tiny sparks, big changes

Why different therapies work the same way

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

• Transcript

Beyond coping: using new experiences to rewire the brain

(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, trisha p.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

Terms of attachment: the unspoken rules running your life

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.com Hello and welcome back to our book club read-a-long of Unlocking the Emotional Brain! If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks, where we explore a chapter from the book together (you can also listen on Spotify!). I help translate the theory into everyday language and show you how to apply it in your own life. We also gather twice per book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time. This book takes us deep into the science of memory reconsolidation, one of the most powerful mechanisms for true and lasting change. It helps us understand how healing actually happens after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up with emotionally immature parents. If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this kind of work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience, including live sessions, current discussions, and the complete archive of past reads like No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this community possible, and I’m so grateful you’re here. This week, we dive into chapter 5, which goes further into attachment and the role it takes in shaping the way we see the world as adults. We know it’s not always attachment, that other things like societal and existential concerns can also create trauma patterns and survival strategies, but attachment sure plays a significant role! This chapter is incredibly dense, but it can help us continue to observe ourselves with more neutrality and understanding (and maybe even compassion!) when we’re examining behaviors we don’t like in the present day. Let’s dive in and learn more! (0:00 - 4:15) Welcome back, read-along friends, and thank you so much for being here. If you’re new here, this is our book club, where we dive into different self-help and therapy books, and every two weeks I release a little podcast episode, breaking down a chapter for you and helping you to understand how you might apply this in real life. You can read along with me, but you don’t have to. You can never pick up the book at all and still get the gist from these episodes. So I’m so glad you’re here as we continue to dive into Unlocking the Emotional Brain, an incredibly dense and incredibly informative book, and I think actually today we’re going to continue our exploration of chapter five, and we may not even get through it all. We’ll see. I want to, but it’s such a dense chapter and such an important chapter that I want to make sure that we take our time. Don’t forget that we have our first of two live meetings for this book coming up on Sunday, December 14th, and that is at 12 p.m. Eastern Time. You’ll receive the link in a separate email coming this week, but that’s 12 p.m. Eastern Time, Sunday, December 14th. Don’t worry if you can’t attend live. The recording will be sent out to all paid members, and thank you so much for being here and supporting my work. So you may remember, as we just briefly touched into chapter five last time, the chapter five explores attachment, and is it always about attachment? And so we know that, especially in modern discourse, there’s somewhat the idea that all roads in therapy and all problems that present in therapy can be tied back to attachment with our parents, and this chapter really dives into some of the attachment science and looks at this idea that there’s often more going on to our experience than just attachment with our parents. It doesn’t mean that attachment might not be involved in some way, meaning our connection to the world around us, to peers, etc., because we know that we are pack animals and we are biologically wired to want to stay in connection with those around us. But does it always come back to a childhood attachment experience with parents? And let’s talk a little bit about that. We know that unlocking the emotional brain is all about emotional learnings and how the experiences we have in our lives and those emotions that go along with them form implicit, meaning unconscious, memories and learnings within our brain that direct our behaviors in our present-day lives. Those learnings can come from, certainly, attachment relationships with caregivers, but they can also come from social contexts like schools, friendships, bullying, racism, layoffs, and also existential experiences. And this is what I don’t see talked about too often, so I’m so glad they mentioned it here, like illnesses, accidents, loss, or confrontation with our own mortality. All of those experiences can create these schemas, and you can think of schemas like templates within our brain, for thoughts, emotions, behavioral sensations, and behaviors. And those schemas hold up those if-then rules. If this happens, this is what I must do to stay safe, to stay in connection, to be loved, to be well, etc. And those all get held in the same place, that emotional, implicit, unconscious memory. And this is part of the emotional coherence framework. So instead of arguing about whether attachment or social class or temperament or whatever is more important, instead we know that the brain doesn’t care which category the experience falls under. If something happens, and you might have heard me say this, if it’s frequent or if it’s intense, no matter the source of the experience, then the brain will file that as a learning in the brain. (4:16 - 4:36) And so that could include, like, implicit learnings and procedural learnings could include riding a bike, handwriting, things that don’t really have a lot of emotion stored alongside of them. But when there’s emotion stored alongside of them, then those emotional, implicit learnings become even stronger. So it’s all these rivers flowing into one wide delta. (4:36 - 10:06) One river might be attachment. One might be social experiences. One might be existential experiences. One might be your innate genetic sensitivity. But once those rivers meet in the delta, all of that water blends together. And so what we’re living with in the present is our felt-sense experience of all of the things that make us us. And this can be important because sometimes people will ask me, well, is it possible that this didn’t come from my childhood? And the answer is yes, of course. We can experience environmental, emotional, developmental, and attachment ruptures at any time in our life because we’re always developing. We’re always experiencing the world and relationships around us. And you may remember the case of Raul, which we discussed briefly last time, where he experienced a major rupture in his adult life that created this sense of intense rage. And it didn’t come from a chaotic childhood. It came from a major betrayal from a business partner in adulthood that wrecked his career and threatened his security. And so his emotional brain learned in his adult life after this rupture that broken agreements destroy lives and that rage would protect him from feeling powerless. And that if he let go of rage, that felt like giving up on justice. Those are the implicit emotional learnings that came out of this adult experience. It’s much more than a simple mom, dad, caregiver experience. And so if the therapist had assumed that that had to come from the parents, then classic sort of reparative attachment work would not have touched the schema. So whether you’re a therapist listening or whether you’re an individual who wants to do this in your own life, I think it’s important to hold that lens of curiosity. And that’s why I’m constantly emphasizing curiosity, neutrality, and observation. If you’ve listened to any of my work, you’ve heard me say a million times about observing, observing, observing. Observing is the work. Noticing is the work. And you’ve heard me compare it to an archeological dig or to being a wildlife documentarian. In this book, they call it an anthropologist, that we are learning how to observe and gather data without making assumptions, without letting all those lenses color our experience. And so that’s why it’s very important, therapist or individual, to observe ourselves with this curious lens instead of trying to project what we think the experience might be about. That’s why we use all of these different experiences. Like if you’ve looked in my five steps to change guide, that’s why what I say is to imagine what you want for yourself, whatever it might be. And then you follow the thread from there. You look at the detours that come up. You look at the learnings underneath of that. And sometimes it’s surprising because sometimes the learning is something unexpected. Like this person could have very easily assumed, well, maybe I’m angry and rageful because I never saw my parents be angry. So I never learned how to manage it. And hey, maybe there could be a thread of that there, right? But this learning very clearly in this case came from this person’s adult life and working with those learnings and reconsolidating them is what allowed him to have space. So all this to say, attachment is incredibly important and it shapes a huge amount of our internal atlas, but it’s not the only thing that shapes us. And not all of our symptoms are attachment derived with our caretakers. They can also be from the world around us. And what I mean by that is we are always navigating attachment relationships with partners, with friends, children, even colleagues, right? We’re in connection with people all the time. So we can think about it as connection related and not necessarily parent caregiver attachment related. So while we’re not explicitly exploring attachment here, I think it’s important to talk about some of the attachment types they talk about in this chapter to see what kind of learnings and schemas might develop from that. So the insecure avoidant type of attachment develops with a primary caregiver who is rejecting, pushing away. And so the child learns to expect that pushing away in response to any expression that the child has of emotion, of distress, of a need, or even of playfulness, of silliness, of joy, or an approach for contact, for care. And we saw this in the Emotionally Immature Parent book, that the child comes in and they are rebuffed, they are pushed away. And so that means that the infant feels that there is a problem, obviously, right? And so the infant learns that their distress can be kept to a minimum if they don’t try to seek that connection, if they don’t feel, if they don’t express their feelings, if they don’t communicate or have any attention on them. And this can be accomplished by dissociation, shutting yourself down. This can be accomplished by quote-unquote intellectualizing. Obviously, an infant can’t intellectualize, but there’s that same functional freeze experience of learning how to grip and shut down the emotions. And that is a solution to the problem. So we know always that symptoms are coherent. They’re a closed system. Symptoms are in direct response to a suffering, and they create a solution. (10:07 - 11:26) They create a lesser of two sufferings. In this case, the infant has learned to respond to the implicit knowledge. And the implicit knowledge is that the need for contact or seeking contact will lead to rejection, aloneness, terror, and helplessness. So the solution of avoiding both feelings and contact is incredibly adaptive. We know all symptoms make sense, and this symptom makes perfect sense. So this schema might present as adults who are quote-unquote dismissive because they will greatly downplay experiences, likely because they are in that shut down, dissociated, withdrawn state. And so they very much might appear as supercilious, holier than thou, intellectualized, prideful about not being overly emotional. And that’s not because they are bad people. It’s because that is the schema in which they developed. Then we have insecure ambivalent or insecure resistance, which uses the opposite strategy, right? So this strategy is the biggest emotional display because we’re adapting to a different problem. In this case, we have a caregiver who is inept, disconnected. Maybe they’re unwell themselves. (11:27 - 11:35) Maybe they’re preoccupied with their own experience, mental illness. Maybe there’s financial stress. Maybe they don’t know how to be with their child’s emotions. (11:35 - 13:41) But sometimes they’re responsive, especially if the child’s behavior is intense enough to attract their attention. And so you get that slot machine effect, right? That intermittent reinforcement, which we know from research produces a very strong learning. And the child learns, of course, this is all unconscious, that that intense neediness, the big emotions, throwing a tantrum or not feeling well and making kind of a big show about it, is required for getting attention. But remember, it’s not reliable. Because of that slot machine effect, we can’t always rely on the parent to respond. But the infant is always trying to make it happen. And so this can kind of come out as this controlling, manipulative, sort of relentless style of interacting, where you’re always hypervigilant to the state of the caregiver, the presence of the caregiver. And this as an adult, that becomes hypervigilantly preoccupied with your partner’s emotional involvement, their presence, how they’re relating to you, and that quote unquote, neediness, right, that can include big emotions, big hurt of trying to pull the partner back in. And remember, that symptom is coherent.

When healing becomes another project (free podcast)

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