tiny sparks, big changes

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Unlocking the Emotional Brain. If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we slowly and thoughtfully explore this book together. You can also listen on Spotify & Apple Music. These episodes are meant to help translate dense theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change. We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time - our next live meeting is Saturday, April 25th at 11 am EDT. If you’d like to learn more about getting unstuck and making lasting change in your life, join my upcoming class: 5 Steps to Change this Sunday (recording will be available if you can’t attend live!).This book takes us deep into the science of memory reconsolidation, one of the most important mechanisms for understanding how lasting change actually happens. It helps explain why insight alone is rarely enough, and how healing can occur after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up in environments where our emotional needs were not consistently met.If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience. That includes our live sessions, ongoing discussions, and the complete archive of past reads, such as No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m genuinely grateful you’re here and reading along with me.Hello and welcome back to our read-along of Unlocking the Emotional Brain. We are making our way through the final chapters of this book where we are looking at different models of psychotherapy like somatic experiencing, internal family systems, and this week we will be looking at psychedelic assisted therapy, specifically looking at a case that is using ayahuasca. I would like to give you a quick note and a warning that the case that we discuss here does mention someone who dies by suicide and I know that can be triggering to us for a variety of reasons and so please know that you do not have to listen to this case to get anything out of the book club.This is just another way of looking at memory reconsolidation. Please take care of yourself and know this will be here in the future if you decide to come back to it, but you don’t have to listen to it right now.And as we are reviewing these we are being curious about that thread that this book hypothesizes leads through all different types of psychotherapy and really all different types of change and that is memory reconsolidation and the therapeutic reconsolidation process that Bruce Ecker lays out for us in this book here.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Unlocking the Emotional Brain. If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we slowly and thoughtfully explore this book together. You can also listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. These episodes are meant to help translate dense theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change. We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time - our next live meeting is April 25, 2026, at 11 am EDT!This book takes us deep into the science of memory reconsolidation, one of the most important mechanisms for understanding how lasting change actually happens. It helps explain why insight alone is rarely enough, and how healing can occur after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up in environments where our emotional needs were not consistently met.If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience. That includes our live sessions, ongoing discussions, and the complete archive of past reads, such as No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m genuinely grateful you’re here and reading along with me.This week, we’re continuing with the section of the book that walks through different therapy modalities, examining how each creates transformational change through the same underlying mechanism: memory reconsolidation. Today, we’re focusing on ISTDP, Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy, a framework developed by Habib Davanloo that looks at how our suppressed emotional experiences drive symptoms, sometimes psychological, sometimes physiological, and sometimes both at once.What I love about going through these cases together is that it keeps reinforcing that it doesn’t matter which modality a therapist uses. What matters is whether they are working with the neurobiological mechanisms of change. And those mechanisms, again and again, look remarkably similar underneath the surface, no matter the type of therapy. These mechanisms are things we can also access in our own lives by practicing observing and being curious about our experience - how cool is that!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Unlocking the Emotional Brain. If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we slowly and thoughtfully explore this book together. You can also listen on Spotify. These episodes are meant to help translate dense theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change. We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time. If you’d like to learn more about getting unstuck and making lasting change in your life, I have two upcoming classes: 5 Steps to Change and Finding a New Story. This book takes us deep into the science of memory reconsolidation, one of the most important mechanisms for understanding how lasting change actually happens. It helps explain why insight alone is rarely enough, and how healing can occur after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up in environments where our emotional needs were not consistently met.If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience. That includes our live sessions, ongoing discussions, and the complete archive of past reads like No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m genuinely grateful you’re here and reading along with me.This week, we’re continuing into Part Two of the book, where the authors begin walking us through different therapy modalities and showing how they create transformational change through memory reconsolidation. Today, we’re focusing on Internal Family Systems. This section of the book is especially meaningful to me because one of the most common questions I get is how to know what kind of therapy actually helps people change. What matters most is not the name of the modality, but whether the therapy engages the mechanisms of change the brain requires in order to update old emotional learnings.Different therapies can look very different on the surface. They may use different languages, structures, or techniques. But underneath, when real change is happening, they are often doing something very similar. They are helping an old emotional learning become active while something genuinely different is experienced at the same time. That process is what allows the brain to reorganize and let go of patterns that once made sense but are no longer needed.In this episode, we’ll walk through case examples from IFS to see how this process unfolds in real sessions. We’ll look at how observing and being with ourselves in an emotion can help rewire old learnings we may have held for decades. My hope is that by the end, you’ll have a clearer sense of what to listen for, whether you’re choosing a therapist, doing your own inner work, or simply trying to understand why certain approaches finally help when others haven’t.(0:00 - 2:51)Hello and welcome back to our read-along book club where we are reading Unlocking the Emotional Brain. It is the book about memory reconsolidation and coherence therapy and we’re walking through it together where I guide you and translate the information in this book, talk a little bit about what it really means beneath all of the technical terms, and share with you how you might apply this in your life. I think this part of the book is one of the coolest parts of the book because it’s where they take their time and they go through these different models of therapy.This week, we’re going to look at internal family systems and examine how that transformational change of memory reconsolidation takes place using that model. I love this so much because one of the most frequent questions I get is about what type of therapy should I do if I’m an intellectualizer, if I’m a professionist, if I’m self-sabotaging, and of course the answer is at the end of the day there is no one right type of therapy modalities. And even the type of therapies discussed in this book, the therapist may not always be using the steps for transformational change, but it is possible because these modalities have all the things required to make that memory reconsolidation process happen.When we’re talking about these types of therapy, we’re not talking about the organization itself. There’s been a lot of things in the news recently about internal family systems and things that have happened within that organization. Just know when we’re talking about IFS, what we’re really talking about is parts work applied in this specific way.Parts work also comes from schema therapy. Coherence therapy in its own way uses parts work, though it may not refer to it as such. But when we think of parts work, parts are really a story humans have given to bundles of thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors in our brain.So all of those rules of engagement that we develop over our life, all of those implicit learnings are stored with context. And that context is the thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors that we experienced when they were happening. The choices we had to make about how to show up in our lives, to stay safe, to stay in connection.All of those things are stored in our predictive brain. And they’re bundled together often in these patterns that go together. So for example, an intellectualizer part may be a part of you, quote unquote, that is a bundle of implicit learnings where you learn to turn down your emotions, disconnect from yourself.Maybe you feel sort of numb or nothingness in your body. You analyze and ruminate and think all of the time. And the behaviors might be that you never slow down, you never fully connect with yourself.(2:51 - 7:23)You’re always going to the next to-do list, the next planner, the next thing. So we might call that a part in certain types of therapies. We might call that a schema in coherence therapy.We might call that a survival strategy in NARM. But all of those things mean the same thing, which they are those rules of engagement of the way that you learn to be in the world. And we can have different experiences of those rules of engagement based on what’s happening in front of us.For example, you might be an intellectualizer, quote unquote, that might be the part of you that you’re most familiar with. Those might be the strategies that you’re using in your everyday life. But you may also have a part that is a people pleaser.So based on the relationship you have the person who is in front of you, you may shift out of that intellectualized state and shift into this part of you that is very hypervigilantly attuned to other people and trying to make things okay for them. Or you may also have a part of you that is very critical alongside of an intellectualizer. Remember, again, these parts are just bundles of thoughts, emotions, and body sensations.So when we’re talking about these therapeutic modalities like internal family systems, we’re not talking about the organization itself because I’m not really qualified to make comments on it because I’m not involved in that organization. But we’re talking about the modality and how parts work might be used to make transformational change. Now one last thing before we dive in, we’re actually getting pretty close to the end of this book.We have a couple more weeks of talking about these different therapeutic modalities. But then there’s a really interesting part three where they go through some of these cases. And so I’d love to hear from you if you would like us to go through some of these cases together.I think it could be really interesting to really dive into some of these cases and look at these unique ways that they’re using coherence therapy. And so as long as that sounds good to you, then we will keep going. But if you would rather curtail part three and not go into the cases and move on to another book, it’s okay to let me know that too.So please feel free to comment, hear a reply, and let me know about going into part three. If we go into part three, it’s if we don’t, it might be closer to the end of March. And then you can also let me know if there’s another book you’d like to see about what comes next.I have some ideas in mind, but I’d love to hear from you. Is there a book about a therapeutic modality or boundaries or having needs or whatever it might be that you’re curious about? You would want to know how we can apply this lens to it of implicit learning, survival strategies, and making change? Let me know and we can start looking toward what comes next. So back into chapter 10, which is talking about internal family systems, and they lay out for us here right off the bat, how much this idea of parts or sub-personalities has been used in the therapeutic world.Of course, this very early idea from Jung, which many of you may have heard of, of the archetypes, right? But this has been a part of many types of therapy, transactional analysis, ego state therapy, gestalt therapy. There’s been parts work and sub-personalities and ego states all throughout the history of psychotherapy. If you were with us when you read No Bad Parts, then you might already be familiar with this, but Internal Family Systems was developed by Dr. Schwartz using that parts language to talk about parts of our experience that carry that emotional memory, referred to as a burden, of these unresolved intense sufferings, of these ruptures that we’ve experienced in our lives.And so they are kept away from our consciousness. And so the parts of us that are kept away in Internal Family Systems are called exiles. And then there are other parts that operate to protect those exiles, to prevent them from being accessed.And we have those two parts called managers. And so managers are kind of like those intellectualism, perfectionism, people-pleasing parts. And then firefighters, which are the emergency response part of us.And so those parts might hold bigger experiences like dissociation, rage, substance use. They’re really trying to suppress any distress that might come up because, again, they’re all protecting those exile parts of us. The exiles are the part of us that hold the deepest, hardest emotional memories of the sufferings we have experienced in our lives.(7:24 - 9:09)In IFS, the therapist is working with the client to access the self, the consciousness, the observer in NARM, the adult consciousness, so that we can unburden the exile. We bring the exile into our direct awareness by observing it, and it can be unburdened by feeling and expressing all of that distress that it has held for so long. And much like the other therapies we’ve explored so far, the client and therapist relationship is a key piece for potentially facilitating this therapeutic process.But the primary experience in IFS is the relationship between the self and the parts. So this is actually an interesting case because the client themselves is a therapist, and they are coming to see this therapist for supervision, because they noticed when they were doing work with a client who was feeling rage, she started feeling a very intense fear within herself that she knows doesn’t make sense in the present context. She knows the client’s not dangerous, she’s not at risk, but she really notices this reaction in her body, specifically in her stomach.So remember, the first step of identifying something to make a change using memory reconsolidation is to figure out the what and the when. And so we can see in this case here, the what and the when is this tension and upset in her stomach that feels like fear when her client starts to get rageful. And so we can see that in internal family systems, much like the modalities of therapy we’ve explored together in this book and in the past, there’s this curious observation.(9:10 - 12:33)There’s not an assuming or an immediate trying to make meaning or manage what’s happening, but there’s this curiosity, this noticing. And so there’s this meeting of this part that feels scared, and it’s felt scared for so long. And so this might indicate in some way that that emotional learning, that anger from other people is dangerous, has been with her for a very long time.And so we’re identifying this in internal family systems as a part, and so we’re letting that part know that we’re the adult now, we’re here now, we are the self. Just the same way as we might identify our adult consciousness in Narm, or our self, our consciousness in any other work, we want to make sure a foot of us stays in the part of us that is observing, even if the rest of us feels very intensely of that other part. And so we’re just asking and we’re being curious, what does this part want us to know? Why is it holding all of this fear? And so in IFS, this is a key piece to look at the distress held by the exile.We want to know why this part is holding on to all of this fear, this exile part, so that we can move toward the therapeutic reconsolidation process of step B, the emotional learning. Remember, the reason why it’s so important to get to that emotional learning is because that emotional learning is what is requiring the symptom. The emotional learning is the thing that says this bad or dangerous or hurtful thing will happen if I let myself, whatever it may be, in this case, if I let myself be comfortable around other people’s anger, something will happen, something dangerous will happen if I’m around other people’s anger.That is the emotional learning that requires the schema, the schema that brings up fear, anxiety, and terror anytime someone else feels anger. This cannot be addressed behaviorally. No amount of telling ourselves, it’s okay if other people are angry, it’s okay if I have a need and it upsets other people is going to address that.Because remember, there’s this idea of two sufferings or in Narm, the core bind. That’s what we’re going to explore here in this case to figure out what is this suffering that she is avoiding when this part of her is choosing to brace and be afraid. We have to figure out what that emotional learning is to see why the schema or the part is bracing so hard against the anger.And that’s key in our own process too. We might think we have a sense of why we do this. We might think we know what the quote unquote core belief is, but without really identifying specifically what that learning or learnings are underneath, we can’t target them with this process.No behavioral change, no thought reframing, no regulating your nervous system will shift that emotional learning without targeting it specifically. So in this case, when she’s asking this part, what’s happening, this part is saying that she learned it’s safer to be silent, not to make demands, not to stand up for herself. So making demands would be standing up for herself and it wouldn’t be safe to do that.(12:33 - 12:50)So we see this emotional learning coming out that standing up for herself is unsafe. And so that feeling is powerlessness. But right now we don’t know the full emotional learning because we don’t know a full description of the suffering she’s trying to avoid.(12:51 - 15:04)So they’re going to continue to be curious about that, right? This young part that’s frightened, a close part that’s saying, don’t make demands, don’t stand up for yourself. And in IFS, that is the manager. The manager is the one saying, don’t make demands, don’t stand up for yourself, because it’s trying to prevent the distress that would come for the exile part.And here’s a really important piece to understand here. In this therapeutic reconsolidation process, there’s an idea that there are two things we learned when something hurtful happens. Number one, this hurts.And number two, here’s what I do about it. And those two learnings get fused together. So in internal family systems, the exile is the hurt part, the part that says this hurts, it’s vulnerable, it’s wounded, it’s feeling all of the pain.And it got tucked away because it was too hard, too much to feel all that pain consciously. The protector part is the other response. What do I do about this? It is the coping part, the behavior, the strategy, the defense, however you’d like to think about it, that developed specifically to prevent that hurt from being felt again.They’re not actually separate problems. They’re two sides of the coin. The protector exists because of the exile.The what do I do about it exists because of the hurt. So we’re really noticing when we’re observing ourselves in this way, we’re looking at is what I’m seeing the hurt itself? Or is it the armor protecting it? Often the thing we might notice first is the armor, the intellectualization, the people pleasing, the perfectionism. But we know that’s not there for fun.It’s not because we enjoy walking around in those strategies. It is protecting us from whatever the hurt is that lies beneath. And so that’s why we get curious about what is the deeper emotion, the deeper learning underneath the strategy.The strategy is armor, the hurt is underneath. So again, things like intellectualization are not the problem, but we often target it as the problem. Intellectualization is the solution.

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

(0:00 - 1:23)Hello, my friends, and welcome back to our Substack Book Club. We have a lot of new people here, and so this is going to be a free episode for everyone to listen to, to learn a little bit more about what we do in our book club here. Just to catch you up, we’re currently reading Unlocking the Emotional Brain, which is the seminal book on coherence therapy and memory reconsolidation.Memory reconsolidation is the process by which we can update the old learnings in our brain. So if you found your way here because you consider yourself an intellectualizer, a people pleaser, a perfectionist, you find yourself stuck in traditional therapy because you already understand a lot of things. Maybe you’ve tried nervous system regulation, but you can’t quite seem to get unstuck.It’s likely because you have old unconscious learnings referred to as implicit emotional learnings that are like pathways in your brain. They are things that happened to you in your past that formed roads in your brain that said, this is the safe road to go down. So if every time you had emotions, or you had needs, or you were yourself, you were criticized, or sent away, or punished, or bullied by your peers, or you had parents who, for whatever reason, couldn’t show up for you, then over time, the learning would be, if I have my needs and I am myself, I will be criticized, or I will lose connection.(1:24 - 2:28)And so then that shows up in the present where we mask, we put our true selves away, we stay up in our thoughts, and no amount of insight will change that process. So this book really helps us to understand how we can make long-term change. If you join our book club, you also get access to all of the old episodes where I have gone through Healing Developmental Trauma, a wonderful book covering NARM therapy and helping us understand this process a little bit more, No Bad Parts, a book on internal family systems, another book that can support memory reconsolidation, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, which is often very important learning for many of us to understand how our early experiences may have shaped our present-day lives.So thank you so much for being here. Whether you are a free or paid member, you help support my work just by listening, liking, engaging, and commenting, and it’s truly an honor to get to share this information with you. This is going to be a recap episode of what we have explored in Unlocking the Emotional Brain so far, and next week we will dive back in.(2:30 - 3:03)So many of you have read every chapter and taken notes along with me, and some of you may be listening while you do the dishes or go on a walk, and you haven’t cracked the book just once, and that is all completely welcome here. You get to show up in the book club at the level that your system has capacity for, and I love getting to translate these books into everyday understanding to help us actively make change in our lives. So let’s walk through some of these ideas together, and I do want to name again that Unlocking the Emotional Brain is not exactly an easy, cozy read.(3:03 - 6:00)It can be pretty clinical and dense in places, but the reason I chose this book anyway is it’s because something so incredibly important, which is transformational change in therapy, transformational change in mental health, transformational change in how we show up in the world, not just symptom management, not just insight, not just telling you that for the rest of your life you’re going to have to use force and fear and to regulate your nervous system every single day just to be in the world. Now, of course, if you know me, you know that I support nervous system regulation work, and I support insight, and all of those things are wonderful, but they alone do not create transformational change. We have to figure out how to shift these patterns at the root because journals and planning and coping skills do not address the root of why we have these learnings, and this process for transformational change is called memory reconsolidation.We can think of it as if we’re updating the maps, the atlas, the GPS in our brain. Underneath those metaphors is the same basic idea that our brain can revise old emotional learnings from memories of things that happened to us in our lives under certain conditions, and that is the core of what this book is about. Think about your brain as a big excel spreadsheet or a big filing cabinet.In all of the experiences in your life, your brain files away and stores the data, and it puts it into themes like a big zip file. So if you had a series of memories that again told you that when you experience emotions, people will pull away from you, then those get filed into a big folder, and because the potential to lose connection with others is coded as survival, because it is in our brain, because we are wired to have connection, then that learning gets moved to the top as a critically important survival learning. So all of these memories the brain sorts through and said, this has happened a lot, so frequency, so this is something I want to hold on to, and then this has happened and it was really intense, so intensity.So frequency and intensity are what the brain uses to categorize what is an important memory to hold on to versus what isn’t. This all happens unconsciously, so you yourself may not have memories of these specific events, but your brain puts them into a file and then creates a learning. Think about a learning like a rule.The brain is using the data to say, I’m going to predict what’s going to happen in the present and the future based on what’s happened in the past, and I’m going to use that to shape the way that you yourself see the world. It changes the lenses through which we perceive reality to try to keep us safe. Because if the brain is predicting that feeling our feelings and being authentic is going to lead to losing connection, being sent away, being punished, which feels survival oriented, then of course the brain is not going to want to let us be authentic and connect easily.(6:00 - 6:47)So then, for example, we might perceive the people around us as more critical than they are. We might perceive situations as dangerous, like going to meet new people, because if we are ourselves we won’t get to form a new connection, when in actuality they are not dangerous. This all happens below the surface and forms these patterns or parts that we as humans have learned to call intellectualization, people pacing, perfectionism, my anxious part, we have a lot of different names we’ve given to it.But those are all bundles of memories and emotions that create rules. If we in the present want to update those rules, we have to follow this process called memory reconsolidation. And that is one of the key neurobiological mechanisms for change.(6:48 - 16:23)This book walks us through that process. So let’s break down what we’ve covered so far in learning about this process. What we talked about in the very beginning is the difference between symptom reduction and transformational change.So it is possible to reduce our symptoms or to change our experience through behavior change, through force, through willpower, through quote-unquote motivation. So therapy could help you maybe feel 20% less anxious, or feel fewer panic attacks, or go to the gym more often, and that’s absolutely not nothing. Those reductions in symptoms can feel like a really big relief.But oftentimes that reduction happens through management. So we learn how to use strategies to manage our brain and what a gift that we can do that. But I’m guessing if you’re here, you don’t want to have to spend the rest of your life doing symptom management and using force.The reason why that thing that gives you a reduction doesn’t change the pathway in your brain is because it’s still in contradiction with an old learning. So going to the gym every day to take care of yourself through management strategies, habits, and force doesn’t contradict an old learning that says taking care of yourself is selfish. So it requires vigilance at all time to use the strategies to override your brain, which is often why we fail quote-unquote at setting new habits, or we do it for a couple of months and then we stop, or we use management strategies but we still kind of feel stuck, empty, disconnected, or unsure of ourselves.tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Transformational change is completely different. In these moments when we can create transformation, we are rewiring the learning that we had. We are rewiring our brain itself so that the brain updates its prediction.It updates its data model. It is so cool that we know now that we can do this. It’s not just about having new experiences.I want to be super clear about that because it’s kind of the in thing right now to talk about how you don’t need regulation, you just need to have new experiences, but they are missing a key part of the process, which is that the new experiences must explicitly target the old learning and they must be incremental, meaning they have to be little bits at a time. But as we do this process, we can update through transformational change these emotional learnings and then we don’t have to use management strategies, force, fear, every single day because the old learnings that say if I’m not perfect I will lose love, if I have needs I’m selfish and I’ll hurt others, if I show feelings people will withdraw, those things can be rewired and the learnings can be updated. So now instead of predicting a 99% chance of something dangerous is happening, the brain realistically says maybe there’s a 5% chance that something could happen if I myself and I have needs.And then what happens is if we have needs and someone criticizes us or doesn’t support our need or whatever it is, we get to experience it through present-day lenses, through our adult eyes, where we can say that still hurt, that didn’t feel good, it doesn’t feel good to be hurt or unseen or criticized or whatever it might be, but it’s not dangerous. And that is the transformational change where we can exist in the present without the past landing onto the present. Another really big part of this book is moving away from seeing symptoms as pathological or self-sabotaging and instead seeing all symptoms as coherent.That is the idea upon which coherence therapy and other types of therapy are based. Every symptom, every strategy, every protective part is coherent because it lines up with an underlying emotional learning. In other words, it makes sense.We spend a lot of time in the future, in the present, sorry, telling ourselves that, well, this symptom doesn’t make sense. I’m not in danger if I have a need. No one’s going to think I’m selfish and if they do, I don’t care.Okay, that’s your rational mind or your intellectualizer mind talking, but that’s not what your emotional learning is. Deep inside, there is a part of you that learned those things do feel dangerous. They do risk connection.They do create suffering. And so we know through this book that there is this idea of two sufferings, that when we have these overwhelming experiences, these intense experiences, these big emotional survival-based experiences, our brain is very quickly categorizing, based on the data it has, what will be the lesser of two sufferings. And so if the suffering is I shut down my own needs, I turn my back on myself, I abandon myself, or the other suffering is I lose connection with people around me, that is actually the far more terrifying suffering.It is far more terrifying, especially as children, to feel that our caregivers would not be okay if we don’t take care of their needs, or our caregivers will withdraw from us if we are our silly, playful selves. That actually creates a feeling of life threat versus the other suffering, which is shutting down our own needs, shutting down our own emotions, going up into our head. We are always choosing between two sufferings.You don’t know you’re doing this. I can’t emphasize enough that this all happens in the unconscious, and it’s not rational. People will try to tell me, well, that doesn’t make sense.That doesn’t matter. These are emotional learnings, and emotions, by their very definition, do not have to be founded in rationality. They are feelings, they are not thoughts.So whatever solutions we came up with in those times of two sufferings, that made sense in the context of the emotional experience and the nervous system experience we had at the time. So if you learned that confident, loud, opinionated adults hurt people, shut other people down, stomped all over them, your brain might come up with a symptom of staying small and doubtful and silent. That symptom might hurt you in the present, it might get in the way of you having the life that you want, but it is the lesser of the two sufferings.If the other option is to turn into the parent or the teacher or whoever it is who terrified you, that is coherent. It’s not random. It’s not a character defect.If every mistake you made as a child was met with shaming, withdrawal, rage, or just disruption and dysfunction in the family system that relied on you to be good, to make them feel okay, then your system will file mistakes as dangerous. So driving yourself to be perfect, never resting, not feeling safe to come down, is fully coherent. It is not something that can be managed solely through behavior because the emotion says that it’s unsafe.We know that these symptoms are adaptive, protective, survival strategies, and they are not the enemy. Instead, we’ve learned through this book to use them as clues to what the emotional learnings are that we want to update. So again, wonderful news that we know about this process now to update these learnings because it wasn’t that long ago that we thought once you had these learnings that they were permanent.You might be able to cope. You might be able to reduce the intensity, but you were stuck with them. Thank goodness through research and science now we know that this is not true.That these old emotional memories can be activated in the moment and then they become flexible or pliable. That data or that file becomes updatable. We can open the spreadsheet.We can update the data. We can add new data through new experiences, but we can also make it so that the brain waits the old data less. And this is the coolest thing in the world to know that we can revise these learnings.We activate it. We introduce what’s called a disconfirmation experience or a congruence experiment that introduces a prediction error. These are all fancy words and what they mean is when we activate the old learning, like if I have a need, I’ll be punished, shamed, or abandoned.And we touch into some of that sadness or fear or terror or anger, whatever it might be. And then we have a new experience where let’s say we might try on telling the barista they gave us the wrong drink and asking them to remake it. Your system may react as if something very dangerous is happening.Your heart might race. You might feel nauseous. You want to bolt.You want to just take the drink you paid $7 for and not say anything. But then you do it and they say, oh, sorry about that. I’ll fix it.Or even if they say, fine, I’ll fix it. You get to observe in real time. You get to take off those old lenses little bit, maybe look over the top of the lenses and say, oh, okay, that sucked.I didn’t enjoy that that much, but it wasn’t dangerous. And in that moment, that is what updates the memory. That is what updates the learning.Now, not every new experience can be that simple. It takes time. And sometimes we start with imaginal experiments, meaning we just think in our mind about what it would be like if that happened.But these prediction errors, when they match and are targeted to the old learning, can update it. So it’s not helpful to just slap an affirmation on and say, I am completely safe to have needs, because you don’t believe it. That is way too big in connection to that old emotional learning, and you haven’t learned that it’s true.(16:24 - 20:16)But when we can try these little steps on at a time of like, oh, part of me expected disaster in that moment, and yet nothing terrible happened. When we hold the both, what we expected and what actually happened, that is what opens the door to reconsolidation. We introduce the mismatch, we juxtapose the old learning and the new learning, and over time and repetition, that learning gets updated.And this structure is laid out in this book for therapists as well, and it’s called the Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process, and it works very similarly. So if you’re a therapist curious about how to activate this in your own work, you can go back and look at that chapter and listen to that episode, or of course, listen on, because we will continue to explore in updating chapters. So a very helpful case in this book, which you heard me reference, is the case of Richard.And Richard comes in because he’s struggling with self-confidence. He’s having a hard time speaking up in meetings, and he comes in thinking, how do I get unstuck from this? And so you might think, oh, he has self-esteem, he doesn’t like himself, he doesn’t trust himself. But what we actually learned is that his father was a very outspoken person, but he was also an aggressor.And so what his learning was is, I must have no confidence at all, or I will become harmful and dominating, and everyone else will hate me. And so in the book, as they move into the transformation phase, Richard was able to practice observing in his day-to-day life when other people speak up in meetings and have good ideas, and everyone responds with relief and appreciation. And that becomes contradictory knowledge for him, a lived experience that can update that learning.And then over the course of our lives, we get verification, which means we get to see it happen over and over again, and then we get to see the shift within ourselves. This is through observation, which is also called metacognition, learning to observe ourselves like a wildlife documentarian with curiosity and neutrality. We also use interoceptive awareness, where we track both our mind and our body.And then we use this memory reconsolidation process to introduce prediction errors, aka new experiences, to make a change. It is normal because we can have many, many learnings for this to take time. It’s normal for there to be partial shifts, or to find a deeper learning when we thought we were working on learning A and another learning pops up.And so noticing is the work. Observing is the work. Continuing to observe and be curious is what will help you with this process over time.This is why I love getting to do this podcast together and to explore and be curious and go slow, because just thinking about things in this different way, shifting the lens a little bit, being curious, observing what happens as you listen or read, that in itself can be a new experience. That in itself can be an opportunity for you to have a moment where it clicks and you say, oh, maybe I’m not doing this because I’m bad or I’m not trying hard enough or whatever it might be. When you observe that and notice that, oh, moment, that can be a new experience we’re introducing to your brain, where you learn to observe yourself versus criticize yourself.And so we know that this process takes time. To take it more slowly, to learn to observe things in a different way, we do have to take it slowly. We do have to process little by little.That is the way the brain and nervous system work. Unfortunately, we can’t rush or push towards this huge change that we might see on social media, even though a part of us might want to. And the part of us that wants to be this big, huge change can also be a part of a deeper learning that says, I’m not acceptable as I am.(20:17 - 21:19)But if we zoom out and we notice that we can learn to be in connection with ourselves, to let our symptoms and strategies make sense, to learn to be more neutral and observe our experience, to insert a tiny pause in between a stimulus and a response, and then to learn to have new experiences that allow us to see things as they are in the present and how they were in the past, that we can update our brain, we can update our learnings, and we can change our lives in that process. So we’re not here to memorize these steps as a formula, but just to notice, maybe 1% more, that your experience makes sense. There is a pathway for change that doesn’t require force and fear and bullying.Your brain and nervous system are wired to learn. They are neuroplastic. They are able to change, but they need the right conditions.(21:20 - 22:26)So as we continue to work through this book together, we’re going to keep coming back to these foundations. We’re going to look at how different therapies you might already know, like somatic work and IFS, are all using versions of this process, even if they use a different language for it, and we’ll keep talking about how this applies to our real lives, how to implement this in our day-to-day. So check in with yourself.Notice in your thoughts, emotions, and body sensations what might be coming up as you listen. Is there a symptom or a pattern that comes up where you say, oh, that might be true for other people, but not about me, or where some part of you wants to figure out how to take this information and make a spreadsheet, make a plan, make a checklist? Then maybe just for a moment, you could notice, this is coherent. This strategy makes sense.This symptom protected me in some way, even if I’m not clear on what it is right now, and there may be new routes ahead, even if I can’t see them yet. So thank you for being here. Thank you for listening and reading, and I’m so grateful we get to walk this road together.wishing you tiny glimmers ahead,trishap.s. If you’re interested in learning more about how to apply this IRL, you can still join me for my 5 Steps to Change Live Class (also recorded!). I’d love to see you there! 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

Hello, tiny sparks readers! Have a new podcast episode for you today about my thoughts on the endless optimization of healing. Before we dive in, I want to share something tender and exciting. I have just started writing a book and was recently accepted into a 12-month writing program to help bring it to life, with the hope of it landing in the world in 2026. If you want to be part of that process and help me actually make it happen, you can join me over on Patreon, where I will share in-progress pieces, reflections, and the middle of shaping this work. There are a few tiers, including one that offers a live meeting every month where I answer your questions personally. If this episode landed for you and you want to support this book growing from an idea into something you can hold in your hands, your presence there really does make a difference. In addition, becoming a paid subscriber here supports my writing, too, and you get to join our wonderful book club! Whether you’re a free or paid subscriber, thank you for being here. If you have questions, curiosities, or things you’d love to see addressed in my book, don’t hesitate to drop me a line or leave a comment below! (0:00 - 2:44)Okay, today I want to talk about something that might sound a little bit strange coming from someone who literally teaches about healing for a living, but I am so, so tired of the self-help industry and especially the social mediafication of the self-help industry. Of course, I am not tired of people wanting to feel better. Of course, we want to feel better.And of course, we are trying to find any amount of information we can to help us feel better. And I’m not tired of those of us who are curious or want to grow or want to explore nervous system work or trauma healing. But I am so tired of the way that healing has been turned into a product for us to consume and complete and be perfect at and overachieve at and try harder at, like a course you have to pass or some kind of project that you have to finish.And if you are someone who tends to live in your head, who’s always been the high achiever, the eldest daughter, the responsible one, the intellectualizer, you probably know exactly what I mean. You go into this idea of healing or being more present in your life or getting unstuck, moving toward what you want for yourself, using the same tools that have always worked for you. You research, you read, you analyze, you organize the information in your mind.And once you set your mind to it, you decide that you’re going to do this right. And the internet is set up for the parts of us that think that we can do this perfectly by making a plan and trying harder and researching it to the bitter end. That is what the self-help world, especially the self-help world on social media, is built upon.And it gives us this steady stream of little bite-sized promises. Do this journal prompt, reflect on your year, say an affirmation, set a boundary, cut contact, breathe in this way, no, breathe in that way, cold punch, don’t cold punch, stretch your hips, drink your water, take your supplements. And there’s this message that if you can get the formula just right, if you do enough, if you try hard enough, if you’re good enough, you will finally be okay, feel good, have the life you want, and specifically have the life that you might see represented on social media.People who seem so happy, so successful, perfect family, perfect house, perfect friends, plenty of money. And so it’s normal that we’re drawn toward these things. We want there to be something that we can do that will make us feel okay.Of course, some other part of us also deeply resists that because it feels impossible. We feel stuck in this bind of needing to be perfect to be okay, but feeling like it’s impossible to actually follow through with all of those things. And that’s not because there’s anything wrong with you.(2:44 - 4:58)It’s because our brain works based off old learnings getting landed into the present. It’s so, so understandable that we want something to be a checklist that we can move through and complete. We want to fill out a worksheet.We want to make a few meals, take a few supplements, do some deep breathing, and wake up in a completely different place with a different relationship to ourselves and to the world. A different job maybe, a different personality, a different partner, a different relationship to money, whatever it might be. But that’s not how these patterns that were built for survival reorganize themselves.And for those of us who grew up reading the room constantly, reading people around us constantly, knowing the sound of everyone’s footsteps and whether it meant they were happy or angry, then people-pleasing, intellectualizing, perfectionism, overachieving are not random bad habits and they’re not personality traits. They are learned responses to our environments. If we learned that having big feelings got us shamed or ignored, then shutting down those feelings makes a lot of sense.If you rewarded and celebrated every time you achieved or functioned so well, took on more and solved the problem, then of course that learning would get set up in your brain to say, this is what makes me good and worthy. And many times it’s subtle, right? Like sometimes we had very clear trauma or sometimes it was very clear that our parents criticized us when we had emotions or sent us away. But oftentimes it’s so much more subtle than that.It’s an ongoing experience of being misattuned to. If you are a joyful, playful little child born to parents who are under immense stress and they themselves are intellectualizers or incredibly rational people who don’t know how to deal with their own feelings, it’s not that they might hurt you or punish you when you have feelings, but they themselves might become overwhelmed. And so then we learn, uh-oh, when I am playful, silly, joyful myself, people around me get overwhelmed and that makes me feel stressed and unsafe because I need my caregivers to be okay.(4:59 - 5:42)Or maybe it’s our peers, maybe it’s our teachers. And yes, we can have experiences in our adult life that impact us as well. But all of these things get coded in our brains as roots of safety, worth, value, and connection.So then you come into healing spaces because sometime in your life, and it’s usually later on in our life, it starts to take more of a toll. And maybe we notice physical symptoms, maybe we feel slightly depressed, disconnected, anxious, but we’re not sure why, kind of stuck or dissatisfied in our lives, and we want to fix those patterns. But things start to get slippery because we might feel this pull into healing and we turn it into another pattern.tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.(5:42 - 7:05)We want to be good at it, we want to solve it, we want to get an A in therapy, we want to do trauma recovery work, check it off the list, let them be codependent no more, get our body to stop keeping the score, and then we will be good enough to deserve to rest and relax. And this is where self-help becomes so incredibly toxic because so much of it mirrors the very same culture that we have already been mired in and are already burned out from. There is a focus on progress, optimization, and improvement of our behavior.Even somatic work has become an idea that you need to optimize your nervous system, you need to optimize your body. If you’re an intellectualizer, you just need to learn how to track your body. Somatic work, somatic work, fix your nervous system, stretch your hips, and then you can let all your emotions go and then you will be well.So it’s pressure, pressure, pressure, morning routines, five-step systems, and very, very tidy before and after stories, which just feeds right into those beliefs. And the brain says, see, if you just try hard enough and plan enough and analyze enough, and then you can finally be worthy and be good. And these other people did it.Why can’t you? Why can’t you be more productive, more regulated, more aligned? Why can’t you follow through with these activities? And so maybe you try it. You know, you see the posts on Instagram and you give it a try. You do the journaling, the affirmations, try to track your body.(7:06 - 14:35)And for a little while, that can feel exciting. And we get a little dopamine, we get a little oxytocin, we feel a spark that this will be the thing, the thing that finally makes it okay for us to say no, to be present, to want something different, to have needs, to not have to worry about being disapproved of, to not have to explain ourselves and criticize ourselves constantly. But then eventually something happens.Either we turn on ourselves or we stop doing the things because we’re tired or exhausted, or some part of our brain says, nope, that’s not safe. You’re going off the survival pathways. Maybe someone gets disappointed in us.A relationship shifts and boom, we’re right back in those old patterns, overthinking, overexplaining, over-apologizing, over-criticizing. And now that we have all these self-help messages, when we see that happen, because of course we can observe it, right? We can observe these things happening. Well, the only answer is that it must be something wrong with us.And then we get fed this message that we’re too self-aware. And then maybe we go to therapy and we even get told we’re too self-aware for therapy. We already know so much, so why are we here? Which again just feeds into this idea that something must be wrong with us.The mindset, the discipline, we’re not doing enough. We’re self-aware, we can’t make the change. We can’t even fit in in therapy.Something really must be wrong with us. We must be our eyes at everything. Healing is fake.Nothing works. This is stupid. I want to offer us a different picture.And the picture is that you and your brain are not bad or wrong. You’re neither too self-aware nor not self-aware enough. You are a human with a brain that is made up of all of your past experiences, that is predicting what is going to happen in the present.What is the probability that something safe is going to happen versus something dangerous? And it has been paying attention for your whole life about what happens when you speak up, when you rest, when you cry, when you ask for help, when you don’t mask, when you put on a show, when you get angry, when you succeed, when you fail. And it’s built up a whole atlas in your brain on what to expect. And this is all filed away unconsciously.We’re not even actively aware that we’re doing it. We may become actively aware of the patterns through our endless analysis and intellectualization, but that doesn’t change the automatic pattern that is embedded in the implicit side of your brain. So when you set a boundary or you try or you think about setting a boundary or saying no or whatever it is, and you feel a rush of panic afterward, that is the predictive pattern getting set off where your brain said that was something dangerous.That’s not something that leads to more connection. And so maybe you criticize yourself, you feel panic, you feel like you need to make up for setting the boundary by like getting the person a gift or something like that. That is that brain saying you went down a route that is unsafe and now I need to get you back to the safe route and the safe route is not having boundaries, not having needs.Or maybe you do go to therapy and you have this wonderful insight, then you go home and you repeat the very same behavior that you just unpacked. It’s not because you didn’t listen. It’s not because you self-sabotaged.It’s because your brain does not have a route that says that new behavior is safe or that that stopping that old behavior is safe. And so self-help is not designed to talk to these implicit learnings, to remap our brain, our predictive survival pathways. It’s only talking to the part of us that consumes information and makes lists.It’s very behavioral oriented. And yes, even self-help that is targeted toward trauma learning is very much about have new experiences, try harder, set a boundary, feel your body, share your emotions. All of those things are behaviors that feel unsafe.And so doing those things will push us out of our window of tolerance, no matter how smart we are, no matter how hard we try. And it can become quicksand really quickly because the more we turn healing into a job or something to analyze or intellectualize, the louder the survival patterns get. Perfectionism sneaks in everywhere, people-pleasing shows up, over-functioning shows up, we over-functioning even on trying to help ourselves feel better.So we might try to install these new behavioral habits, but those old survival pathways are still the way our brain will take us when we are living outside of that window of tolerance. So then what do we do if the answer is to not just try harder? Because we don’t want to just give up. And I think the first step is really being truthful and honest about the time scale that your brain built these maps over years and years of repetition, usually under stress.And so they’re not going to reorganize overnight, even if you do the affirmations, even if you do the journaling, even if you eat the food that you think you need to eat. They will not reorganize overnight because none of us are going to be the exception to the rules of neuroscience. Now there are mechanisms of change that can help speed up the process.Nonetheless, it will be a process, just like building new roads in real life. It is a process. And we also have to stop pretending that insight is equal to integration.We love insight. We love seeing patterns. We love that.But that is not changing the route. And for us intellectualizers and overachievers and perfectionists, the temptation is to stay in the insight because that’s where we feel comfortable. We get a rush every time we have a new insight and say, okay, got it now.I’m going to be different. But your body still tightens up. Your throat still closes.You still get in your own way. You still criticize yourself. You still overwork.It’s not a moral failing. Remember, it is those safety pathways and the built-in detours that your brain has to get you back onto the safety pathways. So this is why I often think about the work that I do as kind of the anti-self-help self-help.I know it sounds silly, but I do care deeply about giving people tools and language to understand themselves and to understand their brains, to remap and rewire their brain toward new ways of being in their life. But I’m also not interested in trying to hand you another system that you can try and not succeed at, not because you failed, but because it’s going against your survival brain, because that doesn’t quite sit right with me either. I want you to have an understanding of your patterns.It’s not just insight, but that truly allows you to see the mechanisms that are happening in your brain and allows you to understand the mechanisms that have to happen to change and rewire those pathways. I want you to see how deeply logical your overthinking, self-sabotage, people-pleasing, perfectionism, hyper-independence is. I want you to understand that all of those things are representative of survival pathways, adaptive strategies in your brain that are happening because your brain is predicting if you don’t do them, something dangerous will happen.No matter how much you say you know nothing dangerous will happen, this is not a conscious experience. It’s implicit. Implicit like handwriting, right? It’s below the surface.We’re not thinking about it actively. We have to make these things explicit to be able to work with them, but understanding them as protective allows us to use a little bit of a different lens. So when we use this lens of rewiring our brain and understanding our predictive brain rather than endless self-optimization, we get to see things a little bit more clearly.(14:36 - 16:57)So if we overcommit, we might say, I need to optimize this. I need to say no, have better boundaries. I’m just going to start saying no and stop people-pleasing.I’m going to read a book about boundaries, go to the library, get the book, read all that, and then of course you don’t follow through because your body floods with fear or guilt or dread or you criticize yourself, you tell yourself other people’s needs are more important, or you don’t even realize it and somehow you’ve over-scheduled yourself again. And then you might end up back in an anxiety spiral or telling yourself that you failed. But in this lens, we might get curious about noticing how saying yes is a way to stay safe, what the learning is underneath of that, what we’re protecting ourselves from.Maybe times you felt like a burden. Maybe times it felt like meeting something upset other people in your lives. Maybe times adults around you were stressed or unpredictable and you learned to make yourself low maintenance.We would see that as an adaptation and we would see all the detours that keep you on that safe adaptation road, the self-criticism, the busyness, the functional freeze of disconnecting and just going into autopilot. And instead of demanding that you stop, we would play around with observing and noticing because we know observing and noticing alone actually helps the rewiring. And then we would get to a place where we can start doing little mini congruence experiments in the present.We could imagine doing something different and noticing what happens even just by imagining it. It allows us to see the learning differently and relate to the learning differently because we can pluck out that old learning that might say having needs makes other people not like me or having needs is selfish. And we can show the brain something different that’s happening in the present where we can experience in real time that having needs is not selfish.Now, it’s not that simple, right? We can’t just prove to ourselves that having needs isn’t selfish, but through these experiments, either imagining them or acting them out in real time, we can actually rewire our brain. That process is called memory reconsolidation and it invokes neuroplasticity in our brain, which allows our brain to form new neural pathways and allows us to repattern our own attachment to ourselves and provide co-regulation to ourselves. Now, that process is kind of boring from a self-optimization process.(16:57 - 17:37)It’s kind of boring to the algorithm. It’s not quite as fun as doing affirmations and journaling and drinking water and then magically being fixed, but it is realistic. It is founded in the science of how our brain works and it is actually the quickest and most effective way to actually do this change.Now, you might be listening to this and thinking, I don’t know how to design those kinds of experiments. I don’t know how to work with these patterns without making it a checklist or something to hold myself up a yardstick to measure myself against. And yeah, you’re right.(17:37 - 19:49)You don’t. You don’t have neural pathways for this yet. Or if you do, because you’ve heard this before, the roadways are kind of back roads, they’re potholes, they’re dirt.Your brain’s not yet comfortable driving down them, but it is possible to build those roadways over time. Not on the timeline of social media, but on your own timeline of observing, noticing, building safety, and rewiring our brain. And this is exactly the work that I am building.This is the work of change. This is the anti-self-help, self-help. When you understand that all forms of therapy and all forms of self-help are trying to mimic these mechanisms of change, but not quite hitting the mark, because these mechanisms of change are not behavioral, then it becomes clear.We have to work with the neural pathways, the predictive patterns, the survival adaptations first, and behavior change comes second. Down the line. Behavior change becomes so much easier when our brain is not telling us, for example, that taking care of ourselves is dangerous.Then you don’t need to obsess and plan and buy a new checklist and sign up for a new course and harangue yourself because you didn’t get it quite right. So for right now, maybe you can notice the ways that you’re trying to make healing into self-optimization tasks. Maybe you can notice the posts you save on social media that promise you a fast fix through journaling, through affirmations, through breathwork.And you can notice what feels good about those ideas, and you can notice what might create pressure out of those ideas, because it’s not that those ideas can ever be helpful. But to notice what are we trying to get at. If I do this breathwork, and I journal, and I do affirmations, how is it I will feel? What will my life, how will my life be different? That is going to reveal what we want, and that is where we can start to gain clarity about what is getting blocked.If you want to learn more about this, this is the work that I do every day on social media, in the courses I teach, I have free guides. Ironically, yes, it is called five steps to change, but it’s not like that. It’s not a simple five-step snap your fingers and you’re out the door.It’s an iterative process to allow you to remap or rewire your brain. And I would love to hear your thoughts, questions, and curiosities. And thanks for being here.Thanks for reading tiny sparks - trisha wolfe! This post is public so feel free to share it.Opportunities to work with me:* On January 11th, I’ll be teaching a live class called 5 Steps to Long-Lasting Change. This class is all about making sense of why change feels so hard, and how we can work with the brain and body to make it easier. I’ll walk you through the framework I’ve developed that weaves together neuroscience, memory reconsolidation, and nervous system regulation. It’s practical, compassionate, and designed to help you not only see what needs to shift, but also learn how to create changes that truly last! If you can’t attend live, the full recording will be available for you.* Also in January, I’ll be opening The Shift 8 Week Immersion, a small group experience for women who already know themselves well, but feel stuck living out the same patterns again and again. This is where we take the lens from my teaching and actually practice it together through live sessions, guided nervous system work, and gentle experiments between meetings. Over eight weeks, we will map your loops, reconnect with your values, and try on small, doable shifts that help you feel safer and make change more possible in real life. If you are craving a space that is structured, supportive, and focused on embodied change rather than more information, this is where we will do that work side by side.* Book club! We just finished up Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and what a deep experience it was. Next up: Unlocking the Emotional Brain - this book is clinical, but truly informational as the seminal resource on all things coherence therapy, memory reconsolidation, and the science behind why things like EMDR and NARM actually work.By becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack for just $5 a month, you get full access to my biweekly podcast, where I do a deep dive into each chapter, and two live fireside chats, where we connect and explore our learnings together. You also get full access to the archive of the book club, where you can listen to episodes about Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, No Bad Parts, and The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma - all my favorite books for those who truly want to heal from their past, get unstuck, and start moving forward. 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

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 coherent. Whether you’re a therapist or a person interested in applying this to your own life it’s so important to understand that when we’re getting to these underlying patterns these neural pathways these schemas we’re not looking for something to make sense in the present. And this is a real sticking point for people who intellectualize because they’ll say well I know I’m not going to turn into my father if I’m if I’m you know confident that’s not what it is.But we’re not looking in the present we’re not talking about does it make sense in the present. In the past it made sense and so the system set up a symptom to keep us protected the same way that for example being perfect made us feel protected from a parent who would criticize us if we weren’t perfect which made us feel terrified alone and sent away that is a strategy that makes perfect sense. Even if you know in the present that you can be loved if you aren’t perfect or that being perfect isn’t even realistic anymore that doesn’t change the internal schema of the symptom and the protective pattern that comes out that is deeply embedded in our unconscious and in these neural pathways about what is safe and remember safety above all else.So our brain is always trying to maintain that system of safety and that’s what we see playing out here. And a really important point that I think they make in this chapter is the symptom often means we are suffering. Right so the perfectionism can make us suffer the self-doubting can make us suffer but that suffering feels more tolerable and in a sense gives us a sense of control.Of course it’s a faux sense of control but it gives us a sense of control. Well if I can just keep myself small yes I have to suffer but I don’t have to come up against this idea that if I let myself be confident I will turn into this heavy-handed controlling know-it-all like my dad and inflict harm on people around me the way my dad did to me. So the suffering of keeping myself small is more tolerable than the other suffering and so in coherence therapy they kind of refer that as the two sufferings.

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 mistakes as dangerous. So it will not let you go down those roads.And if you go down those roads, it’s going to set off a series of things to try to make you stop, which might be panic attacks, or anxiety, or shutting down, or dissociating. So these maps keep happening even when the environment has changed, even when there are new places to explore, new roads to be built in our adult lives. The GPS still says, no, those roads are dangerous.I can’t be myself. I can’t make mistakes. I can’t be present.But memory reconsolidation is like updating the GPS. If you remember back in the day before we used our phones for GPSs, you had to download updates for your GPS. You had to buy them and download them as new routes were built.(10:04 - 16:01)It didn’t automatically update. And so that’s kind of what we’re dealing with here with our brain. We’ve got to download the updates through memory reconsolidation and update the routes little bits at a time so that our system can recalculate, our brain can recalculate, and allow us to go down new roads.That is why this is transformational change, because as you do this process over time, you don’t need to go down those roads anymore, and it doesn’t require constant effort. You don’t have to worry that if you miss a day of meditation, you’ll go back because you quite literally repatterned the memories. Something I really love about this book and about coherence therapy and other types of therapy like NARM and IFS is we don’t have to look at symptoms anymore as maladaptive or as signs of some kind of greater pathology.These aren’t dysfunctions. Actually, they’re quite functional. They formed in a way that makes sense based on the environment you grew up in or the environment you lived in.And so the authors of this book talk about if you look at that underneath schema, that underneath pattern of why this developed, what was happening in the environment, then actually the symptoms or the strategies are coherent, meaning they make sense. They are in balance. They are your brain and your body and your nervous system responding to something.So when we know they are coherent, then we know that we can’t change them through control because they make sense based on the learning. What we do is we update the learning. And as that changes the schema or the overall pattern, then we don’t have to live by that schema anymore.So we don’t have to battle the symptom any more than we would want to battle the younger part of ourselves or any more than we want to battle a protective part of ourselves. Now, many times people will come into therapy and say, no, no, I hate that part of me. Cut it out.I want to get rid of it. That makes sense to me. That’s actually part of a schema where you learned that you are the problem and anything that is wrong or bad about you must be a problem.And so what should you do? Well, you should cut it out, criticize it, get rid of it. That’s a learned emotional learning neural pathway. But what we know is no amount of trying to get rid of parts of us will actually make them go away.That’s the same as going into the doctor and saying, I want to breathe in, but I don’t want to breathe out. Breathing out is necessary and it’s part of you. So this really gets to shift the lens away from symptoms being problematic, which is so much of what we might hear in traditional therapy or in the past.It’s shifting, thankfully, but we can start to understand that these symptoms are coherent. These symptoms make sense. They are an ally and a messenger that is showing us what the old learning is.So how does this process actually work? Well, they touch into it briefly, but of course, we’re going to get to do a deep dive. They call this the therapeutic reconsolidation process. And so step one is reactivating the old learning.And so that means we’re actually going to touch into that neural pathway together, the thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors. And we know that as we touch into these learnings, these memories, these neural pathways, a part of us feels like it’s happening in the moment. And that is often referred to as experiential therapy.And we talked about this a lot through internal family systems, what those parts want to tell us, what they’re holding, and through NARM, where we look at the survival strategies, how they developed, where they served us, and where they might not serve us anymore. But we want to be able to access the experience in the present, even though it might be accompanied with painful emotions, because we know from memory reconsolidation, the memory needs to be active in the moment. Now, it’s very important that you’re working with someone, or if you’re doing this on your own, that you scale this, you do it little pieces at a time, because if you flood yourself, that’s not going to allow you to do the memory reconsolidation process.Now, know that there is no shame, if you’re curious about this in your own life or in therapy. If you are touching into a memory, and you find yourself flooded or overwhelmed or shut down, that’s very normal, and that’s likely another coherent system. So then we might want to work, we might want to shift our work from whatever we were thinking about that led to the shutdown, to the learning about the shutdown.What happens when I feel big emotions and I need to shut them down? What is the learning there? Then step two is we bring in the new knowledge or experience that directly contradicts that symptom. So if the idea is making mistakes means I’m worthless, and here is this moment where I got third place in the debate, and I came home, and my mom or my dad or my grandma or whoever, they just looked at me and walked away. I could just tell they were so disappointed.They just, they didn’t engage with me then for several days, and I could tell they were furious and thinking that I’m such a loser. And so what’s the learning from that? Making mistakes means I’m worthless. It’s not enough to just say that’s not true, because it’s a deeply held emotional learning, awash, remember, in fear, rage, grief, and shame.What we want to do is bring in a contradiction that is experienced as a mismatch. You’ve heard me call it a prediction error, right? If our brain is predicting when I make a mistake, something dangerous will happen. We want to introduce an error that says, here’s a time I made a mistake, and yeah, it was uncomfortable and I hated it, but nothing dangerous has happened.That is what they call a juxtaposition experience. When we can hold both of those side by side, that’s when the memory reconsolidation process is activated. That is where the old memory can be updated with what is true in the present.(16:01 - 17:44)And as we do that, little by little, that learning loses its charge. The GPS gets updated. That old road is no longer maintained in the same way, and so suddenly we just find ourselves doing something differently.Now, I say suddenly. This is still a process. Yes, it is a really cool, really effective process, but it is still a process.Now, there are lots of different modalities of therapy that use this, like we talked about. Coherence therapy, ADP, EFT, EMDR, IFS, somatic experiencing. Of course, there’s so many acronyms, right? But they all facilitate it in different ways, and they believe different things about it.What I want to say and reinforce within you is that no matter what kind of therapy that you’re trying, the most important thing is that you’re able to take things slowly and stay on your own side. Some therapies promise quicker results than others, and what I will say is it’s different for every person. We might think, oh, well, okay, so I did that memory.I no longer think that making mistakes is worthless. I’m all good. Well, there are memories and memories and memories.There are learnings and learnings and learnings that are stacked. So yes, this process is very effective for transformational change, but I want to reiterate again that healing needs to be a slow process. It needs to happen little bits at a time, because if we try to move too quickly, some part of our brain and body are going to respond in a way that that feels dangerous, that feels like too much, and so many of us have learnings around when things are too much, I need to shut down, or things can feel like not enough, and so if things are not enough, then I need to shut down, and we never want to be pushing you towards shutdown.(17:44 - 20:54)So as we’re reading through this book or you’re doing your own therapy, just know if you find yourself going into shutdown, there’s a deeper learning, one that you might not even have verbal access to or memories that you can access, but we know that there’s a deeper learning to be worked with that says being seen as unsafe or being supported is unsafe, or your system in general just feels everything is unsafe, and so it’s always on the precipice of shutting down, and sometimes that can look like actual collapse, but other times that can look like, for example, my favorite intellectualizers, I talk about them a lot because I am one, and so I can really understand what it’s like to be that way. That’s another form of shutting down, and so if I’m doing this work in therapy with someone, and I can see them go up into the analysis, well, I might very gently reflect to them and be curious about what just happened, what happened right before, what roadblock got thrown up that made you go into the analysis, what emotion happened right before that. So if you have seen my five steps to change guide, which by the way is free, and I’m doing a live class on it coming up toward the end of October, it is based on this process of memory reconsolidation with my own experience as a therapist thrown in, and so I will link that here so that you can grab it if you want to and have a look as we read this together.So that is the remapping process that we have been curious about together all along, and I’m really excited to get to dive in together the science of why this works, of why we are able to remap our brain, and that is memory reconsolidation combined with observation and slowing things down. So maybe you’re thinking about your own inner map as you listen to this, and you’re thinking about one road that you find yourself traveling again and again, maybe that self-criticism or that overthinking. What’s it like right now to think that maybe, maybe, possibly, potentially, you could form a new road? Maybe, possibly, potentially, that symptom has made sense in the past, but maybe you’re wanting to shift it now.And we just notice what happens when you think that, because a learning might come up right then. Maybe you feel a little bit of hopefulness, and then you shut yourself down, or maybe you automatically say, oh, that might be true for other people, but it’s not true for me. Those are the roadblocks, those are clues that we’ve stumbled upon a place that doesn’t feel safe, and our brain is trying to get us back where we quote-unquote belong, where it’s safe.It’s always about safety and maintaining connection. And the last part of this intro chapter talks a little bit about some struggles that clinicians and therapists face, and some, I know some of you here are clinicians and some of you aren’t, but this is really wonderful work for therapists as well, because it gives them the space and the knowledge of how to support people to make long-lasting change, and that can feel really good for therapists, and it can feel really good for clients, but it can also take some of the perfect intervention, or in some way that they need to fix their clients. So clients, you’re not a problem to be fixed, and therapists, it’s not your responsibility to fix anyone else.(20:56 - 21:57)So wonderful. I’m so excited to get to dive into transformational change together, and I know I’ve said that several times, but it is so true. This is my favorite thing to do, is to get to explore these things with you together.If you have questions or curiosities, please feel free to reply or comment here. We’ll get to explore this book together over the course of several months. There are a lot of chapters, so it’s going to take us a bit of time to get through this book, but I think it’s so worthy to do these deep dives and to really learn more about ourselves and the way our brains work.There will be two live meetings, possibly three, depending on how long this book stretches, because it is a little bit dense. It might be nice to have to have another live meeting thrown in there. I will get a schedule to you soon.I am working out the schedule myself because I will be doing some big, big things in the later October, which I will share with you later, but I will certainly get a schedule for the live meetings to you soon. And yes, I’m looking forward to continuing on the road together.Opportunities to work with me:* On October 26th, I’ll be teaching a live class called 5 Steps to Long-Lasting Change. This class is all about making sense of why change feels so hard, and how we can work with the brain and body to make it easier. I’ll walk you through the framework I’ve developed that weaves together neuroscience, memory reconsolidation, and nervous system regulation. It’s practical, compassionate, and designed to help you not only see what needs to shift, but also learn how to create changes that truly last! If you can’t attend live, the full recording will be available for you.* On November 8th, I’ll be leading a mini virtual retreat for women called The Shift. This retreat is about creating space to step out of old survival patterns and into new ways of being that feel steadier, more connected, and more possible. We’ll weave together teaching, guided practices, and reflection so you can not only understand how trauma and resilience show up in your life, but also begin to gently re-map the pathways that keep you stuck. It’s a space for depth, curiosity, and practical tools you can carry with you long after we’re done. This will also be recorded if you can’t attend live (small group sharing will not be recorded for participant privacy, but all teachings will be!). 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

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 about my friend, my partner, a colleague, a person I do have a relationship with where there's not attacking and withdrawing and game playing. And what's it like to notice that right now? So what do emotionally mature people look like? This chapter really offers this exploration into the characteristics of an emotionally mature person.And we can slow down and take these in. That emotionally mature people are realistic and reliable. They work with reality rather than fighting against it.They don't get stuck in how things should be based on their opinions. But they adapt, they problem solve, they connect, and they stay in the present. They can think and feel at the same time.And they can be upset without losing perspective and lashing out or pulling away. They can be consistent. They're trustworthy.And they don't take everything personally as an attack. They're respectful and reciprocal. They respect your boundaries, your individuality.And they give back, not just out of obligation, but because they want the connection to be fair and mutual. They're flexible, they compromise. They don't engage in power struggles.They're even-tempered. So again, they don't use that anger or withdrawal as an attempt to control you emotionally. And they're curious about you.They let your perspective matter. They could be influenced by you and not take that as an attack. They can tell the truth and when they've hurt you, they apologize and they make changes.(10:34 - 16:29)So not only is there repair, but there's repair backed by action. Oftentimes, emotionally immature parents can know how to try on repair or sort of parody repair. But it's all about manipulation to make themselves feel better, to make themselves feel like the martyr, or to make you feel like a bad person.That's not the case in emotionally mature relationships. Emotionally mature people are also responsive. They offer empathy.They offer safety. They make you feel seen and understood. But they give and receive those things with ease.And they can reflect on their actions and try to change when something isn't working. And laugh and be playful and can be enjoyable to be around. So in IFS terms, if you were with us for the No Bad Parts book, these people relate from the self.Not 100% of the time, because none of us do. But they really embody that self-energy of curiosity, compassion, calm, and connectedness. And in NARM terms, they're coming from that adult consciousness.And if they shift into child consciousness, or they shift into these protective parts, which would be normal, because we all do that as humans, they're able to notice it, observe it, take care of themselves, come back into the present, communicate, ask for what they need, and repair. And in return, we can feel the safety to start to offer those things as well, that create new neural pathways that help make relationships feel safer over time. And where we can allow ourselves to feel safer over time.And again, if you're thinking, I don't know how I can try those things on. I'm too scared to trust that someone could offer me those things. That's okay, because we're taking it one little bit at a time.But because also, we can try this on in other safe relationships, like in therapy, for example. You know, very often in therapy, I am working with people, not only on what they're sharing about their lives, about what they want to explore, but about what comes up between us. So if we're doing something and a person is like, I just don't know the right answer.I don't know what you want me to say. Then we have an opportunity to explore between us. What makes it feel like I need a right answer from you? What do you think will happen if you don't give me the answer that I'm looking for? Because we get to explore that this is something different.I don't actually need a right answer from you. I'm not actually expecting anything from you. I don't need a right answer.I don't need you to be calm. I don't need you to get better. I don't need you to figure it out.I am here to offer a curious and connected space with you. And so it's really such a wonderful, depthful exploration, if you have the time and inclination and resources to do this kind of depth work in therapy, because the patterns of your life will come out in therapy as well. And so you get the opportunity, not just to observe what it's like to be an emotionally mature relationship with someone who can hold space for you just as you are, who doesn't need anything from you and isn't trying to manipulate you.But you also get to observe within yourself, how you have become your own, your own emotionally immature parent. In a sense, we internalize that voice. And then we use it against ourselves.We call ourselves names, we pressure ourselves, we abandon ourselves, we withdraw from ourselves, we shut down our own needs. We don't need our emotionally immature parent to do that anymore, even though they might still continue to do that. Because now we do it to ourselves.That's normal and typical. That's a survival behavior. That's what the protective parts are.That's what the child consciousness is. They're all trying to protect us by doing it to ourselves first, to give us some sense of safety and control. But we want to be able to cultivate within ourselves, this emotionally mature person who can embody those qualities that I listed before, within ourselves, so that we can co-create emotionally mature relationships by being able to ask for help when we need it, to speak honestly without overgiving our energy, to hold our boundaries, to keep in touch with people we care about, to not criticize and pressure ourselves all the time, to not overwork, to rest when we're tired, to not have to intellectualize and analyze everything, and to communicate our needs clearly instead of expecting others to guess.This is what happens when we can shift into ourself, into the present, when we remap and build these new neural pathways. And so this is such a rich opportunity not to say, oh, you're saying I do it to myself, so I am the messed up one. I always knew it was me.I always knew it was the problem. If you find yourself reacting in that way, that's normal, of course. That's part of the criticism you learn to place on yourself.But rather, this is an opportunity to explore what did you learn you had to do to yourself to maintain connection, to keep yourself in line, to be good? What persona did you create? What suit of armor or suits of armor did you put on to try to keep connection with yourself, with your parent, with those around you? And do you still need those things now? Is your life still feeling like it's at stake in the same way that it was? Well, let's come back into building safety together. This process is so rich and so valuable, but it can also stir grief and anger. This awareness and exploration shines a light on what happened, what didn't happen, and how that shaped your choices and where you are today.(16:30 - 19:13)And sometimes that can feel overwhelming. And so we take it one little bit at a time so that we can come into the present to see ourselves more clearly and to live as ourself instead of as these protective roles. Self-discovery, the coolest thing in the world, can feel like living twice in one lifetime.Because for lack of a better term, and I hope you'll forgive the cliche, it's a whole new world. And I could sing a little Aladdin to you there. But just to know that everything opens up in front of us when we create these new neural pathways, when we build new learnings for ourselves, because we get to step out of becoming our own enforcer, our own emotionally immature parent, and we get to step into ourselves where we can start updating our map, moving toward what we want for ourselves, having needs, having wants, being present, living a life that feels truly embodied and connected to what we want.tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.If that sounds exciting to you right now, welcome. If that sounds terrifying, welcome as well. That's normal.It's typical. We're all at different parts of our process. And maybe we touch the excitement for a minute, and then we come into criticizing ourselves.Maybe we touch the excitement for a minute, and then we go into getting busy, busy, busy with something else. It's an iterative process. It's learning.It's curiosity. It's an experiment. And, you know, my favorite thing is to talk about experiments because you can't mess an experiment up.All you can do is try it on, look at the results, and then try it again with a slightly different question. So remember, when we're doing our steps to change, the first thing we're looking at is what's the new destination we're wanting? What do we want to put into our internal GPS? And you might notice that if you think about that right now, you think about something you want to change in someone else. Well, I want my mother to be less critical.Or I want my dad to be more present in my life. Or I want my sibling to connect with me and want to spend time with me and not always run away when we try to connect. Or maybe it's about your partner.I want my partner to be more responsive to my needs. Or whatever thing you might be imagining for yourself. If you find that the thing that you're wanting has to do with other people changing or other people's behaviors, well, now we're in a bit of a pickle.And that makes sense. Because as a child, of course, you would have done anything to try to make sure your caregivers were okay. So that finally, finally, finally, you could be loved and seen and had your needs responded to and feel supported.(19:13 - 20:40)But as adults, we want to turn that around and figure out what is it I'm trying to get at by managing this other person's behavior. If my mother were less critical of me, how would I feel differently? How would I behave differently? What would I do if I woke up tomorrow and my mother never criticized me again? What would I do within my life? And that reveals what we actually want for ourselves and what we have agency over. So this is a curiosity that you can always come back to.We notice where we want to go. We notice the roadblocks that come up, the self-criticism, the shaming, the intellectualizing, the busyness, the perfectionism, which gives us clues to the old destination, the old road. We build safety.And then little bits at a time, we can move toward what we want. That's my model that I created of the five steps to change that can be used as you're undergoing this process of integrating this book, of thinking of all you've learned and where you want to go from here. You can't go wrong, because if you realize the destination you chose isn't what you want, change the destination.If you realize the destination you chose is involving someone else's behaviors, change the destination. You can always come back into the present. You can always come back into safety, because all we have is this moment.(20:40 - 22:57)We know that our work lies not in theory, right? Not in learning everything there is to learn, though of course I deeply love us learning together. But in taking the theory and integrating it, living, honoring a boundary, choosing reciprocity over self-sacrifice, noticing and savoring the feeling and safety of being understood, of building those new neural pathways together. And so as we get a chance to connect sometime, I would love to answer any questions you have about that process.You know, this book was less about an intellectual understanding, but more about offering this new lens to observe some of the ways that we may have been treated as children and even as adults, so that we can figure out what we want for ourselves now. A few questions for you to reflect on as we finally close. When you think about the emotionally matured traits that we've described in this chapter, which ones feel familiar in your current relationships? When is a time when you have experienced connection, balance, reciprocity, care? And which ones would feel like new roadways for your system to explore that might have felt unsafe in the past, but you're curious about now? Looking back, what patterns or qualities in other people may have felt magnetic because they were familiar, even if they didn't feel safe or nourishing? And how might you like that to be now? What do you notice within your thoughts, emotions, or body sensations, when you have a moment of connection with another person that feels safe? Or even just in this moment, as you notice a connection to yourself as you're here being curious? And if you could imagine something you're wanting for yourself right now, that you could put into that GPS on your internal roadmap, what would it be? How would you feel? What are you imagining? And what happens as you imagine it right now? Whatever roadblocks come up, can you take a moment and notice them? Try observing them for just a split second of, oh, that's how I learned to keep myself safe.(22:57 - 24:10)And that makes sense. So thank you for being a part of this book club. Your connection and engagement is so rich, and I really enjoy this so much.I'm so excited to dive into unlocking the emotional brain together. I think that work is truly life-changing, and I'm so excited to begin integrating it into my life and my practice. Please feel free to share any feedback with me about what you're curious about, what you're noticing.I'd love to find a space for us to be able to engage more together, if maybe it's on a Substack chat or a Discord chat, or I've also considered shifting from these podcast episodes to maybe meeting live more frequently. So let me know what you're thinking. This book club is a co-creation between us, and it's constantly unfolding.And I would love to hear any thoughts you have. You can leave a comment here, you can reply, and it comes straight to me, or I'll look forward to seeing you live on August 30th. And it will be recorded if you're not able to attend live, and then in mid-September, we'll dive into what comes next.Thank you for being here, and I'm wishing you a gentle day ahead. 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

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 feeling good wasn't the right thing to do.09:35If you could be that person right now, what would your life be like? What would be different? How would you show up in your life if you had free time? Who would the people you engage with be and what would they like to do?09:50What would be your perfect day? On the other side, you can write my real self, and you can think about those things you had to develop as armor, maybe things that you notice in yourself now as you've been listening to this and doing your own work, the ways that you please others instead of yourself, the ways you say yes to everything even when you're exhausted, the way you take on more and more and more work to keep yourself busy,10:17the way you shove your own needs to the side, the way you intellectualize everything and analyze everything but never get to actually live in your life. Once you're done, you can place that paper somewhere safe and come to it a few days later and compare the two sides, and you can look at where are the ways you are connecting to your true self and where are the ways you notice the real self showing up.10:43map. I like to do a similar activity, but instead of different roles, I like to create a map of my brain, my own personal atlas. What are some of the major highways that I drive down in my brain? What are some of the things I do consistently and repeatedly?10:58And what are the little side roads that come off of that? Do I say yes all of the time when I mean no? What's happening down that road? What do I believe to be true? From that's that role self or that child consciousness self.11:13If I say no, what will happen? What is the body sensations that I feel like when I think about saying no? What are the emotions? When I start to flesh that out, I can see how deeply formed these roadways are and they all lead to safety.11:29And then I start to create a couple of new roadways, things I'm being curious about. Maybe something I'm being curious about is having a need. I draw that roadway and I consider what would it be like?

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 to happen, the body will respond as such. So then when we go to check in with our body, and we say, well, my heart's beating really fast, and I'm bracing and I'm really tense, this must actually be dangerous. It can reinforce that feedback loop. So what happens is that it's oftentimes in our adult lives, when we start to realize that we feel stuck, or unseen or disconnected, but we don't quite know why. Or we might think we know why, right? My intellectualizer will say, well, I know why I know all the facts behind all of this. But without really understanding that the knowing is different from the embodying and connecting to those old feelings, knowing that you had emotionally immature parents is a step on the path. But connecting with the part of you that experienced all of everything that that meant, the sadness, the fear, the anger, the disconnection, and coming into your adult self, who can be with that part of you, and who can start to take off those layers of armor. That's how we start to make change. And so it's oftentimes very scary in therapy, because people will say, well, if I'm not the person who takes care of everyone else's needs all the time, then who am I? Am I going to change my whole personality? If I'm not the person that knows everything and handles everything for everyone all of the time, then who am I? That is the role self. Oftentimes, our true self is hidden away behind all of these protective strategies. And we can't just go in and pluck it out. We have to go through a bit of an archaeological dig, an excavation process, where we're going through each of these layers, and touching little bits of your experience, and feeling what's different in the present. So feeling in the present little tiny moments where maybe you don't have to be hyper vigilantly over attuned to everyone all the time, and things can be safe. And by doing that little by little, we rewire new safety pathways in the brain that says, hey, maybe possibly, potentially, I'm okay, if I'm not over attuning to everyone's needs all of the time. Remember, the brain does not like to form new neural pathways.(12:36 - 16:12)It costs too much energetically, and it feels unsafe. But little bits at a time, we can do that, not because we dislike the role self. We understand how protective these roles have been, how much they kept us safe. But we also know that that's not what we want for ourselves here in the present. Remember that because the brain resists this, the work will feel very difficult. It will bring us back into our patterns, because anything that contradicts that role that we took on to protect ourselves, the brain will view as dangerous. So again, if we identify as a caretaker, but we then need support, or someone's helping us, or someone's giving us something, the brain's going to say, danger, danger, danger, this is a tiger. And it's going to make us feel actively dangerous. And so we might push the person away, or we might feel really embarrassed or shameful and not let ourselves accept the help. That's not because there's anything wrong with us. That's because that role self is part of that deeply protective brigade in the brain that says, hey, we can't let her, we can't let our body do that. We can't let our body accept help, because then we could be hurt. So how do we get her back on track? We can criticize her, we can make her feel shame, we can make her body feel really tight and tense. And that'll get her back into that protective braced state. And so those are those protective patterns that many of us are experiencing all the time on a day to day basis.

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 🩵