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Hello, my friends, and welcome back to our Substack Book Club. We have a lot of new people here, and so this is going to be a free episode for everyone to listen to, to learn a little bit more about what we do in our book club here. Just to catch you up, we’re currently reading Unlocking the Emotional Brain, which is the seminal book on coherence therapy and memory reconsolidation.

Memory reconsolidation is the process by which we can update the old learnings in our brain. So if you found your way here because you consider yourself an intellectualizer, a people pleaser, a perfectionist, you find yourself stuck in traditional therapy because you already understand a lot of things. Maybe you’ve tried nervous system regulation, but you can’t quite seem to get unstuck.

It’s likely because you have old unconscious learnings referred to as implicit emotional learnings that are like pathways in your brain. They are things that happened to you in your past that formed roads in your brain that said, this is the safe road to go down. So if every time you had emotions, or you had needs, or you were yourself, you were criticized, or sent away, or punished, or bullied by your peers, or you had parents who, for whatever reason, couldn’t show up for you, then over time, the learning would be, if I have my needs and I am myself, I will be criticized, or I will lose connection.

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And so then that shows up in the present where we mask, we put our true selves away, we stay up in our thoughts, and no amount of insight will change that process. So this book really helps us to understand how we can make long-term change. If you join our book club, you also get access to all of the old episodes where I have gone through Healing Developmental Trauma, a wonderful book covering NARM therapy and helping us understand this process a little bit more, No Bad Parts, a book on internal family systems, another book that can support memory reconsolidation, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, which is often very important learning for many of us to understand how our early experiences may have shaped our present-day lives.

So thank you so much for being here. Whether you are a free or paid member, you help support my work just by listening, liking, engaging, and commenting, and it’s truly an honor to get to share this information with you. This is going to be a recap episode of what we have explored in Unlocking the Emotional Brain so far, and next week we will dive back in.

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So many of you have read every chapter and taken notes along with me, and some of you may be listening while you do the dishes or go on a walk, and you haven’t cracked the book just once, and that is all completely welcome here. You get to show up in the book club at the level that your system has capacity for, and I love getting to translate these books into everyday understanding to help us actively make change in our lives. So let’s walk through some of these ideas together, and I do want to name again that Unlocking the Emotional Brain is not exactly an easy, cozy read.

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It can be pretty clinical and dense in places, but the reason I chose this book anyway is it’s because something so incredibly important, which is transformational change in therapy, transformational change in mental health, transformational change in how we show up in the world, not just symptom management, not just insight, not just telling you that for the rest of your life you’re going to have to use force and fear and to regulate your nervous system every single day just to be in the world. Now, of course, if you know me, you know that I support nervous system regulation work, and I support insight, and all of those things are wonderful, but they alone do not create transformational change. We have to figure out how to shift these patterns at the root because journals and planning and coping skills do not address the root of why we have these learnings, and this process for transformational change is called memory reconsolidation.

We can think of it as if we’re updating the maps, the atlas, the GPS in our brain. Underneath those metaphors is the same basic idea that our brain can revise old emotional learnings from memories of things that happened to us in our lives under certain conditions, and that is the core of what this book is about. Think about your brain as a big excel spreadsheet or a big filing cabinet.

In all of the experiences in your life, your brain files away and stores the data, and it puts it into themes like a big zip file. So if you had a series of memories that again told you that when you experience emotions, people will pull away from you, then those get filed into a big folder, and because the potential to lose connection with others is coded as survival, because it is in our brain, because we are wired to have connection, then that learning gets moved to the top as a critically important survival learning. So all of these memories the brain sorts through and said, this has happened a lot, so frequency, so this is something I want to hold on to, and then this has happened and it was really intense, so intensity.

So frequency and intensity are what the brain uses to categorize what is an important memory to hold on to versus what isn’t. This all happens unconsciously, so you yourself may not have memories of these specific events, but your brain puts them into a file and then creates a learning. Think about a learning like a rule.

The brain is using the data to say, I’m going to predict what’s going to happen in the present and the future based on what’s happened in the past, and I’m going to use that to shape the way that you yourself see the world. It changes the lenses through which we perceive reality to try to keep us safe. Because if the brain is predicting that feeling our feelings and being authentic is going to lead to losing connection, being sent away, being punished, which feels survival oriented, then of course the brain is not going to want to let us be authentic and connect easily.

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So then, for example, we might perceive the people around us as more critical than they are. We might perceive situations as dangerous, like going to meet new people, because if we are ourselves we won’t get to form a new connection, when in actuality they are not dangerous. This all happens below the surface and forms these patterns or parts that we as humans have learned to call intellectualization, people pacing, perfectionism, my anxious part, we have a lot of different names we’ve given to it.

But those are all bundles of memories and emotions that create rules. If we in the present want to update those rules, we have to follow this process called memory reconsolidation. And that is one of the key neurobiological mechanisms for change.

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This book walks us through that process. So let’s break down what we’ve covered so far in learning about this process. What we talked about in the very beginning is the difference between symptom reduction and transformational change.

So it is possible to reduce our symptoms or to change our experience through behavior change, through force, through willpower, through quote-unquote motivation. So therapy could help you maybe feel 20% less anxious, or feel fewer panic attacks, or go to the gym more often, and that’s absolutely not nothing. Those reductions in symptoms can feel like a really big relief.

But oftentimes that reduction happens through management. So we learn how to use strategies to manage our brain and what a gift that we can do that. But I’m guessing if you’re here, you don’t want to have to spend the rest of your life doing symptom management and using force.

The reason why that thing that gives you a reduction doesn’t change the pathway in your brain is because it’s still in contradiction with an old learning. So going to the gym every day to take care of yourself through management strategies, habits, and force doesn’t contradict an old learning that says taking care of yourself is selfish. So it requires vigilance at all time to use the strategies to override your brain, which is often why we fail quote-unquote at setting new habits, or we do it for a couple of months and then we stop, or we use management strategies but we still kind of feel stuck, empty, disconnected, or unsure of ourselves.

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Transformational change is completely different. In these moments when we can create transformation, we are rewiring the learning that we had. We are rewiring our brain itself so that the brain updates its prediction.

It updates its data model. It is so cool that we know now that we can do this. It’s not just about having new experiences.

I want to be super clear about that because it’s kind of the in thing right now to talk about how you don’t need regulation, you just need to have new experiences, but they are missing a key part of the process, which is that the new experiences must explicitly target the old learning and they must be incremental, meaning they have to be little bits at a time. But as we do this process, we can update through transformational change these emotional learnings and then we don’t have to use management strategies, force, fear, every single day because the old learnings that say if I’m not perfect I will lose love, if I have needs I’m selfish and I’ll hurt others, if I show feelings people will withdraw, those things can be rewired and the learnings can be updated. So now instead of predicting a 99% chance of something dangerous is happening, the brain realistically says maybe there’s a 5% chance that something could happen if I myself and I have needs.

And then what happens is if we have needs and someone criticizes us or doesn’t support our need or whatever it is, we get to experience it through present-day lenses, through our adult eyes, where we can say that still hurt, that didn’t feel good, it doesn’t feel good to be hurt or unseen or criticized or whatever it might be, but it’s not dangerous. And that is the transformational change where we can exist in the present without the past landing onto the present. Another really big part of this book is moving away from seeing symptoms as pathological or self-sabotaging and instead seeing all symptoms as coherent.

That is the idea upon which coherence therapy and other types of therapy are based. Every symptom, every strategy, every protective part is coherent because it lines up with an underlying emotional learning. In other words, it makes sense.

We spend a lot of time in the future, in the present, sorry, telling ourselves that, well, this symptom doesn’t make sense. I’m not in danger if I have a need. No one’s going to think I’m selfish and if they do, I don’t care.

Okay, that’s your rational mind or your intellectualizer mind talking, but that’s not what your emotional learning is. Deep inside, there is a part of you that learned those things do feel dangerous. They do risk connection.

They do create suffering. And so we know through this book that there is this idea of two sufferings, that when we have these overwhelming experiences, these intense experiences, these big emotional survival-based experiences, our brain is very quickly categorizing, based on the data it has, what will be the lesser of two sufferings. And so if the suffering is I shut down my own needs, I turn my back on myself, I abandon myself, or the other suffering is I lose connection with people around me, that is actually the far more terrifying suffering.

It is far more terrifying, especially as children, to feel that our caregivers would not be okay if we don’t take care of their needs, or our caregivers will withdraw from us if we are our silly, playful selves. That actually creates a feeling of life threat versus the other suffering, which is shutting down our own needs, shutting down our own emotions, going up into our head. We are always choosing between two sufferings.

You don’t know you’re doing this. I can’t emphasize enough that this all happens in the unconscious, and it’s not rational. People will try to tell me, well, that doesn’t make sense.

That doesn’t matter. These are emotional learnings, and emotions, by their very definition, do not have to be founded in rationality. They are feelings, they are not thoughts.

So whatever solutions we came up with in those times of two sufferings, that made sense in the context of the emotional experience and the nervous system experience we had at the time. So if you learned that confident, loud, opinionated adults hurt people, shut other people down, stomped all over them, your brain might come up with a symptom of staying small and doubtful and silent. That symptom might hurt you in the present, it might get in the way of you having the life that you want, but it is the lesser of the two sufferings.

If the other option is to turn into the parent or the teacher or whoever it is who terrified you, that is coherent. It’s not random. It’s not a character defect.

If every mistake you made as a child was met with shaming, withdrawal, rage, or just disruption and dysfunction in the family system that relied on you to be good, to make them feel okay, then your system will file mistakes as dangerous. So driving yourself to be perfect, never resting, not feeling safe to come down, is fully coherent. It is not something that can be managed solely through behavior because the emotion says that it’s unsafe.

We know that these symptoms are adaptive, protective, survival strategies, and they are not the enemy. Instead, we’ve learned through this book to use them as clues to what the emotional learnings are that we want to update. So again, wonderful news that we know about this process now to update these learnings because it wasn’t that long ago that we thought once you had these learnings that they were permanent.

You might be able to cope. You might be able to reduce the intensity, but you were stuck with them. Thank goodness through research and science now we know that this is not true.

That these old emotional memories can be activated in the moment and then they become flexible or pliable. That data or that file becomes updatable. We can open the spreadsheet.

We can update the data. We can add new data through new experiences, but we can also make it so that the brain waits the old data less. And this is the coolest thing in the world to know that we can revise these learnings.

We activate it. We introduce what’s called a disconfirmation experience or a congruence experiment that introduces a prediction error. These are all fancy words and what they mean is when we activate the old learning, like if I have a need, I’ll be punished, shamed, or abandoned.

And we touch into some of that sadness or fear or terror or anger, whatever it might be. And then we have a new experience where let’s say we might try on telling the barista they gave us the wrong drink and asking them to remake it. Your system may react as if something very dangerous is happening.

Your heart might race. You might feel nauseous. You want to bolt.

You want to just take the drink you paid $7 for and not say anything. But then you do it and they say, oh, sorry about that. I’ll fix it.

Or even if they say, fine, I’ll fix it. You get to observe in real time. You get to take off those old lenses little bit, maybe look over the top of the lenses and say, oh, okay, that sucked.

I didn’t enjoy that that much, but it wasn’t dangerous. And in that moment, that is what updates the memory. That is what updates the learning.

Now, not every new experience can be that simple. It takes time. And sometimes we start with imaginal experiments, meaning we just think in our mind about what it would be like if that happened.

But these prediction errors, when they match and are targeted to the old learning, can update it. So it’s not helpful to just slap an affirmation on and say, I am completely safe to have needs, because you don’t believe it. That is way too big in connection to that old emotional learning, and you haven’t learned that it’s true.

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But when we can try these little steps on at a time of like, oh, part of me expected disaster in that moment, and yet nothing terrible happened. When we hold the both, what we expected and what actually happened, that is what opens the door to reconsolidation. We introduce the mismatch, we juxtapose the old learning and the new learning, and over time and repetition, that learning gets updated.

And this structure is laid out in this book for therapists as well, and it’s called the Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process, and it works very similarly. So if you’re a therapist curious about how to activate this in your own work, you can go back and look at that chapter and listen to that episode, or of course, listen on, because we will continue to explore in updating chapters. So a very helpful case in this book, which you heard me reference, is the case of Richard.

And Richard comes in because he’s struggling with self-confidence. He’s having a hard time speaking up in meetings, and he comes in thinking, how do I get unstuck from this? And so you might think, oh, he has self-esteem, he doesn’t like himself, he doesn’t trust himself. But what we actually learned is that his father was a very outspoken person, but he was also an aggressor.

And so what his learning was is, I must have no confidence at all, or I will become harmful and dominating, and everyone else will hate me. And so in the book, as they move into the transformation phase, Richard was able to practice observing in his day-to-day life when other people speak up in meetings and have good ideas, and everyone responds with relief and appreciation. And that becomes contradictory knowledge for him, a lived experience that can update that learning.

And then over the course of our lives, we get verification, which means we get to see it happen over and over again, and then we get to see the shift within ourselves. This is through observation, which is also called metacognition, learning to observe ourselves like a wildlife documentarian with curiosity and neutrality. We also use interoceptive awareness, where we track both our mind and our body.

And then we use this memory reconsolidation process to introduce prediction errors, aka new experiences, to make a change. It is normal because we can have many, many learnings for this to take time. It’s normal for there to be partial shifts, or to find a deeper learning when we thought we were working on learning A and another learning pops up.

And so noticing is the work. Observing is the work. Continuing to observe and be curious is what will help you with this process over time.

This is why I love getting to do this podcast together and to explore and be curious and go slow, because just thinking about things in this different way, shifting the lens a little bit, being curious, observing what happens as you listen or read, that in itself can be a new experience. That in itself can be an opportunity for you to have a moment where it clicks and you say, oh, maybe I’m not doing this because I’m bad or I’m not trying hard enough or whatever it might be. When you observe that and notice that, oh, moment, that can be a new experience we’re introducing to your brain, where you learn to observe yourself versus criticize yourself.

And so we know that this process takes time. To take it more slowly, to learn to observe things in a different way, we do have to take it slowly. We do have to process little by little.

That is the way the brain and nervous system work. Unfortunately, we can’t rush or push towards this huge change that we might see on social media, even though a part of us might want to. And the part of us that wants to be this big, huge change can also be a part of a deeper learning that says, I’m not acceptable as I am.

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But if we zoom out and we notice that we can learn to be in connection with ourselves, to let our symptoms and strategies make sense, to learn to be more neutral and observe our experience, to insert a tiny pause in between a stimulus and a response, and then to learn to have new experiences that allow us to see things as they are in the present and how they were in the past, that we can update our brain, we can update our learnings, and we can change our lives in that process. So we’re not here to memorize these steps as a formula, but just to notice, maybe 1% more, that your experience makes sense. There is a pathway for change that doesn’t require force and fear and bullying.

Your brain and nervous system are wired to learn. They are neuroplastic. They are able to change, but they need the right conditions.

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So as we continue to work through this book together, we’re going to keep coming back to these foundations. We’re going to look at how different therapies you might already know, like somatic work and IFS, are all using versions of this process, even if they use a different language for it, and we’ll keep talking about how this applies to our real lives, how to implement this in our day-to-day. So check in with yourself.

Notice in your thoughts, emotions, and body sensations what might be coming up as you listen. Is there a symptom or a pattern that comes up where you say, oh, that might be true for other people, but not about me, or where some part of you wants to figure out how to take this information and make a spreadsheet, make a plan, make a checklist? Then maybe just for a moment, you could notice, this is coherent. This strategy makes sense.

This symptom protected me in some way, even if I’m not clear on what it is right now, and there may be new routes ahead, even if I can’t see them yet. So thank you for being here. Thank you for listening and reading, and I’m so grateful we get to walk this road together.

wishing you tiny glimmers ahead,

trisha

p.s. If you’re interested in learning more about how to apply this IRL, you can still join me for my 5 Steps to Change Live Class (also recorded!). I’d love to see you there!

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