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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 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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.