tiny sparks, big changes

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!(0:00 - 1:09)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.(1:09 - 1:28)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.(1:29 - 4:46)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.(4:47 - 5:22)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.(5:23 - 6:40)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.(6:40 - 7:51)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.(7:52 - 8:17)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.(8:18 - 10:04)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 mista

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHello Book Club Friends! Wow, I am so loving reading Unlocking the Emotional Brain together! We’re just getting started but I’m having so much fun learning more about the science of transformational change. I know this book can be a bit dense/clinical, so don’t worry too much if it feels like a lot to get through - that’s why I’m here! I love getting to read through the chapters and translate it into real life understanding. Please feel free to leave a comment below and let me know what you’re learning! And scroll wayyyyy down to the bottom for a book club schedule for this book :). It’s a long one but SO worth it!(0:00 - 2:54)Hello and welcome back to our read-along of The Emotional-Based Brain. I have been enjoying reading this book so much because it is so exciting when you get to see science backing up everything that you’ve already known. You know, a lot of times psychology and counseling are considered quote-unquote soft sciences, but this book does a great job of delivering the actual hard science results that show why things like therapy work.So we’ve done a lot of learning together, but this book is actually about unlearning. Oftentimes when we think about healing or changing or moving toward what we want for ourselves in our life, we think about addition. We think about adding awareness, we think about adding tools, we think about adding new habits, though if you’ve listened to me or worked with me, you know I’m not a big fan of trying to control our habits.But we often tell ourselves we just need to think differently, act differently, choose differently, and of course that’s often part of our underlying strategies, our underlying patterns that we have learned that to show up differently in the world we have to try harder, be better, be perfect, don’t have needs, etc. But Unlocking the Emotional-Based Brain actually talks about unlearning, and that is what chapter two is about. This describes what is probably the most important discovery in the neuroscience of change and healing from trauma, which is the process of memory reconsolidation.Over the course of the last couple years I’ve been learning more and more about this term, and it wasn’t a term I had heard before then, but it describes something that I already knew and already talked about, which is the idea that we can update these maps in our brain thanks to neuroplasticity and this process called memory reconsolidation. So later on in this book we will be diving into all the different types of therapy like EMDR and IFS and somatic experiencing and looking at how they affect change using this process. But for now we want to learn more about how this process works.So memory reconsolidation is the process by which the brain can change the impact of old emotional learnings, these old learnings that keep us stuck in shame, in fear, in self-protection, long after the actual danger or the felt sense of danger has passed. As you know if you’ve been in the book club for our past books, we know that especially when we’re children, but when we’re adults too, and we’re existing in environments that are overwhelming, that are too much, that are not enough, we get a sense that we constantly have to be on edge to be trying to protect ourselves, even in situations where a physical danger is not at risk. That is because we are wired to stay in connection to our primary attachment figures, our parents, our caregivers, but as humans we are wired to stay in connection to others as well.(2:54 - 13:49)So when we’re young we don’t have the cognitive complexity to understand that our parents aren’t really in danger or that we aren’t really in danger. Instead what we’re feeling is, oh my gosh every time I come home from school and I didn’t get a really good grade or something went a little bit wrong or I made a mistake, I feel a tension in my house. I feel like maybe my parents pulled back from me a little bit.I feel like I get a little bit less attention or maybe I even get punished or sent to my room. Maybe it’s nothing overt, but it’s just this generalized sense of disappointment. And when that happens repeatedly, what our child brain will learn is that love will be withdrawn if we are not perfect all of the time.And that could be from our parents, we could experience from our peers, our teachers, and again in our adult life. But when that happens, remember how neural pathways form. They form with frequency and intensity.So when we have these frequent and intense experiences that create a lot of fear in us as a child, and even anger and sadness too, it creates these neural pathways, these emotional learnings in our brain that create ideas like, if I’m not perfect, I won’t be loved. Remember, emotional learnings are a little bit different from thinking those things, right? They’re a little bit different from this idea of core beliefs, which is things we’re actively thinking. They’re in our unconscious mind.So maybe you’ve heard this quotation before, that’s not exactly accurate, we could go more into that later, but from Jung that says, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you’ll call it fate. And I think that’s really apt to describe what these emotional learnings are like. They are implicit, they are unconscious, they are below our conscious mind, but unwittingly we are constantly acting out these learnings because we are trying to prevent the loss of connection.So what memory reconsolidation allows us to do is to isolate these old emotional learnings, isolate these pathways in our brain, and start to change the impact that those learnings have on us in the present by targeting memories or experiences where we first learned those things. So let’s talk a little bit about this process. For most of the 20th century, scientists believed that emotional memories were permanent.You might be able to suppress them, or change their intensity through exposure or coping, but you couldn’t really erase them because the emotional brain and the amygdala were sort of hardwired. In 2000, they started doing some interesting experimentation that changed this belief. Now I do want to give you a little heads up in this chapter, and thus in this podcast, I’m preparing to discuss some lab experimentation they did with animals, specifically rats, and you know that might not be the best feeling for you, or it might be something that you don’t feel comfortable with, and so you’re more than welcome to skip over this part, and it’s not going to change your fundamental understanding of the book.So in this lab, they conducted an experiment with rats, and they trained these rats to associate a tone, a sound that they played, with an electric shock. And after several times of doing that, the rats would freeze whenever they heard the tone. So it’s sort of that classical Pavlovian conditioning.Now what they did then is they reactivated the fear memory by playing the tone just once. So they played the tone, and the rat’s brain activated the memory that said, a shock is going to be coming. And during that short window, they injected a protein synthesis blocker into the rat’s amygdala.And when the rats were tested again the next day, the fear response was totally gone. And this was the first time the researchers realized that they may be able to deconsolidate a memory that already existed. And they did achieve this chemically, but as they continued to study this, they found that a similar thing could happen through experience, where we could rewrite the emotion of the memory.And so they learned that they could do this without using chemicals or medication through introducing what is called a prediction error. If you’ve been listening to the other books or you know my work, you know this is something I talk about very frequently, where as we build up that felt sense of safety and that capacity to observe ourselves and the maps or roadways in our brain, eventually we have to introduce what I call congruence experiments, which is where we think about and then eventually try something very small to see what happens that is different from our past experience. So the example that I use a lot is if you have a core learning, an emotional learning that says every time I have a need I am punished or sent away, then we might think about what would happen if you get the wrong drink at the coffee shop and you let the barista know you got the wrong drink and you beg them to remake it.That is an opportunity for your brain to say, stop, no, that’s dangerous. But we get to introduce a prediction error and say, hmm, is anything dangerous actually going to happen in that moment? Or does anything dangerous actually happen in that moment when you try it on? That’s how we introduce a prediction error to our brain to say, this actually doesn’t hold up with this old emotional learning. And so the studies continue to bear this out that that prediction error or that mismatch experience could change these emotional learnings.They could erase the fear or whatever other emotions might be coming along. So if we think of our brain of that map with all of those roads and many of those roads are coded in safety, they say this is what I have to do to stay in connection and not get voted off the island. And it might hold learnings like if I cry or show emotions, people will withdraw from me.If I’m quiet and I take care of other people’s needs, I am loved. If I do well, I am loved. Those are all those roadways, those beliefs stored inside your map.But these maps don’t automatically update. Unlike our GPS in present day, they don’t automatically update just because we become adults or we leave the difficult situation. Those old, very charged learnings are still in there.Memory reconsolidation is part of the process that allows us to redraw those routes and to find new routes that are actually safe. So let’s talk a

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comUnderstanding AEDP and Memory Reconsolidation: A Deep Dive into Transformational TherapyEpisode OverviewThis episode explores Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) and how different therapy modalities create transformational change through memory reconsolidation. Using the case study of "Daniel," a 40-year-old divorced father, the discussion illustrates how therapeutic presence and attunement can help clients update deeply held emotional learnings about relationships and safety.Key ConceptsMemory Reconsolidation ExplainedThe process allows the brain to unlearn old emotional patterns that no longer serve usUnlike exposure therapy (which builds distress tolerance), memory reconsolidation actually updates the original learning generating the emotionRequires accessing both the belief/cognition AND the feeling that makes it powerfulThe emotion is how our brain makes meaning out of original experiencesAEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy)Core PrinciplesFocused on transformational change from attachment traumaEmphasizes experiential process - there must be activation and feeling in the presentBased on reparative attachment through corrective attachment experiencesThe therapeutic relationship itself can create memory reconsolidationThe Experiential ComponentWhy experiential matters:Needs activation - a feeling in the present of these learningsNot enough to only intellectualizeEven just talking and being in relationship with a therapist activates emotions, body sensations, and memoriesThe secure base of the therapeutic relationship is incredibly important for creating changeThe Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process in AEDPHow AEDP Implements the StepsUnique approach: Steps 2, 1, 3, V, and A & B occur intermittently throughoutActivation of the disconfirming experience: Therapist constantly asking "How is it for me to say this? How is it for me to be here with you?"Reactivation of symptom schema: Repetitions of "how it was versus how it is now"Observation (Verification): Noticing what is different - how the activation is different, how symptoms are different, increased easeFor TherapistsThe Containment Strategy:Don't follow yourself or your client down into strategies and symptomsAlways come back to the presentAlways notice: "What are you actually noticing? What's actually happening for you in this moment?"For Self-WorkWhen working on your own:"What's it like to let myself name that it's sad right now?"Even without tears or body sensationsSlow down from intellectualizationThis seemingly small step is actually quite significantMemory Reconsolidation vs. Exposure/HabituationExposure Therapy:Builds distress toleranceBrain learns "I can feel this and survive"Useful but doesn't update original learningStill have to do management strategiesMemory Reconsolidation:Updates the original learning generating the emotionTouches a piece of the feeling WHILE simultaneously holding contradictory evidenceBrain reorganizes data modelProbability of old pattern decreases (99% → 70% → eventually almost nothing)The Split Screen MetaphorImagine a movie screen split down the middle:Left side: Old experienceRight side: New experienceBoth held simultaneously for brain to reorganizeKey TakeawaysDisconfirmation experiences don't have to be as big as you think - even tiny moments of noticing difference matterThe therapeutic relationship itself is transformational - co-regulation with therapist creates new experiences for the brainTitration is key - little bits at a time, not flooding with emotionPresent moment focus - constantly bringing awareness back to "what's happening right now"Spaciousness over pushing - allowing room to notice differences rather than demanding full emotional expression

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comChapter 6 pulls back to show us the bigger picture: how all the different therapy approaches - IFS, EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and more - work through the same underlying process when they create real, lasting change. We explore the decades-long specific factors vs. common factors debate in therapy research, and what it means for your own healing journey.In This Episode:Why different therapy modalities are like different vehicles crossing the same terrainThe Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process (TRP) steps - a quick refresherThe therapy research debate: Is it the techniques or the relationship that matters?Why feeling safe and understood is essential but often not enough on its ownMemory reconsolidation as the mechanism of change - and why the mechanism isn't the whole storyWhat this means for your therapy or self-healing workKey Takeaways:When deep, lasting change happens in therapy, the same underlying process is occurring - regardless of which modality is being used.The therapeutic relationship creates the safety you need to do vulnerable work, but the relationship alone usually isn't enough to produce transformational change. You need both.Memory reconsolidation is the engine of change, but you also need fuel (safety, readiness), a road (observation, curiosity, awareness), and often a driver (therapist or your own developed capacity).What looks like sudden or accidental change is usually the result of lots of prior groundwork, including building a felt sense of safety and capacity to observe ourselves differently through metacognition.It's okay - and even helpful - to understand what your therapy is actually doing. It's your brain and your healing.Connect the Dots:To NARM: The adaptive survival styles in NARM are examples of the implicit emotional learnings we've been discussing. The TRP framework helps explain how those survival styles can be transformed, not just understood.To IFS: When you're working with parts in IFS, the moments of transformation often involve the same juxtaposition experience - an exile holding old pain encounters new evidence (often through Self-energy or an updated understanding) that contradicts the old belief.To Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: The terms of attachment we discussed in Chapter 5 - those unspoken rules about what's allowed in order to stay connected - are exactly the kind of implicit learnings that need to go through this reconsolidation process to truly shift.Questions to Sit With:In my own therapy or self-work, am I getting to the feeling of the old learnings, or mostly talking about them?Have I had experiences in my life that contradict my old beliefs or where something different happened than what my brain predicted? What happened when I did?Where in my life am I doing the observation and curiosity work, even if change hasn’t happened yet in the way I want it to?Coming Up Next:Part 2 of the book walks through case examples from different therapy approaches - showing how the TRP unfolds in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, IFS, and more. We'll get to see the theory in action!

(0:00 - 1:23)Hello, my friends, and welcome back to our Substack Book Club. We have a lot of new people here, and so this is going to be a free episode for everyone to listen to, to learn a little bit more about what we do in our book club here. Just to catch you up, we’re currently reading Unlocking the Emotional Brain, which is the seminal book on coherence therapy and memory reconsolidation.Memory reconsolidation is the process by which we can update the old learnings in our brain. So if you found your way here because you consider yourself an intellectualizer, a people pleaser, a perfectionist, you find yourself stuck in traditional therapy because you already understand a lot of things. Maybe you’ve tried nervous system regulation, but you can’t quite seem to get unstuck.It’s likely because you have old unconscious learnings referred to as implicit emotional learnings that are like pathways in your brain. They are things that happened to you in your past that formed roads in your brain that said, this is the safe road to go down. So if every time you had emotions, or you had needs, or you were yourself, you were criticized, or sent away, or punished, or bullied by your peers, or you had parents who, for whatever reason, couldn’t show up for you, then over time, the learning would be, if I have my needs and I am myself, I will be criticized, or I will lose connection.(1:24 - 2:28)And so then that shows up in the present where we mask, we put our true selves away, we stay up in our thoughts, and no amount of insight will change that process. So this book really helps us to understand how we can make long-term change. If you join our book club, you also get access to all of the old episodes where I have gone through Healing Developmental Trauma, a wonderful book covering NARM therapy and helping us understand this process a little bit more, No Bad Parts, a book on internal family systems, another book that can support memory reconsolidation, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, which is often very important learning for many of us to understand how our early experiences may have shaped our present-day lives.So thank you so much for being here. Whether you are a free or paid member, you help support my work just by listening, liking, engaging, and commenting, and it’s truly an honor to get to share this information with you. This is going to be a recap episode of what we have explored in Unlocking the Emotional Brain so far, and next week we will dive back in.(2:30 - 3:03)So many of you have read every chapter and taken notes along with me, and some of you may be listening while you do the dishes or go on a walk, and you haven’t cracked the book just once, and that is all completely welcome here. You get to show up in the book club at the level that your system has capacity for, and I love getting to translate these books into everyday understanding to help us actively make change in our lives. So let’s walk through some of these ideas together, and I do want to name again that Unlocking the Emotional Brain is not exactly an easy, cozy read.(3:03 - 6:00)It can be pretty clinical and dense in places, but the reason I chose this book anyway is it’s because something so incredibly important, which is transformational change in therapy, transformational change in mental health, transformational change in how we show up in the world, not just symptom management, not just insight, not just telling you that for the rest of your life you’re going to have to use force and fear and to regulate your nervous system every single day just to be in the world. Now, of course, if you know me, you know that I support nervous system regulation work, and I support insight, and all of those things are wonderful, but they alone do not create transformational change. We have to figure out how to shift these patterns at the root because journals and planning and coping skills do not address the root of why we have these learnings, and this process for transformational change is called memory reconsolidation.We can think of it as if we’re updating the maps, the atlas, the GPS in our brain. Underneath those metaphors is the same basic idea that our brain can revise old emotional learnings from memories of things that happened to us in our lives under certain conditions, and that is the core of what this book is about. Think about your brain as a big excel spreadsheet or a big filing cabinet.In all of the experiences in your life, your brain files away and stores the data, and it puts it into themes like a big zip file. So if you had a series of memories that again told you that when you experience emotions, people will pull away from you, then those get filed into a big folder, and because the potential to lose connection with others is coded as survival, because it is in our brain, because we are wired to have connection, then that learning gets moved to the top as a critically important survival learning. So all of these memories the brain sorts through and said, this has happened a lot, so frequency, so this is something I want to hold on to, and then this has happened and it was really intense, so intensity.So frequency and intensity are what the brain uses to categorize what is an important memory to hold on to versus what isn’t. This all happens unconsciously, so you yourself may not have memories of these specific events, but your brain puts them into a file and then creates a learning. Think about a learning like a rule.The brain is using the data to say, I’m going to predict what’s going to happen in the present and the future based on what’s happened in the past, and I’m going to use that to shape the way that you yourself see the world. It changes the lenses through which we perceive reality to try to keep us safe. Because if the brain is predicting that feeling our feelings and being authentic is going to lead to losing connection, being sent away, being punished, which feels survival oriented, then of course the brain is not going to want to let us be authentic and connect easily.(6:00 - 6:47)So then, for example, we might perceive the people around us as more critical than they are. We might perceive situations as dangerous, like going to meet new people, because if we are ourselves we won’t get to form a new connection, when in actuality they are not dangerous. This all happens below the surface and forms these patterns or parts that we as humans have learned to call intellectualization, people pacing, perfectionism, my anxious part, we have a lot of different names we’ve given to it.But those are all bundles of memories and emotions that create rules. If we in the present want to update those rules, we have to follow this process called memory reconsolidation. And that is one of the key neurobiological mechanisms for change.(6:48 - 16:23)This book walks us through that process. So let’s break down what we’ve covered so far in learning about this process. What we talked about in the very beginning is the difference between symptom reduction and transformational change.So it is possible to reduce our symptoms or to change our experience through behavior change, through force, through willpower, through quote-unquote motivation. So therapy could help you maybe feel 20% less anxious, or feel fewer panic attacks, or go to the gym more often, and that’s absolutely not nothing. Those reductions in symptoms can feel like a really big relief.But oftentimes that reduction happens through management. So we learn how to use strategies to manage our brain and what a gift that we can do that. But I’m guessing if you’re here, you don’t want to have to spend the rest of your life doing symptom management and using force.The reason why that thing that gives you a reduction doesn’t change the pathway in your brain is because it’s still in contradiction with an old learning. So going to the gym every day to take care of yourself through management strategies, habits, and force doesn’t contradict an old learning that says taking care of yourself is selfish. So it requires vigilance at all time to use the strategies to override your brain, which is often why we fail quote-unquote at setting new habits, or we do it for a couple of months and then we stop, or we use management strategies but we still kind of feel stuck, empty, disconnected, or unsure of ourselves.tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Transformational change is completely different. In these moments when we can create transformation, we are rewiring the learning that we had. We are rewiring our brain itself so that the brain updates its prediction.It updates its data model. It is so cool that we know now that we can do this. It’s not just about having new experiences.I want to be super clear about that because it’s kind of the in thing right now to talk about how you don’t need regulation, you just need to have new experiences, but they are missing a key part of the process, which is that the new experiences must explicitly target the old learning and they must be incremental, meaning they have to be little bits at a time. But as we do this process, we can update through transformational change these emotional learnings and then we don’t have to use management strategies, force, fear, every single day because the old learnings that say if I’m not perfect I will lose love, if I have needs I’m selfish and I’ll hurt others, if I show feelings people will withdraw, those things can be rewired and the learnings can be updated. So now instead of predicting a 99% chance of something dangerous is happening, the brain realistically says maybe there’s a 5% chance that something could happen if I myself and I have needs.And then what happens is if we have needs and someone criticizes us or doesn’t support our need or whatever it is, we get to experience it throug

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHello and welcome back to our book club read-a-long of Unlocking the Emotional Brain! If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks, where we explore a chapter from the book together (you can also listen on Spotify!). I help translate the theory into everyday language and show you how to apply it in your own life. We also gather twice per book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time.This book takes us deep into the science of memory reconsolidation, one of the most powerful mechanisms for true and lasting change. It helps us understand how healing actually happens after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up with emotionally immature parents.If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this kind of work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience, including live sessions, current discussions, and the complete archive of past reads like No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this community possible, and I’m so grateful you’re here.This week, we dive into chapter 5, which goes further into attachment and the role it takes in shaping the way we see the world as adults. We know it’s not always attachment, that other things like societal and existential concerns can also create trauma patterns and survival strategies, but attachment sure plays a significant role! This chapter is incredibly dense, but it can help us continue to observe ourselves with more neutrality and understanding (and maybe even compassion!) when we’re examining behaviors we don’t like in the present day. Let’s dive in and learn more!(0:00 - 4:15)Welcome back, read-along friends, and thank you so much for being here. If you’re new here, this is our book club, where we dive into different self-help and therapy books, and every two weeks I release a little podcast episode, breaking down a chapter for you and helping you to understand how you might apply this in real life. You can read along with me, but you don’t have to.You can never pick up the book at all and still get the gist from these episodes. So I’m so glad you’re here as we continue to dive into Unlocking the Emotional Brain, an incredibly dense and incredibly informative book, and I think actually today we’re going to continue our exploration of chapter five, and we may not even get through it all. We’ll see.I want to, but it’s such a dense chapter and such an important chapter that I want to make sure that we take our time. Don’t forget that we have our first of two live meetings for this book coming up on Sunday, December 14th, and that is at 12 p.m. Eastern Time. You’ll receive the link in a separate email coming this week, but that’s 12 p.m. Eastern Time, Sunday, December 14th.Don’t worry if you can’t attend live. The recording will be sent out to all paid members, and thank you so much for being here and supporting my work. So you may remember, as we just briefly touched into chapter five last time, the chapter five explores attachment, and is it always about attachment? And so we know that, especially in modern discourse, there’s somewhat the idea that all roads in therapy and all problems that present in therapy can be tied back to attachment with our parents, and this chapter really dives into some of the attachment science and looks at this idea that there’s often more going on to our experience than just attachment with our parents.It doesn’t mean that attachment might not be involved in some way, meaning our connection to the world around us, to peers, etc., because we know that we are pack animals and we are biologically wired to want to stay in connection with those around us. But does it always come back to a childhood attachment experience with parents? And let’s talk a little bit about that. We know that unlocking the emotional brain is all about emotional learnings and how the experiences we have in our lives and those emotions that go along with them form implicit, meaning unconscious, memories and learnings within our brain that direct our behaviors in our present-day lives.Those learnings can come from, certainly, attachment relationships with caregivers, but they can also come from social contexts like schools, friendships, bullying, racism, layoffs, and also existential experiences. And this is what I don’t see talked about too often, so I’m so glad they mentioned it here, like illnesses, accidents, loss, or confrontation with our own mortality. All of those experiences can create these schemas, and you can think of schemas like templates within our brain, for thoughts, emotions, behavioral sensations, and behaviors.And those schemas hold up those if-then rules. If this happens, this is what I must do to stay safe, to stay in connection, to be loved, to be well, etc. And those all get held in the same place, that emotional, implicit, unconscious memory.And this is part of the emotional coherence framework. So instead of arguing about whether attachment or social class or temperament or whatever is more important, instead we know that the brain doesn’t care which category the experience falls under. If something happens, and you might have heard me say this, if it’s frequent or if it’s intense, no matter the source of the experience, then the brain will file that as a learning in the brain.(4:16 - 4:36)And so that could include, like, implicit learnings and procedural learnings could include riding a bike, handwriting, things that don’t really have a lot of emotion stored alongside of them. But when there’s emotion stored alongside of them, then those emotional, implicit learnings become even stronger. So it’s all these rivers flowing into one wide delta.(4:36 - 10:06)One river might be attachment. One might be social experiences. One might be existential experiences.One might be your innate genetic sensitivity. But once those rivers meet in the delta, all of that water blends together. And so what we’re living with in the present is our felt-sense experience of all of the things that make us us.And this can be important because sometimes people will ask me, well, is it possible that this didn’t come from my childhood? And the answer is yes, of course. We can experience environmental, emotional, developmental, and attachment ruptures at any time in our life because we’re always developing. We’re always experiencing the world and relationships around us.And you may remember the case of Raul, which we discussed briefly last time, where he experienced a major rupture in his adult life that created this sense of intense rage. And it didn’t come from a chaotic childhood. It came from a major betrayal from a business partner in adulthood that wrecked his career and threatened his security.And so his emotional brain learned in his adult life after this rupture that broken agreements destroy lives and that rage would protect him from feeling powerless. And that if he let go of rage, that felt like giving up on justice. Those are the implicit emotional learnings that came out of this adult experience.It’s much more than a simple mom, dad, caregiver experience. And so if the therapist had assumed that that had to come from the parents, then classic sort of reparative attachment work would not have touched the schema. So whether you’re a therapist listening or whether you’re an individual who wants to do this in your own life, I think it’s important to hold that lens of curiosity.And that’s why I’m constantly emphasizing curiosity, neutrality, and observation. If you’ve listened to any of my work, you’ve heard me say a million times about observing, observing, observing. Observing is the work.Noticing is the work. And you’ve heard me compare it to an archeological dig or to being a wildlife documentarian. In this book, they call it an anthropologist, that we are learning how to observe and gather data without making assumptions, without letting all those lenses color our experience.And so that’s why it’s very important, therapist or individual, to observe ourselves with this curious lens instead of trying to project what we think the experience might be about. That’s why we use all of these different experiences. Like if you’ve looked in my five steps to change guide, that’s why what I say is to imagine what you want for yourself, whatever it might be.And then you follow the thread from there. You look at the detours that come up. You look at the learnings underneath of that.And sometimes it’s surprising because sometimes the learning is something unexpected. Like this person could have very easily assumed, well, maybe I’m angry and rageful because I never saw my parents be angry. So I never learned how to manage it.And hey, maybe there could be a thread of that there, right? But this learning very clearly in this case came from this person’s adult life and working with those learnings and reconsolidating them is what allowed him to have space. So all this to say, attachment is incredibly important and it shapes a huge amount of our internal atlas, but it’s not the only thing that shapes us. And not all of our symptoms are attachment derived with our caretakers.They can also be from the world around us. And what I mean by that is we are always navigating attachment relationships with partners, with friends, children, even colleagues, right? We’re in connection with people all the time. So we can think about it as connection related and not necessarily parent caregiver attachment related.So while we’re not explicitly exploring attachment here, I think it’s important to talk about some of the attachment types they talk about in this chapter to see what kind of learnings and schemas might develop from that. So the insecure avoidant type of attachment develops with a primary caregiver who is rejecting, pus

Hello, tiny sparks readers! Have a new podcast episode for you today about my thoughts on the endless optimization of healing. Before we dive in, I want to share something tender and exciting. I have just started writing a book and was recently accepted into a 12-month writing program to help bring it to life, with the hope of it landing in the world in 2026. If you want to be part of that process and help me actually make it happen, you can join me over on Patreon, where I will share in-progress pieces, reflections, and the middle of shaping this work. There are a few tiers, including one that offers a live meeting every month where I answer your questions personally. If this episode landed for you and you want to support this book growing from an idea into something you can hold in your hands, your presence there really does make a difference. In addition, becoming a paid subscriber here supports my writing, too, and you get to join our wonderful book club! Whether you’re a free or paid subscriber, thank you for being here. If you have questions, curiosities, or things you’d love to see addressed in my book, don’t hesitate to drop me a line or leave a comment below! (0:00 - 2:44)Okay, today I want to talk about something that might sound a little bit strange coming from someone who literally teaches about healing for a living, but I am so, so tired of the self-help industry and especially the social mediafication of the self-help industry. Of course, I am not tired of people wanting to feel better. Of course, we want to feel better.And of course, we are trying to find any amount of information we can to help us feel better. And I’m not tired of those of us who are curious or want to grow or want to explore nervous system work or trauma healing. But I am so tired of the way that healing has been turned into a product for us to consume and complete and be perfect at and overachieve at and try harder at, like a course you have to pass or some kind of project that you have to finish.And if you are someone who tends to live in your head, who’s always been the high achiever, the eldest daughter, the responsible one, the intellectualizer, you probably know exactly what I mean. You go into this idea of healing or being more present in your life or getting unstuck, moving toward what you want for yourself, using the same tools that have always worked for you. You research, you read, you analyze, you organize the information in your mind.And once you set your mind to it, you decide that you’re going to do this right. And the internet is set up for the parts of us that think that we can do this perfectly by making a plan and trying harder and researching it to the bitter end. That is what the self-help world, especially the self-help world on social media, is built upon.And it gives us this steady stream of little bite-sized promises. Do this journal prompt, reflect on your year, say an affirmation, set a boundary, cut contact, breathe in this way, no, breathe in that way, cold punch, don’t cold punch, stretch your hips, drink your water, take your supplements. And there’s this message that if you can get the formula just right, if you do enough, if you try hard enough, if you’re good enough, you will finally be okay, feel good, have the life you want, and specifically have the life that you might see represented on social media.People who seem so happy, so successful, perfect family, perfect house, perfect friends, plenty of money. And so it’s normal that we’re drawn toward these things. We want there to be something that we can do that will make us feel okay.Of course, some other part of us also deeply resists that because it feels impossible. We feel stuck in this bind of needing to be perfect to be okay, but feeling like it’s impossible to actually follow through with all of those things. And that’s not because there’s anything wrong with you.(2:44 - 4:58)It’s because our brain works based off old learnings getting landed into the present. It’s so, so understandable that we want something to be a checklist that we can move through and complete. We want to fill out a worksheet.We want to make a few meals, take a few supplements, do some deep breathing, and wake up in a completely different place with a different relationship to ourselves and to the world. A different job maybe, a different personality, a different partner, a different relationship to money, whatever it might be. But that’s not how these patterns that were built for survival reorganize themselves.And for those of us who grew up reading the room constantly, reading people around us constantly, knowing the sound of everyone’s footsteps and whether it meant they were happy or angry, then people-pleasing, intellectualizing, perfectionism, overachieving are not random bad habits and they’re not personality traits. They are learned responses to our environments. If we learned that having big feelings got us shamed or ignored, then shutting down those feelings makes a lot of sense.If you rewarded and celebrated every time you achieved or functioned so well, took on more and solved the problem, then of course that learning would get set up in your brain to say, this is what makes me good and worthy. And many times it’s subtle, right? Like sometimes we had very clear trauma or sometimes it was very clear that our parents criticized us when we had emotions or sent us away. But oftentimes it’s so much more subtle than that.It’s an ongoing experience of being misattuned to. If you are a joyful, playful little child born to parents who are under immense stress and they themselves are intellectualizers or incredibly rational people who don’t know how to deal with their own feelings, it’s not that they might hurt you or punish you when you have feelings, but they themselves might become overwhelmed. And so then we learn, uh-oh, when I am playful, silly, joyful myself, people around me get overwhelmed and that makes me feel stressed and unsafe because I need my caregivers to be okay.(4:59 - 5:42)Or maybe it’s our peers, maybe it’s our teachers. And yes, we can have experiences in our adult life that impact us as well. But all of these things get coded in our brains as roots of safety, worth, value, and connection.So then you come into healing spaces because sometime in your life, and it’s usually later on in our life, it starts to take more of a toll. And maybe we notice physical symptoms, maybe we feel slightly depressed, disconnected, anxious, but we’re not sure why, kind of stuck or dissatisfied in our lives, and we want to fix those patterns. But things start to get slippery because we might feel this pull into healing and we turn it into another pattern.tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.(5:42 - 7:05)We want to be good at it, we want to solve it, we want to get an A in therapy, we want to do trauma recovery work, check it off the list, let them be codependent no more, get our body to stop keeping the score, and then we will be good enough to deserve to rest and relax. And this is where self-help becomes so incredibly toxic because so much of it mirrors the very same culture that we have already been mired in and are already burned out from. There is a focus on progress, optimization, and improvement of our behavior.Even somatic work has become an idea that you need to optimize your nervous system, you need to optimize your body. If you’re an intellectualizer, you just need to learn how to track your body. Somatic work, somatic work, fix your nervous system, stretch your hips, and then you can let all your emotions go and then you will be well.So it’s pressure, pressure, pressure, morning routines, five-step systems, and very, very tidy before and after stories, which just feeds right into those beliefs. And the brain says, see, if you just try hard enough and plan enough and analyze enough, and then you can finally be worthy and be good. And these other people did it.Why can’t you? Why can’t you be more productive, more regulated, more aligned? Why can’t you follow through with these activities? And so maybe you try it. You know, you see the posts on Instagram and you give it a try. You do the journaling, the affirmations, try to track your body.(7:06 - 14:35)And for a little while, that can feel exciting. And we get a little dopamine, we get a little oxytocin, we feel a spark that this will be the thing, the thing that finally makes it okay for us to say no, to be present, to want something different, to have needs, to not have to worry about being disapproved of, to not have to explain ourselves and criticize ourselves constantly. But then eventually something happens.Either we turn on ourselves or we stop doing the things because we’re tired or exhausted, or some part of our brain says, nope, that’s not safe. You’re going off the survival pathways. Maybe someone gets disappointed in us.A relationship shifts and boom, we’re right back in those old patterns, overthinking, overexplaining, over-apologizing, over-criticizing. And now that we have all these self-help messages, when we see that happen, because of course we can observe it, right? We can observe these things happening. Well, the only answer is that it must be something wrong with us.And then we get fed this message that we’re too self-aware. And then maybe we go to therapy and we even get told we’re too self-aware for therapy. We already know so much, so why are we here? Which again just feeds into this idea that something must be wrong with us.The mindset, the discipline, we’re not doing enough. We’re self-aware, we can’t make the change. We can’t even fit in in therapy.Something really must be wrong with us. We must be our eyes at everything. Healing is fake.Nothing works. This is stupid. I want to offer us a different picture.And the picture is that you and your brain are not bad

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHello and welcome back to our book club read-a-long of Unlocking the Emotional Brain! If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks, where we explore a chapter from the book together (you can also listen on Spotify!). I help translate the theory into everyday language and show you how to apply it in your own life. We also gather twice per book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time.This book takes us deep into the science of memory reconsolidation, one of the most powerful mechanisms for true and lasting change. It helps us understand how healing actually happens after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up with emotionally immature parents.If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this kind of work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience, including live sessions, current discussions, and the complete archive of past reads like No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this community possible, and I’m so grateful you’re here.This week, we dive into chapter 4, which goes further into the process of the Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process and emotional learnings. This chapter further refines our understanding of how these emotional learnings can get embedded deep in our subconscious and affect nearly everything we do. Many of us experience this when we feel like we KNOW all of our patterns, we know HOW to change them, but we can’t seem to get unstuck. You’re not alone - let’s dive in and learn more! (0:00 - 3:03)Welcome back, book club friends. So excited to dive into unlocking the emotional brain again together this week. If you’re new here for my book club slash read along, there’s no need to even have the book.You are welcome to join in and listen as I walk us through popular self-help and therapy books and break them down into become easier to understand and talk about how to apply this your everyday life. So as I was looking through my notes for this week’s episode, I noticed how on every single page of the chapters, there was something I wanted to talk about with you. And so I really enjoy that we can take our time together.And sometimes that means flexing and flowing from our schedule. So I’m going to be talking a little bit about chapter four this week and a little bit about chapter five, but I’m going to push our live meeting out because I want to make sure we have time to get through some of these major concepts before we meet for the first time, so that you can ask any questions or curiosities you might have. So let’s actually plan for our live meeting to be Sunday, December 14th at 12 o’clock Eastern time.And you will receive a Google meet invite for that, where we can join in together, have a little fireside chat. And of course, if you’re not able to join live, you will receive the recording. And now let’s dive in together.So I didn’t even really get to go into chapter four last time because we were talking about chapter three. And the case there was so fascinating. I’ve thought about it so much because I think that understanding of the person who really struggled with being able to speak up in meetings, and that case really helped us understand the symptom coherence, but also to not make assumptions in our own lives as we’re exploring what these underlying routes, these old neural pathways, these old learnings might be.So when the person in that case was talking about struggling speaking up in meetings, it might be easy to think that he lacks self-confidence, maybe he didn’t see confidence in his family, or maybe he was criticized by his peers, and so he worries about being judged when he speaks up. But in that case, what we saw as they went through the process together to map out this old learning, what they found was he was actually afraid that if he spoke up, he would become this extremely assertive aggressor in a way that his father was. And so I think that’s an incredibly interesting observation to make because it really shows us how every symptom is coherent.Every symptom is emotional logic. It makes perfect sense in the system, even if it doesn’t make sense in the present. And so we’re going to talk a little bit more about that today.But this idea that every symptom is coherent is something we’ve seen in all the books that we’ve read together so far. In the NARM book with the exploration of survival strategies, in No Bad Parts, internal family systems, talking about how there literally are no bad parts. All parts serve a protective purpose.(3:03 - 4:40)And then in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, where the author very clearly laid out the adaptive strategies that we may develop if we grew up in an environment like that. And so I love getting to continue to explore this thread together because it’s at the root of all the work that I do, and it’s also just founded in neuroscience. These implicit learnings that get created, these neural pathways, these routes in our brain that get created, are all in response to something that is happening, something that happened to us.And it doesn’t matter if you find it logical in the present. It made sense in the moment, and it was a strong enough experience that your brain held onto it as a pattern to try to keep you safe. And so it’s very common that these patterns form through both frequency and intensity.And so that’s just something to think about that these experiences might not stand out to you. You might not have a clear memory from your childhood or from your adult life where you can see a pattern form, but they may have been small, frequent experiences. Or you might say, well, this was just a one-time thing.How could it impact me in that way? Well, the intensity may have been very, very large to you, to your experience, through your perception. And so as we continue to follow these threads together, and as you might be curious about your own life, I hope that this can offer a different lens that you can use to observe your own experience. And that’s why part of the process that I created, my five steps to change model, is about observing and mapping these things out with curiosity and neutrality.(4:41 - 5:33)And so chapter four, again, really emphasizes this idea that is so critically important when we’re understanding people’s experiences of environmental rupture. And it’s this idea that there is the thing that the person is afraid will happen. And then there is a survival strategy that tries to solve it.And so there are two different sufferings that can be experienced. But the survival strategy, the pattern, the implicit learning, the adaptation, the part, however you want to think about it, is the lesser of two sufferings. Whatever we perceive will happen in that moment of an environmental rupture and attachment failure feels so big, so life or death, that we would rather shut down our own experience, shut down our own needs, than feel that feeling.(5:33 - 10:37)That is the situation that gets these patterns encoded in the brain, where it says, if the choice is being eaten by a tiger, or shutting down my own needs, then I can handle shutting down my own needs. I can go into a functional freeze and just intellectualize and take care of everyone else’s needs. I can definitely handle that suffering.But of course, over time, that suffering wears on us more and more and more. And it can build up resentment and disconnection and a stuck feeling. But when these learnings get formed, the two sufferings are the choice between what can feel like obliteration or annihilation, or shutting away some part of us.And over time, that just becomes part of our behavioral pattern. It becomes part of our procedural manual. So we have a whole atlas in our brain of maps, and those roads are made up of survival roads.But the roads that lead to having needs, moving toward what we want for ourselves, feeling good, feeling joyful, feeling playful, being in the present moment, those roads are underdeveloped. No funding has gone to them over the years. So they might be non-existent, or they might be just little dinky back country dirt roads with a lot of potholes that our brain said, maybe, possibly, potentially, we can go down that road.Very infrequently, if the circumstances are exactly right. But no, most of the time, I’m not going to allow you to go down that road. Because again, the idea is that going down that road will lead to some suffering that is so terrifying.So in this chapter, they are talking about the coherence therapy model, which uses memory reconsolidation to dissolve these schemas, these schemas that are made up of these implicit emotional learnings. And you can think of schemas just like the parts, just like the survival strategies. But to dissolve these schemas, it must be brought into awareness, we must map the route out and connect to the emotional learning that is underneath of that, not just intellectually, but in the moment to feel and touch a piece of that.Because accessing the emotion around that is what allows us to reconsolidate that memory, aka update and organize the pathway in the brain and start to form new neural pathways. So there are a few more interesting cases in this chapter. And one thing I really value about this book is how much they use these cases, because it really helps understand the theory and put it into practice.And so one of the cases in this chapter is about Ted, a man in his 30s, who sort of self-described as a drifter, he had a difficult time holding a job, had a hard time committing to anything, and really kind of lived in those patterns of chronic underachievement. And so again, it would be easy in a traditional model to think, lack of discipline, lack of motivation, lack of willpower, we need some behavioral therapy, we

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHello and welcome back to our book club read-a-long of Unlocking the Emotional Brain! If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks, where we explore a chapter from the book together. I help translate the theory into everyday language and show you how to apply it in your own life. We also gather twice per book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time.This book takes us deep into the science of memory reconsolidation, one of the most powerful mechanisms for true and lasting change. It helps us understand how healing actually happens after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up with emotionally immature parents.If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this kind of work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience, including live sessions, current discussions, and the complete archive of past reads like No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this community possible, and I’m so grateful you’re here.This week, we dive into chapter 3, which goes into the process of the Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process. This chapter is complex but lays out a case for us that gives us further insight into the steps that create change of deeply held symptoms - in this case, Richard suffers from a lack of confidence and a loud inner critic that keeps him small. Many of us may relate to this experience! Understanding how to get at the deeper emotional learnings underneath the pattern are what allows us to create long term change. Let’s dive in!(0:00 - 2:38)Hi and welcome back to our read-along of Unlocking the Emotional Brain, a deep dive into how we create therapeutic change. I know we have some new members here so thank you so much for joining and just a reminder some people read the book along with me and some people never pick up the book and they listen to my interpretation and explanation of the book so welcome. Last week’s post will go into the schedule a little bit more of how this works but we have a fresh podcast episode every two weeks and then we have two live meetings where we get to meet and ask questions.Of course you’re always able to comment or send a question back to me now if you’d like to explore and thank you for being patient with me through my bi-week where I was defending my dissertation so I am now officially Dr. Wolfe and I am thrilled to be complete. I had a wonderful time getting to conduct my own independent research and I’ll look forward to talking about that more on here in the future but for now let’s dive into Unlocking the Emotional Brain and in this chapter, chapter three, we’re going to dive further into therapeutic reconsolidation process. Something I really love about this book though I know it can be quite dense is that it doesn’t just describe emotional change in abstract terms it really lays out for us scientifically what this process looks like and gives us these really helpful case studies to understand what this looks like in real people and so as we dive into these chapters today there are going to be quite a number of cases we’re going to use to explore this transformational therapeutic reconsolidation process that leads to change.So what this process does is works through that memory reconsolidation process. We’ve talked about that a little bit so far and you may have heard me talk about that in some of my other work but what we know is that memory reconsolidation is one of the key mechanisms of change in therapy and we know that we can access old memories, activate them and for a certain period of time those memories, the learnings from those memories can be updated. So we’re not trying to change the memory but we’re pulling out the emotional learning from that memory and so as you’ll see in these cases as we walk through these steps we can pull out these old memories that you’ve heard us talk about as survival strategies when we talked about NARM and the Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma.(2:38 - 5:54)Oftentimes these are the burdens that the parts carry from No Bad Parts internal family systems perspective and these are the adaptive symptoms that we develop when we have emotionally immature caretakers or we go through developmental trauma and this process is one of the major mechanisms of change to shift some of those old emotional learnings that are impacting so many of us in the present unconsciously. Things like intellectualization and people pleasing and self-criticism and perfectionism, they all come from these deeply held emotional learnings and this therapeutic reconsolidation process along with a few other things are those mechanisms that allow us to repattern these things in therapy and in our own personal work. So specifically in these chapters they are talking about how this applies to a type of therapy called coherence therapy and coherence therapy follows these steps for transformational change where they start with identifying the symptom, what it is that’s happening that we want to change, and then retrieving the learning or the schema, whatever it is that’s underneath that learning that makes the symptom necessary.Then we identify a contradictory knowing, a time where something happened that was the opposite of that learning. Once we have identified those then we can reactivate that old learning through that memory, also activate the present day contradictory knowledge, and then we kind of hold those both up to the brain and create a juxtaposition experience and that is what allows that learning to reconsolidate and shift into the present and from there we can verify that that symptom, that schema, is no longer activating. And they talk about here that that change can feel effortless and permanent.Now I want to clarify that very true that these changes can feel effortless and permanent and I get to see that work in my own sessions with my clients all of the time but it’s also important to know of course that this is different for everyone. We can have many many many target learnings and so I never want anyone to feel like well I’ve been doing therapy for x months or x years and I’m not seeing these permanent and effortless changes. When you have a long series of experiences over the course of years that build up these learnings it’s normal and expected that sometimes things might really feel like they shifted and other times it can really feel like it takes time.So just know that we are all on our own timeline here. But let’s just go through some of these cases together and explore this model. So in the first case here we have Richard and Richard comes in with this chronic self-doubt and low confidence and criticism and so let’s walk through this transformational process here, this therapeutic reconsolidation process that we first start with identifying the symptom and sometimes like in this case it is easier for us or for the client to identify the symptom that there can be this recurring pattern where maybe we hesitate to share our ideas, our heart races, we feel anxious, we feel small, we feel regretful that there is a pattern there that we are identifying that is the symptom.(5:55 - 8:08)Now a key component of coherence therapy is recognizing that all symptoms are coherent meaning they all exist as a foil to something occurring. So to some experience occurring that is where the symptom comes from and so they ping off of each other and so coherence therapy really focuses on getting to the root of what is the symptom responding to. What is the schema or the system that existed in our early lives that created the need for this symptom because symptoms always make sense.Symptoms are always part of a coherent system, meaning they are balancing another experience - they HAVE to happen based on our current neural pathways. So the idea is that when we can target these emotional learnings and re-pattern them the symptoms will no longer be necessary so thus the symptom will cease. So very similar to what we’ve seen for example in NARM we don’t worry about working on the symptom behaviorally.We don’t try to stop you from criticizing yourself or people pleasing or second guessing or in this case feeling anxious and trying to keep yourself small. We don’t try to get you to stop doing the symptom because the symptom is fully coherent based on the neural pathway in your brain. The neural pathway in your brain says when A happens I must do B. When we can re-pattern the idea that when A happens I must do B then we never we don’t have to do B. And then they use a technique here with Richard called symptom deprivation and this is a technique we also see in therapies like NARM where we’re essentially imagining what if you had the thing you wanted? What if you could show up confidently? What if you could have your own needs? What if you could be present, connect to yourself, be silly? And we work through this not as a positive happy override but because even just imagining something makes our brain feel like it’s happening and so the very same dilemma or distress or schema that exists in our brain in the world will come up in the moment and we see that here with Richard when he begins imagining being in a meeting at work making some comments and feeling confident we see that old schema coming up.(8:09 - 23:33)And so what we see in this case is that Richard some part of him feels like if he is confident then he would show up as arrogant and overbearing just like his father was. And so just like we’ve seen in the past this is where we’re exploring these old parts of us these old survival strategies these old schemas where in this case if I show up as confident then I will be this controlling invalidating person like my father. Thus the symptom of keeping myself small makes perfect sense.It is

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. I’m re-sharing this old episode because it relates perfectly to the conversations I’ve been having over on TikTok about how to truly heal from old patterns and start to do the things we WANT to do, not the things we unconsciously feel we HAVE to do. And - big news from my corner of the world: after years of research, writing, and late nights, I’m finally nearing the end of my doctoral dissertation. As I look toward this milestone, I’ve been reflecting on all the things I wish I had learned earlier in my learning - practical tools for navigating trauma, building resilience, and creating change that truly lasts. That reflection has sparked something new: I’m developing a curriculum that brings these pieces together in a way that feels clear, grounded, and accessible. Teaching this work is one of the places I feel most alive, and I can’t wait to share it with you. If you’d like to be part of the very beginning, I have two opportunities coming up: a live 5 Steps to Long-Lasting Change class on October 26th, and a mini virtual retreat for women on November 6th.Now, onto our deep dive into “self-sabotage”! 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.tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.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

In the final episode of our book club, we explore the last few chapters of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. The focus shifts from recognizing emotionally immature people to seeking and building relationships that nourish us. Skepticism may arise, as many of us have experienced emotional immaturity from our parents or caretakers in the past. Our survival system may make it feel like their behavior is still dangerous in the present, but we have the opportunity to work to build a sense of safety within ourselves.Emotionally mature people are responsive, empathetic, offer safety, and make you feel seen and understood. They embody Self-energy of curiosity, compassion, calm, and connectedness, and can reflect on their actions. Emotionally mature people make relationships feel safer over time and allow us to feel safer in ourselves. Through therapy, we can explore the patterns in our lives and our relationship with our own emotionally immature parent, and learn to embody emotionally mature qualities within ourselves. Please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you’re observing. In September, we will dive into Unlocking the Emotional Brain - I’m so excited! I’m brainstorming ways for us to connect even further - more live meetings? Discord chat? Let me know your thoughts!(0:00 - 3:27)Welcome back book club friends to our final podcast episode about adult children of emotionally immature parents. We will have our final live meeting together on August 30th where we get a chance to come together, explore, ask questions, and just have that time of connection to integrate all that we've learned together from this depthful book. So as we come to these last chapters we're just kind of bringing everything together.It's been a journey of exploration of what immature parents represent, how they show up, and what happens within us when we grow up in that kind of environment. And so chapter 10 introduces us to how we identify emotionally immature people. It can sound really simple and it can sound like well duh I just look for the opposite but I think it's actually a really profound exploration when you've grown up with emotional immaturity as your baseline.You know we have to remember that what we experience repeatedly becomes very strong neural pathways within our brain and they can become the lenses through which we see the world. But it's all subconscious. Most of it's subconscious.So we might find ourselves as we've talked about through this book over and over again getting into relationships or friendships or staying in connection with emotionally immature people. And again that's because with these lenses that we have learned to see the world we might say well it's me. I'm the problem.This other person can't be the problem. I'm just not trying hard enough. I'm not working hard enough to figure out a solution for this person so that they can behave more kindly or be more connected to me or I just keep making mistakes and that's why this person isn't showing up for me.Or we endlessly analyze it and intellectualize it but never being able to quite come to that moment where we recognize that it may not be about us. It may be about this other person's dynamic and we can choose not to engage in that dynamic little bits at a time. A lot of times in popular culture right now we talk a lot about cutting people off.You know boundaries and then boundaries are this idea that it means we never talk to the person again or you know we have to set these really hard lines and I'm fully in support of whatever people need to do to take care of themselves but it's important to understand that to go from completely trying to make things okay for other people, family members or whoever it might be, to fully cutting them off can feel incredibly jarring and terrifying to our nervous system. And so I want to emphasize that if you have been told or have this idea that you have to jump to cutting your parents off or whoever the emotionally immature person might be, you can take things slower. You can take things one tiny step at a time and in fact we just know that that's how our brain works.That's why I named this substack Tiny Sparks because neurons that fire together wire together. So just remembering that one little step at a time is just fine even if you're feeling an intensity of an experience. So as we come back into chapter 10 we are learning how the focus shifts from recognizing emotionally immature people and the way they've impacted us to starting to shift to our agency of seeking and building relationships that nourish us and that feel deeply connecting.(3:28 - 4:06)So this chapter talks about something that children of emotionally immature parents often experience, which is this skepticism that a truly connected relationship where you can be yourself, be safe, be seen, have needs and have your own emotions isn't possible. That it really just can't exist out there because your brain is shoving in your face all this data. Times where you have attempted to have needs or be yourself or be seen and it has gone awry either from your parents or other people and it's all stuck up in there and it's not just from the past.(4:06 - 6:28)Some of this might still be happening in the present and often it is. If you are still connected with your parents or if you are in other relationships that are emotionally immature that data is still coming into your data model. And when I'm working with people in therapy what I am always exploring with them is we're teasing apart the difference between it happening when we're children and happening when we're adults.Because when it happens when we're children, as you've learned by now through our time together in exploring this book in a really depthful way, it feels like a threat to our lives. It's not just about a parent who withdraws or a parent who criticizes. It's about the fact that as children we rely on our caregivers to keep us safe and keep us alive.We are biologically wired to do so. So every moment where we feel having a need, being seen, having an emotion, making a mistake, whatever the experience might be causes some discord for our parents that lands onto us, that actually creates a survival energy in the mind and body. Even if you don't remember that, even if you're not consciously aware of it, that fight, flight, fawn, freeze, those are survival things.Those are things that should only come out when there's a tiger chasing you or when you come across a bear on the hiking trail or when you really need to protect your survival. Those things shouldn't be happening with our parents, but they do because it feels like, uh-oh, if my parent's not okay, I'm not okay. If I have to choose between my parent and myself, I must choose my parent or caregiver in order to keep me alive.So the difference that we're teasing apart is we want to take that old emotional learning that having a need and someone getting upset about that is no longer dangerous. So we want to take the learning where it felt dangerous and we want to bring it into the present that even if your parent is still reacting aggressively or immature toward you when you have a need in the present, even if it's just saying, oh no, I'm not going to make it to that dinner, but thanks for the invitation. And then you get laid in with all manner of sarcasm or manipulation or immaturity or criticism that your life is not at stake here in the present.(6:29 - 10:33)The emotional immaturity coming from your parent or whomever it is in the present is not dangerous, even though your survival system is going to make it feel like it's the same thing happening because of that predictive patterning, because of that old data model. And so that's why our work in the present is to notice it, observe it, build the part of us who is here in the present who has some sense of safety. And you might think, I don't know if I have a sense of safety.Well, that's why this is a process. That's why I don't recommend jumping to cutting people off unless you decide to where there's a safety concern, because first you need to build safety within yourself in the present to be able to state and hold those boundaries. And so the work really is so deeply within us of unwinding those old neural pathways, those old learnings.And that's why the next book we're going to read together is Unlocking the Emotional-Based Brain, which is all about these emotional learnings. And that's why in my guide to change that I created for Substack, I focus on observation within ourself and building safety. Because we have to believe that something different is possible.And we have to believe that our safety is not at stake in the present if we have a need or if we express ourselves or if we do what feels good for ourselves. So it all comes back to the re-patterning of the neural pathways. So if you feel that skepticism, don't worry, that's normal.Thanks for reading tiny sparks - trisha wolfe! This post is public so feel free to share it.That's your brain trying to protect you. You feel like everything is emotionally lonely and you can never be connected because those predictive maps are built on the future. And so we're changing our neural pathways and we know that we can, and that's the hope and the power of neuroplasticity.But know that it takes time. And so if you feel that skepticism coming up that things could be different with your parent, or that you could build an emotionally mature relationship with someone else, just let yourself notice that part of you that feels really scared right now. And that those old neural pathways might be coming up right now.And see if you can find one thing that lets you feel safe here in the present, even if it's just that your front door is locked. Or maybe as you slow down and you notice it in this moment right now, you can feel this feels impossible. This feels scary.This feels like it'll never happen. But wait a second, I'm thinking

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comWelcome back, book club read-a-long friends! This week, we are diving into chapters 8 and 9 of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents! It’s hard to believe we’re almost finished with this book - it’s truly been such a wonderful exploration. Our live meeting will be Saturday, August 30th, at 10 am Eastern Time (New York). What book should we choose next?! The front runner right now is Unlocking the Emotional Brain, but feel free to cast your vote for what you’re curious about!(0:00 - 0:35)Welcome back, book club, to our read-along of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. It's hard to believe we're getting near the end of this very rich book, but this week we will be going through chapter 8, and hopefully chapter 9, and then our last meeting live together will be Saturday, August 30th at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. If you can't make that time, not to worry, it will be recorded, but I'm really excited to get together and talk about what we learned, what we explored, and what we've noticed with this book, and to answer any final questions.(0:36 - 3:25)So you will get that link the week before. Just once more, that live meeting will be August 30th at 10 a.m. Eastern Time on Google Meet. So as we've spent the book learning a little bit about what emotionally immature parents are like and how they affect us and play out in our adult relationships, these two chapters talk a little bit about, now that you know, what do you do? How do you not get hooked back into the pattern? How do you live from a place that is truly yours? And we know because of those predictive patterns in our brain that are always trying to predict what's coming next, based on what's happened in the past, those well-worn neural pathways and emotional learnings that are deeply embedded in there, especially from our childhood experience, that are, we will, we will get hooked back in.And maybe you've experienced that. Maybe you go home for the holidays and you notice you feel like you're back to being your 10-year-old self, or a five-minute conversation with a parent, and your body feels like you just jumped off of a 500-foot water tower. It's a full thought, emotion, and body sensation experience when we get hooked into these patterns, that we might feel that collapse, that activation, that confusion, that looping.All of those are signs and signals that we have gotten hooked back into one of these old patterns. Remember, that is our brain working as designed, so it's so important as we explore some of these tools to know these tools are not foolproof. Your brain will, not if, but will get hooked back into these patterns, and that is okay.That doesn't mean it feels good, but it means it's very, very important to name and notice that we may find ourselves feeling that pull, but over time the pull will be less, and it will shift, and it will feel less like panic, and more like a little present-day stress. And so that is the work of being curious, and noticing, and observing. And if you listen to me all this time, you know that I'm always talking about observing, observing, observing, becoming aware.What road are we on in our neural pathway atlas map? Are we in an old pathway covered in tigers, or are we in the present day of what's happening right now? When we are hooked into these patterns, and we feel the panic, and the collapse, our brain isn't reacting to what's happening here in the present. It's reacting to past patterns that are landing onto the present, because we're expecting what's going to happen. So we're just waiting for the moment we're going to be criticized, or punished, or love is going to be withdrawn from us.And so we're very slowly teasing apart old patterns versus what's happening in the present. That's not easy to do. It does take time, and it does take this practice of observation, just like Gibson talks about in this chapter.(3:26 - 6:50)So as Gibson talks about stepping out of that old fantasy that we've talked about, that one day if we could just say the right thing, and do the right thing, our parent will become the person we need them to be. As we come out of that more and more, a process that's often called separation and individuation, what that means is over the course of our life really, starting from around age two, we are learning that we are separate and individual from our parents. And we are building our separate and individual identities from them.And that is what allows us to have a healthy relationship. You can think of two-year-olds saying, no, I want to dress myself. And you can think of teenagers who are like, I never want to be anything like my parents.That's normal. They're building their identity. They come back around as their own individual, as they have finished that sort of completion of separation and individuation.When you have emotionally immature parents, you don't get a chance to complete those phases, especially because emotionally immature families are often very enmeshed, meaning no one gets to be separate. And if you try to be separate, and you try to be your own person, have your own feelings, emotions, experiences, you will be punished in some way, through actual punishment, through criticism, or through withdrawal of care and love. And sometimes it's very overt, but sometimes it's much more subtle.But that separation and individuation is what we're curious about building as we build these new neural pathways in the present. The first thing Gibson talks about to forge a new relationship with our families is that detached observation. You've heard me talk about this many times as the neutral observer or the wildlife documentarian.It's a practice where instead of being hooked in to the past patterns playing out in the present, we are the ones noticing the hook. We see the hook dangled in front of us. Because we know that emotionally immature people subconsciously will want to hook us back into their patterns, because that's their homeostasis.That's what feels comfortable and familiar for them. It's very often not intentional, but it's for us to be curious and observe. My wildlife documentarian Gibson calls an anthropological field study, where you're just noticing what's happening both for yourself and for the other person.And when you start to feel those little flags that you're getting hooked back in, that is the time to pause. So Gibson talks about kind of like repeating to yourself, detach, detach, detach. I would say that's different for everyone.If that works for you, that's fantastic. For many of us, we may not yet be in a place where that feels good. Because saying detach, detach, detach can really activate that protective child consciousness part of us that is saying it's not safe to detach.And your adult part saying, but I want to detach. I don't want to be hooked into this. And the child consciousness protective parts of us saying, no, if I detach, I'll lose my relationship.So I don't necessarily jump to those behavioral sort of cognitive shifts of saying detach, detach, detach to yourself. But you can try on what works for you through a series of mini experiments. Is it walking away? Is it taking a break? Is it looking around the room and find what lets you feel safe in that moment? Is it putting boundaries on how much time you'll be there or whether you'll talk on the phone or actually visit? So it's not a passive process.(6:50 - 8:17)It's very, very active. She also talks about relatedness versus relationship. And so staying related to them, where we're not trying to have a satisfying emotional exchange, but we're staying in contact with whatever limits work for us.Why? Because we know that that person right now, in this moment, doesn't have the capacity for emotional reciprocity and a true, depthful relationship. And trying to get them to that place is part of that fantasy role. Maybe one day they could get there, but that's through their own work.We can't try to make them get there. In this chapter, Gibson also talks about this maturity awareness approach of different ways to relate to a parent or caregiver who is exhibiting emotional immaturity in the moment, expressing what you want to say and not trying to control the outcome. So not needing the other person to hear you and meet you in an adult way, even if a part of you wants that, focusing on the outcome rather than the relationship.And so we're looking very specifically at, I want to express myself to my parent, even though I'm nervous, rather than trying to be depthful in the relationship and have that person meet you and explore with you and have a really adult interaction. We know, again, that's not possible. So we're focusing on what we want for ourselves.(8:17 - 10:56)And then Gibson also talks about managing not engaging. Maybe you've heard the term jade before. It's often talked about when relating to people who are emotionally immature and not in their adult consciousness.And it stands for justify, argue, defend, and explain. So when we're engaging with someone who is in an emotionally immature state and they are not in their adult consciousness place, they are not in a relational place, there isn't any use in trying to justify, argue, defend, or explain in trying to engage with them in that way. Because they are in their patterns, and they are in this protective old young state, they aren't going to be able to engage with you in that way.So being related and managing versus trying to engage in a depthful relationship. Now, what I want to say about this chapter is it's very behavioral. And there are some strategies in here that you might find incredibly helpful.But it's really important to know that it's very, very common for these approaches to bring up all kinds of things within us. And that is where the work is right now. So what I will often say to people is, yes, this book is great.It's a self-help book. It's e

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comWelcome, new book club friends! So glad you’re here. We’re diving into Chapter 7 today, but remember, you have full access to the archive, too! So feel free to go back and begin at Chapter 1. Also - it’s already time to start thinking about our next book - please drop any titles you may be curious about in the comments or reply and send them straight to me! 00:00Welcome back to our book club and read-along together. We have quite a few new people here this week so I'm just going to briefly recap what we're doing. Together we are reading books and some of you are reading along with me and some of you are just listening to my recaps which is perfect.00:16You're welcome whichever way you would like to engage with this material. Right now we're reading adult children of emotionally immature parents. In the past we've read No Bad Parts, a book on internal family systems, and The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma, a book on the model called the Neuroeffective Relational Model.00:36Right now we're beginning chapter 7 of adult children of emotionally immature parents. Every two weeks I provide you with a recap with interpretation from a therapist who works with complex and developmental trauma point of view and occasionally I drop in little meditations or journaling exercises for you too.00:54Twice we meet live, once halfway through and once at the end which for this book will be at the end of August. And if you're here you also have full access to the archive so you can go back and listen to all the other chapters and all the other books whenever you'd like.01:08It also gets pushed through to all the podcast software so if you would like to listen on your phone, on your walk, you can listen on Spotify and Apple Music. So thanks for being here. I love getting to do this work and let's dive into chapter 7.01:27So this is a huge chapter and as always I will add in my little reminder to take things little bits at a time. All this time we've been kind of taking things in from an intellectual perspective but as we've been doing that we've been noticing ways that this might have impacted us in our childhood and ways that it might be impacting us now in our adult lives.01:46But what we're coming upon now is what really happens when we integrate all of this information. When we start to connect into the emotions, patterns, behaviors, thoughts, and body sensations that have been tied into to these roles that were foisted upon us, not because of our choice, but in these emotionally immature homes where we had no choice but to adapt, to stay in connection to our caregivers,02:12who themselves were not able to show up as parents, caregivers, and adults. In this chapter, Gibson is diving into what happens when we start to become aware of and observe these roles, these patterns that we've been in for a long time.02:29And this can create in many of us a sense of being out of control, a sense of failure, a sense of anxiety. There can be major grief and anger and fear that comes up with this because we are starting to recognize that we are not our patterns.02:47We are not this role that we have been thrust into. And if that is true, which part of us might feel like is a very good and exciting thing, another part of us can feel terrified. And so Gibson is exploring this idea of what is the true self.03:03And if you've been along with me for the other two books, you know that in NARM, this is referred to as the adult consciousness. In IFS, it is referred to as the self with a capital S. And we can think of it as the observer of everything that's happening, our true selves.03:21And this is an idea that has its core in many cultures, many therapeutic models, many ways of relating to the world of who we really are at our core. This is a huge shift and a huge question because what we're really asking is, who am I?03:38Who am I? If all of these thoughts and patterns and behaviors that I have done my whole life are not me, then who am I? And that can be incredibly earth shattering. And again, it's a push and a pull and a bind because of course, many of us are doing this work because we know we don't feel good.03:55We know we want something differently. But at the same time, a part of us desperately does not want something different. And that is why so many people will come into therapy talking about quote unquote self sabotaging when what they really mean is, I started to move toward what I want for myself or my true self or my true feelings.04:15And that was terrifying because a part of my brain encoded doing that as being a tiger. And so my brain protected me by using an old pattern of behavior to get me back into alignment. And that is not you self sabotaging because you think it's fun or because you just can't let yourself want anything.04:34That is a deeply protective road in your brain that all of these neural pathways have been created to keep you safe and keep you in connection with your emotionally immature parents and caregivers. So this question of who am I really is the ultimate question because we are ready to shed off these roles.04:53A part of us is, but the other part of us is still terrified. So what I want to tell you before we go. any further into this chapter is we can think of this not as creating a new us or not having to figure out from scratch who we are but more like we're taking off layers of armor.05:13So many of us since we were young children have been walking around wearing 10 or 15 suits of armor and it's heavy it's so heavy and we can't fully move and we can't be ourselves we can't play we can't be silly we can't do a cartwheel or whatever we might want to do but over time we could become so accustomed to wearing the armor that we don't even realize we're wearing it and so starting to take it off is like oh huh it's lighter maybe I kind of like that maybe I can walk a little more easily but another part of us is like oh absolutely not this is terrifying I feel so unprotected and unsafe because what we've learned is all along we must wear those protective suits of armor,05:53the perfectionism, the people pleasing, the internalizing, the intellectualizing, we must wear those to keep connection and make sure that our parents and those around us are okay. So many people when they come to this point and you may be here in real time feel an incredible bind and I want to reassure you that is normal, that is the old patterns in your brain mashing up with the new patterns you're creating,06:17the new questions that you are asking yourself. So please know this is not something you jump into in one chapter or one week or one month, this is a back and forth curiosity of who am I in this one tiny moment and then going back to the protective pattern.06:36And honestly this can be as small as, I use this example a lot because a lot of people can relate, you go to a coffee shop, you order a drink with milk because you have a dairy allergy, you watch them make it with dairy and then it is so terrifying to consider letting them know that you cannot drink that drink that you paid seven dollars and fifty cents for.06:57And that is a moment and if you haven't yet you could go back and read last week's written sub-stack, that is a moment where we get to practice something called a congruence experiment and when we are coming into our true self it's going to be a series of these experiments where we try on what do I want for myself versus what was safe in the past.07:18So in the past it wasn't safe to state your needs, it was terrifying, it was dangerous, it could upset the whole apple cart, your parent might withdraw from you for days or they might go off on you or a whole variety of things could happen in that slot machine effect of emotionally immature parents.07:33And so having needs now in the present, even something as quote unquote simple as letting them know they didn't make your drink correctly, sets off that survival pattern in the brain that makes it feel like our life is at stake.07:46When we're being curious about who am I really, what we call could do in that moment is try on a little experiment to say, well, I want to be a person who could say, you made my drink wrong, would you mind remaking it?07:59But right now it feels deeply unsafe. Could I pause in this moment in real time for 15 seconds or 30 seconds and notice that even though this feels deeply unsafe right now, as I look around the coffee shop and I feel my feet on the ground and I see what's happening, I can feel, maybe, that I actually am safer than I thought.08:19You don't have to jump to letting them know they made your drink wrong, though you can. What we're doing is we're building up the pathway that says, oh, it used to be true that I wasn't safe to have needs, but it's not true right now.08:31And that's just one little piece of armor off, one little piece of light coming in and shining onto the real you who gets to choose in real time whether you want to say it or not say it. It doesn't matter whether you actually say it to the barista, what matters is that you have the choice in the moment because you are connecting to that true self, that self with a capital S, and not the self who is trying to keep your emotionally immature parent okay.08:58So Gibson has a little exercise in this chapter that I'm going to talk you through about awakening to your true self. And what she offers is getting a pen and a piece of paper, folding the piece of paper in half down the middle.09:10So, on one half you write my true self, and on the other half you write my real self. And under your true self, you think back to yourself as a child, and what you might have been like before you started trying to make things okay for those around you, before you learned to criticize yourself instead of criticizing your parents, before you learned that having fun and playing and fee

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHi, tiny sparks readers and listeners! Two quick notes for you: first, a gift! I created this free ritual guide for another area of my work, Field Day, where I create tools and practices to help you engage more deeply with the world around you. As a supporter of my work, you can find it free here. Second, I started a Patreon! For years, people have asked me to create longer-form video, and I really have such a passion for teaching and helping people get unstuck from old patterns. If you’d like to join me (it’s free!), you can do so here. Thanks for being here!(0:00 - 1:06)Welcome back to our book club and read-along of adult children of emotionally immature parents. This week we're going to be diving into chapter six that goes further into that concept of internalizer and I'm really excited to dive into this chapter a little more because I bet a lot of you listening can relate to this chapter. I know that I certainly can and especially if you found me through my work talking about intellectualizers and how often they can get missed in therapy, you probably will really relate to this chapter.So this chapter really explores what it's like to grow up in an emotionally immature home and to turn inward. So we know that our protective survival strategies are our brain, nervous system, and body working together subconsciously, biologically, to determine what is going to keep us safe when there is a threat. And remember in this situation we're not talking just about physical safety but about a felt sense of safety which means maintaining connection with our parents and caregivers and those around us.(1:07 - 1:35)It's so important to remember that these are all protective strategies to keep us safe. It's hard to conceptualize as an adult because of course we want to say well I was safe but I always want to is our biological imperative to stay safe, to stay alive because we rely on them to keep us alive. So staying connected and feeling like we belong with them is our biological imperative.(1:36 - 6:46)So that is what our brain and nervous system are doing when they create these protective strategies and so it's not something that we get to consciously choose. We don't get to decide if we're going to be an externalizer or an internalizer. It's very similar to fight, flight, fawn, or freeze.When we're in an emergency situation, like we're in a dark alley and someone walks in behind us, we don't pause and think cognitively and intellectually. Should I fight this person? Should I run away? Should I try to make everything okay by being nice and sweet? Should I freeze? We're not deciding any of that consciously. It's decided in milliseconds subconsciously by our brain.So just remember that these strategies are similar in that regard and so if you are listening and you're thinking I don't really relate to the internalizer. I partially do but sometimes I'm an externalizer. Just know that all of this is your brain and nervous system wiring.It doesn't mean anything about you and what we're curious about is how they show up here in the present because that is where we have an opportunity to make a change because what happens for many of us who grew up in homes with adult emotionally immature caregivers is we become that person for ourselves. We become, we internalize that emotionally immature parent and then we treat ourselves the same way. We abandon our needs.tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.We abandon our boundaries because we are criticizing ourselves all of the time because we don't feel like we can handle the emotions so we need to shut them down because we feel like we're not good enough and so we take care of everyone else's needs to make us feel like we are good enough. We do that as adults because those are the neural pathways that are laid down as children but that's what we're wanting to change and so that's what we're being curious about when we observe this. Not to criticize ourselves for noticing these behaviors but to say well I can really understand how these developed and I feel sad and I feel angry and I can be with the part of me that was afraid but I don't have to do those things anymore.Little bits at a time I can start to change my neural pathways. So Gibson defines internalizers as those of us who learn to turn our distress inward. So instead of acting out, you may remember from the last chapter, we withdraw, we overthink, we intellectualize, we manage, we go internal and try to manage everything all at the time.So we will appear very mature, very capable, very thoughtful. We're often told that we're literal little adults as children but what we don't see is that maturity is actually a part of the survival strategy. If we have emotionally immature parents and that feels dangerous to us then we will develop this sort of faux sense of maturity beyond our needs to try to manage, beyond our age is what I meant to say, to try to manage an environment that feels unmanageable and that feels unsafe.So when we grow up in these families where our emotional needs are not met, we don't just give up on that connection, we double down on trying to earn it, right? So we will become whatever our parent needs, we will become the most helpful person with no needs, we're very low maintenance, we're responsible, we're self-regulating because this is what is safe. This is how we're trying to get our needs met and stay in connection and then we don't just do this with our parents, we do this with our teachers, we do this with our peers and our friends. This is how we learn to navigate the world.We learn subconsciously and then eventually consciously that connection is very, very fragile, very, very fraught, that we're always at risk of kind of being voted off the island and thus we must earn it. We must do something to keep it. We must perform lovability.So again in NARM and in parts work, we recognize this the same way that these are protective parts of us, these are adaptive survival strategies. When we develop these, it's because we're actually very, very perceptive. Some part of us senses what other people need and so we learn to become hyper-vigilantly over-attuned.You've heard me say that word before, of sensing every single little shift in a room. And so as an adult, you might say to your partner, what's wrong? And they might say, nothing's wrong. And you might say, well, your tone of voice changed a little bit and now it seems like you're upset.And they're like, no, everything's totally fine. I don't think my tone of voice changed. But you were responding to some tiny little shift because you're so over-attuned and now your nervous system is saying something must be unsafe.You need to make it okay. Something must be unsafe. You need to make it okay.So our atlas in our brain is made up of all of these roads that say, here's how you minimize your needs. Here's how you minimize your emotions. Here's how you be as lovable as possible.And those are the pathways that are available to our brain, that our brain goes down most frequently. The other pathways of having needs, having boundaries, communicating, feeling emotions, being authentic, going after what we want, feeling that anything is possible. Those roadways either are very, very underdeveloped.(6:47 - 11:57)They're like little back rocky roads, or they're not developed at all. So it feels terrifying to us. Remember, if we try to go somewhere where the neural pathway doesn't exist, or the road is encoded as unsafe, our brain says, that's way too dangerous.I can't let you do that. And it will want to get us back to these other pathways. And it'll often do that by making us feel overwhelmed.We'll criticize ourselves to shut ourselves down. We'll turn our back on our needs. We'll tell ourselves we're not good enough, whatever we have to do to get us back to those safe pathways.That is how our brain is wired when we grow up in homes with a... So you could imagine that if you're an internalizer, the name of your atlas, all the maps and neural pathways in your brain would be entitled something like, if I want love, I need to be good. If I want love, I need to not have emotions. Connection is dangerous, and this is how I stay safe.And it's just an atlas full of these survival pathways. And it's incredibly heartbreaking to do this work, because oftentimes when we are children, we don't have the capacity to feel these emotions, to understand what's really happening. And we're often not supported in our homes to feel the emotions.And so we don't know that what's happening could make us feel angry, or sad, or afraid. Instead, it's just sort of this like, it's normal. This is what's normal.This is what my family does. So this must be what love is like. So when you are coming to terms with this as an adult, and this is why I always say to take this work so slowly, is that oftentimes all of those emotions that you didn't get to feel as a child, the anger, the fear, the sadness, and grief, will come up now.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comWelcome back to week 5 - so glad you’re here! Here’s my little reminder, as always, that it’s okay (and recommended!) to take this material slowly. Your brain might say, no, go faster, learn it all, do more! But in reality, making change requires us to titrate, i.e., take things one small step at a time. You have all the time you need. Wishing you tiny sparks of goodness this week!(0:00 - 6:40)Hello and welcome back to Book Club, where this week we're going to be diving into Chapter 5 in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. So I'm curious how you're finding things so far. If you want to leave a comment or reply to me here, I'd love to hear any of the things that you're learning and thank you for all the comments you've left and shared with me so far. I really love when this gets to feel like a community of us learning together. Because so much of healing from things like having emotionally immature parents requires us to have co-regulation. And for many of us, we may not have that. We may not have a person in our lives who can truly understand what it's like to grow up in an environment like this. So while we might not see each other, I hope we can feel the energy that we're all holding as we do this depthful exploration together. So you may remember from last time that we talked about the different ways that emotionally immature parents can show up. In Chapter 5, we're going to talk about two concepts that I find so important as we are learning to heal and rewire our brain after growing up in environments with these environmental failures. And that is the healing fantasy and the role self. So let's dive in. If you have been with me for a while through some of the other book clubs or some of my classes, you've heard me use the term survival strategy, protective mechanism, or parts. Specifically, protective parts. Those are all words for what happens when our environment can't meet our needs in a way that feels good to us. So whether our parent needs us to be perfect so that they can feel safe, they need us to not feel emotions because they don't know how to be with emotions, they need us to take care of their needs because they can't meet their own needs. All of those things create an environment where, as you've heard me say many times, it feels unsafe for a child. And I can't emphasize that enough that to our child brain, these environments create a bind where we have to choose between our caregivers or ourselves. And we rely on our caregivers to keep us safe and alive as children. So we will always choose our caregivers and we will split away from ourselves. In this book, she talks about it as coping. And I have nothing wrong with the word coping, of course, but I think a lot of times we hear the word coping mechanism and it can get used really negatively. Like, well, this is just a coping mechanism. You know, you're just coping and you need to stop doing that. And it's a little bit different from coping, so that's why I like to use the word survival strategy or protective mechanism. Maybe you've heard before of like pro-symptom therapy models. And what that means is we understand that all symptoms, all behaviors, all ways of talking to ourselves and treating ourselves that are negative are as a result of keeping ourselves safe and protecting us. It means they served us at some time in our life. So as we delve into this chapter, I invite you to hold that concept not of coping, but of safety and protection, that these neural pathways got laid down in your environment, in your life, to keep you safe, to help your brain and your nervous system make you feel safe, either by shutting things off, by pushing you into perfectionism, by pushing you into externalizing behaviors, which we'll dive into more. But all of this was in pursuit of trying to create safety in a situation where there were none. We know we can rewire these pathways, but it's really important that the language we use reflects the truth, which is that it was protective. So it's not just coping. It's actually a very, very smart setup by our brain and our survival system to keep us safe. Coping can make people think that it's a behavior that they should just be able to change. Rather than understanding, these are encoded as survival pathways in your brain. And your brain always values survival pathways over happiness or presence or whatever the other thing is. So just keep that in mind as we go further. So the author talks here about this concept of healing fantasy. And we can think about a healing fantasy of this subconscious belief or daydream or story that one day, somehow, we will finally get what we didn't get in childhood. Maybe that means we'll find the perfect partner. Maybe it means if we just work hard enough, we'll get the perfect job and we'll prove ourselves through success. We'll achieve enough that finally we'll be loved, cared for, and seen as good enough. And we can really see how protective this is, right? We are trying to make a story about what is happening and to protect ourselves from the terror, rage, and grief of what we don't have right now. And part of that healing fantasy involves us changing ourselves into something that people will finally love. So these healing fantasies, these stories that are all part of these protective survival strategies always start with this idea of, if only. If only I was beautiful enough. If only I was successful enough. If only I was funny enough. If only I was wealthy enough. And so it's very typical and common that children who grow up in environments like this will spend a lot of time in this healing fantasy space. And as part of the healing fantasy is where this role self develops. And this role self develops as a way to try to get attention or to try to find your place in your family. And remember, this is not manipulative. Children are not able to be manipulative. They are trying to get their needs met. So you can almost think of the role self as us trying to figure out our space in the game of our family. So we're constantly trying to figure out what are the roles? What are the roles? What do I need to do to get my needs met and stay safe in the situation? But remember, when you're in an environment with developmental ruptures and environmental failures, the roles are constantly changing and the rules are constantly changing.(6:41 - 7:43)So this role self is an identity that we're constantly trying to build to secure our place in the family. And that's where those protective survival strategies come from. If we figure out that our game piece is the caretaker, then we're going to develop a series of strategies, including shutting down our own needs, shutting down our own emotions, becoming hyper vigilantly over attuned and over aware of other needs, and really just creating a whole role where we convince ourselves that if we never have needs and we take care of everyone else's needs all of the time, then we will finally be loved. So we have the role self and we have the healing fantasy that if I fulfill this role, I will be loved. From an IFS perspective, and for those of you who are here for No Bat Parts, you may already be putting this together. These fantasies and these roles are often held by exile parts and the protector parts, the manager and the firefighters.(7:44 - 9:55)So that exile part that holds all of that emotion of what wasn't and what was too much that carry the memory of their unmet needs and that pin their survival on the someday solution. While the protective parts kind of build out around that of earning and fixing and performing of anything to kind of avoid that core wound. So we can see that same story here with the healing fantasy and the role self. And in NARM, again, we will frame this as survival strategies that develop into a survival style based on disconnection from ourself to build this sort of compensatory identity, right? So it's the 15 layers of armor that you don't even know that you're wearing. Like you're just so convinced that no, you just love taking care of everyone else's needs all of the time, because it's not safe to look underneath and see that that's just something that you've had to do. But underneath of that, truly, you would also like to have needs, but it's too terrifying to look at that. tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.So we stay in the role self, we stay in the survival strategy, we stay in the protective parts, not because there's anything wrong with us, but because our brain is following well-worn neural pathways that are encoded for safety. It's important to understand that these fantasies are not just mental, they are very much neural pathways in the brain. But there are other things associated with those neural pathways that live in the body and in our behaviors. They influence how we orient towards relationships. So we might lean in too quickly, we might find ourselves oversharing or getting into a relationship too quickly before we really know the person. Or we might feel really anxious in relationships, and we might freeze or fawn when someone tries to pull away. We might believe we have to constantly fix or soothe or save someone. Or we might avoid emotions and relationships entirely, because we feel that we're just going to be taken from again and again and again. And all of this can manifest as anxiety, tension, clenching your jaw, your chest being tight.(9:56 - 12:36)It can also manifest as not feeling anything, feeling numb, feeling like, well, I just don't really need emotions. So it's not just in the brain, these predictive patterns play out in different bodily and behavioral experiences. And so it can really convince us that what's happening is real. Because when our brain predicts something dangerous is going

Hi, tiny sparks reader! This week’s book club read-a-long is free to listen to (or read the transcript). I had some feedback that timestamps are useful, so I’m trying that out this week, let me know if that’s helpful or not! Thanks for being here and making this work sustainable for me. It truly means so much to me to get to do this work. Have others things you’d like to see me explore? Leave a comment below or reply to this email and let’s get into it!Trisha 00:00:01 Hello and welcome back to our Read Along. So excited to get to dive into chapter four and five. This week together. I think these are really rich chapters and thank you all so much. You could come to our live meeting. And for those of you who watched the recording and sent me your messages, I love getting to hear your experience as we move along. I've had so much depth in this book that is incredibly helpful, because I think they name things that many of us sensed as children, but never were able to have language to, and this book really provides some structure around that, and I think it's so important for those of us, too, that have always sensed something inside of us that didn't feel right, but didn't feel like we actually had trauma. And so understanding these environmental ruptures, environmental failures, these attachment ruptures really helps us understand ourselves more in the present and observe where some of these predictive patterns and survival strategies in our brains may have developed, and it helps us be more curious about our experience versus criticizing ourselves.Trisha 00:01:07 You know, oftentimes we do want things to make sense. And that's not just an intellectualizing pursuit. Understanding ourselves is a very important part of being able to connect to our agency. And so when we can start to understand how our patterns that we criticize ourselves for here in the present, we're actually survival strategies and adaptive patterns that served us in environments with emotionally immature parents. Then we can start to feel more neutral and eventually, maybe even more compassionate toward ourselves. So we know that not all emotionally immature parents look the same, but what they share is that deep emotional unreliability or inconsistency. And that's actually one of the most challenging things for our nervous system is to have inconsistency and unreliability. It's a slot machine effect, right? You never know when you pull the lever. Which parent you're going to get. And that creates a constant sense of hypervigilance or need to be alert in our system. So whether our parents were volatile or passive and not engaged with us, or whether they were intrusive, trying to be involved in every single aspect and control our lives, or if they were distant and completely uninterested in our lives.Trisha 00:02:24 What we know is that parents who operate from these places themselves have these deeply unresolved emotional needs and are acting out their survival strategies. And so these things can really often pass generationally as parents who have these unresolved ruptures and attachment failures try to use their children to meet their own needs. So let's talk about the four types of emotionally immature parents we have emotional, driven, passive, and rejecting. And so while they may look different on the surface. Again, we know that these. These parents are operating from their survival strategies that are often engaged in egocentricity. So they have difficulty feeling into the experiences of people around them, especially their children. Low empathy or a really difficult time connecting with other feelings. Blurred boundaries. So either very hard boundaries which keeps them very distant or very enmeshed. Boundaries where you don't get to feel any separation or individuation from your parent at all, which is a key part of healthy development and often an inability to tolerate frustration, you know? So in nervous system terms, they are very often not in their window of tolerance at all, or their window of tolerance is so narrow you can think of it as a thimble.Trisha 00:03:49 And being a parent requires some level of window of tolerance and a larger capacity. No, not all the time. We're not here to create unrealistic expectations for parents, but children will have big emotions and children's will make mistakes, and children will try on their autonomy in ways that don't make sense. And that's appropriate. That is how children are meant to behave. And so when a parent, for whatever reason, cannot show up for those things, that's where these attachment ruptures get created. And so having a parent who doesn't have the capacity for healthy emotional self-regulation means that they are trying to manage this dysregulation, this distress in these really reactive or shut down ways. So emotional parents, you could guess by the name are often ruled by their feelings. And so they might really swing between being overly involved in their child's life, that enmeshed style where you don't get to feel separate at all, and then a really abrupt withdrawal. Right. So again, there's that instability where you never know which parent you're going to get.Trisha 00:04:59 And that creates that hypervigilance in our system. And if we're feeling that hypervigilance in our system of never knowing, is our parent going to overreact to this or withdraw entirely? Well, can you see how very quickly you would learn to shut down your emotional experience, because you know that having any need or having any emotion or even making any mistakes is a prime time for your parent to overreact or to pull back from you. And that is the origin for many of us of these protective adaptive strategies of intellectual ization, people pleasing and perfectionism that served us very well with a parent who wasn't able to manage their own emotional experience. They weren't able to stay with their own distress. And so this often also sets children up for the role reversal. So maybe you've heard the term parental ification where the child becomes the one managing the parents experience. They're the therapists, they're a fixer, or they learn to be that ghost. To just disappear and not need or want anything ever. Because they learn. Child learns subconsciously, and then maybe consciously as they grow up, that their safety as a child depends on being hyper attuned or over attuned to their parents emotions.Trisha 00:06:17 And so when you have to be attuned to your parents emotions all of the time for your safety, of course you would develop this anxiety, this hypervigilance, or even the quote unquote fawn response, right? The people pleasing the peacemaker. But what this does is it cuts us off from our own experience of anger and sadness and grief and needs and fun and all the things we should be experiencing as children. Then we have the driven parent and, you know, driven parents often appear externally as very successful, very competent, very admirable, but they are profoundly disconnected from their own emotional experience and thus their children's as well. and so driven parents are. Often they give their love based on performance. So it's very, very conditional. And so of course we can see from the driven parent how that would develop a child who feels like they constantly need to be performing to get their parents love. And there's a lot of control in this style of parenting, because they are trying to act out their own experiences onto their children.Trisha 00:07:26 And so they learned as children. Our parents learned as children to get around their own emotional neglect by just trying really hard. And so then they want their children to do the same thing. So they couldn't possibly offer their children unconditional acceptance or love. Instead, they try to control and they hold love as a reward only for only for doing well. And so in another way, this creates a deep hypervigilance and anxiety and frustration in a child's experience of never feeling like they're good enough. And I can't emphasize enough that not feeling like you are good enough as a child for your parents. Love creates a lack of safety. You've heard me talk about the felt sense of safety a million times. This is where it develops. We don't have a felt sense of safety that the person we rely on to keep us safe in the world is going to do so unless we perform. That's terror. And that terror carries through with us to adulthood. Whether we're consciously aware of it or not. You know, maybe you're the person who, when you get a message from your boss that says, hey, can we talk at 2 p.m.? You're panicking for five hours because you're trying to figure out a list of all the mistakes you could have made, and all the way down to thinking you're going to get fired and you're going to lose your home and lose everything, that's that over attuned hypervigilance to making a mistake.Trisha 00:08:49 And then we have the passive parent. And this sometimes can confuse people because a passive parent can be very Affectionate, very kind, very fun. They can even be engaged with their children and emotionally available. But with the passive parent, it's only available up to a point. So if things get intense emotions or experiences or whatever it is, they will withdraw. They will hide their head in the sand and so they don't offer boundaries or guidance or containment. As you've heard me talk about being very important to child development. They can't offer any of those things. They can offer fun and playfulness, but they can't offer true, connected, authoritative, boundary loving parenting. So they rely on their children to be fun and playful and meet their needs for a companion. It's really another form of parental fixation, but they don't want to deal with any of the other experiences that that children need. Right. The children need to have help, to have boundaries, to make mistakes, all of those things. But it's not possible to get

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHello and happy Friday! This week, I’ve recorded a little bonus for the book club - a guided visualization to explore what might be coming up as we navigate reading this book together. Please know that visualizations are powerful practices - when we practice them, a part of our brain responds as if they’re actually happening. So, it’s crucial to honor your instincts as you listen. Honor your experience by taking the time to pause, step away, and take it one little moment at a time. It will be here for you when you’re ready, and there isn’t any rush. Part of how we deal from chronic relational mistattunment and environmental ruptures is by learning to observe, listen, and respond to our experiences here in the present. I know there may be a part of you that wants to rush to the end, and that part is welcome here, too. Maybe, just for this moment, you can invite that part of you to rest, to pause, holding the knowing that while that part has kept you safe in the past, maybe, possibly, potentially, in this moment, it’s okay and safe to slow down. Be gentle to yourself, be neutral when gentleness isn’t available. Know that if you can’t be gentle or neutral in this moment, it’s okay. Just as soon as you can, return to finding that felt sense of safety, even if it’s small. Gentleness and neutrality will come again.If you’d like, I included some journaling questions for you to explore after the visualization. Take good care of yourself on the journey 🩵

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHappy Friday, book club! My first 2 minutes of intro got eaten by my editing software, but suffice to say, I’m so happy to be doing this exploration with you, and I encourage, as always, to take it slowly (slower than that - soooo slow you start to get annoyed). Please feel free to comment below or reply with any questions, curiosities, or observations! Dive in to the episode or check out the transcript below. Wishing you a gentle weekend ahead!So in chapter one, we started by talking about how emotionally immature parents affect their adult children's lives. And I always really like to emphasize, as you heard me talk about two weeks ago, that sometimes people have difficulty recognizing that this was their experience. And of course, that's just fine. It can take time to come to terms with what happened from an adult place.But it's important to remember that it's not always as stark as some of these examples. Sometimes it can be those environmental ruptures that you've heard me talk about many times where you just didn't fully feel seen in your experience. Your parents themselves never got the chance to develop their emotion and And so while you may not have said, I had a traumatic childhood, there was a way in which your child self experienced those ruptures. In this chapter, we're going to talk about recognizing the emotionally immature parent.And as always, we want to take this topic gently because it can be both illuminating, where we might have moments where it's like, wow, I'm This makes so much sense why I feel the way I do now or why I felt the way I did then or why I developed some of these patterns and habits and relationships that I see in my adult life now. And so it can be really validating and illuminating, but it can also be painful and bring up grief and anger and all that old fear that we might have felt as children if we recognize some of this in our parents. So we remember that we're not here to create blame or place blame because that in itself can be activating to feel that we're here to attack your parents or you may recognize some of this in yourself as a parent, not because you are bad or wrong, but because you are still learning and developing. And so our curiosity here is self-understanding, self-connection, and building a felt sense of safety here in the present with our self, as IFS calls it, or with our adult consciousness, as Narm calls it.And in that way, we can feel and metabolize some of the experiences we had as children. that may still be impacting us now through that predictive patterning and that data modeling in our brain. And as we metabolize that and let it move through, then we can be more and more present in our lives in an adult way and move more toward what we want for ourselves and feel more connection and have needs and have emotions. And don't worry, we'll take it one step at a time, but that's really what we're curious about.So as we're diving in, Maybe you can take a moment and just feel your breath or feel where your body is right now in the world and just knowing that this material can be challenging to learn or to take in and that's okay. For many of us, it's hard to see our parents clearly because to a part of our brain, it can feel disloyal to think about our parents this way or to admit that they weren't fully emotionally capable of giving us what we need. And in our brain, when we start to feel that disloyalty, even though we know somewhere in our adult consciousness self that our parents are complex people and it's okay to notice the way that they couldn't meet us where we are, in our predictive patterns, in our child consciousness, in our protective parts... A survival part is going to come up and say, it's not okay to think badly about my parents.And so we might start to feel some fear or anxiety come in or some distraction come in where we're like, no, don't look away. Or we might feel some of that intellectualization coming in, right? The part might come in that wants to disconnect you from feeling the emotions of recognizing that your parents weren't capable of giving you what you needed fully or feeling the fear of recognizing that. It would make sense that a part of you would want to intellectualize and figure it out logically and distance yourself from the pain.Or maybe there's even a perfectionist part that wants to come in as you're reading this book or taking this in and say, well, yeah, but you were a difficult child. What could you have done better to make them understand? these are our adaptive protective survival strategies they are patterns and neural pathways in our brain that developed based on the early environments we grew up in not just our caregivers but our teachers and our peers and the world around us so if these strategies come up as we're exploring this it's okay to notice them and notice the way that they might try to protect you from something here in the moment, from the vulnerability and the confusion, as is laid out so well in this book here, that comes from being unseen. So if you notice right in this moment, some internal resistance, maybe it's okay to just name that for yourself right now, a neutral curiosity.We're just documenting what's happening. We're not trying to do anything with it right now. We are just noticing that. So as this chapter moves forward and encourages us to hold this capacity of being curious, but being with ourselves through the difficult emotions that might come up here, she talks a little bit about the goal of of gaining self-confidence by knowing the truth of your own story and even that word self-confidence or knowing your own story can be activating so again i just want to encourage you to take what works for you from this book and leave the rest for now more of it might come in later there is an exercise here to assess your parents emotional immaturity This is another one of those things that can be deeply insightful, but deeply activating.So you can take your time and you can have a look if you'd like to. But knowing that you don't have to take this all in right now, but some signs that your parents may not have been able to be with their own emotions or yours. is maybe they overreacted to minor things like you spilling something. Or maybe as you were growing up, when you started having your own ideas or asking questions, they would get irritated by that.Or maybe your parents were very inconsistent, your caregivers. Sometimes they were there, sometimes they weren't. Sometimes they were connecting, sometimes they weren't. Or they were there for you until you became upset.And then they tried to shut that down. So these are just some of the things that can demonstrate some emotional immaturity. Why? Because your parents were likely in their own protective strategies too.And that landed onto you. You know that emotional immaturity or really what we can think of it as is an inability to be with emotions. We don't have the capacity for it. It is a protective survival strategy where when a big emotion comes in, our body and brain just shut it down.And whether it moves to the intellectual, you know, where they send you away, or they just try to meet your emotions with logic, or the irrational, where they yell and get upset at you, or they go away. What we know is that this experience, this survival strategy, often echoes unmet generational needs. That it's likely that your parents and caregivers maybe had parents or caregivers who also lacked that vulnerability, that emotional connection, that presence, and that self-awareness. So it's likely that these survival strategies pass through in generations until people are able to do the work to recognize them.which is what you're doing right now. And it's a really brave and courageous thing to do. It's very typical that emotionally immature parents will experience traits like rigidity or impulsiveness or low stress tolerance, and that the way they respond to you or the world is much more subjective rather than it is objective. And again, that is because they are trying to manage their own survival responses at any given time.But as children, we can recognize as adults, right? We can say, okay, I get that. Maybe I even recognize some of those things in myself. Like maybe I have a lot of rigidity and a low stress tolerance.We can understand that for us, those are survival strategies. Intellectualizing, like disconnecting from our emotions, it's a survival strategy. And so it's likely the same for your parents or caregivers. But the difference is, as a child, you don't have the cognitive capacity to recognize that.you rely entirely on your caregivers to be okay to show up for you and to model for you so that you can develop and learn how to do things and when you get this inconsistency this hot and cold or this idea that in some way you are causing a problem for those around you just by being a kid or having emotions or making a mistake That creates this real disconnect in your brain where your brain says, I don't think my parents are taking care of me in a way that feels good. This is all subconscious, of course. Kids don't think at this level. But it's really scary to feel that way.And so then we have to choose between being on our parents' side or being on our side. And we will choose being on our parents' side nine times out of ten because that is what feels safest to our survival system. And then, of course, those patterns carry through to adulthood as those major survival strategies. Not being able to attune to ourselves and over-attuning to others.tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Not being able to have autonomy or agency, but getting mad when we don

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHello and welcome back for our Tiny Sparks read-along.I'm so excited that you're here.If you've been here with me for No Bad Parts, the Internal Family Systems book, and Healing Developmental Trauma, the NARM book, then welcome back.If you're here for the first time, then welcome.I'm so excited to dive into the book adult children of emotionally immature parents, how to heal from distant, rejecting, or self-involved parents.If this is your first time here, I'll just give you a little bit of background of how our read-along works.Many people read the book along with me, and we usually take one chapter every two weeks so that we have time to really dig into it and sit with and be curious and track our responses to it.While it might seem slow, we know that the nervous system and brain prefer things to go much slower than our quick, quick, fix-everything selves might feel.So it's normal if a part of you feels like you want to speed up, and I invite you to just be curious and notice those parts of you.If you read faster than the book club goes, that's wonderful. It gives you an opportunity to come back and review.Many people also are a part of our read along and don't read the book at all. They listen to these podcast episodes that I create to allow them to have the space to just process what's happening.So if you feel like you don't have the bandwidth to read right now, or maybe you don't have the space to kind of read as quickly as you might like to, then know that it's perfectly fine to be here and not be reading the book at all.We have one episode together every two weeks where I dive into the chapter, share a little bit about it, and share my perspective from a therapist.And often it is a little bit different than the books that we are reading together because I practice from a model that centers around the idea of developmental trauma, relational trauma, and attachment trauma, and agency.And developmental trauma is going to feature very heavily in this book, where the idea is, this is for people who grew up with parents who were emotionally immature, which oftentimes may not be considered a trauma in our society, but creates significant ongoing environmental ruptures.AKA the feeling or experience that our environment can't meet us or care for us or provide for us or meet our needs when we are children. And that, no matter what you might think as an adult, is often experienced as a trauma for children.So while we dive into this book together, we'll be reviewing the book, but we'll also be going a little bit deeper into some of my thoughts and experiences around that. As always, you're more than welcome to send any questions via email.You can comment on the Substack posts, or you can reply to the posts and that will come to my email as well. I love when you send questions because it gives me an opportunity to know what you'd like to know more about We'll have two live meetings together where we hop on a Google Meet video session and I answer your questions and we talk and we explore and we connect.It's okay if you can't join those live because they are recorded, so no worries, we're all in different time zones.Our first meeting will be on Saturday, May 24th at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. So that allows our European folks to join and hopefully our U.S. folks to join. I know it's a little early for Pacific and may not work for some of our Australian friends, but not to worry, it will be recorded. And we'll try to make sure to do the other one at a different time. So 10 a.m. Eastern Time, Saturday, May 24th, will be our first live meeting.One thing I appreciate about this book is that it's really written at a level for anyone to understand. So it's not as clinically complex as the first book we read, Healing Developmental Trauma.That being said, it's normal when exploring things like this that it can bring up unexpected feelings. especially if it's describing something that you experienced, or maybe something that you didn't even know you experienced.So as always, I encourage you to take it slow, to slow down. And if you notice something feels activating or triggering or upsetting, even if you don't know why, it's an opportunity to pause.Our cognitive brain, and especially those of us who are intellectualizers, may feel like we want to override that experience and push on to finish the chapter or whatever it is.But know that this is an opportunity to practice tracking and connecting to yourself in a way that maybe your parents or caregivers never tracked or connected to your experience, your emotions, and what you were feeling in your body.So as we dive into this chapter, the author, Dr.Lindsay Gibson, gives us this way of understanding what emotional loneliness is and what it's like to experience that in childhood and with parents who aren't able to be aware of us or be with our emotions and it's really important to know that this might be an experience that you had and didn't even know that you had because oftentimes parents who struggle with emotional connection and are emotionally immature may present as very quote-unquote normal They may have taken care of your needs in many ways, like your physical health and meals, and maybe they took you to sports or activities that you wanted to do, but they weren't able to be fully present to you emotionally.This can be a really confusing experience because oftentimes adults who experience this feel guilty or bad for thinking that they experienced something traumatic.And a lot of times they'll tell me, well, other people had it way worse than I did.And I understand that there is a way in which we can be compassionate toward other people that had different trauma.But it's important to understand that having parents and caregivers who aren't able to be present to our emotions and to be present to our experience and to see us. does feel like life threat to us.And so as she's describing it here, that there's this gut feeling of emptiness and the sense of shame for having needs or having emotions, that that carries through for us.And so if you've joined me here because you've heard me talk a lot about intellectualization, people who use intellectualization as a survival strategy or a protective mechanism often had emotionally immature parents or parents who were not able to be present to their emotions.And maybe that's because your parents' parents weren't able to be present to their emotions.But imagine you're a person who learned it wasn't safe to have emotions and you stay very intellectualizing and very rationalizing.And then you have a child and children by their nature have all range of emotions and they look to their parents for regulation and to learn how to be with those emotions.Well, when you have a parent who's emotionally immature, They're not able to do that.And so they may pull away when you have an emotion, they may send you away to your room or pull back or punish you, or they may just kind of ignore it.And what happens is over time, we learn that having an emotion, having an emotional need, Wanting to be connected feels dangerous because we feel our parents pull back from us.And we perceive that as a child as a dangerous thing because we rely on our parents to take care of us.This is a theme we've noticed through all the books we've explored, how much our perception as children impacts the way the pathways in our brain works.None of this is to say you have the worst parent in the world or the best parent in the world, but it's to notice how our parents' patterns impact us. and how those form predictive patterns because our brain works much like a data model.So it takes in that data from our childhood and then it uses it in the present to predict what's going to happen.So if we grew up with parents who were emotionally immature, and we form these patterns of intellectualization or not having needs or having deep shame around being seen or having needs, then our capacity to have emotional intimacy and deeply connect with other people will be ruptured.And that's because our experience of that as a child was a lack of safety or an environmental rupture that didn't feel safe to be attuned to.So then it doesn't feel safe to attune to ourselves.So when we meet someone who maybe can attune to us or can see us, a friend or a teacher or a potential romantic partner or even a therapist, instead of it feeling good, it can feel really threatening and scary.And that's because our brain is using that old data from our childhood to say, this is not a safe experience.Remember, oftentimes children do not know what is wrong.They can't put words to it.So you might not even have the words to have described this, but you would have gone around feeling this emotional loneliness.And oftentimes then we carry that into our adult lives and it makes us feel like we're on the outside.

join me this week for another guided meditation practice. wishing you a neutral to good week ahead as you take these ten minutes with me to connect to your matrix of support 🩵 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit trishawolfe.substack.com/subscribe