tiny sparks, big changes

Hello and welcome to our No Bad Parts Book Club and read along together. I'm so excited that you all are here to join me. We have a lot of new people joining me this time, and so I just briefly wanted to discuss the format our book club has taken in the past.

The first thing that's really important to know is it's okay if you don't have the time to read along with us right now. Those of us who are not reading along will still find a lot of rich value in the discussion, and in each post I'll be breaking down the chapter and discussing it. So even if you haven't read it, you'll be able to listen and take in the material. Of course, you are more than welcome to read along, but I know that everyone reads at a different pace and we all have different levels of capacity in our lives, so you are welcome here, even if you will not be reading along, but just listening along. Each week I will discuss a chapter of the book and break it down a little bit of my viewpoint as a therapist, and how we might apply this in our personal lives. That will be the bulk of our book club.

You are welcome to leave questions or comments on each post, and I will respond to your questions, either in the comments or on our next session. I will record a response to your question. We'll also have a private chat on Substack that's for paid subscribers only, which is where we can discuss as we're reading or ask questions or share curiosities that pop up…or share interesting TikToks we saw- we can share anything we want to there.

Once or twice during this period, we will have what I call like a pop up fireside chat, where I'll give you about a week's notice that we're going to have a live meeting, and then we'll all pop on zoom together, discuss. I'll answer questions, share curiosities, whatever we might be drawn to in that hour. We will have live meetings that usually take place at 6 p.m. eastern time, which I know will not work for everyone in all time zones, so they will be recorded and then shared on Substack.

This book has 11 chapters and we'll see how we go with the chapters. Usually I do one chapter a week just because there's a lot of rich material to talk about. But sometimes we might do two chapters just depending on how I'm feeling with the content. And this book club is for my paid subscribers, so if you're a free subscriber and you'd like to join, you can upgrade to the paid membership. It is $5 a month, and that helps support the time that I use to put together these book club posts and other parts of my work.

For those of you who are new here, we just completed our book club on the book about NARM- Neuro Affective Relational Model called The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. Because I am a therapist who practices NARM and uses an IFS lens, you will hear me make references to NARM and how NARM works in relationship to IFS. If you would like to learn more about NARM and how that might work with IFS as a paid subscriber, you have access to the entire archive so you can go back and listen to all the chapters that I've recorded about the NARM book called The Practical Guide for healing Developmental Trauma.

So right off the bat, that mono mind paradigm is that idea that we have just one mind or just one consciousness inside of our mind. And Richard Schwarz suggests that we actually all have these different parts inside of us or these sub minds. And this can be really confusing, especially if we have heard of things like multiple personality disorder, which is now called dissociative identity disorder. A lot of times people will think, well, does this mean that I have dissociative identity disorder? Of course, I'm not here to diagnose anyone, but for most of us, the answer to that question is no.

Thinking of these different sub minds or parts of us is a way to understand the different experiences we all have inside of us. So as he uses the example of kind of like that classic angel and devil on the shoulder, one part of us saying go for it and another part of us saying, don't you dare, you can kind of think of that as two separate parts or two separate voices inside of your mind. And so IFS relies mainly on this idea of parts that develop at different times in our lives. If you've seen the Inside Out movies, then you're familiar. They use IFS, Internal Family Systems, as a model for those movies to really help differentiate those parts. In Inside Out, the parts have emotion names in IFS. We don't necessarily assign emotions the names, because we know each part of us can experience a wide range of emotions, but I think Inside Out gives you a great idea of what it's like to have those different parts in our mind that are trying to run the show.

He does a really important and big thing here in the first chapter of laying out this idea of willpower and shame that is so pervasive in the American culture. And if you joined us for the NARM Book Club, you know how much we talked about this idea of shame, and it has this idea that we should be able to manage everything through willpower: pull yourself up by your bootstraps all the time, and anything else is part of your kind of like your…evil impulse. And so you need to keep that evil impulse under control with your drill sergeant or inner critic selves. But most of us find that the harder we try to get rid of these parts of us that are not “willpower,” the more they fight back. And this is why the self-help industry is $1 billion industry. If you've watched any of my content and you know that, I kind of have ongoing criticism of the Atomic Habits book, and if the Atomic Habits book works for you, that is wonderful… But books like that take this idea that you can change your habits and make it really, really simple, as if we all should be able to do it.

What happens is I get a lot of people coming into therapy saying, well, I did all of these things in the book and I still couldn't stick to my habits. And that comes back to this idea of willpower and shame. We should be able to stick to what the Atomic Habits book says or whatever other self-help book says. And if we can't, it's because there's something wrong with us. And so we criticize ourselves more. And I don't know about you, but if someone's criticizing me, do you think I’m more or less likely to do the habit change? Less likely. Right. So we get stuck in these endless internal battles of trying to willpower and pressure our way into change, and IFS offers a different viewpoint of things. It's really important to know that it doesn't mean there's not room for wanting to set habits or make change in our lives, but that we all have parts that want different things. And some of those things might be things that are not in pursuit of what is good for us or what we really want. We might have parts who want things that are really bad for us, and that's not because they are bad parts, but because there's something they're trying to accomplish with that desire.

Many traditions, whether religious or philosophical or cultural, teach us that we have this single mind, and to control this single mind, we have to overcome our thoughts and overcome our emotions. And what that does is it sets us up to constantly attack ourselves when we can't control our thoughts and can control our emotions. And it really strengthens that inner critic part. Certain types of therapies and spiritual practices can reinforce this with this idea that to be successful in life or to achieve enlightenment or whatever it may be, that we have to control more tightly; grip more tightly onto our thoughts. But in IFS, we're challenging this, and we're suggesting that the thoughts and emotions and body sensations (I'm going to throw that in there) that we experience come from different parts of us. So rather than having one mind that is just throwing these thoughts at us that we need to try to control, we have these different parts that have developed in different parts of our lives to try to keep us safe. Rather than viewing them as obstacles that need to be controlled through habit change and planners and spreadsheets, instead we view them as parts of us that need to be heard and loved and taken care of.

Now, mindfulness or observing is a really big part of IFS- not to try to shut down our emotions and thoughts or to stop our thoughts, which oftentimes mindfulness has gotten to be this idea that we need to stop our thoughts- but rather to observe and be curious and notice. So if you go back and listen to any of my posts about the NARM model, for those of you who weren't there with us, you'll hear me talk nonstop about observing and noticing. Because if we can observe and notice with curiosity and neutrality, then we have the opportunity to intervene, do something different, or show up for these parts in a way that they have never been shown up for before. So our goal in observing isn't to push these parts away, but to connect with and support the healing of these different parts of us. So we're not trying to quiet the mind, but rather to bring them in, listen to them, and nurture them. And that as we do that, they can express what they've been holding all along. Then, they will lessen or shift into strengths.

Doctor Schwartz really shares his curiosity and learning here as a therapist, where he used to subscribe to the sort of mono mind idea of just trying to control and change our behaviors by changing our thoughts. But then he started to notice that a lot of his patients were sharing these different parts of them. Some of them were helpful, some of them may have been enacting harm to the patient, but all of them were protective and shaped by that person's past experiences. And when he was able to be with the clients and allow these parts to share their stories and how they might have been frozen in time from a younger part that experienced trauma or difficult experiences, then things started to shift a little bit. Then the part started to be less destructive and less harmful and start to take on different roles. And so even a behavior as they share in this book, like self-harm, could be part of one of those internal parts of us that is trying to protect us.

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

Hi Book Club pals! I’ve had THE BEST time reading The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. Here’s the recording of our final fireside chat for this book (there’s a transcript here on Substack or you can listen on Spotify/Apply Podcasts!) - such a rich evening together. We’ll be starting No Bad Parts with our first post on Chapter 1 on Oc…

Hello Substack Pals! We’re getting close to wrapping up our first read-a-long and it’s been so wonderful getting to engage and share in this work with you. I’d love to hear from you about what you liked, what you wish were different, and ideas for future book clubs (or other ideas!).

On TikTok, many of you have expressed a desire for deeper support and connection in your personal growth journeys. This inspired the idea of the “Self Help Drop Out Club”—a space for those who want to move beyond quick-fix advice and dive into meaningful, lasting transformation - a mixture of a community chat space and live meetings. If this resonates with you, let me know in the comments or reply directly. Together, we can create something truly supportive and connected.

Be sure to scroll to the bottom for our live book club meeting date and link!

Also - new this week, I added a summary! I know for some of us, 25 minutes is way too long to be able to listen to/take in all at once. So if you, like me, enjoy a shorter summary to process and then come back later to the longer post, scroll down to the bottom!

Now, onto our transcript this week:

Welcome back for our read-along of the Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. This week we're going to be exploring Chapter 7, the NARM Emotional Completion Model.   And as a reminder, I'm here recapping these chapters for you, whether you're reading along with me or you're just listening along. I want to make this information more accessible so that you can take it and apply it to your life. Thank you so much for being here and supporting my work in this way. Let's dive in.  

So as you may remember from our earlier discussions together, when we are children, we are biologically wired to stay in connection to our caregivers above all else. We rely on our caregivers to love us, support us, and provide a safe and caring environment where we can learn and grow and develop. And when our environment is not able to provide that to us and our caregivers are not able to provide that to us for whatever reason, it is the most heartbreaking experience because we won't expect that from our caregivers. We expect our caregivers to love us and show up for us.  And when they aren't able to do so, when we aren't able to safely attach to them, when we aren't able to safely develop and grow and be curious and have emotions, it is so devastating. It is hopeless. It is helpless.  

And we will have this experience of really, really deep despair.  And so, of course, as children, living with that deep despair just feels completely intolerable.  

As adults, at the very least, when we experience heartbreak, we have this ability to understand it, to have some cognition about it and to feel our way through it. But as children, we can't conceptualize that maybe our parents are having a hard time or our caregivers are having a hard time.  Instead, it feels like something must be wrong with us.  And so, of course, we would disconnect from our emotional experience to prevent a deeper feeling of loss. And when we do that, we disconnect ourselves from the full vitality and connection of life. But that's what we had to do to survive.  

When we get into our adult life, those survival strategies don't magically disappear.   And so we're trying to navigate a life where we want to feel fullness, connection,   love, aliveness, but we had to disconnect from that. And that is what can lead to us feeling so stuck and so dissatisfied in our lives. Emotions are such a central part of how we understand ourselves, how we create meaning in our lives,  and how we connect with others and navigate the world.  

And so if we learned that it wasn't safe and we had to disconnect from our emotions,   then we are missing a key part of our experience. That is why people who identify as intellectualizers, though they might understand everything very clearly, still feel stuck because they have that disconnection from their emotional experience.  

And often, if we had to disconnect from our emotions, it means we disconnected from our body and the sensations there as well.  And that's often where we see that freeze or that functional freeze of the nervous system where we're going through life, but we feel numb or disconnected from ourselves.  

So, for example, in our early lives as children, we are crying because we don't have the ability to regulate ourselves as babies because we're stating that we need something from the environment.  And in a healthy, securely attached environment,   the child will be responded to and the need will be met. And that emotion of distress or need or whatever it is, feels resolved and completed. And we can go back to feeling regulated and exploring and playing and connecting.  

But if we live in an environment that can't meet our needs, then we experience an environmental failure or a rupture.  In that case, what we will learn is that it's not okay to have needs.  Maybe my caregiver comes and they're upset, or my caregiver comes and they're withdrawn, or they don't come at all.  So over time, what we learn is to shut down our experience.  Because it's futile, it's useless.  And not only is it useless, but it disconnects us further from our caregivers. And that, again, brings up that hopeless, helpless feeling.  

None of this, again, is about blaming your caregivers and parents, but rather understanding how early environmental failures and ruptures led to us disconnecting from our own emotions, from our own needs.  And these roots can start so early.   And they start in families,  even if you weren't harmed, even if your parents loved you,  but they couldn't attune to you and they couldn't show up to you, or you had ruptures in school through bullying or from your teachers.  Then we learn from this deeply young age to shut down our emotions and shut down our ability to know what we want and move toward it, which is that experience of agency.  

Part of moving forward and connecting to ourselves or our adult consciousness is allowing some of these emotions that have been held down for so long to be felt and move through. Oftentimes people think why would I need to feel them now why can't I just be rid of them if I'm not feeling them right now and the answer to that is you're feeling them you're just working really really hard to hold them down to repress them to push them down you may not be aware of that because you may have been doing it for so long.  

But that's where that same analogy comes in of driving the car with the emergency brake on.  It takes such a toll on us over time.  And so the answer isn't to hit the gas harder, but the answer is to start to let off the emergency brake.  As we explore this model of emotional completion,   we want to differentiate between fear and anxiety,   which is such an important part of the NARM model.  

Fear or terror is a response to something that is directly threatening us,   that is directly threatening our survival.  So you're out walking in a bear,   you come upon a bear or,  you know, my example of a tiger trying to eat you.   Your survival system is going to activate.  Your nervous system and brain are going to immediately choose a fight,  flight,  fawn,  or freeze response to ensure that you survive.  None of this is conscious.  It's all happening very, very quickly below the surface with your brain and nervous system deciding what is the best choice of survival.  

It is so important to understand that as children, these environmental failures don't just make us feel anxious, but they trigger terror.  Because we know, again, that biological wiring makes it so that the threat of the loss of connection with our parents and our caregivers, our attachment relationship, it does impact our survival.   We are completely reliant on the adults in our lives as children to survive.  So that loss of relationship is literally a threat to our lives.  

That is different from the adult experience where we know that losing a relationship or having something scary or challenging happening to us can be hard, but that our life is not at stake.  And that is very, very different  

NARM talks about this as futuristic memory, meaning where we're holding these past experiences and projecting them into our present and future.  Here and on TikTok,   you've likely heard me talk about predictive patterning, and this is that same idea where our brain is using what has happened to us in the past to try to predict what is going to happen in the future.  And again, that's to keep us safe.  

It's actually super adaptive so that we don't have to be making conscious choices all of the time, which would be exhausting. The predictive patterning lets us drive to work safely, even if we're not % focused.  But where it becomes challenging is if we've had these environmental failures in our early life, and that sets up a pattern that says,   for example, everyone is going to reject and leave me because I'm not good enough.   Then we are predicting that all of the time to people around us.  And that creates this internal experience of anxiety.  

So when NARM is talking about this distorted reality, this futuristic memory that happens for us in adult relationships, that is because in our brain, those old predictive neural pathways are there telling us that is what is going to happen.  So it's not just that you're anxious,  it's that your brain has an old predictive pattern saying,   having needs is unsafe because I may lose the connection.  Being my own person is unsafe because I may lose the connection.  

And so it's entirely possible that in your adult life, the anxiety that comes up has nothing to do with the present situation, but is rather that old predictive pattern.   We know that we can change predictive patterning, thank goodness, right?  We know that we can change our brains and form new pathways.  But to do so, we have to be aware that a predictive pattern is coming on. And that is why I talk so much, and NARM talks about this too, about learning to observe these different patterns or these different parts of us, and to start to be curious about, similar to rock strata, like the Grand Canyon, where you see all the layers, to see what lies beneath.  

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

Hi, and welcome back to Tiny Sparks. This week we have a little mini podcast episode. I like to change up the way I present the information to you, because some of us like to listen, some of us like to read, and the good thing is, with the podcast episode, if you don't want to listen, you can read the full transcript below.

So this week, I wanted to talk about something that comes up so frequently in therapy and healing work, which is the idea of self-sabotage. I see people all the time on social media talking about this, and very, very often the people I work with will come in and say, oh, I was making so much progress. And then I did this, this and this this weekend. And I'm just too self-sabotaging. And oftentimes the way that term self-sabotaging is used is it's very critical, it's very collapsing. It's this idea that I was doing good and now I'm bad. I'm sabotaging myself. And very often, what I want to support people in knowing is that it's not that you are “bad” or purposefully getting in your own way, but rather that a part of your brain is trying to protect you and keep you safe. That automatically shifts the lens from this collapsing blaming lens to this understanding of there's something deeper happening when we talk about self-sabotage.

People mean all kinds of things when they talk about self-sabotage. A lot of times people will talk about things like procrastination, oh, I landed this project that I'm really, really excited about, but instead of working on it this weekend, I scrolled on my phone and watched TV all weekend. I am self-sabotaging and always delaying things- I'm never following through. Self-sabotage can show up in other ways, too. Perfectionism can be a form of self-sabotage, where we set impossibly high standards for ourselves that we can never reach. But oftentimes, self-sabotage people mean that they're not on the path that they want to be on. So they'll say, well, I was really wanting to go to the gym every day to take care of my health, and I did it for three weeks. But then this weekend, I didn't go to the gym at all. I laid on the couch all day and I just ate snacks, and I didn't move, and I didn't even go on a walk. I'm just really self-sabotaging.

So first, there's this really problematic idea, which is that when we're wanting to make a change in our lives or to do something differently, or to move toward something different, that we have to be doing it exactly right every single day, or else we're not successful in that change. That, in its core, is a misunderstanding of how our brain works. When we're trying to make changes or move towards something we want that is new, that is different, that is something we haven't done before, we have to think about our brain and to understand that the things we have done repeatedly in our lives are like beautiful, paved highways in our brain. Our brain creates these patterns on based on what has happened to us in the past, so that it can predict what is going to happen in the future.

So you can kind of think of the roadways in a city. They're not going to make beautiful big paved highways out in the rural country where not a lot of people go. They might have one, two lane rural state highway. They're not going to have a big, beautiful, gorgeous 12 lane interstate. They make the interstates around the major cities where there are a lot of people going, and our brain works the same way. It builds these pathways to say, this is something that's happened in the past. It's likely something that will happen in the future. It's something that I need to be able to access regularly. So I will build a roadway around it. It doesn't matter whether it's something that we like, something we don't like. It's all about what is going to keep us safe, keep us going and what we do repeatedly. When you want to make a change in your brain, you are saying, I want to go off of this interstate highway that I drive on every single day, and I want to go out into the Amazon jungle. That's what it's like in the rest of our brain outside of these neural pathways and predictive patterns.

So when you're wanting to make a change in your life, you are basically getting off the interstate and you get off the exit, and not only is there not a road there, but there's a really, really dense, dense, dense jungle. So it's not realistic to expect that you're going to be able to make a sudden change, because when you get off the interstate and you're in the jungle, it's like, huh, I can't even I can't even drive my car. I'm gonna have to get out of my car and start walking and start hacking down vines. That's what it's like when we want to make a change in our brain. So you can see why. First off, it's simply unrealistic to expect that when we want to make a change, we're going to do the change every single time. Like maybe ten times you'd get in your car and you drive on the interstate, which is not going to the gym. And the 11th time you go out into the jungle, you start hacking down vines, and you do go to the gym. Very often when we start to make a change, we have some initial excitement about making the change, so we're able to override and just kind of go out into the jungle. But after a while, our brain gets fatigued and wants to go back to that old pathway of not going to the gym. In this example, it starts to get a lot deeper than that when we recognize that not only is our brain not wanting to go from the roadway into the jungle, but it's also trying to protect us and keep us safe.

The brain wants to maintain something called homeostasis. And homeostasis means keeping everything the same. It wants to do that because it doesn't want to expend extra energy trying to make changes all of the time. So it wants to stay on those familiar, comfortable highways. When we tried to disrupt the homeostasis by going against the same things that we have always done, the brain is going to say, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa whoa, pump the brakes. In a way, our brain will actively resist change. Then add the next level onto this: when we start to understand that these predictive pathways, these neural pathways in our brain formed to keep us safe based on what has happened to us in our earlier life. Then it gets even more complex.

So if you start to think about what in this example, what does going to the gym represent? Let's just say that going to the gym represents taking care of yourself, that you really want to be able to show up and take care of yourself. It doesn't matter if you walk ten minutes on the treadmill or you stretch or whatever it is, you just really want to start taking care of yourself more. Sounds great right? We're always talking about self-care and taking care of ourselves. What happens if in your early life what you learned is having needs made everyone upset? Maybe in your house what you learned was, when I have a need, when I want something, when I act out a little bit or I reach towards something that I want, everything in my house feels really tense. Maybe it's that your family didn't have a lot of money, so when you wanted something like to go on a field trip, it wasn't that your family didn't want to support you in that, but they just genuinely didn't have the funds. So there was a lot of tension, a lot of stress as your parents tried to figure out how to juggle that and make that work. Or maybe you had caregivers who just couldn't take care of their own needs. They didn't learn how to do that. And so then when you had a need or want or an emotion or an experience that made them feel really overwhelmed, so they pulled back from you, or they sent you to their room or whatever it is, or maybe you lived in an environment that was very emotionally volatile.

So you learn from a young age, having needs and wants was just an unsafe experience. Things already felt so much, so volatile, so unsure, that you just learned to keep your needs and wants shut down- to not take care of yourself, but to focus on taking care of and attuning to everyone else's needs around you. In each of these situations, what is happening is your brain is forming predictive patterns in your brain to say having a need, having a want, having an emotion, having needs, and not focusing on the needs of people around me is dangerous. And this is from the mind of usually a child, a younger part of us. Yes, we can experience this as adults too, but it oftentimes starts in our early environment where children don't have the cognitive complexity- or maybe as adults we don't have the safety- to choose and say, I want to do something differently. This isn't about me. The fact that my parents can't support my needs or my partner or whoever it is isn't about me. We might not have had that opportunity or the ability to do that, because we are so wired to stay in connection to our caregivers in our early life, but instead what we do is we just say, well, if I have to choose between my caregivers and me, I'm going to choose my caregivers. Because it just feels so unsafe to consider anything else. So boom, now you have this really well formed interstate highway in your brain that says choosing myself, having needs, attuning to myself, taking care of myself puts my connection with others at stake, which means it puts my life at stake.

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

Welcome back to the read-a-long of The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. This week we’re exploring the end of chapter 5 (finding agency - the thing we all want!) and chapter 6 (reflecting psychobiological shifts aka noticing what happens in ourselves as we shift)! You can join at any time, even if you aren’t currently reading the book - I’m here to recap and break things down for you so you can take this and apply it to your life. Thanks for being apart of this community, I’m so glad you’re here. (By the way, if you didn’t know already, you can listen to this episode on Spotify or Apple Music - if you’re like me and love to listen to podcasts on your walk, add it to your listen list over on those platforms, too!).

By the way, I wanted to let you know I am hosting Part Two to my “Let's Talk About Getting Unstuck” on August 30th at 7:00 pm EST. It will be recorded if you can't attend live and I'm so excited about it.

Part One was wonderful and so uplifting to get to do. And that recording is available on my website. You don't need to have been to part one to join us for Part Two, but you might find it interesting in Part One I'm talking a lot about nervous system flexibility, how our nervous system and brain work together. Part Two will be about putting it into practice. So I would love to see you there. I have a little coupon code for all my Substack readers. If you'd like to join, you can get 20% off (coupon code is: bookclub). Have a great week and I'll see you back in two weeks!

Welcome back for our reading of the Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. Wherever you are in your reading process is just fine. Or maybe you decided not to read the book at all, but just to join in the discussion. Either way, I'm happy you're here.

We left off talking about the very, very powerful pillar in NARM of reinforcing agency and really getting curious to start to notice how some of the experiences we’re having may be internal processes that we learn to land on ourselves. For example, instead of saying I feel guilty or I felt ashamed, we could notice that maybe there's a way we are guilting or shaming ourselves.

And there's a little reflective exercise at the end of chapter five to notice the shift from I feel pressure to I put pressure on myself. I feel burn out. I burn myself out. This is such a critical, critical piece of understanding what it's like to live with developmental trauma, where for many of us, we didn't have a say over what happened as a child and so we developed these protective survival strategies. As adults, we become the ones who pick up the torch and use those things against ourselves to stay disconnected from our agency, from our capacity, from our ability to move forward because of that internal dilemma where moving forward feels like it's a risk to our connection. So it gets that pathway going in our brain that says, oh my goodness, a tiger is trying to eat me.

So becoming aware of the ways that we set our own agency down by doing things like shaming ourselves isn't to make you feel worse, but to help support you in understanding how some of the roadblocks (not all of them), are things that we can start to be curious about slowing down and getting underneath.

There’s a great dialogue here between therapist and client that can be really helpful for us to start to understand how to add this NARM lens onto things, how to add a developmental trauma lens onto things, to notice how so many of these subconscious predictive patterns are happening all of the time. For example, maybe we start to feel anger and we use that shame to shut ourselves down, or we have a need and we guilt ourselves for having the need again to shut down our agency. And all of this is because of those learned patterns that we learned that we had to do as a child to maintain connection with our caregivers and in our early environments.

But as adults, those same patterns are now getting in our way of feeling our feelings, expressing our needs, connecting safely to our body, and just having the agency and choice to do those things.

It's one of the scariest and best thing that I've ever done, is to start to accept my role in my current life of where I get in my own way- to own my part of the dynamics in my life. And that doesn't mean that there aren't other dynamics happening around me, in relationships and in the systems in which I live. But to be able to own my part and consider that maybe, possibly, potentially, I can do something differently is the best gift.

Some of this sample language here, while again it's suited towards therapists, can be wonderful for us in our own processes to be curious, to notice: Hmm, I wonder if I'm starting to feel shame when I feel angry, or when I feel sad, or I wonder what I'm telling myself about that experience. I wonder how I'm relating to this situation. So powerful for this process of internal curiosity, internal observation, which we know is what allows us to reconnect to that agency.

I really love this practice exercise at the end, and if you don't have anyone you could do this with, perhaps you could do it with your therapist, or you could even do it written in a journal to notice an area where you're feeling stuck. And then let yourself be curious at this question what else is true? Not because we're trying to override the area where you're feeling stuck, but because we're curious.

 Hello and welcome back to our Read Along of the Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma, where I use my expertise as a therapist who specializes in complex and developmental trauma to break down popular self-help books and to create a community where we can explore and ask questions together.

I have had so many new faces joining me on Substack in the last few weeks, but I decided to make this post a free post so that you could get a little feel for what we do over here in our book club read-alongs. You don't need to own the book, or even to be on the same chapter that we are on. If you are reading along, because I'm going to provide a little summary and then share some of my thoughts about it as well.

Listen above or read the transcript below!

This week we'll be exploring chapter five of The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. This chapter is on reinforcing agency, which is a huge concept in the NARM model.

To understand agency, we need to understand what we're talking about when we talk about our sense of self or our observer, or our curious experiencer, as I call it. And to do that, we need to understand the concept of structuralization. To put it simply, structuralization is a process through our development, starting as children, where we take our life experiences and we internalize them to build maps or models of the world around us, including how we see ourselves.

And this sort of internal map helps shape us: what we think about ourselves, how we feel about ourselves, what we allow ourselves to do. And we're always sort of filing that information away, determining if we can clear through developmental gates. And when I say gates, I kind of imagine it like a hurdle. Can I have my own needs? Can I be my own person? Can I do those things and still be loved? We're exploring each of those things starting from infancy throughout our life, and based on the feedback we get from our early environments, including our caregivers, schoolmates, teachers, anyone who's around us, that's how we build our internal sense of self and our internal map of the world.

You could almost imagine a little kid building something with Legos, and every Lego brick that they pick up represents an experience or an interaction they have with the world around them. Positive experiences where they feel loved, seen, attuned to, or supported help them build a strong, stable structure, a strong, stable foundation. Negative experiences where they might feel unseen, neglected, unsafe, or even mis-attuned to, meaning you're supported and you're loved, but there's a miss.

So maybe you were a highly sensitive child, but you grew up in a family of engineers who weren't extremely connected to their emotions. While they may have loved and supported you and made sure that you had a stable home, you may have felt missed because you felt things strongly and you were always feeling emotions. Being this attuned to in that way leads to a shaky, unstable structure. And so as we grow up into teenagers and adults, that internal structure that we've built influences our entire world- how safe we feel having agency, how safe we feel being ourselves, responding to challenges in our life, connecting with other people, building relationships.

If we have a strong structure, then we likely have a strong sense of us as ourselves, and we can handle stressful things and know that we are still okay. So we're not in survival mode. We don't have those predictive patterns in our brain saying that a tiger is trying to eat us all of the time. But if we had a history of misfortune or a lack of safety or any other sort of environmental ruptures and failures, then we don't have that foundation. And so when things happen, or when we think about the potential for hard things to happen, we might get that feeling that things are unsafe because we don't have that stable structure.

Another way to think about structuralization is through that lens of the different parts. So if you've seen the Inside Out movie, you might be familiar with what I'm talking about, where we might have a very strong sense of self who is able to keep us steady and moving forward even when things are challenging or hard, even if anxiety is trying to take over or anger is rushing up to the board. And if we don't have that experience, then we might have these parts that split off. We might get fragmented internally, where we have to take those parts of us and put them underground, because it doesn't feel safe to have those parts of us out in the world. And when we do that, when we have to take our true self and hide them underground, lock them up in a castle, put on all these suits of armor, then we are disconnected from that curious experience or observer of life. And so what can become impaired is that agency. And that's what this chapter is all about.

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

Agency is about that ability to observe and be present to our own experience- how we show up in the world and how we are presenting ourselves to others out in the world. It is such a critical, critical piece of how we move toward what we want for ourselves. It really stood out to me in this chapter, the quotation that they said “I am the one living my life. I am living life versus life happening to me.”

So as you have learned and I read along so far, the NARM model does not focus on reliving all of the trauma that happened to you, but rather being curious about how those survival strategies may have developed for you to adapt to the environment around you based on that early structure, based on that self that you were able to build. So if we lived in an environment where things did not feel safe, we did not have a false sense of safety. It doesn't matter if we actually were safe, if we didn't have a false sense of safety, for example, that misattunement that I used, then we split those parts of us off and we move forward identifying with those survival strategies. What that means is instead of being able to recognize: this is a pattern, I learned to keep myself safe, we feel like it is us.

A great example of that is sometimes people will say, well, I really want to set this boundary, but then I feel so guilty and they'll talk about guilt as it is this external experience that comes out of nowhere and lands onto them. And I know it really feels that way because I have said the very same thing myself. But from an agency perspective, when we can get into that self, that curious experiencer, we can notice- instead of saying, I want to set that boundary, but then I feel guilty. I want to set that boundary. But it's scary. So I guilt and shame myself, and I shut myself down from having the boundary that I want to have because that feels like what I need to do to stay safe and in connection.

So in the NARM model agency is the critical piece that allows us to connect the child consciousness who holds all of those protective survival mechanisms, and the adult consciousness, who is our true self, who knows that no matter what comes, we can handle it- that our life is not at stake in the way it felt like it was as a child. When we are disconnected from our agency because we had to take our true selves underground and offline, we spend so much of our time in shame and shutting ourselves down over and over and over again, often without realizing we're doing it, which can leave us feeling very helpless.

That's also why I'm doing this series right now on Substack about shame, because it is such a big part of so many of our experiences, and so often, if not all the time, is founded in developmental trauma. It's very, very important, as we're taking in this chapter, to take in the idea that recognizing how we might have shut ourselves down or how we might play a role in our current life circumstances, is not the same as blaming ourselves.

It can b…

Thanks for joining me for the read-a-long of The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. This week we’re exploring the end of chapter 2 (all things disidentification) and Chapter 4 - the power of asking exploratory questions and drilling down into our own experiences! You can join at any time, even if you aren’t currently reading the book - I’m here to recap and break things down for you so you can take this and apply it to your life.

Transcript below:

Hello Book Club and welcome back! Super excited to be moving through The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma together.

I'd love to hear from some of you what you have been curious about as you've been doing the reading, and you're more than welcome to leave a comment here or just reply to this email- it comes straight to me. I'd love to feel the connection with each of you as we're undertaking this process together because this book is so rich and so deep that it's so important to hold the container together of knowing that we're in this together- we're learning and being curious as we go along.

Something for me, as I've been rereading this book that has really stood out, is that process of dis-identification. We talked a little bit about this in our last meeting together, but it really, really stood out to me about how impactful and how big that dis-identification process is and can be. We talked last week about that pillar one model of NARM called clarifying the therapeutic contract. What that pillar really represents is connecting you to your agency and what you want for yourself.

An experience that I had in my own therapy when I started NARM long ago was how much I hated doing that. And what I didn't know at the time was that I have a really, really strong part of me that wants to push against autonomy and agency. Part of my predictive adaptive patterns were around protecting me from having wants, having needs, and wanting to be a separate and individual person from those around me. Clarifying what I wanted for myself really hit upon this part of me that was like, oh my gosh, that is a huge thing to let myself figure out what I really want. And that might sound kind of strange because if you knew me, you would know that I'm a very achieving, moving towards goals type of person. But what I didn't realize is that a lot of what I was achieving and moving towards was what I thought other people wanted from me. I didn’t have a deep, genuine sense of connection to that desire of what I really want, what I value, how I want to live in my life.

And so whenever I would come up against that therapeutic contract, when I was in training for NARM and doing my own NARM therapy, I would feel a sense of anger of why is this therapist trying to put this back on me? Aren't they here to help? What I was able to realize is underneath of that anger was a strong sense of fear and deep sadness that I had spent a portion of my life trying to make others around me happy. There was also a part of me that was so deeply exhausted from having to juggle everything all of the time to make others around me happy and keep going and keep achieving. I wanted someone to do it for me. I wanted someone to tell me what I should be doing and what I wanted for myself.

What I love about this model is that it's so deeply non-pathologizing- that I was never made to feel like there was something wrong with me for not being able to get clear about what I wanted for myself, or what I needed in my life or in relationship, but rather the support to come into my own capacity and to start to dis-identify or un-blend in internal family system terms from that old predictive pattern that said it wasn't safe to have wants and needs and to not take care of everyone around me.

But that dis-identifying from that people pleasing, perfectionist, intellectual part of me was a pretty intense process, and it took time to start to recognize that wasn't actually me, but rather that predictive, protective part of me. Maybe several parts of me, as I thought, surely those are adult parts of me. They want to achieve; they want to set goals. They want to take care of others. I'm a really caring person, and a lot of times I'll joke with the clients I work with that it sounds like an adult, but if you really look underneath it, what you feel is that there's sort of three child consciousnesses stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat. And that was definitely the case for me, as I was able to slow things down and feel all the fear at dis-identifying from what I thought was my identity.

Then I could start to come into true connection to myself in my own capacity. I wanted to share that story with you all, because I know sometimes these concepts can be sort of clinical, and I think you'll really enjoy towards the end of the book where they intersperse little therapeutic conversations, but that this is real and can be impactful in our lives in such a positive, empowering way. That we can dis-identify from these old patterns, that these predictive patterns are not part of our identity, but rather a suit of armor we put on to try to stay safe and stay in connection with those around us.

Just to be clear, it doesn't mean that I might never have a little people-pleasing or perfectionist strategy pop up, because we know that these protective strategies are always there for us when we need them, not when we want them. And that's okay. Many of us may still be in situations in our lives where it's not fully safe to be 100% ourselves, and that's all right. As long as you have the awareness of your agency and flexibility to stay on your own side and continue to feel the sense of safety in whatever way it's available, that's what is really valuable. So let's dive into pillar two together.

This is one of my favorite things about NARM is the emphasis on curiosity. And if you know me in real life or you've ever worked with me, you will never hear the end of the word curiosity. In fact, one of my friends gifted me with a little resin stand that says be curious because they've heard it from me so much, and the power of curiosity and getting underneath our experience- it's just one of the most valuable things we can do. And it reveals so much without having to try so hard. It’s really important to understand, here's a little overlay with how our nervous system works, is that our survival system - many people think about it as an alarm system, but really it's a novelty system. And so what that means is it's not just looking for things that are scary, it's also looking for things that are novel or different.

Welcome back to Book Club. So glad you're here.

One of the first things that I want to dive into is this concept of emotional completion in the NARM model. So what we know from what we've read so far is that as children, when we experience these environmental failures, we have to shut down our true self and shut down our true emotional experiences- lock them up and take them on offline. What that means is oftentimes as adults, we may struggle to connect with our authentic emotions. We may not even be aware of what our authentic emotions were because we weren't able to be with them as children, or they weren't reflected to us as children. We aren't born knowing what emotions are. We have to be safe to feel them and have people in our lives who can reflect them to us and model to us how to handle those different complex emotions like anger and sadness and jealousy and fear and all of those things.

So as an adult, that disconnection continues. And so we might be aware of distressing symptoms like we can't connect fully, we can't authentically be ourselves. We might feel anxious a lot of the time, or we might feel shame, but we might not be aware of what emotions are actually underlying these protective strategies that keep us from connecting to the emotions. So we consciously or subconsciously are spending a lot of energy avoiding those emotions, keeping them locked down. And oftentimes we use shame as a psycho biological tool to lock those emotions up in that lock box. And what that means is we might be protected from them, but our true authentic self who can experience the breadth of emotions is locked up in there as well. And so one of those things we can start to become aware of is our primary emotions versus our default emotions.

So maybe your default emotion is sadness. That's always the first emotion you go to. And it feels like a safe emotion to feel. It may be that underneath that sadness, you actually hold a lot of anger that you weren't supported to feel in your early life or even in your life now. And so you keep that sort of stuff down underneath and it keeps you disconnected, but you stay with sadness because it feels safe or vice versa. Maybe you go to anger quickly, but you actually have some deep sadness and grief under there. And then both of those cases, there might be terror. That feeling, your true primary emotion, will risk the connections in your life; that you might lose the connections. And those are the experiences we have in childhood that are different as adults. As adults, we can learn how to get underneath and find some of these primary emotions and figure out what those emotions are trying to convey and what those child consciousness parts of us might want us to feel. And as we do that, little by little, we start to feel our adult self capacity in the present where we can feel emotions even when they're hard. We can feel emotions and be safe. Emotions are valid and they are worthy of our attention. And our life is not at stake for feeling our emotions.

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Now, of course, I add the caveat that I'm saying in most cases. If you're actively existing in a traumatic environment, then the same will not be true that we're talking about when you can build a false sense of safety and have a false sense of safety around you, meaning your needs are met and you are safe. If that's not the case, it's still possible to be curious about this work, but your nervous system and brain are going to be more protected as they should be. So different from old models in the 80s and 90s that were really big and catharsis just having people feel all their feelings and use foam backs to beat up the pillows. NARM is all about allowing you to feel your capacity as an adult, to feel some emotion and allow it to complete, to be contained, to feel your own vitality in life, energy, in feeling and emotion without having to flood yourself and also without having to shut it all down. When you do this, that's when you can start to feel joy, creativity, aliveness, presence, connection and pleasure.

But we also have to titrate those experiences, meaning take them one drop at a time. And that can be really hard to understand. For those of us where relaxing or feeling pleasure or joy or creativity doesn't feel good, it actually feels dangerous. That's because of those adaptive protective survival strategies that don't want us to have expansive energy, because that was such a risk to us in our childhood, because it would have led to us losing connection. It felt like it would have led to us losing connection with those around us. If you're really curious about what this might look like in real life, I highly recommend checking out Inside Out or the new Inside Out 2, to understand a little bit what it might look like to touch into some of our emotions from that self, from that adult place, little bits at a time and in the same vein as emotional completion, we have this concept that in NARM is called dis identification. Internal family systems, which is another model that works similarly, calls it unblending.

And if you join after we finish this book and we start reading “No Bad Parts,” we'll learn more about that. But what this idea is that so many of us, because we grew up in these environments with ruptures and failures or systemically or within our families, we have these adaptive protective survival strategies that feel like they are us. We don't know- we can't tell- where the strategies end, and we begin because we feel like we genuinely just don't have needs or where people pleaser. We're an intellectualizer or we're a perfectionist just feels like who we are. I've often had people say to me, it's just my personality. And what we know within this model is that those strategies are almost like wearing a suit of armor. So you are you you are underneath it there, but you're wearing this really, really, really heavy suit of armor, maybe several suits of armor. So you're walking around every day with your true self way buried underneath of there with this really heavy armor of these protective strategies on top.

So this concept of dis identification, or unblending is where we start to find ourselves, our true selves, our adult consciousness- who we are- underneath all of those protective adaptive strategies. So dis identification lets us, little bits at a time, start to uncouple ourselves from our strategies, to start to find our authentic selves underneath of there, where we can really feel what it's like to be authentically ourselves and present in whatever way makes sense for us. Does that mean we're authentic 100% of the time? No. Does that mean we're perfectly present and authentic in every situation? No, it does not have to mean that at all. But what it means is that you have agency and flexibility (meaning choice), to do those things. If you want to do those things, and when you want to do those things, this identifying or unblending can be absolutely terrifying because those survival strategies have kept us safe for so long. It's as if those parts of us, they don't want us to dis identify; they don't want us to be our true, authentic selves. Because that is so scary and so risky that it feels like a threat to our lives. It really gets our survival system going as if a bear is about to eat us, because our connection with our family and our culture and people around us are built upon these survival strategies.

So if we suddenly start having needs or feeling emotions, what's going to happen to the relationships around us? To the child consciousness, that just feels so utterly terrifying. Like we will be voted off the island and we won't belong. Of course, the tricky part of this is if we only belong now because of our strategies, then we don't get to have an authentic sense of belonging because it's not truly us. But ove…

Hello tiny sparks reader! Joining you this week with another audio exploration - this time of perseverance. I’m pasting the transcript below for those of you who are readers rather than listeners. Wishing you a great week ahead~

Decided this week to do another little short recorded exploration versus a written exploration just to give my eyes a little break from the screen.

I am still in the midst of writing my candidacy exams for my PhD which means I'm spending a lot more hours on my computer every day reading and writing so I wanted to still bring you some information to explore just in a different format and in pursuit of me continuing to do my exams I want to talk a little bit about perseverance and how we make little changes in our life towards what we want for ourselves.

That is the name of this newsletter after all, Tiny Sparks.

And so I want to talk about this concept of how we take little incremental steps towards a really big thing. And the first thing to understand is that making a change in your life, even if you think it's a small change, is actually a really big thing to your brain.

So from a neuroscience perspective, the goal of our brain is to maintain allostasis and allostasis is essentially keeping everything the same because that is what feels safe to the brain. So it doesn't matter if you feel good, if you feel comfortable, if you feel happy, if you feel you've achieved what you want to do. All that matters to your brain is that you keep things the same so that you are safe and you're not using up energy that the brain wants to conserve.

That's really important because when we want to make changes in our life or move towards completing a big project or task a lot of times we think well I really want to do this thing so why don't I feel motivated to do it or why is it so hard to take steps towards doing what I want to do

Now there's a lot of other things that come into play based on our history, our environment, any trauma or stressors. But just from a really basic understanding of our brain, our brain will actually resist changes. And the bigger the change or the bigger the project that you're undertaking, the more likely it is that the brain is going to get in your way.

So to understand this a little further, what you've got to understand is that when you take steps towards changing something, working on a big project, setting a goal for yourself, you're asking your neurons in your brain to fire a new neural pathway.

And so to understand what that means, you can kind of think about when you're driving around your city every day, wherever you live, maybe you're driving on a big, huge interstate, or if like me, you live somewhere more rural, maybe you're driving on just a two lane highway, you know, 55 miles an hour. But wherever you are, it's most likely that you're driving on a paved road that's pretty well maintained (unless you live in Michigan where the roads are horrible) but you're driving on roads that are at least somewhat maintained they're paved they're familiar you know the speed limit you know where your turns are and so that's what it's like in our brain for things that are familiar to us notice I didn't say good things I said familiar so for example if you have the habit every morning of picking up your phone when you wake up and scrolling on social media for half an hour that's actually a neural pathway in your brain

And so if you say, I want to stop doing that. I don't want to get on my phone when I wake up first thing in the morning. It makes me feel weird. It doesn't start the day off on the right foot.

Well, that's great that a part of you has identified that you want it to be different. But your neural pathway, your interstate highway in your brain is to pick up your phone and start scrolling.

So when you wake up and you say, I'm not going to scroll today, you're sending your neurons in a direction they've never gone before.

So here you are driving on the interstate and now you're telling your brain, hey, get off the highway here and head on into the Amazon jungle.

And if you know anything about the Amazon jungle, you know it's incredibly dense. There's not roads through it and trying to even clear a path to hike through it takes a lot of really intense equipment and the jungle sort of grows back around you as you go.

So that's what it's like in our brain.

When you wake up and you say, I'm not going to scroll today, you're stepping off the interstate. You're pulling your car off the interstate and getting out of your car and saying, I guess I'm going to hike through the jungle.

So maybe you do it the first day and you're like, yeah, I did it.

And the second day you're like, yeah, I'm on a good routine.

Then by the third or fourth day, your brain starts feeling a little fatigued from you trying to send these neurons down this jungle pathway, instead of going down the nice, comfortable, familiar interstate.

And so that's our brain resisting the change to our allostasis or to keeping things the same.

So when you want to work towards a big project or a goal change, that's why we do it incrementally. We start with small little pieces.

So maybe instead of saying, I'm not going to pick up my phone and scroll in the morning ever again, you could just start by saying, when I wake up and I first open my eyes, I'll take 30 seconds and I'll just look around the space or I'll sit up or I'll do a little mindfulness practice for 30 seconds or

Maybe I'll just get up and stand up for a second and even if I want to sit back down in bed and scroll, that's fine.

But then you can link together those incremental stages and incremental choices that you're making to start building a new pathway towards the jungle.

And so for me, as I'm working on my exams, I am having to dedicate a lot of time and energy that normally would be used for resting, self-care, doing other work like cooking and cleaning to write. And it's a big change from not doing that. I haven't been in classes for a little while to doing that.

And so if I said, I'm going to sit down every day and spend three hours reading and writing, I know for myself that I would never do that.

But if I set a little goal for myself to say, I'll just sit down and look at this for 15 minutes, and when the 15 minutes are up, I can keep going if I want to, or I can stop.

And I do that a couple times a day, I find that without the pressure, I can get going and oftentimes spend 30, 45, 60 minutes and not feel fatigued.

Another thing I do for myself is I let myself take a day off.

It's stressful. I'm under a time crunch. I only have 10 weeks to do this. But my brain is also adjusting to a big change in my routine.

And I know that if I want to produce good quality work without burning myself out, I have to allow my brain to adjust by taking things slowly and not shocking my brain.

And so that's why perseverance or tiny sparks or little incremental steps towards building a new pathway in your brain are much more effective than relying on big bursts of motivation where you might try to make a huge change and make it last for a few days or a few weeks and then not stick to it.

So if you have something you're trying to change or a little thing you're curious about moving towards - let me know! Let me know how it's going for you.

And maybe consider if there's a way you can break it into small steps, and not even small steps, but tiny steps, remembering that your brain is trying to keep you safe by resisting those big changes.

And so you can either fight your brain and feel pretty miserable, or you can say, I'm going to be on the same team as my brain and just allow my brain to feel supported in making tiny sparks this week.

So have a great week.

Thanks for being here with me, and I'll see you again in two weeks.

I decided to try something a little different this week with a short podcast on how our brains support us in moving toward more goodness. Wishing you lots of gentle moments as we wrap us this year and look toward 2024. Thanks for joining me here - and please see the transcript below for those of you who don’t prefer an audio medium.

For all of my Michigan readers (or elsewhere who don’t mind traveling!), I hope you’ll join me at blossom, my retreat to gently greet the new year and connect to our vision.

We’ll have the opportunity to go on a quest together to connect with our values and our vision - finding what we uniquely want for ourselves. Along the way, we’ll pause and find moments to strengthen our internal resilience. At the end of our journey, you’ll be in the flow of your authenticity, able to swim around any obstacles that may arise as you float down the current gently, welcoming 2024 with ease. I would love to see you there.

I was baking cookies this week leading up to Christmas and just having a low key Christmas this year where it's just me and my husband and my dog, our first year in our new house.

And I normally do cookie boxes every year where I bake a bunch of different varieties and mail them to everybody that I know and love.

But I felt overwhelmed this year moving into a new house and all that goes along with that, that it just felt like too much.

But I still wanted to mark the season with some cookies.

So I decided to make a few small batches just for us to have.

And immediately, as I started making the dough, putting them into the oven, smelling the different scents, I started thinking about all the different times that I've made cookies in my life with my grandma, all my family there, with my mom, with my dad, all the different houses that I've baked cookies and decorated cookies in.

Cut Out Cookies and Smelled Cookies.

And it made me think how I talk a lot on here about the difficult parts of nervous system regulation, but I also wanted to talk about some of the ways that our brain does help us to access nervous system regulation.

And one of those ways is through this idea of memory templates.

If you've ever

created a resume from Microsoft Word.

Then I think, you know what I mean when I say a template where it's sort of like a prebuilt wireframe and something really cool about our brain is that it creates these templates as well in our memory.

And it's part of our memory working together to help our brain be more efficient and hold on to things that are important.

We can't possibly hold on to every single thing that ever happens to us.

but when something is meaningful or impactful or hard or difficult, our brain wants to make it so we can respond faster next time.

So this part of our brain called the hippocampus creates a little template to say, okay, I know what's happening here.

When this happens, then this comes next.

And then it can send messages to our amygdala, which is a part of our brain that feels emotions and also where our survival system lives.

I got to thinking about this with the way my body immediately felt this really warm, regulating connection just through this simple act of making cookies.

I started thinking about that memory template in my brain around

the scent of cookies and Christmas and family and connection and there wasn't anything I had to do in that moment to try to make myself feel regulated or to make myself feel good.

I didn't even consciously try to think about all the times I'd made cookies in the past but my brain

my sweet little brain had that little template filed away.

But even though this year I didn't get to bake cookies with my mom or my dad or my friends or my grandma or my great grandma, even though I didn't get to do that, my brain said, I remember this scent.

I remember this experiment.

I remember this time spent with others.

And it was as if it was happening right in that moment.

just a warmth, a sweetness, and just an overall softening in my body.

And I just wanted to share that with you so that maybe if this time of year is hard or wonderful or lonely or amazing or exhausting or stressful or connecting or all of the above, that maybe you can notice if you have some of those little

pleasant, joyful, even neutral memory templates in your brain.

And if not, if the templates around this time of year feel difficult for you, as they do for many people, maybe you can start to create a little template for yourself.

Like maybe you can go outside and you start to build this little template in your brain that says, Oh, I know this.

I know the trees and

the smell of them, the sound of the birds.

And I can file that away.

When I hear that, I know that I'm connected.

I'm not alone.

I'm at peace, or I have more safety or more neutrality.

Or maybe it's starting your own tradition of making cookies or baking a little meal, even if it's just for you or

taking a walk with your pet or calling a friend or making a little craft, little Christmas craft or Hanukkah craft or Kwanzaa craft, whatever you celebrate.

And just starting to build in your brain safety in this moment that your brain can file away and access later without you having to try so hard.

So I'm wishing you a gentle end to this year and a soft, warm welcome to the next year.

And thanks for taking a few minutes with me.