Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Unlocking the Emotional Brain. If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we slowly and thoughtfully explore this book together. You can also listen on Spotify. These episodes are meant to help translate dense theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change. We also gather twice during each 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 important mechanisms for understanding how lasting change actually happens. It helps explain why insight alone is rarely enough, and how healing can occur after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up in environments where our emotional needs were not consistently met.

If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience. That includes our live sessions, ongoing 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 space possible, and I’m genuinely grateful you’re here and reading along with me.

This week, we’re continuing into the section of the book that walks through different therapy modalities, looking at how each one creates transformational change through the same underlying mechanism: memory reconsolidation. Today, we’re focusing on interpersonal neurobiology, a framework developed by Dan Siegel in the 1990s that looks at how our early attachment experiences shape these mental models, these big books of rules about how the world works, how relationships work, and how safe we are allowed to feel inside of them.

What I love about going through these cases together is that it keeps reinforcing something I think is so important: it doesn’t matter which modality a therapist uses. What matters is whether they are working with the right mechanisms. And those mechanisms, again and again, look remarkably similar underneath the surface. In this episode, we’re going to look at how interpersonal neurobiology activates the reconsolidation process, and we’re going to follow a case that shows something I find genuinely fascinating: how the patterns we carry aren’t always just ours. Sometimes we are holding something that traveled through the people before us.

(0:00 - 4:07)

Hi and welcome back to our book club read-along of Unlocking the Emotional Brain. We are doing a deep dive into this book that tells us all about memory reconsolidation, transformational change, and the therapeutic reconsolidation process. And what all of that means is we are looking at what the mechanisms of change are within therapy.

What is it that allows us to actually create long-lasting change versus feeling like we always have to manage, to be managing our habits, to be managing our behaviors, to be reframing our thoughts. There’s a time and a place for those activities. But this book guides us into deeper understanding of how we can actually create transformational change and work with the root cause of our thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, and patterns in the present, rather than having to try to whack-a-mole down the symptoms that stem from them.

So it’s a really exciting book. It puts together a lot of research into this process. And we are now in the part of the book where we are diving into different modalities, different types of therapy, and looking at how memory reconsolidation plays a role in their process of creating transformational change.

This week we’re going to be talking about interpersonal neurobiology. This is a type of psychotherapy that was created by Dan Siegel in the 1990s, and it too has an exploration into emotional implicit schemas that have been formed in response to patterns of distressing interaction that we might experience in our infancy and in our childhood. So Dan Siegel has done a lot of wonderful work in this field, and let’s look at a little bit of how interpersonal neurobiology uses memory reconsolidation to create long-lasting change.

And before we dive in, if you are new here and you’re not familiar with some of these terms like memory reconsolidation or transformational change, you can go back and listen to the full archive where we have gone through each of these terms and talked about what that means from a mind-body component. So you can see a theme in a lot of these modalities that we’ve discussed so far, that there is this idea of schemas, patterns, parts, survival strategies, and interpersonal neurobiology holds that same idea that these mental models form by an individual and are part of what create our symptoms or our patterns in the present. Think of these mental models like a big book of the rules of engagement.

It’s all of the ways that you learned to interact with the world, positive, negative, and neutral. Not all implicit learnings or rules of engagement are negative. Some of them are pro-social, meaning they are about how we behave in the world to be kind to others, to be in community, to be in connection.

Others are about ourselves, our self-concept, how we see ourselves in the world and relating to others, and they can be pieces of our identity. And others are around trying to stay safe and in connection and prevent damage. And those are the ones that can generate symptoms in the present that come from this early, ongoing, insecure attachment in relationship.

And sometimes we can think about that as harm that we experienced in our early lives. And for some of us, it was very clear that there was harm. And for others of us, it’s less clear.

There wasn’t necessarily a direct harm experience, but perhaps like that earlier book we read, we had emotionally immature parents. Perhaps our parents were under a lot of stress themselves. So we got that slot machine parent where we never knew whether we were going to get love and connection or withdrawn or snapped at and sent away.

(4:08 - 9:52)

All of those insecure moments in an attachment relationship can create these thought, emotion, body sensation patterns of us trying to figure out how to stay safe in this confusing world. So interpersonal neurobiology holds that same idea. They also, much like AEDP and some of these other modalities, hold the idea that the therapeutic relationship, the experience between the therapist and client, can create that reparative attachment experience that can help upgrade our brain functioning in the present.

So as we saw earlier in the AEDP model, the experience of being reflected to from the therapist or having the therapist be this safe, curious person when these patterns or emotions arise in itself is a disconfirming experience. And remember that disconfirming experience is where something different happens from what our brain is expecting to happen. In the predictive brain model, we call that a prediction error.

So if your brain is predicting that, for example, someone’s going to hurt you or send you away when you feel your emotions, and then you get to be present with this therapist that not only doesn’t send you away, but is so curious about them with you, that reflects them with you, that rides the wave with you, that is an experience where your brain predicted you would be hurt or sent away, but instead you get someone who stays in it with you. So a lot of therapeutic modalities hold the idea that that therapeutic relationship is in itself a disconfirming experience, which is part of the memory reconsolidation process. So then interversal neurobiology relies on the client’s felt-sense experience of the therapist’s empathetic emotional attunement, the guidance from the therapist for attending to, noticing, and naming these quote-unquote right brain activities where those implicit learnings are held or unconscious learnings are held, guidance for how to identify the way current triggers might resemble past experiences, and then cultivating all of that into an integrated awareness of what was suffered in the past, the idea being that that will end the projection of the past onto the present.

So again, we see very similar experiences between some of the models we’ve talked about so far, internal family systems, AEDP, EMDR, somatic experiencing, and this is why I always want to emphasize, and I love that this book goes through all of these modalities, it doesn’t matter what modality you choose, as long as they are focusing on these mechanisms of change, and as long as you feel connected to the model and the therapist, then you have everything you need to make a change, because they all kind of hold these same unifying concepts of the therapeutic relationship and the therapeutic reconsolidation process using memory reconsolidation, and interpersonal neurobiology is the same. Now this case is slightly different from some of the other cases we’ve seen, just because of the way that interpersonal neurobiology publishes and shares their information. This is a recounting of a therapist named Bonnie about their case, so it’s not quite as in-depth as some of the other cases we’ve seen.

However, I think it’s important to go through nonetheless to look at how interpersonal neurobiology might help us understand how we can activate this reconsolidation process. So in this case, the client’s name is Cerise, and Cerise came to therapy because all of her close relationships ended in her pulling away whenever the emotional intimacy became intense. So remember, this is step A of the process, symptom identification.

And I just want to make a little note about that off the start, that some modalities start with the symptom identification, others start with desire identification. So instead of what they want to move away from, they look at what they want to move toward. And I think interestingly enough, moving toward the desire is always the way that I have worked and found myself working in my own life and with my clients, because very often people will come in thinking that they have a very clear idea of what their symptoms are.

And again, we know symptom identification is step A in this process, but that doesn’t mean they know what they want. That doesn’t mean they know where they want to go. And because we know so much of the process of trauma, of having emotionally immature parents, of existing in the world in these difficult states, is that we get very disconnected from knowing what we want because of those lenses from our implicit learnings that color and change the way we view the world.

And so very often if I do ask people what they want, they might say something self-critical, or it might be around wanting other people to change their behavior, which of course makes sense. But it’s fairly typical that they might not have a sense of what they actually want for themselves. Because we are often disconnected from choice and flexibility and having needs, let alone having wants and desires, it can be really interesting to start with desire, what we want to move toward or wants, rather than what we don’t want to move toward.

Both are acceptable and valid, but since you’re listening to this not only for, you know, there might be some therapists who want to help their clients, but for yourself, it’s something you can be curious about too as you’re identifying all of your symptoms in step A of this process. You can be curious about what you might want for yourself that might reveal even more deeply held implicit learnings. You might not even be able to identify what you want for yourself.

(9:52 - 10:11)

That in itself becomes the curiosity. What learnings do I have around wanting something, desiring something? So that’s a little side note from me, but models start differently, and I just want to notice that as we’re going together. And you are trying to apply this in your life to understand, starting with the symptoms makes sense, it’s part of this process.

(10:12 - 14:08)

We can also be curious about what we’re wanting for ourselves, and very often our brain will then reveal even deeper symptoms there. Okay, so back to the case where they have identified that Ceres often pulls away when emotional intimacy becomes intense. And so in interpersonal neurobiology, they’re working their way through these childhood memories in which she had felt overwhelmed by her mother, but they didn’t really notice any change from working through these memories.

And so they tried to go deeper and deeper into this source of her fear, and she felt this backing away when she saw an image of her parents in their avoidance, so her parents avoiding each other. And so in memory reconsolidation process, the next step is looking at the underlying emotional learning. This is step B, right? So in this case, this self-protective distancing from her parents’ difficult relationship was looking alongside of, oh, that’s her pattern, right? She observed that in her parents, and then her pattern is distancing herself from her own potential relationship.

So there’s something about a learning here, about an expectation that being in any relationship, any romantic relationship, will have some entrapment into the misery that she saw her parents experience, right? So we know we’re always looking for the deeper learning. What are the rules we learned in our lives? And here we can see it wasn’t just about this avoidance that she experienced from her mother, but her parents’ relationship was so difficult, and she would have felt all the difficulty and pain in that as a child, and so her brain developed a learning that said, if I get myself into a romantic relationship, I too will be stuck in this suffering. So isn’t that interesting, right? We’re always looking for what does the brain think will happen? So if I let myself get close to someone, what does the brain think will happen? Do I even want to have a close relationship? That’s why I like looking at a desire approach.

So if you’re pulling away from emotional intimacy, do you want it? Do you want to be in a relationship? Is that what you’re really wanting for yourself? Because that would be revealing too. If that’s not what you really even want, why? And that’s where we might get to that learning too about any relationship being a trap. So I just want you to see that you can start in multiple directions and still come into that curiosity of what does my brain think will happen with this symptom? What is it protecting me from? What is this strategy? What is the lesser of the two sufferings? Remember, coherence therapy holds the two sufferings idea.

So there’s some suffering that is better to choose, in this case, better to kind of rupturing my own relationships when I get close to emotional intimacy, than letting myself get into this deep relationship and being trapped in misery. And we can see that laid out here. So as this case progresses, they’re looking to work with the quote unquote child states of mind and looking at these inner parents and talking about what was hurting or scaring them.

So many types of therapy use this idea of a child state. In internal family systems, we have the idea of parts, we have exile parts, manager parts, firefighter parts, all of which could represent these child experiences. In NARM, which is not discussed in this book, but we read the NARM book, if you want to go back and listen to that, they often refer to it as the child consciousness.

I want to emphasize here, implicit learnings can be acquired at any point in our lives, not just our childhood. But because there’s so much rapid development and attachment happening within our childhood, that’s very often why we look back there to see what we might have learned. We’re starting from scratch when we’re born, right? So we’re acquiring a lot of learning very quickly, which is why there’s often this focus on our experience when we were children, and what rules and learnings we may have acquired then.

(14:08 - 14:40)

But of course, you can also gather learnings in your adult life too. When we’re talking about the consciousness or the child mind, what we’re really talking about is getting to that implicit knowledge, in this case, relating to her parents, looking at what she might have learned from this experience. And so in this interpersonal neurobiology case, the therapist is eliciting her knowledge and using the parent, each of the parents, as a representative of this process.

(14:40 - 15:16)

So we’re connecting with this emotional learning that we didn’t know was there because it’s unconscious, right? So in this sense, they are connecting first with her father. So they’re looking at what has she internalized? What did she learn after observing with her father? And in this case, Cerise started to notice her body feeling that behavioral impulse to pull away when she felt a romantic partner coming in, wanting more connection. So this seems to imply that she learned that self-protective response of distancing from her father’s example.

(15:16 - 15:40)

Okay, so that continues our information in step B of the process of memory reconsolidation, looking for those underlying emotional learnings. So they stay with this moment in the case, and they let her father know that they would stay with him. And she could feel this frightening loss of connection that her father had felt in the connection with her, with his depressed mother.

(15:41 - 21:42)

Okay, so for her father’s experience, it wasn’t just about his relationship with her mother, but there was an experience he had with his own mother in which she was depressed and pull away from him. So her implicit knowledge, she learned from her father, who learned it from his mother’s emotional disconnection. So he learned to use that emotional disconnection to protect himself from the feeling of abandonment.

You can really see in this case how the patterns pass through generations. And this is the underlying quote-unquote schema, right? The pattern driving her relationship. So this ties up step B. We now know that there’s an expectation of emotional abandonment, and that is what needs to be unlearned.

So in this state, if you’re familiar with IFS The Parts work, which we talked about last time, the part in this case they are referring to as her father, you know, and that makes sense in this context where they really prioritize the early attachment figures, but this could just as easily be a part of us, right? We take on what we have observed and experienced, and we create our own internal parts. In this model, what they’re offering to this father part is this understanding, this comfort, this connection, things that had been missing for him throughout his childhood. And so that’s an ego state of her, as the authors call it.

Think of it as a part, a child consciousness, a survival strategy that she picked up and internalized from her father. And they are now offering to that part of her connection from herself, from her adult consciousness. She is offering to herself what she didn’t receive, which is that connection, that secure attachment from her quote-unquote adult ego state, right? The self with a capital S. And that is providing the disconfirming experience in this case.

So remember, in the therapeutic reconsolidation process, we find the symptoms, we find the emotional learning, we reactivate the experience, which they’re doing by going into this part. We provide the contradictory experience, which in this case is the secure attachment from the adult self and also from the therapist. And when we go into step three, it’s that we can hold both of those states at once.

And when we do that, the brain then reconsolidates the learning, meaning it updates the learning and says, oh, what happened in the past isn’t the same as what happened now. And she could feel this emotional release in the of that feeling of wanting to pull back. And so that disappearance of the somatic feeling that she was feeling, this desire to pull back, is the marker of transformational change.

It’s what lets us know that the learning has been updated. As the case goes on, they then work with her mother part, so the internal experience from her mother’s state. And this one doesn’t come quite as easily.

And I’m really glad that they both named this. It sometimes takes layers and layers and layers of work because the implicit learnings are tangled together to protect us, and because they all stack on top of each other through our lives. I always think of it like an archaeological dig.

We’re going through layers, and based on the era in which the layer developed, there will be different findings, different thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors associated there. And so in this case, they were talking about how as they worked with her mother part, they noticed the inner father watching the process and being curious. So that fearful response of withdrawing is no longer there.

And as they worked with the emotional layers from the mother, the internal mother, there was able to be this internal connected relationship. That dance of avoidance was over. And so after this happened, then her encounters with her parents and other memories, the clients, Cerise, they were softened.

They were turned down. The big emotional charge was not still there. So that is what this case looks like, and how we know transformational change has occurred is the symptoms are turned down.

The somatic symptoms, the cognitive symptoms, the emotional symptoms. Then she doesn’t have that same behavioral impulse to need to back away. And that is the final step, V, in this process, the behavioral and emotional freedom.

I just want to review again that this idea of the parent part, the adult part, and the child part are in many, many models of therapy. For example, transactional analysis is another one that includes those kind of ego states as parts. You can figure out what works best for you.

If you like thinking about it as your internal parent, if you like thinking about it from an IFS model with managers and firefighters, if you like thinking about the adult consciousness versus the child consciousness, it’s all about what works for you. I personally like to think about that idea that all of these schemas are really representations of what? Bundles of thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors related to the rules of engagement that we learned in our lives. And so each of those parts just represents different learnings like that archaeological dig, different layers of our experience developed at different times in our lives that our brain uses to predict what’s going to happen in the present versus what’s going to happen in the past.

I just so enjoy continuing to go through these cases with you because it gives us such a rich opportunity to learn together that there is no one right way to heal. There is just curiosity, observation, connection, excavation, and then building new experiences for ourselves. And very, very often the new experiences that we start with are internal, meaning how we relate to ourselves.

(21:42 - 22:05)

And that gives us back so much agency, choice, power, and flexibility because we no longer have to rely on other people to give us those new experiences. Let me be clear, it is reasonable and makes sense to want the people around us to be safe and to meet our needs. And as we have agency, choice, and flexibility, those are the relationships we will feel drawn toward.

(22:06 - 22:57)

But we do not need other people around us to give us the new experience that we’re wanting to be able to complete this memory reconsolidation process. And very often as we learn to meet ourselves in a different way, we will shift the way we show up in relationships in the present. And that very often leads to a change in that relationship as well.

So thank you again for being here. What a rich and interesting case this was. Based on your feedback, I think we’re going to go through all the cases.

We’re going to go through all the chapters and I’m so excited. I think I continue to learn so much. It’s my fourth or fifth time reading this book from these cases and I think it is the best way to see it applied.

It’s not just theoretical, then we really get to see it step by step. So I’d love to hear your thoughts, curiosities, what you learned from this case, and what you’re exploring. Wishing you a good week ahead.

Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Unlocking the Emotional Brain. If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we slowly and thoughtfully explore this book together. You can also listen on Spotify. These episodes are meant to help translate dense theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change. We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time. If you’d like to learn more about getting unstuck and making lasting change in your life, I have two upcoming classes: 5 Steps to Change and Finding a New Story.

This book takes us deep into the science of memory reconsolidation, one of the most important mechanisms for understanding how lasting change actually happens. It helps explain why insight alone is rarely enough, and how healing can occur after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up in environments where our emotional needs were not consistently met.

If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience. That includes our live sessions, ongoing 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 space possible, and I’m genuinely grateful you’re here and reading along with me.

This week, we’re continuing into Part Two of the book, where the authors begin walking us through different therapy modalities and showing how they create transformational change through memory reconsolidation. Today, we’re focusing on Internal Family Systems. This section of the book is especially meaningful to me because one of the most common questions I get is how to know what kind of therapy actually helps people change. What matters most is not the name of the modality, but whether the therapy engages the mechanisms of change the brain requires in order to update old emotional learnings.

Different therapies can look very different on the surface. They may use different languages, structures, or techniques. But underneath, when real change is happening, they are often doing something very similar. They are helping an old emotional learning become active while something genuinely different is experienced at the same time. That process is what allows the brain to reorganize and let go of patterns that once made sense but are no longer needed.

In this episode, we’ll walk through case examples from IFS to see how this process unfolds in real sessions. We’ll look at how observing and being with ourselves in an emotion can help rewire old learnings we may have held for decades. My hope is that by the end, you’ll have a clearer sense of what to listen for, whether you’re choosing a therapist, doing your own inner work, or simply trying to understand why certain approaches finally help when others haven’t.

(0:00 - 2:51)

Hello and welcome back to our read-along book club where we are reading Unlocking the Emotional Brain. It is the book about memory reconsolidation and coherence therapy and we’re walking through it together where I guide you and translate the information in this book, talk a little bit about what it really means beneath all of the technical terms, and share with you how you might apply this in your life. I think this part of the book is one of the coolest parts of the book because it’s where they take their time and they go through these different models of therapy.

This week, we’re going to look at internal family systems and examine how that transformational change of memory reconsolidation takes place using that model. I love this so much because one of the most frequent questions I get is about what type of therapy should I do if I’m an intellectualizer, if I’m a professionist, if I’m self-sabotaging, and of course the answer is at the end of the day there is no one right type of therapy modalities. And even the type of therapies discussed in this book, the therapist may not always be using the steps for transformational change, but it is possible because these modalities have all the things required to make that memory reconsolidation process happen.

When we’re talking about these types of therapy, we’re not talking about the organization itself. There’s been a lot of things in the news recently about internal family systems and things that have happened within that organization. Just know when we’re talking about IFS, what we’re really talking about is parts work applied in this specific way.

Parts work also comes from schema therapy. Coherence therapy in its own way uses parts work, though it may not refer to it as such. But when we think of parts work, parts are really a story humans have given to bundles of thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors in our brain.

So all of those rules of engagement that we develop over our life, all of those implicit learnings are stored with context. And that context is the thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors that we experienced when they were happening. The choices we had to make about how to show up in our lives, to stay safe, to stay in connection.

All of those things are stored in our predictive brain. And they’re bundled together often in these patterns that go together. So for example, an intellectualizer part may be a part of you, quote unquote, that is a bundle of implicit learnings where you learn to turn down your emotions, disconnect from yourself.

Maybe you feel sort of numb or nothingness in your body. You analyze and ruminate and think all of the time. And the behaviors might be that you never slow down, you never fully connect with yourself.

(2:51 - 7:23)

You’re always going to the next to-do list, the next planner, the next thing. So we might call that a part in certain types of therapies. We might call that a schema in coherence therapy.

We might call that a survival strategy in NARM. But all of those things mean the same thing, which they are those rules of engagement of the way that you learn to be in the world. And we can have different experiences of those rules of engagement based on what’s happening in front of us.

For example, you might be an intellectualizer, quote unquote, that might be the part of you that you’re most familiar with. Those might be the strategies that you’re using in your everyday life. But you may also have a part that is a people pleaser.

So based on the relationship you have the person who is in front of you, you may shift out of that intellectualized state and shift into this part of you that is very hypervigilantly attuned to other people and trying to make things okay for them. Or you may also have a part of you that is very critical alongside of an intellectualizer. Remember, again, these parts are just bundles of thoughts, emotions, and body sensations.

So when we’re talking about these therapeutic modalities like internal family systems, we’re not talking about the organization itself because I’m not really qualified to make comments on it because I’m not involved in that organization. But we’re talking about the modality and how parts work might be used to make transformational change. Now one last thing before we dive in, we’re actually getting pretty close to the end of this book.

We have a couple more weeks of talking about these different therapeutic modalities. But then there’s a really interesting part three where they go through some of these cases. And so I’d love to hear from you if you would like us to go through some of these cases together.

I think it could be really interesting to really dive into some of these cases and look at these unique ways that they’re using coherence therapy. And so as long as that sounds good to you, then we will keep going. But if you would rather curtail part three and not go into the cases and move on to another book, it’s okay to let me know that too.

So please feel free to comment, hear a reply, and let me know about going into part three. If we go into part three, it’s if we don’t, it might be closer to the end of March. And then you can also let me know if there’s another book you’d like to see about what comes next.

I have some ideas in mind, but I’d love to hear from you. Is there a book about a therapeutic modality or boundaries or having needs or whatever it might be that you’re curious about? You would want to know how we can apply this lens to it of implicit learning, survival strategies, and making change? Let me know and we can start looking toward what comes next. So back into chapter 10, which is talking about internal family systems, and they lay out for us here right off the bat, how much this idea of parts or sub-personalities has been used in the therapeutic world.

Of course, this very early idea from Jung, which many of you may have heard of, of the archetypes, right? But this has been a part of many types of therapy, transactional analysis, ego state therapy, gestalt therapy. There’s been parts work and sub-personalities and ego states all throughout the history of psychotherapy. If you were with us when you read No Bad Parts, then you might already be familiar with this, but Internal Family Systems was developed by Dr. Schwartz using that parts language to talk about parts of our experience that carry that emotional memory, referred to as a burden, of these unresolved intense sufferings, of these ruptures that we’ve experienced in our lives.

And so they are kept away from our consciousness. And so the parts of us that are kept away in Internal Family Systems are called exiles. And then there are other parts that operate to protect those exiles, to prevent them from being accessed.

And we have those two parts called managers. And so managers are kind of like those intellectualism, perfectionism, people-pleasing parts. And then firefighters, which are the emergency response part of us.

And so those parts might hold bigger experiences like dissociation, rage, substance use. They’re really trying to suppress any distress that might come up because, again, they’re all protecting those exile parts of us. The exiles are the part of us that hold the deepest, hardest emotional memories of the sufferings we have experienced in our lives.

(7:24 - 9:09)

In IFS, the therapist is working with the client to access the self, the consciousness, the observer in NARM, the adult consciousness, so that we can unburden the exile. We bring the exile into our direct awareness by observing it, and it can be unburdened by feeling and expressing all of that distress that it has held for so long. And much like the other therapies we’ve explored so far, the client and therapist relationship is a key piece for potentially facilitating this therapeutic process.

But the primary experience in IFS is the relationship between the self and the parts. So this is actually an interesting case because the client themselves is a therapist, and they are coming to see this therapist for supervision, because they noticed when they were doing work with a client who was feeling rage, she started feeling a very intense fear within herself that she knows doesn’t make sense in the present context. She knows the client’s not dangerous, she’s not at risk, but she really notices this reaction in her body, specifically in her stomach.

So remember, the first step of identifying something to make a change using memory reconsolidation is to figure out the what and the when. And so we can see in this case here, the what and the when is this tension and upset in her stomach that feels like fear when her client starts to get rageful. And so we can see that in internal family systems, much like the modalities of therapy we’ve explored together in this book and in the past, there’s this curious observation.

(9:10 - 12:33)

There’s not an assuming or an immediate trying to make meaning or manage what’s happening, but there’s this curiosity, this noticing. And so there’s this meeting of this part that feels scared, and it’s felt scared for so long. And so this might indicate in some way that that emotional learning, that anger from other people is dangerous, has been with her for a very long time.

And so we’re identifying this in internal family systems as a part, and so we’re letting that part know that we’re the adult now, we’re here now, we are the self. Just the same way as we might identify our adult consciousness in Narm, or our self, our consciousness in any other work, we want to make sure a foot of us stays in the part of us that is observing, even if the rest of us feels very intensely of that other part. And so we’re just asking and we’re being curious, what does this part want us to know? Why is it holding all of this fear? And so in IFS, this is a key piece to look at the distress held by the exile.

We want to know why this part is holding on to all of this fear, this exile part, so that we can move toward the therapeutic reconsolidation process of step B, the emotional learning. Remember, the reason why it’s so important to get to that emotional learning is because that emotional learning is what is requiring the symptom. The emotional learning is the thing that says this bad or dangerous or hurtful thing will happen if I let myself, whatever it may be, in this case, if I let myself be comfortable around other people’s anger, something will happen, something dangerous will happen if I’m around other people’s anger.

That is the emotional learning that requires the schema, the schema that brings up fear, anxiety, and terror anytime someone else feels anger. This cannot be addressed behaviorally. No amount of telling ourselves, it’s okay if other people are angry, it’s okay if I have a need and it upsets other people is going to address that.

Because remember, there’s this idea of two sufferings or in Narm, the core bind. That’s what we’re going to explore here in this case to figure out what is this suffering that she is avoiding when this part of her is choosing to brace and be afraid. We have to figure out what that emotional learning is to see why the schema or the part is bracing so hard against the anger.

And that’s key in our own process too. We might think we have a sense of why we do this. We might think we know what the quote unquote core belief is, but without really identifying specifically what that learning or learnings are underneath, we can’t target them with this process.

No behavioral change, no thought reframing, no regulating your nervous system will shift that emotional learning without targeting it specifically. So in this case, when she’s asking this part, what’s happening, this part is saying that she learned it’s safer to be silent, not to make demands, not to stand up for herself. So making demands would be standing up for herself and it wouldn’t be safe to do that.

(12:33 - 12:50)

So we see this emotional learning coming out that standing up for herself is unsafe. And so that feeling is powerlessness. But right now we don’t know the full emotional learning because we don’t know a full description of the suffering she’s trying to avoid.

(12:51 - 15:04)

So they’re going to continue to be curious about that, right? This young part that’s frightened, a close part that’s saying, don’t make demands, don’t stand up for yourself. And in IFS, that is the manager. The manager is the one saying, don’t make demands, don’t stand up for yourself, because it’s trying to prevent the distress that would come for the exile part.

And here’s a really important piece to understand here. In this therapeutic reconsolidation process, there’s an idea that there are two things we learned when something hurtful happens. Number one, this hurts.

And number two, here’s what I do about it. And those two learnings get fused together. So in internal family systems, the exile is the hurt part, the part that says this hurts, it’s vulnerable, it’s wounded, it’s feeling all of the pain.

And it got tucked away because it was too hard, too much to feel all that pain consciously. The protector part is the other response. What do I do about this? It is the coping part, the behavior, the strategy, the defense, however you’d like to think about it, that developed specifically to prevent that hurt from being felt again.

They’re not actually separate problems. They’re two sides of the coin. The protector exists because of the exile.

The what do I do about it exists because of the hurt. So we’re really noticing when we’re observing ourselves in this way, we’re looking at is what I’m seeing the hurt itself? Or is it the armor protecting it? Often the thing we might notice first is the armor, the intellectualization, the people pleasing, the perfectionism. But we know that’s not there for fun.

It’s not because we enjoy walking around in those strategies. It is protecting us from whatever the hurt is that lies beneath. And so that’s why we get curious about what is the deeper emotion, the deeper learning underneath the strategy.

The strategy is armor, the hurt is underneath. So again, things like intellectualization are not the problem, but we often target it as the problem. Intellectualization is the solution.

Episode Overview

In this episode, we continue exploring Part Two of Unlocking the Emotional Brain, examining how memory reconsolidation works within two powerful therapeutic modalities: Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Through detailed case studies, we unpack what "changing emotion with emotion" actually means and why bilateral stimulation in EMDR creates lasting change.

The Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process

Step A: Identify symptoms (what and when) Step B: Uncover implicit emotional learnings (the gut-level beliefs) Step C: Access contradictory knowledge (the juxtaposition that updates the brain)

This is the same engine of change across all effective therapies and in self-directed work.

Practical Applications

Observer Stance

Practice slowing down and watching for subtle patterns. Self-criticism, helplessness, and hopelessness often hide in language that sounds very adult and rational. Notice statements like:

"I never follow through because I'm an idiot" (sounds factual but reveals an implicit belief)

"There's nothing that can be done" (helplessness)

"That's just how I am" (resignation)

True accountability sounds different: "It's been challenging to follow through, and I'm curious why, because I genuinely want to do these things."

The Core Bind

Most of us hold both the old learning and the contradictory knowledge simultaneously. This is the bind that keeps us stuck. Therapeutic work (or self-work) is about consciously experiencing both at the same time so the brain can update.

Different Paths, Same Mechanism

Whether you journal, walk, do somatic work, or attend therapy, the mechanism of change is the same: identifying implicit emotional learnings and creating experiences that contradict them. Find the approach that works for your nervous system and trust level.

Important Notes

Not all therapies work for all people at all times

Complex trauma may make highly emotional approaches (empty chair, intense EMDR) overwhelming

The practitioner, your trust in them, and your current capacity all matter

These approaches never focus on symptom management (breathing, grounding) during the reconsolidation work itself - they target the underlying templates creating the symptoms

Understanding AEDP and Memory Reconsolidation: A Deep Dive into Transformational Therapy

Episode Overview

This episode explores Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) and how different therapy modalities create transformational change through memory reconsolidation. Using the case study of "Daniel," a 40-year-old divorced father, the discussion illustrates how therapeutic presence and attunement can help clients update deeply held emotional learnings about relationships and safety.

Key Concepts

Memory Reconsolidation Explained

The process allows the brain to unlearn old emotional patterns that no longer serve us

Unlike exposure therapy (which builds distress tolerance), memory reconsolidation actually updates the original learning generating the emotion

Requires accessing both the belief/cognition AND the feeling that makes it powerful

The emotion is how our brain makes meaning out of original experiences

AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy)

Core Principles

Focused on transformational change from attachment trauma

Emphasizes experiential process - there must be activation and feeling in the present

Based on reparative attachment through corrective attachment experiences

The therapeutic relationship itself can create memory reconsolidation

The Experiential Component

Why experiential matters:

Needs activation - a feeling in the present of these learnings

Not enough to only intellectualize

Even just talking and being in relationship with a therapist activates emotions, body sensations, and memories

The secure base of the therapeutic relationship is incredibly important for creating change

The Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process in AEDP

How AEDP Implements the Steps

Unique approach: Steps 2, 1, 3, V, and A & B occur intermittently throughout

Activation of the disconfirming experience: Therapist constantly asking "How is it for me to say this? How is it for me to be here with you?"

Reactivation of symptom schema: Repetitions of "how it was versus how it is now"

Observation (Verification): Noticing what is different - how the activation is different, how symptoms are different, increased ease

For Therapists

The Containment Strategy:

Don't follow yourself or your client down into strategies and symptoms

Always come back to the present

Always notice: "What are you actually noticing? What's actually happening for you in this moment?"

For Self-Work

When working on your own:

"What's it like to let myself name that it's sad right now?"

Even without tears or body sensations

Slow down from intellectualization

This seemingly small step is actually quite significant

Memory Reconsolidation vs. Exposure/Habituation

Exposure Therapy:

Builds distress tolerance

Brain learns "I can feel this and survive"

Useful but doesn't update original learning

Still have to do management strategies

Memory Reconsolidation:

Updates the original learning generating the emotion

Touches a piece of the feeling WHILE simultaneously holding contradictory evidence

Brain reorganizes data model

Probability of old pattern decreases (99% → 70% → eventually almost nothing)

The Split Screen Metaphor

Imagine a movie screen split down the middle:

Left side: Old experience

Right side: New experience

Both held simultaneously for brain to reorganize

Key Takeaways

Disconfirmation experiences don't have to be as big as you think - even tiny moments of noticing difference matter

The therapeutic relationship itself is transformational - co-regulation with therapist creates new experiences for the brain

Titration is key - little bits at a time, not flooding with emotion

Present moment focus - constantly bringing awareness back to "what's happening right now"

Spaciousness over pushing - allowing room to notice differences rather than demanding full emotional expression

Chapter 6 pulls back to show us the bigger picture: how all the different therapy approaches - IFS, EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and more - work through the same underlying process when they create real, lasting change. We explore the decades-long specific factors vs. common factors debate in therapy research, and what it means for your own healing journey.

In This Episode:

Why different therapy modalities are like different vehicles crossing the same terrain

The Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process (TRP) steps - a quick refresher

The therapy research debate: Is it the techniques or the relationship that matters?

Why feeling safe and understood is essential but often not enough on its own

Memory reconsolidation as the mechanism of change - and why the mechanism isn't the whole story

What this means for your therapy or self-healing work

Key Takeaways:

When deep, lasting change happens in therapy, the same underlying process is occurring - regardless of which modality is being used.

The therapeutic relationship creates the safety you need to do vulnerable work, but the relationship alone usually isn't enough to produce transformational change. You need both.

Memory reconsolidation is the engine of change, but you also need fuel (safety, readiness), a road (observation, curiosity, awareness), and often a driver (therapist or your own developed capacity).

What looks like sudden or accidental change is usually the result of lots of prior groundwork, including building a felt sense of safety and capacity to observe ourselves differently through metacognition.

It's okay - and even helpful - to understand what your therapy is actually doing. It's your brain and your healing.

Connect the Dots:

To NARM: The adaptive survival styles in NARM are examples of the implicit emotional learnings we've been discussing. The TRP framework helps explain how those survival styles can be transformed, not just understood.

To IFS: When you're working with parts in IFS, the moments of transformation often involve the same juxtaposition experience - an exile holding old pain encounters new evidence (often through Self-energy or an updated understanding) that contradicts the old belief.

To Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: The terms of attachment we discussed in Chapter 5 - those unspoken rules about what's allowed in order to stay connected - are exactly the kind of implicit learnings that need to go through this reconsolidation process to truly shift.

Questions to Sit With:

In my own therapy or self-work, am I getting to the feeling of the old learnings, or mostly talking about them?

Have I had experiences in my life that contradict my old beliefs or where something different happened than what my brain predicted? What happened when I did?

Where in my life am I doing the observation and curiosity work, even if change hasn’t happened yet in the way I want it to?

Coming Up Next:

Part 2 of the book walks through case examples from different therapy approaches - showing how the TRP unfolds in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, IFS, and more. We'll get to see the theory in action!

(0:00 - 1:23)

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.

(1:24 - 2:28)

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.

(2:30 - 3:03)

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.

(3:03 - 6:00)

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.

(6:00 - 6:47)

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.

(6:48 - 16:23)

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.

tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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.

(16:24 - 20:16)

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.

(20:17 - 21:19)

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.

(21:20 - 22:26)

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!

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!

(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.

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!

(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.

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. 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.