Welcome back book club readers and welcome to our new members! SO beyond excited to dive into transformational change and memory reconsolidation together in Unlocking the Emotional Brain. If you start reading and find this one a bit dense, don’t worry, it is! That’s why I’m here: to translate and share this truly life-changing material into something practical and applicable to our lives. Memory reconsolidation is a critical process in creating long-lasting change, getting unstuck, and moving toward the lives we want, and this book gives us allllll the details. If you’re a free subscriber and want to join in, becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack for just $5 a month gives you full access to my biweekly podcast, where I do a deep dive into each chapter, and two live fireside chats, where we connect and explore our learnings together! Now, let’s dive in!

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Welcome back book club members. I’m so excited to dive into a new book together today, Unlocking the Emotional Brain. And this book, be prepared, it is a bit dense.

And so if you’re reading along, you might find it a bit dry and boring at times. But that’s part of why I’m here to help translate this into information that we can use in our daily lives. And I chose this book, despite it being a bit dense and a bit clinical, because this book covers one of the most important things in making change in our life, which is memory reconsolidation.

And so this book will lay the groundwork for a modality of therapy called coherence therapy. So so far, we’ve talked about NARM, neuro affective relational model, and internal family systems through no bad parts. And we explored both of those, those lenses as we dove into adult children of emotionally immature parents.

Just a reminder, if you’re new, you have access to all the archives, so you can go back and listen to all those episodes. It also syncs through to Spotify podcasts and Apple Music podcasts. So you can listen while you walk or while you drive.

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But not only does this book cover coherence therapy, it also talks about the mechanism for many other therapies like IFS, like EMDR, like somatic experiencing. And that is memory reconsolidation. So this chapter is introducing us to the concept of transformational change.

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And transformational change isn’t just a symptom reduction. It’s not just about working on behaviors or coping skills, which you might see in sort of everyday CBT therapy. But it’s about these moments that actually transformationally change these deeply held patterns that we may have held for years or decades.

These are the moments that many of us are wanting out of therapy, but we leave feeling missed and confused because we might try the worksheets, or we might try to update our behaviors, or we might try to have self compassion for ourselves. And maybe it sticks for a while. But no matter what we do, we seem to go back into people pleasing or perfectionism or intellectualization or those panic attacks that just don’t end.

In fact, as they talk about here in most research around therapy, what counts as success is about a 20 to 25% reduction in symptoms. And of course, you might be thinking if I’m suffering a lot, a 20% reduction sounds great. Of course it does.

But as you know, through the work that we explore here together, we’re curious about deep change, building new neural pathways, changing old neural pathways, and coming into our adult consciousness in a way that lets us get unstuck and move forward. And that is where memory reconsolidation comes in, that it is the brain’s process of profound unlearning. This was discovered in neuroscience in the late 1990s, and really hasn’t gotten its due, I think, up until now.

And even now, it’s not really getting its due because it’s finding its way, right? It takes time for research to come into the present day life. But this process of memory reconsolidation, I’ve done a lot of research around, and I’m so excited to dive into it together, because it is truly life changing. So think of it like this, if you have a ton of weeds in your yard or in your garden, of course, you can cut the weeds, or you can even pull them.

But if you’re not pulling them up by the roots, then the problem will return. And you’re also not making space for new things to grow because the weeds can choke out everything else. We are curious about this deep transformational change at that root level.

So let’s talk a little bit about what creates some of these symptoms, as you’ve heard me call them strategies, or in IFS, parts of us that hold these deeply protective strategies. It’s so important, as you know, if you’ve been with me for a while, and if you’re new, to know that these symptoms, these strategies, these protective parts of us are not random, and they are not signs of brokenness. In this book, they refer to them as emotional learnings, and what you’ve heard me call predictive pathways, old BAPs, or old neural pathways.

They essentially represent a neural pathway in our brain that is deeply laden with thoughts, emotions, and body sensations and behaviors. But they’re deeply laden, especially with emotions. It might be rage, it might be grief, it might be fear, there might be shame.

But these are implicit learnings, meaning they’re behind our conscious awareness. They’re not things that we are perfectly able to access. They sort of play out as programs in our brain, just like other neural pathways do.

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For example, handwriting is a form of an implicit learning. It’s not something you have to think about to consciously access. It’s just something that happens.

And so these emotional learnings form in moments of strong reaction, where our brain says, okay, here’s what makes it stick in my brain. It’s frequency and intensity. So if you think about handwriting, there’s usually not an intensity associated with handwriting, but there’s a frequency.

When we’re children, we practice it over and over and over again. So the brain builds a very strong pathway and says, okay, this is something I need to do all the time. I’ll build a very strong pathway around this.

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But when there’s frequency and intensity of emotions, that creates these really strong patterns of learnings. And when they form, they become automatic reactions. So if you were shamed for crying, or you were sent away, sent to your room until you could behave, or you were punished, or you were ignored, what do you learn? You learn that showing emotions means feelings are dangerous.

So of course you would go up into your head. If you learn that you only get attention when you’re performing, when you’re getting straight A’s, when you’re winning the prize, then of course you would learn that achievement equals worth, and you can never rest. You always have to keep going.

These are emotional learnings that are not conscious, but are very well formed. They’re big highways in our brain, which means when our brain is deciding where to go, it will always go towards those big highways because they’re easy, quote unquote, to drive on, and because those highways are marked as safe. And remember, the priority of our brain is always safety.

Safety first. Once safety is met, if you want to worry about your happiness or whatever, maybe your brain will let you do that. But if safety is not met, then your brain will not care about anything else.

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So these patterns are always getting set off in moments where we might feel unsafe. It’s important to understand that when I say safe, I don’t necessarily mean physical safety, though sometimes physical safety has been a concern for people. But what I’m talking about is whether your brain senses things are safe or not.

And in these emotional learnings, safety gets over-coupled, over-linked with things that aren’t actually dangerous in our adult lives, but felt dangerous when we were young. For example, resting and not driving harder to achieve, to be what people want you to be, that’s not actually dangerous in our adult life. But because as children, we are wired to please our caregivers and stay in connection with those around us, it will feel like dangerous.

It will feel unsafe if we’re resting, if we’re not achieving, if we’re not being what everyone else wants us to be. So that emotion is of strong fear and terror, and that emotional learning is what carries through to the present. And that’s why no amount of meditation or mindfulness or trying to relax or going to a spa or whatever you might think you need to do is going to change that pattern, because that pattern is about safety.

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The way we can change the pattern? Memory reconsolidation. So what scientists found with memory reconsolidation is that when one of these emotional memories or survival strategies or protective parts come up, when they’re reactivated, the memory becomes somewhat flexible again. And so for a short window, the brain can revise that old learning.

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So if we think about our brain as a data model that is using all the past data to predict what’s going to happen in the present and the future, when all of that data says resting or feeling my feelings or being myself is dangerous, of course you will not do those things. You will shut yourself down, shame yourself, overwork yourself, criticize yourself. But when we can access some of those memories of that learning, and we can re-pattern them, we can change the data.

We add new data. So even if there’s still the old memories there, it’s revised, and so it feels less dangerous in the present, and it creates more space for us to be in our present, in our self, as they call it in IFS, or in the adult consciousness. So if we think about our brain an