Welcome back book club readers and welcome to our new members! SO beyond excited to dive into transformational change and memory reconsolidation together in Unlocking the Emotional Brain. If you start reading and find this one a bit dense, don’t worry, it is! That’s why I’m here: to translate and share this truly life-changing material into something practical and applicable to our lives. Memory reconsolidation is a critical process in creating long-lasting change, getting unstuck, and moving toward the lives we want, and this book gives us allllll the details. If you’re a free subscriber and want to join in, becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack for just $5 a month gives you 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! Now, let’s dive in!
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Welcome back book club members. I’m so excited to dive into a new book together today, Unlocking the Emotional Brain. And this book, be prepared, it is a bit dense.
And so if you’re reading along, you might find it a bit dry and boring at times. But that’s part of why I’m here to help translate this into information that we can use in our daily lives. And I chose this book, despite it being a bit dense and a bit clinical, because this book covers one of the most important things in making change in our life, which is memory reconsolidation.
And so this book will lay the groundwork for a modality of therapy called coherence therapy. So so far, we’ve talked about NARM, neuro affective relational model, and internal family systems through no bad parts. And we explored both of those, those lenses as we dove into adult children of emotionally immature parents.
Just a reminder, if you’re new, you have access to all the archives, so you can go back and listen to all those episodes. It also syncs through to Spotify podcasts and Apple Music podcasts. So you can listen while you walk or while you drive.
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But not only does this book cover coherence therapy, it also talks about the mechanism for many other therapies like IFS, like EMDR, like somatic experiencing. And that is memory reconsolidation. So this chapter is introducing us to the concept of transformational change.
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And transformational change isn’t just a symptom reduction. It’s not just about working on behaviors or coping skills, which you might see in sort of everyday CBT therapy. But it’s about these moments that actually transformationally change these deeply held patterns that we may have held for years or decades.
These are the moments that many of us are wanting out of therapy, but we leave feeling missed and confused because we might try the worksheets, or we might try to update our behaviors, or we might try to have self compassion for ourselves. And maybe it sticks for a while. But no matter what we do, we seem to go back into people pleasing or perfectionism or intellectualization or those panic attacks that just don’t end.
In fact, as they talk about here in most research around therapy, what counts as success is about a 20 to 25% reduction in symptoms. And of course, you might be thinking if I’m suffering a lot, a 20% reduction sounds great. Of course it does.
But as you know, through the work that we explore here together, we’re curious about deep change, building new neural pathways, changing old neural pathways, and coming into our adult consciousness in a way that lets us get unstuck and move forward. And that is where memory reconsolidation comes in, that it is the brain’s process of profound unlearning. This was discovered in neuroscience in the late 1990s, and really hasn’t gotten its due, I think, up until now.
And even now, it’s not really getting its due because it’s finding its way, right? It takes time for research to come into the present day life. But this process of memory reconsolidation, I’ve done a lot of research around, and I’m so excited to dive into it together, because it is truly life changing. So think of it like this, if you have a ton of weeds in your yard or in your garden, of course, you can cut the weeds, or you can even pull them.
But if you’re not pulling them up by the roots, then the problem will return. And you’re also not making space for new things to grow because the weeds can choke out everything else. We are curious about this deep transformational change at that root level.
So let’s talk a little bit about what creates some of these symptoms, as you’ve heard me call them strategies, or in IFS, parts of us that hold these deeply protective strategies. It’s so important, as you know, if you’ve been with me for a while, and if you’re new, to know that these symptoms, these strategies, these protective parts of us are not random, and they are not signs of brokenness. In this book, they refer to them as emotional learnings, and what you’ve heard me call predictive pathways, old BAPs, or old neural pathways.
They essentially represent a neural pathway in our brain that is deeply laden with thoughts, emotions, and body sensations and behaviors. But they’re deeply laden, especially with emotions. It might be rage, it might be grief, it might be fear, there might be shame.
But these are implicit learnings, meaning they’re behind our conscious awareness. They’re not things that we are perfectly able to access. They sort of play out as programs in our brain, just like other neural pathways do.
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For example, handwriting is a form of an implicit learning. It’s not something you have to think about to consciously access. It’s just something that happens.
And so these emotional learnings form in moments of strong reaction, where our brain says, okay, here’s what makes it stick in my brain. It’s frequency and intensity. So if you think about handwriting, there’s usually not an intensity associated with handwriting, but there’s a frequency.
When we’re children, we practice it over and over and over again. So the brain builds a very strong pathway and says, okay, this is something I need to do all the time. I’ll build a very strong pathway around this.
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But when there’s frequency and intensity of emotions, that creates these really strong patterns of learnings. And when they form, they become automatic reactions. So if you were shamed for crying, or you were sent away, sent to your room until you could behave, or you were punished, or you were ignored, what do you learn? You learn that showing emotions means feelings are dangerous.
So of course you would go up into your head. If you learn that you only get attention when you’re performing, when you’re getting straight A’s, when you’re winning the prize, then of course you would learn that achievement equals worth, and you can never rest. You always have to keep going.
These are emotional learnings that are not conscious, but are very well formed. They’re big highways in our brain, which means when our brain is deciding where to go, it will always go towards those big highways because they’re easy, quote unquote, to drive on, and because those highways are marked as safe. And remember, the priority of our brain is always safety.
Safety first. Once safety is met, if you want to worry about your happiness or whatever, maybe your brain will let you do that. But if safety is not met, then your brain will not care about anything else.
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So these patterns are always getting set off in moments where we might feel unsafe. It’s important to understand that when I say safe, I don’t necessarily mean physical safety, though sometimes physical safety has been a concern for people. But what I’m talking about is whether your brain senses things are safe or not.
And in these emotional learnings, safety gets over-coupled, over-linked with things that aren’t actually dangerous in our adult lives, but felt dangerous when we were young. For example, resting and not driving harder to achieve, to be what people want you to be, that’s not actually dangerous in our adult life. But because as children, we are wired to please our caregivers and stay in connection with those around us, it will feel like dangerous.
It will feel unsafe if we’re resting, if we’re not achieving, if we’re not being what everyone else wants us to be. So that emotion is of strong fear and terror, and that emotional learning is what carries through to the present. And that’s why no amount of meditation or mindfulness or trying to relax or going to a spa or whatever you might think you need to do is going to change that pattern, because that pattern is about safety.
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The way we can change the pattern? Memory reconsolidation. So what scientists found with memory reconsolidation is that when one of these emotional memories or survival strategies or protective parts come up, when they’re reactivated, the memory becomes somewhat flexible again. And so for a short window, the brain can revise that old learning.
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So if we think about our brain as a data model that is using all the past data to predict what’s going to happen in the present and the future, when all of that data says resting or feeling my feelings or being myself is dangerous, of course you will not do those things. You will shut yourself down, shame yourself, overwork yourself, criticize yourself. But when we can access some of those memories of that learning, and we can re-pattern them, we can change the data.
We add new data. So even if there’s still the old memories there, it’s revised, and so it feels less dangerous in the present, and it creates more space for us to be in our present, in our self, as they call it in IFS, or in the adult consciousness. So if we think about our brain and our body as a GPS, and it has all these built-in maps that it’s built throughout your life about where danger is and how to stay safe.
Those are those old emotional learnings and neural pathways. So if you were criticized harshly, then your GPS marks mistakes as dangerous. So it will not let you go down those roads.
And if you go down those roads, it’s going to set off a series of things to try to make you stop, which might be panic attacks, or anxiety, or shutting down, or dissociating. So these maps keep happening even when the environment has changed, even when there are new places to explore, new roads to be built in our adult lives. The GPS still says, no, those roads are dangerous.
I can’t be myself. I can’t make mistakes. I can’t be present.
But memory reconsolidation is like updating the GPS. If you remember back in the day before we used our phones for GPSs, you had to download updates for your GPS. You had to buy them and download them as new routes were built.
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It didn’t automatically update. And so that’s kind of what we’re dealing with here with our brain. We’ve got to download the updates through memory reconsolidation and update the routes little bits at a time so that our system can recalculate, our brain can recalculate, and allow us to go down new roads.
That is why this is transformational change, because as you do this process over time, you don’t need to go down those roads anymore, and it doesn’t require constant effort. You don’t have to worry that if you miss a day of meditation, you’ll go back because you quite literally repatterned the memories. Something I really love about this book and about coherence therapy and other types of therapy like NARM and IFS is we don’t have to look at symptoms anymore as maladaptive or as signs of some kind of greater pathology.
These aren’t dysfunctions. Actually, they’re quite functional. They formed in a way that makes sense based on the environment you grew up in or the environment you lived in.
And so the authors of this book talk about if you look at that underneath schema, that underneath pattern of why this developed, what was happening in the environment, then actually the symptoms or the strategies are coherent, meaning they make sense. They are in balance. They are your brain and your body and your nervous system responding to something.
So when we know they are coherent, then we know that we can’t change them through control because they make sense based on the learning. What we do is we update the learning. And as that changes the schema or the overall pattern, then we don’t have to live by that schema anymore.
So we don’t have to battle the symptom any more than we would want to battle the younger part of ourselves or any more than we want to battle a protective part of ourselves. Now, many times people will come into therapy and say, no, no, I hate that part of me. Cut it out.
I want to get rid of it. That makes sense to me. That’s actually part of a schema where you learned that you are the problem and anything that is wrong or bad about you must be a problem.
And so what should you do? Well, you should cut it out, criticize it, get rid of it. That’s a learned emotional learning neural pathway. But what we know is no amount of trying to get rid of parts of us will actually make them go away.
That’s the same as going into the doctor and saying, I want to breathe in, but I don’t want to breathe out. Breathing out is necessary and it’s part of you. So this really gets to shift the lens away from symptoms being problematic, which is so much of what we might hear in traditional therapy or in the past.
It’s shifting, thankfully, but we can start to understand that these symptoms are coherent. These symptoms make sense. They are an ally and a messenger that is showing us what the old learning is.
So how does this process actually work? Well, they touch into it briefly, but of course, we’re going to get to do a deep dive. They call this the therapeutic reconsolidation process. And so step one is reactivating the old learning.
And so that means we’re actually going to touch into that neural pathway together, the thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors. And we know that as we touch into these learnings, these memories, these neural pathways, a part of us feels like it’s happening in the moment. And that is often referred to as experiential therapy.
And we talked about this a lot through internal family systems, what those parts want to tell us, what they’re holding, and through NARM, where we look at the survival strategies, how they developed, where they served us, and where they might not serve us anymore. But we want to be able to access the experience in the present, even though it might be accompanied with painful emotions, because we know from memory reconsolidation, the memory needs to be active in the moment. Now, it’s very important that you’re working with someone, or if you’re doing this on your own, that you scale this, you do it little pieces at a time, because if you flood yourself, that’s not going to allow you to do the memory reconsolidation process.
Now, know that there is no shame, if you’re curious about this in your own life or in therapy. If you are touching into a memory, and you find yourself flooded or overwhelmed or shut down, that’s very normal, and that’s likely another coherent system. So then we might want to work, we might want to shift our work from whatever we were thinking about that led to the shutdown, to the learning about the shutdown.
What happens when I feel big emotions and I need to shut them down? What is the learning there? Then step two is we bring in the new knowledge or experience that directly contradicts that symptom. So if the idea is making mistakes means I’m worthless, and here is this moment where I got third place in the debate, and I came home, and my mom or my dad or my grandma or whoever, they just looked at me and walked away. I could just tell they were so disappointed.
They just, they didn’t engage with me then for several days, and I could tell they were furious and thinking that I’m such a loser. And so what’s the learning from that? Making mistakes means I’m worthless. It’s not enough to just say that’s not true, because it’s a deeply held emotional learning, awash, remember, in fear, rage, grief, and shame.
What we want to do is bring in a contradiction that is experienced as a mismatch. You’ve heard me call it a prediction error, right? If our brain is predicting when I make a mistake, something dangerous will happen. We want to introduce an error that says, here’s a time I made a mistake, and yeah, it was uncomfortable and I hated it, but nothing dangerous has happened.
That is what they call a juxtaposition experience. When we can hold both of those side by side, that’s when the memory reconsolidation process is activated. That is where the old memory can be updated with what is true in the present.
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And as we do that, little by little, that learning loses its charge. The GPS gets updated. That old road is no longer maintained in the same way, and so suddenly we just find ourselves doing something differently.
Now, I say suddenly. This is still a process. Yes, it is a really cool, really effective process, but it is still a process.
Now, there are lots of different modalities of therapy that use this, like we talked about. Coherence therapy, ADP, EFT, EMDR, IFS, somatic experiencing. Of course, there’s so many acronyms, right? But they all facilitate it in different ways, and they believe different things about it.
What I want to say and reinforce within you is that no matter what kind of therapy that you’re trying, the most important thing is that you’re able to take things slowly and stay on your own side. Some therapies promise quicker results than others, and what I will say is it’s different for every person. We might think, oh, well, okay, so I did that memory.
I no longer think that making mistakes is worthless. I’m all good. Well, there are memories and memories and memories.
There are learnings and learnings and learnings that are stacked. So yes, this process is very effective for transformational change, but I want to reiterate again that healing needs to be a slow process. It needs to happen little bits at a time, because if we try to move too quickly, some part of our brain and body are going to respond in a way that that feels dangerous, that feels like too much, and so many of us have learnings around when things are too much, I need to shut down, or things can feel like not enough, and so if things are not enough, then I need to shut down, and we never want to be pushing you towards shutdown.
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So as we’re reading through this book or you’re doing your own therapy, just know if you find yourself going into shutdown, there’s a deeper learning, one that you might not even have verbal access to or memories that you can access, but we know that there’s a deeper learning to be worked with that says being seen as unsafe or being supported is unsafe, or your system in general just feels everything is unsafe, and so it’s always on the precipice of shutting down, and sometimes that can look like actual collapse, but other times that can look like, for example, my favorite intellectualizers, I talk about them a lot because I am one, and so I can really understand what it’s like to be that way. That’s another form of shutting down, and so if I’m doing this work in therapy with someone, and I can see them go up into the analysis, well, I might very gently reflect to them and be curious about what just happened, what happened right before, what roadblock got thrown up that made you go into the analysis, what emotion happened right before that. So if you have seen my five steps to change guide, which by the way is free, and I’m doing a live class on it coming up toward the end of October, it is based on this process of memory reconsolidation with my own experience as a therapist thrown in, and so I will link that here so that you can grab it if you want to and have a look as we read this together.
So that is the remapping process that we have been curious about together all along, and I’m really excited to get to dive in together the science of why this works, of why we are able to remap our brain, and that is memory reconsolidation combined with observation and slowing things down. So maybe you’re thinking about your own inner map as you listen to this, and you’re thinking about one road that you find yourself traveling again and again, maybe that self-criticism or that overthinking. What’s it like right now to think that maybe, maybe, possibly, potentially, you could form a new road? Maybe, possibly, potentially, that symptom has made sense in the past, but maybe you’re wanting to shift it now.
And we just notice what happens when you think that, because a learning might come up right then. Maybe you feel a little bit of hopefulness, and then you shut yourself down, or maybe you automatically say, oh, that might be true for other people, but it’s not true for me. Those are the roadblocks, those are clues that we’ve stumbled upon a place that doesn’t feel safe, and our brain is trying to get us back where we quote-unquote belong, where it’s safe.
It’s always about safety and maintaining connection. And the last part of this intro chapter talks a little bit about some struggles that clinicians and therapists face, and some, I know some of you here are clinicians and some of you aren’t, but this is really wonderful work for therapists as well, because it gives them the space and the knowledge of how to support people to make long-lasting change, and that can feel really good for therapists, and it can feel really good for clients, but it can also take some of the perfect intervention, or in some way that they need to fix their clients. So clients, you’re not a problem to be fixed, and therapists, it’s not your responsibility to fix anyone else.
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So wonderful. I’m so excited to get to dive into transformational change together, and I know I’ve said that several times, but it is so true. This is my favorite thing to do, is to get to explore these things with you together.
If you have questions or curiosities, please feel free to reply or comment here. We’ll get to explore this book together over the course of several months. There are a lot of chapters, so it’s going to take us a bit of time to get through this book, but I think it’s so worthy to do these deep dives and to really learn more about ourselves and the way our brains work.
There will be two live meetings, possibly three, depending on how long this book stretches, because it is a little bit dense. It might be nice to have to have another live meeting thrown in there. I will get a schedule to you soon.
I am working out the schedule myself because I will be doing some big, big things in the later October, which I will share with you later, but I will certainly get a schedule for the live meetings to you soon. And yes, I’m looking forward to continuing on the road together.
Opportunities to work with me:
* On October 26th, 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.
* On November 8th, I’ll be leading a mini virtual retreat for women called The Shift. This retreat is about creating space to step out of old survival patterns and into new ways of being that feel steadier, more connected, and more possible. We’ll weave together teaching, guided practices, and reflection so you can not only understand how trauma and resilience show up in your life, but also begin to gently re-map the pathways that keep you stuck. It’s a space for depth, curiosity, and practical tools you can carry with you long after we’re done. This will also be recorded if you can’t attend live (small group sharing will not be recorded for participant privacy, but all teachings will be!).
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