responses?” because that type of outcome was not being seen with ANY inhibition therapy (eg CBT, exposure therapy, etc). The closest I got to identifying existing therapies which achieved similar rapid and dramatic outcomes were some of the strategic approaches, which when examined could be described as utilising the same mechanism.

I formulated a theory that most of what ails us is due to conditioned thoughts, feelings, and behaviours (including values, perceptions, beliefs) and that conditioned responses rather than being robust and challenging to work with, were in fact extremely fragile, because if we deliberately interfered with the ”replay” of the conditioned response we’d substantially weaken it and even extinguish it altogether. I called it ”interruption of the replay” of the conditioned response.

Literally no-one was interested in my theory and I was basically singing into the wind for a long, long time.

But! I kept searching the literature hoping that others were on the same track, and indeed from the mid 2010s a number of researchers were investigating and explaining ”disruption of reconsolidation” which is a much nicer and more accurate way to describe the mechanism. Finally I was no longer alone. A great feeling!

Unfortunately till now the disruption factor which has been utilised has been pharmaceutical or electrical (giving shocks), both of which are entirely unnecessary because it turns out that any disruptive factor that is sufficiently intense, works perfectly well. As long as that disruptive factor is presented simultaneously with a conditioned stimulus.

And Now? A few of my research papers are listed here under the ”Members” menu (but are visible to visitors), and some of my books have been translated to several European languages as well as Arabic, published by McGraw-Hill and Jarir.

Over my career I’ve consulted in the corporate, medical and military sectors, including in the area of behavioural change for peak performance. I’m a fan of TQM and QA (qualified to audit level), and like to tinker with systems and processes generally. 

The upshot of all this is that I very much want to see effective therapists being more strongly promoted to the general public, which is why these days my primary focus apart from research projects is empowering psychologists to master and integrate the SDR Therapy strategy (it’s all here for people want to explore that specific behavioural strategy) in their practices, and to assist those practices to thrive to a far greater extent than they currently do, and without burnout