Hello 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.

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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.

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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...

The Patterns We Inherit: Interpersonal Neurobiology and the Rules We Learned in Relationships