Podcast
tiny sparks, big changes
Hosted by Trisha Wolfe · EN
tiny sparks: finding your way in the world by building your resilience. all things trauma, nervous system regulation, intellectualization, people pleasing, perfectionism, and more.
trishawolfe.substack.com
trishawolfe.substack.com
19episodes
Episodes
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You are not your thoughts - Are you mad at me? Chapter 4
2w ago00:27:25Tap to summarizeHello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Are You Mad at Me? If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we deep-dive into this book together. You can also listen on Spotify & Apple Music. These episodes are meant to help translate 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 has moved to Sunday, August 2nd at 11 am EDT so that we have a few more chapters under our belt before we meet (a recording will be available if you can’t attend live!). 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 on Sunday, July 26th.This book takes us deep into fawning, one of the survival strategies so many of us developed in childhood to stay connected and safe. It helps explain why we learned to manage other people’s emotions instead of feeling our own, and how patterns like people-pleasing, overfunctioning, and perfectionism make so much sense when we understand where they came from, and how they can change.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 Unlocking the Emotional Brain, No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m grateful you’re here and reading along with me.This week, we’re reading a chapter on learning to observe our thoughts, emotions, and body sensations and get curious about the story they tell rather than getting hooked into them and believing they are 100% true in the present. As you read or listen, you can be curious about these reflection questions:1. Take a moment to imagine your inner critic. What does it look like? Maybe it’s your scared younger self, or maybe it’s a character who represents your younger self. How is criticizing yourself a solution? What would happen if you didn’t criticize yourself?2. Recall a time when your anxious thoughts told you a story that wasn’t true in the present. How might those thoughts have been trying to protect you? What did you learn in the past that might be coming up here in the present?(0:00 - 2:11)Hi and welcome back to our read-along of Are You Mad At Me? where we are deep diving into fawning, people-pleasing, perfectionism, intellectualizing, and all the different survival strategies that develop when we grow up in environments with emotionally immature caregivers, attachment ruptures, and environmental failures. This week we will be diving into chapter four called You Are Not Your Thoughts. We know for many of us who grew up in these environments that our brain continues to make predictions into the present about what has happened in the past.So even if we know as adults that we can feel our feelings and we won’t be hurt if other people can’t see them and respond to them, our brain still predicts that feeling our feelings is going to make people upset, it’s going to make everyone tense, it’s going to make mom and dad fight with each other. So we feel a lot of anxiety, numbness, shutdown whenever we have feelings that we might deem as unacceptable, whenever we have needs, whenever we make mistakes. Those all come from those past predictions that our brain is using to predict the present and the future.Learning how to observe, which you well know if you’ve listened to my content, is my belief the number one most important thing, the foundation for all work of healing from developmental trauma, is learning how to observe. And this book is going to go a little bit more into how to observe your thoughts. Now a quick note before we begin, I am going to be doing a mini podcast series with another creator who specializes in working with women who feel stuck in their lives, who have a loud inner critic, who maybe grew up in very rigid or controlling environments, and who struggle with intellectualization, perfectionism, self-criticism.And we’re going to be looking at some of those major issues and how to get unstuck. So if you have questions, if you resonate with that description, and you would like to know specifically, how do I address this issue? Or how do I get unstuck from this issue? Please feel free to respond to this email or leave a comment as we are shaping up those episodes. We would love to know what you would like to hear about learning how to meet yourself, get unstuck, and move toward the life you want.(2:11 - 5:54)So as we start this chapter, we will see that Meg has a very similar mindset to me, which is that our thoughts and our experiences are not something to try to fix. So as you can see, as we start this chapter, Meg has a very similar insight to me, which is that awareness, aka observing, is an incredibly important part of healing and getting back into our lives. And so it’s really important as we explore this chapter that we remember a lesson we learned in our last book, Unlocking the Emotional Brain, about counteractive behaviors versus transformational experiences.So in counteractive behaviors, what we’re essentially trying to do is to counteract our brain with willpower, with habits, with behavioral management. And so what that can look like is tools, tricks, and strategies to try to convince yourself that what’s happening is okay. So if you have the thought that making a mistake means everyone will hate you, everyone will be upset with you, you’ll lose your job, or whatever it is, a behavioral approach might be to give yourself evidence and say, well, you made a mistake before and nothing happened.It might be to try to settle yourself down and say, it’s okay to make a mistake, it’s okay to feel anxious. All of those things are attempting to counteract a story your brain is telling, a prediction your brain is making, that says making a mistake will upset everyone around me. I could lose my connections, I could lose everything.And there’s a time and a place for counteractive approaches, counteractive approaches where we try to manage the anxiety, the thought, whatever it might be, because we want to be able to live our lives. But we know in the long run, from all the science we read in Unlocking the Emotional Brain, we can’t just use counteractive approaches. Because then for the rest of our lives, we’re really going to have to use a lot of management, a lot of willpower.And there’s going to be some white knuckling time where we’re trying to counteract our brain. Instead, while we’re using counteractive techniques to try to get a little space in the present day, we also want to be using transformational techniques that come from the Unlocking the Emotional Brain again, where we’re observing ourselves, but we’re also getting clear about the underlying story, learning part, schema that is present in that story, so that we can use processes like memory reconsolidation, where we give ourselves a new experience to update that learning. So I know it sounds a little esoteric, like what does that really mean a transformational experience? And if you weren’t with us for the last book, I really invite you to go back and listen to some of those episodes.But we’re going to be curious in this chapter as we practice noticing and observing where things might feel counteractive, which is just fine, and where we might be able to dig a little deeper to offer ourselves a transformational approach. And so we know we often have so much urgency to want to fix ourselves, to get rid of that loud, anxious inner voice. But again, that is counteractive.Instead, we want to meet that part of us, meet that voice, get curious about how a loud, anxious inner voice is a solution. What is it a solution to? What is the prediction our brain is making that says, if I’m not constantly ruminating, analyzing, hypervigilant, everything around me will fall apart, or everything in my life will be dangerous, or my parents won’t love me anymore, I won’t be okay. But we’re really going to get curious in this chapter about meeting these parts of us.Right? So as Meg talks about in this chapter, thoughts are not the ultimate truth. We know that many thoughts will come in and out of our brain doesn’t mean that it’s true. Some of you might already say, yeah, yeah, I know that.(5:54 - 9:48)But for some of us, that can be a lot to come to terms with, especially if our thoughts were our safe place. Analyzing and thinking was a place we could feel like we had some sense of control, and feel like we could know what was going to come next. So when we start to recognize, our thoughts are just our thoughts.They’re a piece of the pie, thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, impulses. These are all generated by those predictive patterns in our brain that’s trying to create context to help us respond. What that means is when a situation happens in our present day life, our brain is very, very, very quickly filing through all the experiences we’ve had in our lives that it’s already cataloged to say, how should I best respond to this to feel good, to maintain connection, and to stay safe? To help us best respond, our brain will generate that same context.Again, it’ll bring up the stories and thoughts, the emotions, ...
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Grief, anger, and emotional loneliness
4w ago00:14:24Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.com(0:00 - 3:50)Hi and welcome back to our book club where we are diving into the book Are You Mad At Me?, all about fawning and our survival strategies from childhood. This week we’re going to be reading a chapter that addresses grief, anger, and emotional loneliness. These are feelings that will be very familiar to those of us who grew up in environments with developmental ruptures and attachment failures.Maybe we had emotionally immature caregivers or other forms of early developmental trauma. If you’re familiar with my work, you’ve likely heard me talk about the big three of the emotions, and that is anger, sadness, and fear. These are normal expected emotions that all humans will feel, and there are many emotions that kind of branch off from there.Of course, hurt and grief and rage and annoyance, frustration, disappointment. There are many ways we might experience emotions within that spectrum, but those emotions are also very present when we have experienced these attachment ruptures in our lives. And there’s a difference between feeling those feelings in the present and feeling those feelings as a child and being all alone in them.And so this chapter is going to be curious about how we as adults can start to feel things like grief, like anger, to identify our feelings of loneliness that can often create feelings of being very afraid because it’s terrifying for a child to feel that they are disconnected, and how those things impacted us as a child versus how we can be with them as an adult. You know by now if you listen to some of the other books, like Unlocking the Emotional Brain, that many of our parts, our schemas, our patterns, what we might think of as core beliefs, are actually emotional learnings. So many of these things that say, if I want other people to love me, that I need to be good, that I need to be meeting all their needs all the time, I can’t be myself.These are unconscious learnings stored in our brain, and they are rife with emotion. So when we are a child and we have this experience of when I’m my playful, silly, messy, emotional self, it upsets my parents, or they seem to fall away from me, or they seem more stressed, or they fight more. We might feel in that moment very scared because we rely on our caregivers to keep us safe.
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The performer, the perfectionist, and the caretaker
Jun 2500:14:35Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.com(0:00 - 8:47)Hi and welcome back to our read-along of Are You Mad At Me? In this chapter, we’re going to be exploring a little bit about this idea of being good and looking at a couple of case studies of how this might develop in different homes. And while we’re exploring this, maybe we’re just going to hold the curiosity of each of the learnings that these individuals may have experienced in their lives that led to learning that they needed to fawn, to people please, to not have needs, in order to maintain their attachment relationship. We know that all of our survival strategies, our parts, our adaptations, however you like to think about them, are not beliefs.They don’t come from beliefs. They come from learnings, meaning they come from acquired experiences in our lives. We develop these things in response to our environment because we are so adaptive as humans.
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The other f-word - what the fawn response is and how it has protected you?
Jun 1200:10:27Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.comHi and welcome back to our book club. I’m so excited to be reading this summer, Are You Mad At Me?, a deep dive into how to stop focusing on what others think and start living for you. I’m excited to have a little bit of a different book this time.
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somatic experiencing and the predictive brain: rethinking the body keeps the score
May 1600:29:57Tap to summarizeIn this episode of our Unlocking the Emotional Brain book club, we explore the final case study in the book, a Somatic Experiencing demo led by Peter Levine with a client named Bonnie. The episode looks at how somatic experiencing, a bottom-up modality developed by Peter Levine and focused on the felt sense and body sensations, uses the very same unifying process of memory reconsolidation as every other modality covered in the book.We talk about why trauma is not literally stored in the tissues of the body but lives instead within the brain's predictive model, why somatic and body-based work is one valid path to healing rather than the only one, and how a disconfirming experience does not always look like an obvious juxtaposition, but can instead be the moment a person becomes aware of a prediction their brain has been making all along. 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
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Psychedelic assisted therapy and memory reconsolidation
Apr 1700:10:47Tap to summarizeThis 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.
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You've got the magic in you
Apr 300:26:05Tap to summarizeHello 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 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 doing a little recap of what, exactly, memory reconsolidation is, how it creates long-term change, and how we can learn to provide ourselves with new present-day experiences that activate that process. 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
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The Good Girl's Rage: Memory Reconsolidation and ISTDP
Mar 2000:10:44Tap to summarizeThis 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!
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The Patterns We Inherit: Interpersonal Neurobiology and the Rules We Learned in Relationships
Mar 600:22:57Tap to summarizeHello 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. 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 the section of the book that walks through different therapy modalities, looking at how each one creates transformational change through the same underlying mechanism: memory reconsolidation. Today, we’re focusing on interpersonal neurobiology, a framework developed by Dan Siegel in the 1990s that looks at how our early attachment experiences shape these mental models, these big books of rules about how the world works, how relationships work, and how safe we are allowed to feel inside of them.What I love about going through these cases together is that it keeps reinforcing something I think is so important: it doesn’t matter which modality a therapist uses. What matters is whether they are working with the right mechanisms. And those mechanisms, again and again, look remarkably similar underneath the surface. In this episode, we’re going to look at how interpersonal neurobiology activates the reconsolidation process, and we’re going to follow a case that shows something I find genuinely fascinating: how the patterns we carry aren’t always just ours. Sometimes we are holding something that traveled through the people before us.(0:00 - 4:07)Hi and welcome back to our book club read-along of Unlocking the Emotional Brain. We are doing a deep dive into this book that tells us all about memory reconsolidation, transformational change, and the therapeutic reconsolidation process. And what all of that means is we are looking at what the mechanisms of change are within therapy.What is it that allows us to actually create long-lasting change versus feeling like we always have to manage, to be managing our habits, to be managing our behaviors, to be reframing our thoughts. There’s a time and a place for those activities. But this book guides us into deeper understanding of how we can actually create transformational change and work with the root cause of our thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, and patterns in the present, rather than having to try to whack-a-mole down the symptoms that stem from them.So it’s a really exciting book. It puts together a lot of research into this process. And we are now in the part of the book where we are diving into different modalities, different types of therapy, and looking at how memory reconsolidation plays a role in their process of creating transformational change.This week we’re going to be talking about interpersonal neurobiology. This is a type of psychotherapy that was created by Dan Siegel in the 1990s, and it too has an exploration into emotional implicit schemas that have been formed in response to patterns of distressing interaction that we might experience in our infancy and in our childhood. So Dan Siegel has done a lot of wonderful work in this field, and let’s look at a little bit of how interpersonal neurobiology uses memory reconsolidation to create long-lasting change.And before we dive in, if you are new here and you’re not familiar with some of these terms like memory reconsolidation or transformational change, you can go back and listen to the full archive where we have gone through each of these terms and talked about what that means from a mind-body component. So you can see a theme in a lot of these modalities that we’ve discussed so far, that there is this idea of schemas, patterns, parts, survival strategies, and interpersonal neurobiology holds that same idea that these mental models form by an individual and are part of what create our symptoms or our patterns in the present. Think of these mental models like a big book of the rules of engagement.It’s all of the ways that you learned to interact with the world, positive, negative, and neutral. Not all implicit learnings or rules of engagement are negative. Some of them are pro-social, meaning they are about how we behave in the world to be kind to others, to be in community, to be in connection.Others are about ourselves, our self-concept, how we see ourselves in the world and relating to others, and they can be pieces of our identity. And others are around trying to stay safe and in connection and prevent damage. And those are the ones that can generate symptoms in the present that come from this early, ongoing, insecure attachment in relationship.And sometimes we can think about that as harm that we experienced in our early lives. And for some of us, it was very clear that there was harm. And for others of us, it’s less clear.There wasn’t necessarily a direct harm experience, but perhaps like that earlier book we read, we had emotionally immature parents. Perhaps our parents were under a lot of stress themselves. So we got that slot machine parent where we never knew whether we were going to get love and connection or withdrawn or snapped at and sent away.(4:08 - 9:52)All of those insecure moments in an attachment relationship can create these thought, emotion, body sensation patterns of us trying to figure out how to stay safe in this confusing world. So interpersonal neurobiology holds that same idea. They also, much like AEDP and some of these other modalities, hold the idea that the therapeutic relationship, the experience between the therapist and client, can create that reparative attachment experience that can help upgrade our brain functioning in the present.So as we saw earlier in the AEDP model, the experience of being reflected to from the therapist or having the therapist be this safe, curious person when these patterns or emotions arise in itself is a disconfirming experience. And remember that disconfirming experience is where something different happens from what our brain is expecting to happen. In the predictive brain model, we call that a prediction error.So if your brain is predicting that, for example, someone’s going to hurt you or send you away when you feel your emotions, and then you get to be present with this therapist that not only doesn’t send you away, but is so curious about them with you, that reflects them with you, that rides the wave with you, that is an experience where your brain predicted you would be hurt or sent away, but instead you get someone who stays in it with you. So a lot of therapeutic modalities hold the idea that that therapeutic relationship is in itself a disconfirming experience, which is part of the memory reconsolidation process. So then interversal neurobiology relies on the client’s felt-sense experience of the therapist’s empathetic emotional attunement, the guidance from the therapist for attending to, noticing, and naming these quote-unquote right brain activities where those implicit learnings are held or unconscious learnings are held, guidance for how to identify the way current triggers might resemble past experiences, and then cultivating all of that into an integrated awareness of what was suffered in the past, the idea being that that will end the projection of the past onto the present.So again, we see very similar experiences between some of the models we’ve talked about so far, internal family systems, AEDP, EMDR, somatic experiencing, and this is why I always want to emphasize, and I love that this book goes through all of these modalities, it doesn’t matter what modality you choose, as long as they are focusing on these mechanisms of change, and as long as you feel connected to the model and the therapist, then you have everything you need to make a change, because they all kind of hold these same unifying concepts of the therapeutic relationship and the therapeutic reconsolidation process using memory reconsolidation, and interpersonal neurobiology is the same. Now this case is slightly different from some of the other cases we’ve seen, just because of the way that interpersonal neurobiology publishes and shares their information. This is a recounting of a therapist named Bonnie about their case, so it’s not quite as in-depth as some of the other cases we’ve seen.However, I think it’s important to go through nonetheless to look at how interpersonal neurobiology might help us understand how we can activate this reconsolidation process. So in this case, the client’s name is Cerise, and Cerise came to therapy because all of her close relationships ended in her pulling away whenever the emotional intimacy became intense. So remember, this is step A of the process, symptom identification.And I just want to make a little note about that off the start, that some modalities start with the symptom identi...
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How does Internal Family Systems Facilitate Healing?
Feb 2000:14:53Tap to summarizeThis 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 de...
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