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Hello 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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.