Magnetic reconnection processes in collisionless regimes are shown to be difficult to excite in well confined plasmas and, when excited, they possess rather weak characteristics in that they depend on the physics of "transition layers" that have microscopic dimensions. When considering the effects of the so-called drift frequencies that depend on the pressure gradients of both the electron and the ion populations, modes with azimuthal or poloidal mode number (m^{0}=1) can be driven unstable only in a limited range of parameters. The relevance of this theory is pointed out to explain the experimentally observed crash events of the plasma temperature in regimes where the electron collision frequency is smaller then the mode growth rate. Given the mode weakness it is suggested that the onset of reconnection should be triggered or prevented by controlling factors, such as the gradients of the plasma density or the creation of a significant high energy particle population in the center of the plasma column. It is pointed out that the plasma pressure gradient in the affected region of the plasma column is the driving factor of the considered instability in a well-confined plasma and, on this basis, the associated process of magnetic reconnection can be expected to proceed only up to the stage where the instability will have adequately depressed the relevant pressure gradient. The applicability of this analysis to space plasmas is discussed. '199. Academic Press, Inc.