tiny sparks: finding your way in the world by building your resilience. all things trauma, nervous system regulation, intellectualization, people pleasing, perfectionism, and more.
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Hello 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!
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 how fawning and other adaptive survival strategies impact our bodies, and ways we might reconnect with safety and presence.
If you’re curious about doing a deep dive into how to create transformational change in your life, check out my new offering: The Transformation Lab. If you’re someone who reads all the books, tries every type of therapy, can analyze themselves better than Freud, but still can’t seem to change, then come join me for an experiment in transformation.
As you read or listen, you can be curious about these reflection questions:
1. What’s your relationship to your body? Has it felt like a safe place in which to exist?
2. Close your eyes and see if you can notice just one or two sensations in your body. Describe them.
Hello 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!
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 be with emotions and to be curious about the messages they might have for us, rather than needing to fawn or freeze and shut our emotions down.
If you’re curious about doing a deep dive into how to create transformational change in your life, check out my new offering: The Transformation Lab. If you’re someone who reads all the books, tries every type of therapy, can analyze themselves better than Freud, but still can’t seem to change, then come join me for an experiment in transformation.
Trisha Wolfe: Hello and welcome. We’re just getting started. I just started the recording and so if you are here and you don’t want to be on the recording, you are more than welcome to turn off your camera and you can ask any question you would like in the chat and I’ll just read it out to the group. But thanks so much for joining whether you’re here live or watching the recording for a little group meeting where we can talk about the book we’re reading. Are you mad at me? all about fawning and people pleasing. Of course, I’m happy to answer questions about books from the past book clubs too. More general questions you have. I am really enjoying this book. You know, some of the books we’ve read have been quite academic. You know, just coming off unlocking the emotional brain, which I love, but is a quite heavy academic text. It’s really nice to read this one, too, which I think does a great job of taking these really complex ideas and putting them into simpler, easy to apply methods.
00:01:08
Trisha Wolfe: So, it’s nice to have a little mix. You know, we read healing developmental trauma, which is more academic, no bad parts, which is a little more for the individual. Adult children of emotionally immature parents, same for the individual, and then unlocking the emotional brain. Back to Are You Mad at Me? So, we’ve really gotten to have quite a wide variety, which is so much fun. I do have a question someone sent in that I’m going to discuss, but since you’re here live, are there any questions any of you have? And again, you’re welcome to put it in the chat or just ask it with your video off or whatever you would like to do. But since you’re here, I would love to answer any questions you might have. And there’s no pressure. Okay. Well, if questions come up as we go, you’re more than welcome to ask them. Usually, this time is a time for me to answer a question. So, I can always talk a little bit about the book if I’d like, but please feel free to ask anything.
00:02:13
It doesn’t have to be related to this book. But the question that we had that someone was talking about from the most recent episode where I was talking about this idea of if you remember chapter 4 was about you are not your thoughts. So it was about noticing this inner voice and talking about some of these ways that we can start to observe for example the inner critic and challenge our perception and kind of not be as fearful about our thoughts. And then moving to soothing and labeling what’s happening. And you might remember Meg uses an acronym called nicer. And nicer stands for notice, invite, curiosity, embrace, and return. So she uses this throughout the book. And this is her process of observing. So first starting with noticing, right? Maybe you’re noticing that you’re overthinking. Then you invite, meaning you let the experience be there. For many of us who have a history of attachment failures and developmental ruptures, we might get scared and want to push away the experience, which makes a lot of sense.
You are not your thoughts - Are you mad at me? Chapter 4
samedi 25 juillet 2026 • Durée 27:25
Hello 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:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
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.
The performer, the perfectionist, and the caretaker
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.
The other f-word - what the fawn response is and how it has protected you?
Hi 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.
somatic experiencing and the predictive brain: rethinking the body keeps the score
samedi 16 mai 2026 • Durée 29:57
In 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
Psychedelic assisted therapy and memory reconsolidation
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 & 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.
You've got the magic in you
vendredi 3 avril 2026 • Durée 26:05
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 & 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
As you read or listen, you can be curious about these reflection questions:
1. What’s your current relationship to uncomfortable emotions like anger, sadness, and fear? How do you usually deal with them?
2. Recall a recent time when you felt an emotion that felt difficult. What was it telling you?
Trisha Wolfe:
00:03:18
Trisha Wolfe: But eventually, we get to a place where we can allow the thoughts, the feelings, the body sensations to be there. We bring in some curiosity and we might notice what part of us has been activated, what feeling is here. Can I put a label on this? that we embrace, you know, we bring that part of us in and then we return to the present, whether that’s feeling the seat underneath of us or looking around us. So, I was talking about in the episode this idea of inner attachment, you know, of how we can give ourselves transformational experiences with how we relate to ourselves rather than trying to counteract ourselves. So, just to refresh your memory, counteractive strategies are things that are managerial. They are often behavioral, whether it’s trying to manage our behaviors themselves or manage our cognitions or manage our emotions. And they have a time and a place, right? When we’re doing this depth work where we’re working on some of these deeper patterns, we need usually to have some counteractive tools for stabilization, which might mean settling ourselves back down, which might mean feeling the chair underneath of us, which might mean learning how to challenge our thoughts.
00:04:26
Trisha Wolfe: But all those things are counteractive, meaning they’re trying to go against a predictive pattern that the brain has. So the brain is predicting if I feel my feelings, people will not love me and they will pull away from me. And so if we notice that happening and we might say, “Hey, you’re allowed to have feelings. It’s okay. Let’s sit with the feeling.” That’s attempting to counteract, that’s attempting to show the brain like, “This isn’t true. You can do this anyway.” And there’s a time and a place. But we’re also curious about transformational experiences of getting to the root of that predictive patterning, getting to the implicit emotional learning. If you remember from a mocking the emotional brain so that we can update that through memory reconsolidation. So in are you mad at me? There’s a mix of counteractive techniques and transformational techniques. And what I was talking about is we don’t always have to have a good external response for it to be a new experience for the brain. For it to be an experience that can update old learnings.
00:05:28
Trisha Wolfe: So the example I always kind of use is if you go you go get a coffee and you see the barista has made your drink with cow’s milk. You can’t have cow’s milk. You ordered it with oat milk. The idea would be, well, this is a great time to try on having needs, having boundaries. You can let the barista know that they didn’t make your drink correctly. They’ll update it. All will be fine. Well, we can’t promise that. First of all, we don’t know if the barista might be having a horrible day and might yell at you or kick you out or whatever it is. But more importantly, the response of the barista isn’t required for it to update a learning in our brain. Because if we go in and we say, “Hey, sorry. I can’t have cow’s milk. I asked for oat milk.” And the barista says, “How dare you speak to me that way? Get out of here.” It can still be a new experience for parts of us who feel
00:06:17
Trisha Wolfe: we’re not afraid to have needs when it comes to how we relate to ourselves, how we observe the experience. So if we leave of this this barista kind of going off on us when we tried to have a simple meal of a drink we paid for, we might start to go into like, see, you can never get it right. you really can’t ask for what you need because everyone’s just going to attack you or you must not have asked for it in the right way. This is why you shouldn’t even try. You always mess everything up. And that’s part of the learning, right? Having needs means people will get upset at me. People get upset at me because I’m too much. Kind of becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy. But the way we can be curious about implementing this observation that Meg is talking about and you’ve heard me talk about quite a bit is to notice what’s happening and then to get curious with ourselves of how we relate to and treat ourselves. If we start going down the like you always mess everything up train, we can pause and we can say, “Hey, this really sucks. That barista was really rude and I really don’t feel very good right now.
00:07:21
Trisha Wolfe: That was a really hurtful experience for me and I actually am allowed to have my needs I think but more importantly I can be with what I’m feeling right now which is sad and confused and angry and hurt and just noticing the feeling and letting ourselves be in that experience. So even though the other person didn’t say of course you’re allowed to have means I’ll fix your drink. We can still be with like, wow, that did not go the way I liked and I’m allowed to be upset with the way it went, but my life isn’t in danger. My primary relationships are not in danger. I’m not going to be voted off the island. That’s really the experience we’re trying to give our brain because now the primary attachment relationship is not with our caregivers, our partners, whoever it is. It’s us to us. So when I was talking about this inner attachment, there was a question about these interactions and how sometimes the way we treat ourselves can be soothing or transformational or counteractive. And so this person asked, “In your experience, have those genuinely soothing interactions created a mismatch experience for those parts? Does just being met with genuine love and attention allow any part no matter the
00:08:34
Trisha Wolfe: manifestation to have a corrective experience? So this is a great question and the answer is sort of like it’s not that simple but also yes. When I think about doing this work with individuals the way we treat ourselves and our inner attachment is foundational to the work. So whatever parts we identify and remember what do we mean by parts? We mean schemas, we mean survival strategies, we mean implicit emotional learnings. Really, what we mean is a bundle of predictive patterns in our brain. So, no matter what part you’re dealing with, intellectualizer, people pleaser, perfectionist, critic, etc. Part of the foundational experience of how we update that learning is us learning to observe and respond to that part of us. Because so often when we’re trying to manage ourselves, for example, if we try to say like, “Oh, well, you just feel anxious about that. You don’t need to overthink it.” Now, stop overthinking. You know, look around the room, name three things you see, go distract yourself, whatever. Again, there’s a time and a place for that.
00:09:43
Trisha Wolfe: But what we’re doing is we’re trying to push that part of us away. We’re trying to manage that part and say, “You shouldn’t be feeling this way right now. Everything’s fine. You shouldn’t be thinking this way right now. Everything’s fine. We need to manage ourselves.” But what’s really underneath is turning and looking at like how do you feel about this part of you, this experience you have where you get anxious and you overthink things. What feeling might be underneath of there? What did you learn about treating yourself when you’re scared or anxious? How did your parents, your teachers, etc. treat you when you were scared and anxious? How have partners and friends in your adult life treated you when you were scared and anxious or hurt? Because what we’re really curious about is if we can explore and play around with how we treat ourselves, then that goes into the world when we’re interacting with other people because we can never promise ourselves that the outcome we get from the world will be the good outcome.
00:10:40
Trisha Wolfe: So many times when people hear this idea that like you need new experiences to update your nervous system, they want to jump to taking action. They want to say, “Okay, I need a new experience. Then I’m just going to go set this need. I’m going to go reach out to this person. I’m going to set a boundary. I’m going to make myself do the scary thing.” Again, there’s a time and a place for exposing ourselves to the scary thing. But you’re jumping to the action before you’ve done the work to identify what learning are you even trying to address. What part of you is even popping up in these moments? What emotion, body, sensation, story does that part of you hold? and how do you respond to and treat that part of you? So, is it entirely internal? Like we can just completely update all of our learnings from the way we teach ourselves. Well, no, because we’re in the world and so we’re always interacting with the world.
00:11:32
Trisha Wolfe: And yes, of course, part of it is connecting with ourselves so that we can connect to others. But I do view that internal mismatch experience as the foundation. And it’s very often a safe place to start when we’re told we have to heal in community and connection. So you have to go out and find people who can give that to you. It’s correct. We are made to be in connection. We are pack animals. We are made to have connection and community. But when all of your trauma centers around attachment and relational connection, you usually don’t even have a strong connection to yourself. And so when you go to try to seek these interactions with others, you will go into the criticism, the overanalyzing, the anxiety, the fear, the panic because you have not yet developed the new lenses to even see relationships as safe. So, I hope that helps understand that like these internal mismatch experiences are necessary and often the best place to start because no one else is involved.
00:12:39
Trisha Wolfe: We do want to move to having other people involved, but other people are very unpredictable. We can usually gather enough data about ourselves to start to learn to predict what’s going to come, the prediction our brain is making and how we want to be responded to. It stacks, right? Because if part of what we want is for someone to be there with us when we’re anxious. We never got that. We yearn for this connection, this protective energy, etc., then us learning how to give that to ourselves by being compassionate sounds good. You might think the mismatch experience is us being compassionate to ourselves. But it can start to stack and we can say, well, being compassionate to myself brings up another learning which says, I can’t be kind to myself because I’m actually secretly a very bad human. and if I’m kind to myself, I won’t be trying so hard all the time and everyone will find out that I’m bad. So, we we kind of find one learning and then it pings pongs to another learning and we’re almost looking for what is the most accessible place to start.
00:13:36
Trisha Wolfe: So, when we read about this idea of being compassionate toward the critic, yes, love it. That’s an internal mismatch experience. But is it even safe to be compassionate toward yourself? Is the critic a loadbearing wall, quote unquote, in your survival system? Is it something you learned you had to do to be safe and alive in the world? Then self-compassion becomes a counteractive tool. It becomes you trying to go against your brain’s survival system. Please know that I am not anti-self-compassion. I’m incredibly pro self-compassion. But we can’t start with self-compassion and assume that it’s just a learnable skill. Self-compassion can be learned like any other behavior. But if it’s counteracting a predictive survival learning that says I have to maintain my attachment by criticizing myself all the time so that no one finds out I’m a bad person, for example, then you have to work with that before you could ever like you you have to even consider the possibility of neutrality before you would ever be able to move towards self-compassion.
00:14:38
Trisha Wolfe: That’s why when you see people with this very strong inner critic and they and their intellectualizers, they know everything about self-compassion. They even say it to themselves. They can say all the words. They sound super adult. You know, they sit in their self-compassion meditation, but they don’t see a change. When push comes to shove, they will go back to criticizing themselves. That’s because you’re not getting at the core. Right? So, you know me, I love a long-winded answer, but that’s kind of my long- winded answer to why internal experiences are key. And we don’t need to worry too much about the tools. The tools come later. You’ll be ready for self-compassion the moment you feel compassionate towards yourself, if that makes sense. Like the first moment you consider that maybe possibly potentially you’re not a bad person at your core, but you lived in an environment where you had to be responsible for everyone else’s experiences. Maybe just that moment of noticing that and saying, “Whoa, maybe that is possible.” That’s your first little drop of self-compassion.
00:15:39
Trisha Wolfe: It doesn’t have to be this like I honor my inner critic and I love this part of me. If that resonates with you and it genuinely sinks through the layers and feels good, that’s amazing. But what we have to be so careful with, especially if you’re here because you like my Intellectualizer content, child consciousnesses can walk like an adult and talk like an adult, but they are not adult. They are not embodied. So we can say the words of compassion, of presence, of curiosity, of noticing. But when you say it, you have to pause and notice. How does it really feel when I say this to myself? How does it really feel when I sink through the layers? Because cognitively you might love self-compassion and eat it up because you know it’s the good or right thing to do. And some part of your brain might believe it’s true. But again, those deep implicit emotional learnings, if we sit with it for a moment, will come up and say, “Well, no, you’re not allowed to do that.” And now I’m going to make you really numb and go take on another project or now I’m going to make
00:16:42
Trisha Wolfe: you scroll on your phone for 9 hours or whatever the brain does to protect us. Yeah. So that’s why, you know, as Meg is talking here about observing ourselves, and you know, with these books, they’re short, right? So they have to put a lot of information in a short period of time. what she’s done here in chapter 4, what she’s laid out here could be the work of years and that would be totally normal if you had developmental trauma. It’s not hopeless. All of those years will have steps forward. But I just want you to understand the reality of working with some of these learnings. Now, when we can get to the root of the learning, you might remember from unlocking the emotional brain, they can reorganize quite quickly. But when you really have grown up in developmental trauma, it’s like a big tangled web of yarn. So when you pull one learning, another learning pulls, right? They’re all tangled up within there. So that’s why we might not see that kind of spontaneous updating magic that we read in some of the cases of unlocking the emotional brain and why we always always always come back to that observing the metacognition.
00:17:43
Trisha Wolfe: If you’ve listened to all five or six books with me, you’re like, is she going to talk about observing again? Yeah, because it’s like the number one thing. and and it’s such important work to tease apart true observation with this analytical intellectualizer part that sounds adult and can say all the right words. So that’s really my challenge and curiosity for you. You know when you get to this section at the end here about nicer where if you want to try this on try it on more as an experiment rather than as a thing you must carry out. Right? So when you notice that your mind starts spiraling and you’re overthinking, just noticing that that could be as far as you get. What happens when you notice that? What is your instinct to do in that moment? How do you feel toward yourself? How do you feel about the world? What emotion is happening? How does your body feel? What is the next impulsive behavior you want to take?
00:18:40
Trisha Wolfe: What feels right about overthinking and ruminating? What does it feel like would happen if you woke up tomorrow and you could never ever ruminate or overthink again? We turned off the gene. Wait for the part of you that’s like, “Yes, yes, that’s what I’m dreaming of.” And then let it sink through the layers and wait for the part of you that’s like, “That would be so dangerous. I would miss something. I would get hurt or someone I love would get hurt or everyone would find out that I’m secretly this bad, horrible person. Whatever it is, that’s enough. That’s the process of this internal attachment. I don’t think I’ve talked about this in the book club yet, but I’ve been talking a little bit on Instagram and Tik Tok about what it’s like to grow up with parents who love you as best they can, but were never curious about your internal world. So, they might say, “How was school?” or they might, you know, take you to your soccer games, but they never really were curious about your emotions, your hopes, your dreams, what was happening inside of you, how it felt when X thing happened, how it felt when your friend moved away, etc. And that can happen with parents who are stressed, who don’t have enough money, who are emotionally immature, who have their own trauma.
00:19:49
Trisha Wolfe: And then you never learn that it’s safe to be curious about your internal world. And so that’s part of this, too. This inner attachment update is really learning to be curious about yourself rather than manage yourself. And so that’s why I say with this book and with every book, whatever the tools are that are being introduced, we put them in our toolbox of experiments of curiosities rather than things we must implement. Right? If you need counteractive tools, use counteractive tools. But don’t lose sight of the relationship to yourself, the curiosity about your experience, and getting more to the root of how all of your behaviors are solutions to some deeper experience. So, that was a wow, I really made that answer last 20 minutes. So, that was a very in-depth answer to that question, but I think it’s it’s really nuanced and so much therapeutic content online because we’re trying to make it as accessible as possible doesn’t have room for nuance. In a 90-cond TikTok, there’s not room to understand this kind of nuance.
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, and the body sensations to help us respond. What that means is what’s happening in the present is not always accurate based on the present. It doesn’t mean it’s not true.
It doesn’t feel true to us, but it’s often the past landing onto the present. So thoughts are just thoughts. We don’t have to always buy into them, but rather we can be curious about them.
So if we have this idea, this thought that comes in that says, I’m unlovable, and I’ll be alone forever, we can recognize that that’s likely the past landing onto the present, but it’s a thought that we will get much more hooked into because connection is at play. And if connection is at play and attachment is at play, us never being lovable, then our brain feels like our survival is at stake, our safety is at stake. So of course, the context around that thought might be that you feel really anxious.
You start to guilt yourself to try to be better. You try to manage yourself. That context is very strong, and it really tries to elicit a response from us versus the thought, I’m worthy of being loved exactly as I am, including my messy parts.
We might not have a basis for that thought. When it enters into our brain, our brain says, no, that’s not true. What’s true is I’m unlovable.
If I think that I’m worthy of being loved exactly as I am, then I have to feel and accept all the parts of me that are angry, sad, and hurt that I didn’t get to feel loved as I was in my childhood or in my relationship or whatever it was. So the context that comes up from that thought will say, this thought that I am worthy is actually unsafe, because it’s trying to counteract the idea that I’m not worthy, that I always need to be trying hard. And that is the idea that keeps me safe and loved.
So I hope you see it creates a little bit of a loop inside of our mind. So instead of trying to convince ourselves that we’re worthy exactly as we are of being loved, instead, we’re being curious and observing, where did we learn that we were unlovable? What feels like it would happen if we believed we were loved, we were worthy of being loved? What would it be like to walk through the world in that way? And your brain might come in and say, well, you’d be too cocky, or you’d, you know, you’d make a mistake anyway, and then you’d find out it wasn’t true. So it’s much safer to just hold the idea that you’re not worthy of being loved.
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That’s what we’re continuing to emphasize here is just this observation and getting deeper into the layers. So we know, again, that rumination, that hyper vigilance, those anxious thoughts, it plays a role. It gives us a faux sense of control, an illusion of control.
And it’s something that developed in environments that felt outside of our control. So we know thinking about the worst case scenarios doesn’t actually alleviate our stress. It increases anxiety, it increases stress, it increases our bracing.
But oftentimes, when we were young, that’s all we had. Right? All we could do is go up into our brain and analyze and ruminate. Because the environment around us didn’t feel safe, it didn’t feel like our emotions could be met.
(9:49 - 22:48)
And so it’s a way that we learn to manage and try to keep ourselves safe, to try to hold on for a sense of control at all costs. And that’s really what fawning is too, right? Like fawning and people pleasing is us trying to give ourselves a sense of safety by making other people around us feel okay. And so Meg talks about how these anxious thoughts, this rumination is managing this feeling of discomfort underneath.
And that’s something we’re really going to be curious about. Because we know, of course, in our adult brain, it’s not dangerous to feel anxious. But for many of us, the context our brain is generating based on the environments we did grow up in is huge terror, huge rage, huge grief, huge disappointment, huge overwhelm.
And underneath it all, a deep sense of aloneness in those feelings. So there’s kind of a split experience where an adult part of us might say, well, I know these thoughts aren’t dangerous. I know I can sit with the discomfort of being anxious.
But when our brain is literally generating the experience that says, it’s deeply dangerous to feel this way, you will lose everyone if you let yourself feel the anger, the rage, the fear, whatever it is, then that’s why we have to start with getting to that deeper learning rather than trying to manage the thoughts and convince ourselves that it’s okay to feel discomfort. That step has to come after we meet and work with that deeper learning, that deeper experience. And I know we might want to jump to that step because we’re ready to be free of the anxious thoughts.
We said, let’s just feel the discomfort and get through it. But that’s counteractive, right? That’s trying to convince our brain with all our might that it’s not unsafe to feel our feelings. But when we had a lot of experiences in our early lives that taught us feeling our feelings, making mistakes, being ourselves, will make everyone around us mad, will make us in a way, will make the environment feel more unsafe.
Then we have to work with that deeper learning first of what our brain predicts would happen. Like what would happen if I could never be anxious again? If you woke up tomorrow and your brain could never, ever, ever feel anxious again, never think about making others happy, never think about making mistakes, just you being yourself and following your instinct and what you want for yourself, what would happen? And a part of your brain might say, oh, that would feel really good. I really want that.
But when we really slow down and let it sink through the layers, that’s often when the deeper experience comes in that says, no, that wouldn’t be safe. I would miss something. I would make a mistake.
I would miss the tiger jumping out and it would eat me, metaphorically, right? So we’re really curious about how that anxiety and those anxious thoughts feel like they’re load-bearing. And we want to figure out what that load is it’s bearing, what it’s protecting us from, what it protected us from in the past. And so what Meg calls conditioned beliefs in this chapter, we’re going to continue to refer to as emotional learnings, parts, and schemas, because we know they’re not just beliefs, they’re actually learnings.
I mean, we acquired them through experiences, right? We acquired them. We had over and over again, repeated experiences where we learned when people are in a bad mood, it’s my fault. No one will like me if I’m myself.
So that gets deeply embedded in your brain, through your memories and your emotions, as a learning, as a prediction. And those predictions entirely shape the way we see the world. So again, as Meg talks about, we kind of view these parts of us, like if you remember when we read No Bad Parts, that we can have many parts of us that serve these protective functions, trying to keep us safe based on the past, trying to keep us in connection based on the past.
And they’re like lenses, glasses through which we see the present. So those predictions from those learnings are always shaping the way we feel, the way we think, and the way we behave. So sometimes it’s helpful for us to envision those parts as younger, our younger selves, and other times it’s not.
No matter how you like to visualize it, you can think about these anxious parts of you, these critical parts of you, these perfectionist parts of you, as bundles of neural pathways in your brain that are trying to keep you safe based on the past. But you’re the one who can see them, and you’re the one who can see what’s actually happening in the present. And little bits at a time, you can help your brain learn from the present and not stay stuck in these old learnings from the past.
We know that inner critic is a really big part of early attachment failures, early developmental ruptures, because it’s all about, inner critic is all about shame, and shame is all about keeping a lid on the pot of bigger emotions that didn’t feel safe. There’s an example in here of someone who, every time she shares her work, she just makes fun of herself and said, oh stupid, it’s just a little side thing I do. And then that underlying learning might be that I need to deflect so people know I’m humbled and good, and then no one will feel threatened by me because I’m just a nobody, right? So again, there’s that sense of safety, no one will feel threatened by me.
But we know that the learning of as long as I am a nobody, as long as I’m humble, I can’t be hurt because no one will feel threatened by me, that that is the learning, right? So it’s not just about not being good enough, it’s about how that learning was protective, how that kept you safe. Because if you didn’t believe that, if you believed that you were actually worthy, then you might have felt threatened. You might have felt like, oh I am worthy and my family can’t see that, so now I’m furious.
But it doesn’t feel safe for us as children to feel furious at our parents. We might feel, oh I am good enough, but my parents just can’t recognize that because they’re so wrapped up in everything that’s happening for them. And that feels so deeply sad and hurtful, that that feels too overwhelming to feel.
It might feel terrifying to think, I can’t be myself and be good enough, because every time I try to express myself, I get sent away, or everyone gets tense, or another fight erupts, and that feels really scary, right? So holding on to this idea that like, if I believe I’m good enough, then I will threaten my family, and they will collapse, they will leave me, they will hurt, whatever it is. It gives us then a sense of safety and a sense of control to tell ourselves that we’re not good enough, to make fun of ourselves. It puts the lid on the pot and allows us to control all those swirling emotions of anger, grief, disappointment, loneliness, that feels like too much, right? That is what happened in the past, but now we’re observing what might be true in the present versus what you learned when you were younger.
And all of this comes from observing. Remember, we won’t be able to observe live in the moment, right? We won’t always be able to feel like, oh, I’m feeling anxious right now, and it’s because when I was a kid, it was really hard for my family, when I had emotions, or when I had needs. We won’t be able to do that in the present because our brain is generating all that context, and we’re feeling overwhelmed.
So we can do this retroactively, right? We can look back at any time. It doesn’t matter if it’s minutes, hours, days, or weeks after a stressful experience happened and you’ve been criticizing yourself. You can pause at any time and watch the tape back and observe and be curious.
What was happening? What was my brain predicting was going to happen? What was happening in the present? Because fair enough, there’s always things happening in the present. There can be stressors and hard things happening in the present. But what is coming from the past and landing onto the present and getting projected into the future? That gives us the information about these deeper learnings or parts that we need to meet, observe, get curious about, and then give ourselves a new experience to help update our brain.
So in that same example, we might come to the end of the day, and maybe we were, I don’t know, you know, spending time with a new friend, and we were thinking, oh, I’m not feeling very good. And we’re looking back and we’re saying, oh, yeah, you know, my new friend was really cheering me on about my graphic design business, and I felt like I had to just keep deflecting and saying, oh, it’s stupid. It’s just a little side thing I do.
You know, I needed to make sure she knew I was a nobody, that I’m not good enough. And that feels really bad. And as I observe that right now, I can just remember how important it was for me to not make anyone in my family feel threatened, to not make them feel like I was better than them.
And as I notice that right now, I just think, oh, my gosh, that must have been so hard for me. Yeah, well, no wonder I feel this way. Right? So do you see how observation allows us that wildlife documentarian capacity to observe and say, that makes sense? We don’t have to jump to self-compassion.
We don’t have to say, oh, I love that part of me, although we can. But instead, just by observing and getting curious about that deeper learning, we shift our brain back into the present instead of being stuck in the past. And that actually gives us a new experience, too, of what is it like for someone to validate our experience, tell us that it makes sense, be curious about our inner world.
So that inner attachment is a very important piece of this, too. It’s also very common when we grew up in environments like this to really feel a lot of fear about our thoughts. We’ll feel shame about being critical of others.
We’ll feel afraid that by thinking something, we’re going to make it happen. And that makes a lot of sense. That’s the experience of a child, right? When we’re children, we really feel like things are magical, like our thoughts have power.
But we know instead, thoughts are just thoughts. When we can observe them and be curious about them, that’s really what slows things down. Right? So when you were stuck in overthinking, ruminating, intellectualization, it can feel like you’re bad for having these thoughts that are making something bad happen by worrying about it.
Right? But instead, we’re just observing, like, oh my gosh, this part of you that is just so scared. Instead of trying to shut them up, right, and resist them and say, nothing’s going to happen when I get on the plane. You know, stop causing difficulty for me.
I know flying is safe. But we try to resist those thoughts, because they’re scary, and they’re overwhelming. And they might feel like they’re getting in our way.
Instead, we can just notice them and be curious. Like, yeah, some part of me is really scared about this experience of getting on this plane. I don’t know why.
Maybe I do know why, but I don’t really know what the deeper learning is. But I don’t have to try to resist this thought. I can just notice it and be curious about it and observe it.
And over time, get more and more clarity about what’s really underneath that thought. Eventually, as we do so, we might step into even soothing or meeting those parts of us. Saying, I know you’re scared right now.
It’s okay, and I’m here. You’re safe now. I’m here, and I’ll take care of you.
I see you’re overthinking again. That’s okay. Thank you for trying to protect me.
You’re allowed to be here, and I’m not trying to get rid of you, but you don’t need to work so hard. Sometimes we’re able to say those things, and they feel really soothing to us. But other times, they’re counteracting that deep survival learning that says, I can’t stop overthinking.
Overthinking is the only way I can stay safe. So we really can use these statements more as curiosities. If I’m stuck in ruminating and hypervigilance, and I say, I see you’re overthinking again.
That’s okay. Thank you for trying to protect me. What happens? Do things slow down? Do I feel a little relieved by that? Or does it feel like I’m really still secretly trying to get rid of that part of me and say, yes, yes, things are okay.
Thank you for trying to protect me. Move along. That’s the difference between embodied compassion and intellectualized compassion.
And it takes time to practice observing, to get clear about when being kind to yourself or meeting yourself is actually thinking through the layers versus when it’s just you trying to manage yourself in another way, right? Intellectualized self-compassion. But we really want to use everything as an experiment to be curious. What happens when I say this? What happens when I try this on? What happens when I do this? Because that observing is going to give us more and more data about those deep core learnings from our life.
So as we’re practicing this observing, that maybe we’re thinking about it like this mindful experience where we’re noticing. And we might have this expectation that we will feel calm, that we shouldn’t have anxious thoughts if we’re observing, if we’re being mindful. But really, we know we’re going to have the full depth and breadth of the human experience, which means there will be many emotions and many thoughts.
And instead, we’re just noticing them. Right? Meg suggests labeling, you know, saying, that’s just what’s happening. I’m overthinking.
(22:49 - 27:01)
Oh, I have this anxious thought right now. Oh, I’m criticizing myself right now. And I think that’s a really good curious practice.
That’s why I always talk about the wildlife documentarian. We’re taking notes. We’re just noticing.
We’re really gathering data about our experience because we don’t really know ourselves. We might know our learnings. We might know all of our survival strategies.
But we don’t really know what’s happening underneath. We want to gather more data to learn not just what we can see, but what else might be happening, what else might be true. And so Meg uses this acronym NICER.
Notice, invite, curiosity, embrace, and return. Right? So notice is that observing what’s happening internally. Invite the experience to be here, allowing it to exist, saying this is okay, even if there’s discomfort.
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Bringing in some curiosity. What part of me has been activated? What is it that I’m feeling? Can I label or notice what the experience is in my body, in my emotions, in my thoughts? Embrace this part of me. Wrap it in a protective blanket and say, I see you.
Thank you for trying to help me. And then return to what’s real and true right now. The sensations of the breath, the sounds of the room, the feeling of the feet on the ground.
Right? So this really interesting mindful practice to help come back to the present. So let’s use that NICER acronym over these next few weeks as an experiment rather than as a mandate, rather than as something you must do and then you must feel better after you do it. Let’s use it as an experiment.
When something comes up, you criticize yourself, you feel anxious, you notice you were fawning, you notice you were overthinking, whatever it is. What happens when you notice it just as soon as you can, even if it’s the next day, the next week? What happens when you observe it? What is it like? Do you start to criticize yourself more? Can you notice that? Can you remember how that’s a lid on the pot, that there must be some bigger feeling that isn’t feeling safe to feel? This invitation of allowing it to exist without immediately trying to fix it or change it. What’s it like to consider that? Does that make you feel more anxious? Do you start to feel numb? Does it feel unsafe? Does it feel like maybe you’re not ready to invite it to be there yet, but maybe you can shift to curiosity? What’s happening in that moment? What is my brain predicting when I notice that? Does it make sense that I don’t want to invite this in because it feels like it will take me deeper down into terror? Does embracing this part even feel possible? Do I even feel separate from this part? Or does it feel like, no, this is just me, this is the truth? We don’t have to embrace the part.
We can just be curious about noticing. Embracing the part can become counteractive if we do it before we’re ready, because it’s us trying to tell ourselves something is okay when something might not be okay, right? It might not feel okay to accept ourselves for who we are, if that means that we will settle down, we won’t be overthinking, we’ll be present. That can feel really dangerous to a part of our brain.
So we don’t have to jump to embracing, we can use it as a curiosity. When I imagine embracing this part of me, thanking this part of me, letting that part of me know it’s safe, what happens? And then when I try to return to what’s present, what happens then? Does it feel safe? Does it feel scarier to try to bring myself back in the present? As this book and with everything, we just use these things as a curiosity, an experiment, to learn more about ourselves and to see what happens. When we can do so without creating pressure that, oh, I have to practice this nicer thing so that I can come back down into the present and stop overthinking and feel a little bit safer, you see, then that’s just going to create another thing that we have to be good at.
But when we can use it as an observational experiment, it’s really us being curious about ourselves, which for many of us is a new experience that we didn’t get that helps update those learnings in the brain and then can help lead to more action, more safety, more presence, more agency, more choice and flexibility over time. So thank you so much for being here. I think this is a really rich chapter.
(27:02 - 27:24)
I would love to hear how you try on observation in your life. Have you tried mindfulness before and felt that it was just another way for you to pressure yourself? What’s the difference for you in your mind between observing and being curious and having to be mindful? Let me know what you’re noticing. Let me know what you’re thinking.
I hope you have a great rest of your week or weekend ahead and I’ll look forward to seeing you for chapter five.
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.
