Rapid Resolution Therapy: Moving Beyond Emotional Pain

RRT is a psychotherapy developed by Dr. Jon Connelly, a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist, to address trauma, grief, anxiety, and other distressing emotional experiences through a brief, solution-focused treatment model.[1] In developing RRT, Dr. Connelly hypothesized that most psychological suffering stems from the way the unconscious continues to process — or fails to process — past traumatic experiences and emotionally charged memories.

Unlike cognitive-behavioral therapies and other traditional forms of psychotherapy, RRT does not involve talking through traumatic experiences and cognitive restructuring. Instead, RRT uses a combination of specially designed language, visualizations, guided imagery, and storytelling, as well as directly addressing the subconscious mind, to change the way traumatic experiences and painful memories are processed and stored, removing the emotional charge associated with them without having to relive the details.

RRT sessions can vary from one to several, with many people reporting considerable and lasting changes in significantly less time than they would have anticipated from any type of psychotherapy. RRT services are delivered at Agape by trained professionals within each patient’s individually tailored treatment plan that may also incorporate additional evidence-based modalities, based on client need.

At the heart of RRT is an understanding that your unconscious does not function the same as your conscious mind when it comes to things like time, logic, and context. When a traumatic or deeply distressing event happens, the subconscious can get “stuck” in a kind of perpetual present, reacting emotionally to memories of traumatic events as if they were happening right then and there, and producing the same fear, grief, shame, or distress you experienced during the initial impact.

That’s why people with unresolved trauma may continue to experience intense emotional distress that seems disproportionate to their current situation, why flashbacks feel so visceral, and why consciously knowing that a traumatic event happened in the past doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll no longer be distressed by it.

RRT addresses this by engaging the subconscious processing mechanisms that produce the distress associated with these memories. 

This is accomplished through a combination of:

• Guided imagery and visualization — Guiding the person through carefully crafted visualizations that allow the unconscious mind to reframe the previously experienced events in a new context and reduce the amount of emotional energy attached to them.
• Language and communication techniques — Using precise, specially calibrated language to directly communicate with the unconscious mind and help with shifting how previous experiences are processed and interpreted.
• Reframing — Helping the client develop different perspectives of previous experiences which are both valid and more productive, displacing the misinterpretations that trauma and emotional pain have created.
• Storytelling and metaphor — Using the imagination to bypass conscious resistance and speak directly to the deeper processing systems that maintain emotional distress.
• Eye movements and visualization sequences — Similar to some aspects of EMDR, though used within a proprietary protocol developed specifically by Dr. Connelly.

As an RRT session progresses, the therapist uses each of these modalities in real time based on the person’s immediate experience, resulting in a highly personalized, flexible approach rather than a strict script.

While RRT has been effective with a wide variety of populations and conditions, it is especially suitable for:

• People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other trauma-related symptoms who have not achieved full resolution through traditional forms of therapy
• Combat veterans and first responders dealing with occupational trauma
• People experiencing flashbacks, nightmares, emotional numbing, or hyperarousal
• Those struggling with fears, phobias, panic disorders, or anxiety that have failed to respond to cognitive-behavioral therapies or conventional treatment options
• People dealing with overwhelming grief, shame, or guilt stemming from past experiences
• People looking for meaningful relief in fewer sessions than long-term psychotherapy

Unlike most psychotherapeutic approaches, RRT explicitly focuses on the subconscious as being where lasting change is most likely to happen. Research in neuroscience and memory consolidation provides evidence supporting the notion that much of our automatic emotional responses and stress reactions originate from subconscious processes.[3] Intellectual consciousness, understanding intellectually that a traumatic event is over, does not always penetrate to those deeper levels. RRT was developed to make contact with them directly.

Drawing upon years of clinical experience combined with extensive research regarding how language and imagery interface with the brain’s emotional processing, Dr. Connelly developed a therapy model that combines elements of imagination and fluidity compared to typical talk therapy. Patients often report experiencing changes after working through their trauma using RRT that feel significantly different from the limited relief provided by other approaches.