tiny sparks, big changes

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHello and welcome back to our book club read-a-long of Unlocking the Emotional Brain! If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks, where we explore a chapter from the book together (you can also listen on Spotify!). I help translate the theory into everyday language and show you how to apply it in your own life. We also gather twice per book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time.This book takes us deep into the science of memory reconsolidation, one of the most powerful mechanisms for true and lasting change. It helps us understand how healing actually happens after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up with emotionally immature parents.If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this kind of work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience, including live sessions, current discussions, and the complete archive of past reads like No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this community possible, and I’m so grateful you’re here.This week, we dive into chapter 5, which goes further into attachment and the role it takes in shaping the way we see the world as adults. We know it’s not always attachment, that other things like societal and existential concerns can also create trauma patterns and survival strategies, but attachment sure plays a significant role! This chapter is incredibly dense, but it can help us continue to observe ourselves with more neutrality and understanding (and maybe even compassion!) when we’re examining behaviors we don’t like in the present day. Let’s dive in and learn more!(0:00 - 4:15)Welcome back, read-along friends, and thank you so much for being here. If you’re new here, this is our book club, where we dive into different self-help and therapy books, and every two weeks I release a little podcast episode, breaking down a chapter for you and helping you to understand how you might apply this in real life. You can read along with me, but you don’t have to.You can never pick up the book at all and still get the gist from these episodes. So I’m so glad you’re here as we continue to dive into Unlocking the Emotional Brain, an incredibly dense and incredibly informative book, and I think actually today we’re going to continue our exploration of chapter five, and we may not even get through it all. We’ll see.I want to, but it’s such a dense chapter and such an important chapter that I want to make sure that we take our time. Don’t forget that we have our first of two live meetings for this book coming up on Sunday, December 14th, and that is at 12 p.m. Eastern Time. You’ll receive the link in a separate email coming this week, but that’s 12 p.m. Eastern Time, Sunday, December 14th.Don’t worry if you can’t attend live. The recording will be sent out to all paid members, and thank you so much for being here and supporting my work. So you may remember, as we just briefly touched into chapter five last time, the chapter five explores attachment, and is it always about attachment? And so we know that, especially in modern discourse, there’s somewhat the idea that all roads in therapy and all problems that present in therapy can be tied back to attachment with our parents, and this chapter really dives into some of the attachment science and looks at this idea that there’s often more going on to our experience than just attachment with our parents.It doesn’t mean that attachment might not be involved in some way, meaning our connection to the world around us, to peers, etc., because we know that we are pack animals and we are biologically wired to want to stay in connection with those around us. But does it always come back to a childhood attachment experience with parents? And let’s talk a little bit about that. We know that unlocking the emotional brain is all about emotional learnings and how the experiences we have in our lives and those emotions that go along with them form implicit, meaning unconscious, memories and learnings within our brain that direct our behaviors in our present-day lives.Those learnings can come from, certainly, attachment relationships with caregivers, but they can also come from social contexts like schools, friendships, bullying, racism, layoffs, and also existential experiences. And this is what I don’t see talked about too often, so I’m so glad they mentioned it here, like illnesses, accidents, loss, or confrontation with our own mortality. All of those experiences can create these schemas, and you can think of schemas like templates within our brain, for thoughts, emotions, behavioral sensations, and behaviors.And those schemas hold up those if-then rules. If this happens, this is what I must do to stay safe, to stay in connection, to be loved, to be well, etc. And those all get held in the same place, that emotional, implicit, unconscious memory.And this is part of the emotional coherence framework. So instead of arguing about whether attachment or social class or temperament or whatever is more important, instead we know that the brain doesn’t care which category the experience falls under. If something happens, and you might have heard me say this, if it’s frequent or if it’s intense, no matter the source of the experience, then the brain will file that as a learning in the brain.(4:16 - 4:36)And so that could include, like, implicit learnings and procedural learnings could include riding a bike, handwriting, things that don’t really have a lot of emotion stored alongside of them. But when there’s emotion stored alongside of them, then those emotional, implicit learnings become even stronger. So it’s all these rivers flowing into one wide delta.(4:36 - 10:06)One river might be attachment. One might be social experiences. One might be existential experiences.One might be your innate genetic sensitivity. But once those rivers meet in the delta, all of that water blends together. And so what we’re living with in the present is our felt-sense experience of all of the things that make us us.And this can be important because sometimes people will ask me, well, is it possible that this didn’t come from my childhood? And the answer is yes, of course. We can experience environmental, emotional, developmental, and attachment ruptures at any time in our life because we’re always developing. We’re always experiencing the world and relationships around us.And you may remember the case of Raul, which we discussed briefly last time, where he experienced a major rupture in his adult life that created this sense of intense rage. And it didn’t come from a chaotic childhood. It came from a major betrayal from a business partner in adulthood that wrecked his career and threatened his security.And so his emotional brain learned in his adult life after this rupture that broken agreements destroy lives and that rage would protect him from feeling powerless. And that if he let go of rage, that felt like giving up on justice. Those are the implicit emotional learnings that came out of this adult experience.It’s much more than a simple mom, dad, caregiver experience. And so if the therapist had assumed that that had to come from the parents, then classic sort of reparative attachment work would not have touched the schema. So whether you’re a therapist listening or whether you’re an individual who wants to do this in your own life, I think it’s important to hold that lens of curiosity.And that’s why I’m constantly emphasizing curiosity, neutrality, and observation. If you’ve listened to any of my work, you’ve heard me say a million times about observing, observing, observing. Observing is the work.Noticing is the work. And you’ve heard me compare it to an archeological dig or to being a wildlife documentarian. In this book, they call it an anthropologist, that we are learning how to observe and gather data without making assumptions, without letting all those lenses color our experience.And so that’s why it’s very important, therapist or individual, to observe ourselves with this curious lens instead of trying to project what we think the experience might be about. That’s why we use all of these different experiences. Like if you’ve looked in my five steps to change guide, that’s why what I say is to imagine what you want for yourself, whatever it might be.And then you follow the thread from there. You look at the detours that come up. You look at the learnings underneath of that.And sometimes it’s surprising because sometimes the learning is something unexpected. Like this person could have very easily assumed, well, maybe I’m angry and rageful because I never saw my parents be angry. So I never learned how to manage it.And hey, maybe there could be a thread of that there, right? But this learning very clearly in this case came from this person’s adult life and working with those learnings and reconsolidating them is what allowed him to have space. So all this to say, attachment is incredibly important and it shapes a huge amount of our internal atlas, but it’s not the only thing that shapes us. And not all of our symptoms are attachment derived with our caretakers.They can also be from the world around us. And what I mean by that is we are always navigating attachment relationships with partners, with friends, children, even colleagues, right? We’re in connection with people all the time. So we can think about it as connection related and not necessarily parent caregiver attachment related.So while we’re not explicitly exploring attachment here, I think it’s important to talk about some of the attachment types they talk about in this chapter to see what kind of learnings and schemas might develop from that. So the insecure avoidant type of attachment develops with a primary caregiver who is rejecting, pushing away. And so the child learns to expect that pushing away in response to any expression that the child has of emotion, of distress, of a need, or even of playfulness, of silliness, of joy, or an approach for contact, for care.And we saw this in the Emotionally Immature Parent book, that the child comes in and they are rebuffed, they are pushed away. And so that means that the infant feels that there is a problem, obviously, right? And so the infant learns that their distress can be kept to a minimum if they don’t try to seek that connection, if they don’t feel, if they don’t express their feelings, if they don’t communicate or have any attention on them. And this can be accomplished by dissociation, shutting yourself down.This can be accomplished by quote-unquote intellectualizing. Obviously, an infant can’t intellectualize, but there’s that same functional freeze experience of learning how to grip and shut down the emotions. And that is a solution to the problem.So we know always that symptoms are coherent. They’re a closed system. Symptoms are in direct response to a suffering, and they create a solution.(10:07 - 11:26)They create a lesser of two sufferings. In this case, the infant has learned to respond to the implicit knowledge. And the implicit knowledge is that the need for contact or seeking contact will lead to rejection, aloneness, terror, and helplessness.So the solution of avoiding both feelings and contact is incredibly adaptive. We know all symptoms make sense, and this symptom makes perfect sense. So this schema might present as adults who are quote-unquote dismissive because they will greatly downplay experiences, likely because they are in that shut down, dissociated, withdrawn state.And so they very much might appear as supercilious, holier than thou, intellectualized, prideful about not being overly emotional. And that’s not because they are bad people. It’s because that is the schema in which they developed.Then we have insecure ambivalent or insecure resistance, which uses the opposite strategy, right? So this strategy is the biggest emotional display because we’re adapting to a different problem. In this case, we have a caregiver who is inept, disconnected. Maybe they’re unwell themselves.(11:27 - 11:35)Maybe they’re preoccupied with their own experience, mental illness. Maybe there’s financial stress. Maybe they don’t know how to be with their child’s emotions.(11:35 - 13:41)But sometimes they’re responsive, especially if the child’s behavior is intense enough to attract their attention. And so you get that slot machine effect, right? That intermittent reinforcement, which we know from research produces a very strong learning. And the child learns, of course, this is all unconscious, that that intense neediness, the big emotions, throwing a tantrum or not feeling well and making kind of a big show about it, is required for getting attention.But remember, it’s not reliable. Because of that slot machine effect, we can’t always rely on the parent to respond. But the infant is always trying to make it happen.And so this can kind of come out as this controlling, manipulative, sort of relentless style of interacting, where you’re always hypervigilant to the state of the caregiver, the presence of the caregiver. And this as an adult, that becomes hypervigilantly preoccupied with your partner’s emotional involvement, their presence, how they’re relating to you, and that quote unquote, neediness, right, that can include big emotions, big hurt of trying to pull the partner back in. And remember, that symptom is coherent.

Hello, tiny sparks readers! Have a new podcast episode for you today about my thoughts on the endless optimization of healing. Before we dive in, I want to share something tender and exciting. I have just started writing a book and was recently accepted into a 12-month writing program to help bring it to life, with the hope of it landing in the world in 2026. If you want to be part of that process and help me actually make it happen, you can join me over on Patreon, where I will share in-progress pieces, reflections, and the middle of shaping this work. There are a few tiers, including one that offers a live meeting every month where I answer your questions personally. If this episode landed for you and you want to support this book growing from an idea into something you can hold in your hands, your presence there really does make a difference. In addition, becoming a paid subscriber here supports my writing, too, and you get to join our wonderful book club! Whether you’re a free or paid subscriber, thank you for being here. If you have questions, curiosities, or things you’d love to see addressed in my book, don’t hesitate to drop me a line or leave a comment below! (0:00 - 2:44)Okay, today I want to talk about something that might sound a little bit strange coming from someone who literally teaches about healing for a living, but I am so, so tired of the self-help industry and especially the social mediafication of the self-help industry. Of course, I am not tired of people wanting to feel better. Of course, we want to feel better.And of course, we are trying to find any amount of information we can to help us feel better. And I’m not tired of those of us who are curious or want to grow or want to explore nervous system work or trauma healing. But I am so tired of the way that healing has been turned into a product for us to consume and complete and be perfect at and overachieve at and try harder at, like a course you have to pass or some kind of project that you have to finish.And if you are someone who tends to live in your head, who’s always been the high achiever, the eldest daughter, the responsible one, the intellectualizer, you probably know exactly what I mean. You go into this idea of healing or being more present in your life or getting unstuck, moving toward what you want for yourself, using the same tools that have always worked for you. You research, you read, you analyze, you organize the information in your mind.And once you set your mind to it, you decide that you’re going to do this right. And the internet is set up for the parts of us that think that we can do this perfectly by making a plan and trying harder and researching it to the bitter end. That is what the self-help world, especially the self-help world on social media, is built upon.And it gives us this steady stream of little bite-sized promises. Do this journal prompt, reflect on your year, say an affirmation, set a boundary, cut contact, breathe in this way, no, breathe in that way, cold punch, don’t cold punch, stretch your hips, drink your water, take your supplements. And there’s this message that if you can get the formula just right, if you do enough, if you try hard enough, if you’re good enough, you will finally be okay, feel good, have the life you want, and specifically have the life that you might see represented on social media.People who seem so happy, so successful, perfect family, perfect house, perfect friends, plenty of money. And so it’s normal that we’re drawn toward these things. We want there to be something that we can do that will make us feel okay.Of course, some other part of us also deeply resists that because it feels impossible. We feel stuck in this bind of needing to be perfect to be okay, but feeling like it’s impossible to actually follow through with all of those things. And that’s not because there’s anything wrong with you.(2:44 - 4:58)It’s because our brain works based off old learnings getting landed into the present. It’s so, so understandable that we want something to be a checklist that we can move through and complete. We want to fill out a worksheet.We want to make a few meals, take a few supplements, do some deep breathing, and wake up in a completely different place with a different relationship to ourselves and to the world. A different job maybe, a different personality, a different partner, a different relationship to money, whatever it might be. But that’s not how these patterns that were built for survival reorganize themselves.And for those of us who grew up reading the room constantly, reading people around us constantly, knowing the sound of everyone’s footsteps and whether it meant they were happy or angry, then people-pleasing, intellectualizing, perfectionism, overachieving are not random bad habits and they’re not personality traits. They are learned responses to our environments. If we learned that having big feelings got us shamed or ignored, then shutting down those feelings makes a lot of sense.If you rewarded and celebrated every time you achieved or functioned so well, took on more and solved the problem, then of course that learning would get set up in your brain to say, this is what makes me good and worthy. And many times it’s subtle, right? Like sometimes we had very clear trauma or sometimes it was very clear that our parents criticized us when we had emotions or sent us away. But oftentimes it’s so much more subtle than that.It’s an ongoing experience of being misattuned to. If you are a joyful, playful little child born to parents who are under immense stress and they themselves are intellectualizers or incredibly rational people who don’t know how to deal with their own feelings, it’s not that they might hurt you or punish you when you have feelings, but they themselves might become overwhelmed. And so then we learn, uh-oh, when I am playful, silly, joyful myself, people around me get overwhelmed and that makes me feel stressed and unsafe because I need my caregivers to be okay.(4:59 - 5:42)Or maybe it’s our peers, maybe it’s our teachers. And yes, we can have experiences in our adult life that impact us as well. But all of these things get coded in our brains as roots of safety, worth, value, and connection.So then you come into healing spaces because sometime in your life, and it’s usually later on in our life, it starts to take more of a toll. And maybe we notice physical symptoms, maybe we feel slightly depressed, disconnected, anxious, but we’re not sure why, kind of stuck or dissatisfied in our lives, and we want to fix those patterns. But things start to get slippery because we might feel this pull into healing and we turn it into another pattern.tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.(5:42 - 7:05)We want to be good at it, we want to solve it, we want to get an A in therapy, we want to do trauma recovery work, check it off the list, let them be codependent no more, get our body to stop keeping the score, and then we will be good enough to deserve to rest and relax. And this is where self-help becomes so incredibly toxic because so much of it mirrors the very same culture that we have already been mired in and are already burned out from. There is a focus on progress, optimization, and improvement of our behavior.Even somatic work has become an idea that you need to optimize your nervous system, you need to optimize your body. If you’re an intellectualizer, you just need to learn how to track your body. Somatic work, somatic work, fix your nervous system, stretch your hips, and then you can let all your emotions go and then you will be well.So it’s pressure, pressure, pressure, morning routines, five-step systems, and very, very tidy before and after stories, which just feeds right into those beliefs. And the brain says, see, if you just try hard enough and plan enough and analyze enough, and then you can finally be worthy and be good. And these other people did it.Why can’t you? Why can’t you be more productive, more regulated, more aligned? Why can’t you follow through with these activities? And so maybe you try it. You know, you see the posts on Instagram and you give it a try. You do the journaling, the affirmations, try to track your body.(7:06 - 14:35)And for a little while, that can feel exciting. And we get a little dopamine, we get a little oxytocin, we feel a spark that this will be the thing, the thing that finally makes it okay for us to say no, to be present, to want something different, to have needs, to not have to worry about being disapproved of, to not have to explain ourselves and criticize ourselves constantly. But then eventually something happens.Either we turn on ourselves or we stop doing the things because we’re tired or exhausted, or some part of our brain says, nope, that’s not safe. You’re going off the survival pathways. Maybe someone gets disappointed in us.A relationship shifts and boom, we’re right back in those old patterns, overthinking, overexplaining, over-apologizing, over-criticizing. And now that we have all these self-help messages, when we see that happen, because of course we can observe it, right? We can observe these things happening. Well, the only answer is that it must be something wrong with us.And then we get fed this message that we’re too self-aware. And then maybe we go to therapy and we even get told we’re too self-aware for therapy. We already know so much, so why are we here? Which again just feeds into this idea that something must be wrong with us.The mindset, the discipline, we’re not doing enough. We’re self-aware, we can’t make the change. We can’t even fit in in therapy.Something really must be wrong with us. We must be our eyes at everything. Healing is fake.Nothing works. This is stupid. I want to offer us a different picture.And the picture is that you and your brain are not bad or wrong. You’re neither too self-aware nor not self-aware enough. You are a human with a brain that is made up of all of your past experiences, that is predicting what is going to happen in the present.What is the probability that something safe is going to happen versus something dangerous? And it has been paying attention for your whole life about what happens when you speak up, when you rest, when you cry, when you ask for help, when you don’t mask, when you put on a show, when you get angry, when you succeed, when you fail. And it’s built up a whole atlas in your brain on what to expect. And this is all filed away unconsciously.We’re not even actively aware that we’re doing it. We may become actively aware of the patterns through our endless analysis and intellectualization, but that doesn’t change the automatic pattern that is embedded in the implicit side of your brain. So when you set a boundary or you try or you think about setting a boundary or saying no or whatever it is, and you feel a rush of panic afterward, that is the predictive pattern getting set off where your brain said that was something dangerous.That’s not something that leads to more connection. And so maybe you criticize yourself, you feel panic, you feel like you need to make up for setting the boundary by like getting the person a gift or something like that. That is that brain saying you went down a route that is unsafe and now I need to get you back to the safe route and the safe route is not having boundaries, not having needs.Or maybe you do go to therapy and you have this wonderful insight, then you go home and you repeat the very same behavior that you just unpacked. It’s not because you didn’t listen. It’s not because you self-sabotaged.It’s because your brain does not have a route that says that new behavior is safe or that that stopping that old behavior is safe. And so self-help is not designed to talk to these implicit learnings, to remap our brain, our predictive survival pathways. It’s only talking to the part of us that consumes information and makes lists.It’s very behavioral oriented. And yes, even self-help that is targeted toward trauma learning is very much about have new experiences, try harder, set a boundary, feel your body, share your emotions. All of those things are behaviors that feel unsafe.And so doing those things will push us out of our window of tolerance, no matter how smart we are, no matter how hard we try. And it can become quicksand really quickly because the more we turn healing into a job or something to analyze or intellectualize, the louder the survival patterns get. Perfectionism sneaks in everywhere, people-pleasing shows up, over-functioning shows up, we over-functioning even on trying to help ourselves feel better.So we might try to install these new behavioral habits, but those old survival pathways are still the way our brain will take us when we are living outside of that window of tolerance. So then what do we do if the answer is to not just try harder? Because we don’t want to just give up. And I think the first step is really being truthful and honest about the time scale that your brain built these maps over years and years of repetition, usually under stress.And so they’re not going to reorganize overnight, even if you do the affirmations, even if you do the journaling, even if you eat the food that you think you need to eat. They will not reorganize overnight because none of us are going to be the exception to the rules of neuroscience. Now there are mechanisms of change that can help speed up the process.Nonetheless, it will be a process, just like building new roads in real life. It is a process. And we also have to stop pretending that insight is equal to integration.We love insight. We love seeing patterns. We love that.But that is not changing the route. And for us intellectualizers and overachievers and perfectionists, the temptation is to stay in the insight because that’s where we feel comfortable. We get a rush every time we have a new insight and say, okay, got it now.I’m going to be different. But your body still tightens up. Your throat still closes.You still get in your own way. You still criticize yourself. You still overwork.It’s not a moral failing. Remember, it is those safety pathways and the built-in detours that your brain has to get you back onto the safety pathways. So this is why I often think about the work that I do as kind of the anti-self-help self-help.I know it sounds silly, but I do care deeply about giving people tools and language to understand themselves and to understand their brains, to remap and rewire their brain toward new ways of being in their life. But I’m also not interested in trying to hand you another system that you can try and not succeed at, not because you failed, but because it’s going against your survival brain, because that doesn’t quite sit right with me either. I want you to have an understanding of your patterns.It’s not just insight, but that truly allows you to see the mechanisms that are happening in your brain and allows you to understand the mechanisms that have to happen to change and rewire those pathways. I want you to see how deeply logical your overthinking, self-sabotage, people-pleasing, perfectionism, hyper-independence is. I want you to understand that all of those things are representative of survival pathways, adaptive strategies in your brain that are happening because your brain is predicting if you don’t do them, something dangerous will happen.No matter how much you say you know nothing dangerous will happen, this is not a conscious experience. It’s implicit. Implicit like handwriting, right? It’s below the surface.We’re not thinking about it actively. We have to make these things explicit to be able to work with them, but understanding them as protective allows us to use a little bit of a different lens. So when we use this lens of rewiring our brain and understanding our predictive brain rather than endless self-optimization, we get to see things a little bit more clearly.(14:36 - 16:57)So if we overcommit, we might say, I need to optimize this. I need to say no, have better boundaries. I’m just going to start saying no and stop people-pleasing.I’m going to read a book about boundaries, go to the library, get the book, read all that, and then of course you don’t follow through because your body floods with fear or guilt or dread or you criticize yourself, you tell yourself other people’s needs are more important, or you don’t even realize it and somehow you’ve over-scheduled yourself again. And then you might end up back in an anxiety spiral or telling yourself that you failed. But in this lens, we might get curious about noticing how saying yes is a way to stay safe, what the learning is underneath of that, what we’re protecting ourselves from.Maybe times you felt like a burden. Maybe times it felt like meeting something upset other people in your lives. Maybe times adults around you were stressed or unpredictable and you learned to make yourself low maintenance.We would see that as an adaptation and we would see all the detours that keep you on that safe adaptation road, the self-criticism, the busyness, the functional freeze of disconnecting and just going into autopilot. And instead of demanding that you stop, we would play around with observing and noticing because we know observing and noticing alone actually helps the rewiring. And then we would get to a place where we can start doing little mini congruence experiments in the present.We could imagine doing something different and noticing what happens even just by imagining it. It allows us to see the learning differently and relate to the learning differently because we can pluck out that old learning that might say having needs makes other people not like me or having needs is selfish. And we can show the brain something different that’s happening in the present where we can experience in real time that having needs is not selfish.Now, it’s not that simple, right? We can’t just prove to ourselves that having needs isn’t selfish, but through these experiments, either imagining them or acting them out in real time, we can actually rewire our brain. That process is called memory reconsolidation and it invokes neuroplasticity in our brain, which allows our brain to form new neural pathways and allows us to repattern our own attachment to ourselves and provide co-regulation to ourselves. Now, that process is kind of boring from a self-optimization process.(16:57 - 17:37)It’s kind of boring to the algorithm. It’s not quite as fun as doing affirmations and journaling and drinking water and then magically being fixed, but it is realistic. It is founded in the science of how our brain works and it is actually the quickest and most effective way to actually do this change.Now, you might be listening to this and thinking, I don’t know how to design those kinds of experiments. I don’t know how to work with these patterns without making it a checklist or something to hold myself up a yardstick to measure myself against. And yeah, you’re right.(17:37 - 19:49)You don’t. You don’t have neural pathways for this yet. Or if you do, because you’ve heard this before, the roadways are kind of back roads, they’re potholes, they’re dirt.Your brain’s not yet comfortable driving down them, but it is possible to build those roadways over time. Not on the timeline of social media, but on your own timeline of observing, noticing, building safety, and rewiring our brain. And this is exactly the work that I am building.This is the work of change. This is the anti-self-help, self-help. When you understand that all forms of therapy and all forms of self-help are trying to mimic these mechanisms of change, but not quite hitting the mark, because these mechanisms of change are not behavioral, then it becomes clear.We have to work with the neural pathways, the predictive patterns, the survival adaptations first, and behavior change comes second. Down the line. Behavior change becomes so much easier when our brain is not telling us, for example, that taking care of ourselves is dangerous.Then you don’t need to obsess and plan and buy a new checklist and sign up for a new course and harangue yourself because you didn’t get it quite right. So for right now, maybe you can notice the ways that you’re trying to make healing into self-optimization tasks. Maybe you can notice the posts you save on social media that promise you a fast fix through journaling, through affirmations, through breathwork.And you can notice what feels good about those ideas, and you can notice what might create pressure out of those ideas, because it’s not that those ideas can ever be helpful. But to notice what are we trying to get at. If I do this breathwork, and I journal, and I do affirmations, how is it I will feel? What will my life, how will my life be different? That is going to reveal what we want, and that is where we can start to gain clarity about what is getting blocked.If you want to learn more about this, this is the work that I do every day on social media, in the courses I teach, I have free guides. Ironically, yes, it is called five steps to change, but it’s not like that. It’s not a simple five-step snap your fingers and you’re out the door.It’s an iterative process to allow you to remap or rewire your brain. And I would love to hear your thoughts, questions, and curiosities. And thanks for being here.Thanks for reading tiny sparks - trisha wolfe! This post is public so feel free to share it.Opportunities to work with me:* On January 11th, I’ll be teaching a live class called 5 Steps to Long-Lasting Change. This class is all about making sense of why change feels so hard, and how we can work with the brain and body to make it easier. I’ll walk you through the framework I’ve developed that weaves together neuroscience, memory reconsolidation, and nervous system regulation. It’s practical, compassionate, and designed to help you not only see what needs to shift, but also learn how to create changes that truly last! If you can’t attend live, the full recording will be available for you.* Also in January, I’ll be opening The Shift 8 Week Immersion, a small group experience for women who already know themselves well, but feel stuck living out the same patterns again and again. This is where we take the lens from my teaching and actually practice it together through live sessions, guided nervous system work, and gentle experiments between meetings. Over eight weeks, we will map your loops, reconnect with your values, and try on small, doable shifts that help you feel safer and make change more possible in real life. If you are craving a space that is structured, supportive, and focused on embodied change rather than more information, this is where we will do that work side by side.* Book club! We just finished up Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and what a deep experience it was. Next up: Unlocking the Emotional Brain - this book is clinical, but truly informational as the seminal resource on all things coherence therapy, memory reconsolidation, and the science behind why things like EMDR and NARM actually work.By becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack for just $5 a month, you get full access to my biweekly podcast, where I do a deep dive into each chapter, and two live fireside chats, where we connect and explore our learnings together. You also get full access to the archive of the book club, where you can listen to episodes about Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, No Bad Parts, and The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma - all my favorite books for those who truly want to heal from their past, get unstuck, and start moving forward. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit trishawolfe.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHello and welcome back to our book club read-a-long of Unlocking the Emotional Brain! If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks, where we explore a chapter from the book together (you can also listen on Spotify!). I help translate the theory into everyday language and show you how to apply it in your own life. We also gather twice per book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time.This book takes us deep into the science of memory reconsolidation, one of the most powerful mechanisms for true and lasting change. It helps us understand how healing actually happens after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up with emotionally immature parents.If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this kind of work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience, including live sessions, current discussions, and the complete archive of past reads like No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this community possible, and I’m so grateful you’re here.This week, we dive into chapter 4, which goes further into the process of the Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process and emotional learnings. This chapter further refines our understanding of how these emotional learnings can get embedded deep in our subconscious and affect nearly everything we do. Many of us experience this when we feel like we KNOW all of our patterns, we know HOW to change them, but we can’t seem to get unstuck. You’re not alone - let’s dive in and learn more! (0:00 - 3:03)Welcome back, book club friends. So excited to dive into unlocking the emotional brain again together this week. If you’re new here for my book club slash read along, there’s no need to even have the book.You are welcome to join in and listen as I walk us through popular self-help and therapy books and break them down into become easier to understand and talk about how to apply this your everyday life. So as I was looking through my notes for this week’s episode, I noticed how on every single page of the chapters, there was something I wanted to talk about with you. And so I really enjoy that we can take our time together.And sometimes that means flexing and flowing from our schedule. So I’m going to be talking a little bit about chapter four this week and a little bit about chapter five, but I’m going to push our live meeting out because I want to make sure we have time to get through some of these major concepts before we meet for the first time, so that you can ask any questions or curiosities you might have. So let’s actually plan for our live meeting to be Sunday, December 14th at 12 o’clock Eastern time.And you will receive a Google meet invite for that, where we can join in together, have a little fireside chat. And of course, if you’re not able to join live, you will receive the recording. And now let’s dive in together.So I didn’t even really get to go into chapter four last time because we were talking about chapter three. And the case there was so fascinating. I’ve thought about it so much because I think that understanding of the person who really struggled with being able to speak up in meetings, and that case really helped us understand the symptom coherence, but also to not make assumptions in our own lives as we’re exploring what these underlying routes, these old neural pathways, these old learnings might be.So when the person in that case was talking about struggling speaking up in meetings, it might be easy to think that he lacks self-confidence, maybe he didn’t see confidence in his family, or maybe he was criticized by his peers, and so he worries about being judged when he speaks up. But in that case, what we saw as they went through the process together to map out this old learning, what they found was he was actually afraid that if he spoke up, he would become this extremely assertive aggressor in a way that his father was. And so I think that’s an incredibly interesting observation to make because it really shows us how every symptom is coherent.Every symptom is emotional logic. It makes perfect sense in the system, even if it doesn’t make sense in the present. And so we’re going to talk a little bit more about that today.But this idea that every symptom is coherent is something we’ve seen in all the books that we’ve read together so far. In the NARM book with the exploration of survival strategies, in No Bad Parts, internal family systems, talking about how there literally are no bad parts. All parts serve a protective purpose.(3:03 - 4:40)And then in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, where the author very clearly laid out the adaptive strategies that we may develop if we grew up in an environment like that. And so I love getting to continue to explore this thread together because it’s at the root of all the work that I do, and it’s also just founded in neuroscience. These implicit learnings that get created, these neural pathways, these routes in our brain that get created, are all in response to something that is happening, something that happened to us.And it doesn’t matter if you find it logical in the present. It made sense in the moment, and it was a strong enough experience that your brain held onto it as a pattern to try to keep you safe. And so it’s very common that these patterns form through both frequency and intensity.And so that’s just something to think about that these experiences might not stand out to you. You might not have a clear memory from your childhood or from your adult life where you can see a pattern form, but they may have been small, frequent experiences. Or you might say, well, this was just a one-time thing.How could it impact me in that way? Well, the intensity may have been very, very large to you, to your experience, through your perception. And so as we continue to follow these threads together, and as you might be curious about your own life, I hope that this can offer a different lens that you can use to observe your own experience. And that’s why part of the process that I created, my five steps to change model, is about observing and mapping these things out with curiosity and neutrality.(4:41 - 5:33)And so chapter four, again, really emphasizes this idea that is so critically important when we’re understanding people’s experiences of environmental rupture. And it’s this idea that there is the thing that the person is afraid will happen. And then there is a survival strategy that tries to solve it.And so there are two different sufferings that can be experienced. But the survival strategy, the pattern, the implicit learning, the adaptation, the part, however you want to think about it, is the lesser of two sufferings. Whatever we perceive will happen in that moment of an environmental rupture and attachment failure feels so big, so life or death, that we would rather shut down our own experience, shut down our own needs, than feel that feeling.(5:33 - 10:37)That is the situation that gets these patterns encoded in the brain, where it says, if the choice is being eaten by a tiger, or shutting down my own needs, then I can handle shutting down my own needs. I can go into a functional freeze and just intellectualize and take care of everyone else’s needs. I can definitely handle that suffering.But of course, over time, that suffering wears on us more and more and more. And it can build up resentment and disconnection and a stuck feeling. But when these learnings get formed, the two sufferings are the choice between what can feel like obliteration or annihilation, or shutting away some part of us.And over time, that just becomes part of our behavioral pattern. It becomes part of our procedural manual. So we have a whole atlas in our brain of maps, and those roads are made up of survival roads.But the roads that lead to having needs, moving toward what we want for ourselves, feeling good, feeling joyful, feeling playful, being in the present moment, those roads are underdeveloped. No funding has gone to them over the years. So they might be non-existent, or they might be just little dinky back country dirt roads with a lot of potholes that our brain said, maybe, possibly, potentially, we can go down that road.Very infrequently, if the circumstances are exactly right. But no, most of the time, I’m not going to allow you to go down that road. Because again, the idea is that going down that road will lead to some suffering that is so terrifying.So in this chapter, they are talking about the coherence therapy model, which uses memory reconsolidation to dissolve these schemas, these schemas that are made up of these implicit emotional learnings. And you can think of schemas just like the parts, just like the survival strategies. But to dissolve these schemas, it must be brought into awareness, we must map the route out and connect to the emotional learning that is underneath of that, not just intellectually, but in the moment to feel and touch a piece of that.Because accessing the emotion around that is what allows us to reconsolidate that memory, aka update and organize the pathway in the brain and start to form new neural pathways. So there are a few more interesting cases in this chapter. And one thing I really value about this book is how much they use these cases, because it really helps understand the theory and put it into practice.And so one of the cases in this chapter is about Ted, a man in his 30s, who sort of self-described as a drifter, he had a difficult time holding a job, had a hard time committing to anything, and really kind of lived in those patterns of chronic underachievement. And so again, it would be easy in a traditional model to think, lack of discipline, lack of motivation, lack of willpower, we need some behavioral therapy, we need atomic habits, you know, to think that, oh, he’s just not accessing his potential, he’s just not accessing his forward momentum, because he’s lazy. And so we just need to move him toward trying harder.However, no behavioral therapy would have worked in this case, because when we get curious to find the emotional learning, that old neural pathway that is coded in survival underneath, what we found was that when Ted imagined succeeding, and he imagined achieving, and doing all of those things that he struggled with, then he immediately imagined telling his father about it. And the experience was that if he told his father about his success, his father would feel proud and validated, as if he were a good parent. And Ted described a childhood that was full of criticism, shame, emotional abuse, and that none of those things were actually acknowledged.So this idea that if his father thinks he was doing well, then his father would think he was a good parent, made Ted feel like his pain wasn’t valid, that the emotional experience he had as a child was not valid. And so him being successful would validate his father’s experience that he was a good parent, and make him feel like none of his experiences ever happened, would totally erase that. Now that might sound illogical to you, but it is in fact entirely coherent, entirely coherent in this person’s experience, where he was constantly derided and pressured to do more.Then doesn’t it make sense in some way, his brain would develop this pathway to keep him safe from having to feel the idea that what happened to him wasn’t real. Because if he were to access his agency, if he were to move forward, then his entire experience of his childhood would be invalidated. Now that gets encoded deep in there, and then we act out these behaviors in the present, not even knowing why we’re doing it.(10:38 - 13:38)But when we can access these emotional learnings in the present, we can really see these predictive patterns that come, right? Where his brain links achievement with self-betrayal. Now I actually really like this case because it’s another example where it might not be exactly what you think, and it’s another case that really helps us understand why behavioral therapy cannot override an implicit learning. No amount of behavioral therapy, willpower, habit stacking, whatever, is going to override the experience that his unconscious brain has that says achieving is dangerous.Achieving is self-abandonment. Achieving is validating this person who harmed me. So if behavioral work were tried with this person, he might make a few steps towards something and then collapse again.And he might be labeled as resistant or self-sabotaging. But what we can see here is that this is an entirely coherent experience where his brain is holding this idea that if I succeed, it will prove he was a good father. And so in some way, part of his brain was also holding out this idea that struggling was the way to get his father to understand how much he hurt him.And that if he were to disconnect from that belief and move forward, he would feel so alone and disconnected, which of course were the feelings he was already feeling, but he was covering up with this freeze state, with this underachievement. And so we can really see that child consciousness experience in NARM terminology of this idea that if I go on without my dad, without him seeing how hurt I was and staying by my side, and I access my agency and I’m responsible for my own life, that would feel terrifying. And so we see the child consciousness experience that accessing agency is scary and dangerous and could lead to the loss of connection.And as he did some processing in this case with the therapist, where they examined the emotional learning in the present and held up some of these ideas, Ted could eventually connect to this idea of knowing his father would never be able to admit that he hurt him or apologize for it. And feeling the grief of that statement, which was also the grief of his childhood experience and the anger that he felt allowed it to resolve, allowed that old emotional learning to resolve and allowed him to differentiate and feel separate from his father, which was another experience he didn’t get in his childhood of criticism and pressure. So as he feels separate, he can feel that it’s okay to be responsible for his own life and have agency and validate his own feelings and grieve the relationship that he wished that he would have.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHello and welcome back to our book club read-a-long of Unlocking the Emotional Brain! If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks, where we explore a chapter from the book together. I help translate the theory into everyday language and show you how to apply it in your own life. We also gather twice per book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time.This book takes us deep into the science of memory reconsolidation, one of the most powerful mechanisms for true and lasting change. It helps us understand how healing actually happens after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up with emotionally immature parents.If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this kind of work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience, including live sessions, current discussions, and the complete archive of past reads like No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this community possible, and I’m so grateful you’re here.This week, we dive into chapter 3, which goes into the process of the Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process. This chapter is complex but lays out a case for us that gives us further insight into the steps that create change of deeply held symptoms - in this case, Richard suffers from a lack of confidence and a loud inner critic that keeps him small. Many of us may relate to this experience! Understanding how to get at the deeper emotional learnings underneath the pattern are what allows us to create long term change. Let’s dive in!(0:00 - 2:38)Hi and welcome back to our read-along of Unlocking the Emotional Brain, a deep dive into how we create therapeutic change. I know we have some new members here so thank you so much for joining and just a reminder some people read the book along with me and some people never pick up the book and they listen to my interpretation and explanation of the book so welcome. Last week’s post will go into the schedule a little bit more of how this works but we have a fresh podcast episode every two weeks and then we have two live meetings where we get to meet and ask questions.Of course you’re always able to comment or send a question back to me now if you’d like to explore and thank you for being patient with me through my bi-week where I was defending my dissertation so I am now officially Dr. Wolfe and I am thrilled to be complete. I had a wonderful time getting to conduct my own independent research and I’ll look forward to talking about that more on here in the future but for now let’s dive into Unlocking the Emotional Brain and in this chapter, chapter three, we’re going to dive further into therapeutic reconsolidation process. Something I really love about this book though I know it can be quite dense is that it doesn’t just describe emotional change in abstract terms it really lays out for us scientifically what this process looks like and gives us these really helpful case studies to understand what this looks like in real people and so as we dive into these chapters today there are going to be quite a number of cases we’re going to use to explore this transformational therapeutic reconsolidation process that leads to change.So what this process does is works through that memory reconsolidation process. We’ve talked about that a little bit so far and you may have heard me talk about that in some of my other work but what we know is that memory reconsolidation is one of the key mechanisms of change in therapy and we know that we can access old memories, activate them and for a certain period of time those memories, the learnings from those memories can be updated. So we’re not trying to change the memory but we’re pulling out the emotional learning from that memory and so as you’ll see in these cases as we walk through these steps we can pull out these old memories that you’ve heard us talk about as survival strategies when we talked about NARM and the Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma.(2:38 - 5:54)Oftentimes these are the burdens that the parts carry from No Bad Parts internal family systems perspective and these are the adaptive symptoms that we develop when we have emotionally immature caretakers or we go through developmental trauma and this process is one of the major mechanisms of change to shift some of those old emotional learnings that are impacting so many of us in the present unconsciously. Things like intellectualization and people pleasing and self-criticism and perfectionism, they all come from these deeply held emotional learnings and this therapeutic reconsolidation process along with a few other things are those mechanisms that allow us to repattern these things in therapy and in our own personal work. So specifically in these chapters they are talking about how this applies to a type of therapy called coherence therapy and coherence therapy follows these steps for transformational change where they start with identifying the symptom, what it is that’s happening that we want to change, and then retrieving the learning or the schema, whatever it is that’s underneath that learning that makes the symptom necessary.Then we identify a contradictory knowing, a time where something happened that was the opposite of that learning. Once we have identified those then we can reactivate that old learning through that memory, also activate the present day contradictory knowledge, and then we kind of hold those both up to the brain and create a juxtaposition experience and that is what allows that learning to reconsolidate and shift into the present and from there we can verify that that symptom, that schema, is no longer activating. And they talk about here that that change can feel effortless and permanent.Now I want to clarify that very true that these changes can feel effortless and permanent and I get to see that work in my own sessions with my clients all of the time but it’s also important to know of course that this is different for everyone. We can have many many many target learnings and so I never want anyone to feel like well I’ve been doing therapy for x months or x years and I’m not seeing these permanent and effortless changes. When you have a long series of experiences over the course of years that build up these learnings it’s normal and expected that sometimes things might really feel like they shifted and other times it can really feel like it takes time.So just know that we are all on our own timeline here. But let’s just go through some of these cases together and explore this model. So in the first case here we have Richard and Richard comes in with this chronic self-doubt and low confidence and criticism and so let’s walk through this transformational process here, this therapeutic reconsolidation process that we first start with identifying the symptom and sometimes like in this case it is easier for us or for the client to identify the symptom that there can be this recurring pattern where maybe we hesitate to share our ideas, our heart races, we feel anxious, we feel small, we feel regretful that there is a pattern there that we are identifying that is the symptom.(5:55 - 8:08)Now a key component of coherence therapy is recognizing that all symptoms are coherent meaning they all exist as a foil to something occurring. So to some experience occurring that is where the symptom comes from and so they ping off of each other and so coherence therapy really focuses on getting to the root of what is the symptom responding to. What is the schema or the system that existed in our early lives that created the need for this symptom because symptoms always make sense.Symptoms are always part of a coherent system, meaning they are balancing another experience - they HAVE to happen based on our current neural pathways. So the idea is that when we can target these emotional learnings and re-pattern them the symptoms will no longer be necessary so thus the symptom will cease. So very similar to what we’ve seen for example in NARM we don’t worry about working on the symptom behaviorally.We don’t try to stop you from criticizing yourself or people pleasing or second guessing or in this case feeling anxious and trying to keep yourself small. We don’t try to get you to stop doing the symptom because the symptom is fully coherent based on the neural pathway in your brain. The neural pathway in your brain says when A happens I must do B. When we can re-pattern the idea that when A happens I must do B then we never we don’t have to do B. And then they use a technique here with Richard called symptom deprivation and this is a technique we also see in therapies like NARM where we’re essentially imagining what if you had the thing you wanted? What if you could show up confidently? What if you could have your own needs? What if you could be present, connect to yourself, be silly? And we work through this not as a positive happy override but because even just imagining something makes our brain feel like it’s happening and so the very same dilemma or distress or schema that exists in our brain in the world will come up in the moment and we see that here with Richard when he begins imagining being in a meeting at work making some comments and feeling confident we see that old schema coming up.(8:09 - 23:33)And so what we see in this case is that Richard some part of him feels like if he is confident then he would show up as arrogant and overbearing just like his father was. And so just like we’ve seen in the past this is where we’re exploring these old parts of us these old survival strategies these old schemas where in this case if I show up as confident then I will be this controlling invalidating person like my father. Thus the symptom of keeping myself small makes perfect sense.It is coherent. Whether you’re a therapist or a person interested in applying this to your own life it’s so important to understand that when we’re getting to these underlying patterns these neural pathways these schemas we’re not looking for something to make sense in the present. And this is a real sticking point for people who intellectualize because they’ll say well I know I’m not going to turn into my father if I’m if I’m you know confident that’s not what it is.But we’re not looking in the present we’re not talking about does it make sense in the present. In the past it made sense and so the system set up a symptom to keep us protected the same way that for example being perfect made us feel protected from a parent who would criticize us if we weren’t perfect which made us feel terrified alone and sent away that is a strategy that makes perfect sense. Even if you know in the present that you can be loved if you aren’t perfect or that being perfect isn’t even realistic anymore that doesn’t change the internal schema of the symptom and the protective pattern that comes out that is deeply embedded in our unconscious and in these neural pathways about what is safe and remember safety above all else.So our brain is always trying to maintain that system of safety and that’s what we see playing out here. And a really important point that I think they make in this chapter is the symptom often means we are suffering. Right so the perfectionism can make us suffer the self-doubting can make us suffer but that suffering feels more tolerable and in a sense gives us a sense of control.Of course it’s a faux sense of control but it gives us a sense of control. Well if I can just keep myself small yes I have to suffer but I don’t have to come up against this idea that if I let myself be confident I will turn into this heavy-handed controlling know-it-all like my dad and inflict harm on people around me the way my dad did to me. So the suffering of keeping myself small is more tolerable than the other suffering and so in coherence therapy they kind of refer that as the two sufferings.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHello Book Club Friends! Wow, I am so loving reading Unlocking the Emotional Brain together! We’re just getting started but I’m having so much fun learning more about the science of transformational change. I know this book can be a bit dense/clinical, so don’t worry too much if it feels like a lot to get through - that’s why I’m here! I love getting to read through the chapters and translate it into real life understanding. Please feel free to leave a comment below and let me know what you’re learning! And scroll wayyyyy down to the bottom for a book club schedule for this book :). It’s a long one but SO worth it!(0:00 - 2:54)Hello and welcome back to our read-along of The Emotional-Based Brain. I have been enjoying reading this book so much because it is so exciting when you get to see science backing up everything that you’ve already known. You know, a lot of times psychology and counseling are considered quote-unquote soft sciences, but this book does a great job of delivering the actual hard science results that show why things like therapy work.So we’ve done a lot of learning together, but this book is actually about unlearning. Oftentimes when we think about healing or changing or moving toward what we want for ourselves in our life, we think about addition. We think about adding awareness, we think about adding tools, we think about adding new habits, though if you’ve listened to me or worked with me, you know I’m not a big fan of trying to control our habits.But we often tell ourselves we just need to think differently, act differently, choose differently, and of course that’s often part of our underlying strategies, our underlying patterns that we have learned that to show up differently in the world we have to try harder, be better, be perfect, don’t have needs, etc. But Unlocking the Emotional-Based Brain actually talks about unlearning, and that is what chapter two is about. This describes what is probably the most important discovery in the neuroscience of change and healing from trauma, which is the process of memory reconsolidation.Over the course of the last couple years I’ve been learning more and more about this term, and it wasn’t a term I had heard before then, but it describes something that I already knew and already talked about, which is the idea that we can update these maps in our brain thanks to neuroplasticity and this process called memory reconsolidation. So later on in this book we will be diving into all the different types of therapy like EMDR and IFS and somatic experiencing and looking at how they affect change using this process. But for now we want to learn more about how this process works.So memory reconsolidation is the process by which the brain can change the impact of old emotional learnings, these old learnings that keep us stuck in shame, in fear, in self-protection, long after the actual danger or the felt sense of danger has passed. As you know if you’ve been in the book club for our past books, we know that especially when we’re children, but when we’re adults too, and we’re existing in environments that are overwhelming, that are too much, that are not enough, we get a sense that we constantly have to be on edge to be trying to protect ourselves, even in situations where a physical danger is not at risk. That is because we are wired to stay in connection to our primary attachment figures, our parents, our caregivers, but as humans we are wired to stay in connection to others as well.(2:54 - 13:49)So when we’re young we don’t have the cognitive complexity to understand that our parents aren’t really in danger or that we aren’t really in danger. Instead what we’re feeling is, oh my gosh every time I come home from school and I didn’t get a really good grade or something went a little bit wrong or I made a mistake, I feel a tension in my house. I feel like maybe my parents pulled back from me a little bit.I feel like I get a little bit less attention or maybe I even get punished or sent to my room. Maybe it’s nothing overt, but it’s just this generalized sense of disappointment. And when that happens repeatedly, what our child brain will learn is that love will be withdrawn if we are not perfect all of the time.And that could be from our parents, we could experience from our peers, our teachers, and again in our adult life. But when that happens, remember how neural pathways form. They form with frequency and intensity.So when we have these frequent and intense experiences that create a lot of fear in us as a child, and even anger and sadness too, it creates these neural pathways, these emotional learnings in our brain that create ideas like, if I’m not perfect, I won’t be loved. Remember, emotional learnings are a little bit different from thinking those things, right? They’re a little bit different from this idea of core beliefs, which is things we’re actively thinking. They’re in our unconscious mind.So maybe you’ve heard this quotation before, that’s not exactly accurate, we could go more into that later, but from Jung that says, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you’ll call it fate. And I think that’s really apt to describe what these emotional learnings are like. They are implicit, they are unconscious, they are below our conscious mind, but unwittingly we are constantly acting out these learnings because we are trying to prevent the loss of connection.So what memory reconsolidation allows us to do is to isolate these old emotional learnings, isolate these pathways in our brain, and start to change the impact that those learnings have on us in the present by targeting memories or experiences where we first learned those things. So let’s talk a little bit about this process. For most of the 20th century, scientists believed that emotional memories were permanent.You might be able to suppress them, or change their intensity through exposure or coping, but you couldn’t really erase them because the emotional brain and the amygdala were sort of hardwired. In 2000, they started doing some interesting experimentation that changed this belief. Now I do want to give you a little heads up in this chapter, and thus in this podcast, I’m preparing to discuss some lab experimentation they did with animals, specifically rats, and you know that might not be the best feeling for you, or it might be something that you don’t feel comfortable with, and so you’re more than welcome to skip over this part, and it’s not going to change your fundamental understanding of the book.So in this lab, they conducted an experiment with rats, and they trained these rats to associate a tone, a sound that they played, with an electric shock. And after several times of doing that, the rats would freeze whenever they heard the tone. So it’s sort of that classical Pavlovian conditioning.Now what they did then is they reactivated the fear memory by playing the tone just once. So they played the tone, and the rat’s brain activated the memory that said, a shock is going to be coming. And during that short window, they injected a protein synthesis blocker into the rat’s amygdala.And when the rats were tested again the next day, the fear response was totally gone. And this was the first time the researchers realized that they may be able to deconsolidate a memory that already existed. And they did achieve this chemically, but as they continued to study this, they found that a similar thing could happen through experience, where we could rewrite the emotion of the memory.And so they learned that they could do this without using chemicals or medication through introducing what is called a prediction error. If you’ve been listening to the other books or you know my work, you know this is something I talk about very frequently, where as we build up that felt sense of safety and that capacity to observe ourselves and the maps or roadways in our brain, eventually we have to introduce what I call congruence experiments, which is where we think about and then eventually try something very small to see what happens that is different from our past experience. So the example that I use a lot is if you have a core learning, an emotional learning that says every time I have a need I am punished or sent away, then we might think about what would happen if you get the wrong drink at the coffee shop and you let the barista know you got the wrong drink and you beg them to remake it.That is an opportunity for your brain to say, stop, no, that’s dangerous. But we get to introduce a prediction error and say, hmm, is anything dangerous actually going to happen in that moment? Or does anything dangerous actually happen in that moment when you try it on? That’s how we introduce a prediction error to our brain to say, this actually doesn’t hold up with this old emotional learning. And so the studies continue to bear this out that that prediction error or that mismatch experience could change these emotional learnings.They could erase the fear or whatever other emotions might be coming along. So if we think of our brain of that map with all of those roads and many of those roads are coded in safety, they say this is what I have to do to stay in connection and not get voted off the island. And it might hold learnings like if I cry or show emotions, people will withdraw from me.If I’m quiet and I take care of other people’s needs, I am loved. If I do well, I am loved. Those are all those roadways, those beliefs stored inside your map.But these maps don’t automatically update. Unlike our GPS in present day, they don’t automatically update just because we become adults or we leave the difficult situation. Those old, very charged learnings are still in there.Memory reconsolidation is part of the process that allows us to redraw those routes and to find new routes that are actually safe. So let’s talk about the unlearning sequence. Step one is reactivation.And so we have to actually bring that learning online and as an experiential way. That’s why we often focus on experiential therapies when we’re working with things like complex PTSD or childhood trauma or people who are just really stuck. We need an experiential modality where we’re not just talking about it, but we’re experiencing it.We’re activating that old learning. And so when we bring up that emotional learning in the present, we know that it opens a window. This is what they’ve shown in many studies.It opens a window where that memory becomes changeable. It becomes editable, essentially. Imagine we reach into the filing cabinet of your brain.We pull out one of the folders that is bright red and says, safety, safety, safety. So we pull out one of these folders that hold one of your learnings around safety. And we want in the moment for you to truly be able to connect to the emotions of that experience because it is the emotion that creates the learning in the present.Then we introduce that mismatch, that prediction error, like we talked about. We introduced the time when you said your drink needed to be remade and nothing dangerous happened. We know that when the emotional learning is activated and being experienced in the moment and we introduce this contradiction, that is when it is changeable.