Transformation Series

Therapy isn’t magic–certain things need to happen in order for our brain to change. If you can be aware of what those things are, and actively try to engage them during therapy, you are more likely to have a positive experience.

Many of my clients end up coming to me because they feel their previous therapists didn’t give them enough guidance. Hopefully this video can serve as that guidance and coach you on where and how to place your focus in order to achieve the deepest change.

If you are in therapy, or thinking about therapy, watch this video! I truly hope it will speed along your process of change by helping you most effectively utilize your therapy hour.

There are two types of change: incremental change, which is often slow and takes more effort to maintain, and transformational change, which can happen in a moment and is effortless to maintain. Given the benefits of the latter, this video outlines how to position ourselves to achieve transformational change.

While transformational change happens in a single moment, that isn’t to say it is easy. We have to be a bit strategic. Why? Because for transformational change to occur, the brain must be confronted with two very specific sources of information simultaneously. One–what we learned about reality in the past. And two–what we can witness about reality in our present. The first–which requires that we become aware of our brain’s deepest beliefs about how the world works–is easier said than done. That is because what our brain most fervently believes is often completely unconscious to us.

This video will explore how to achieve transformational change through making our unconscious beliefs more conscious, and how to pair these with experiences which will disconfirm or challenge (and hopefully update!) our view of reality.

 

Transcript for Transformational Change: A Deeper Kind of Growth

 

Today I’d like to talk to you about transformational change. There’s some exciting new research within the field of psychology about how to transform. In other words, how to more quickly achieve both a deeper and more lasting shift toward health and well-being. That shift can happen when our schemas which are our conditioned expectations of how reality works, and how we need to adapt to it, can dissolve or at least evolve so we’re more freed up to adapt to reality as it actually is. To make that shift and achieve transformational change, our brain must first enter a learning mode of sorts almost more akin to being a child.

Why is it so hard to change?

While during childhood we are constantly learning about reality and what to expect and how to respond, once we have those assumptions, we pretty much just stick with them through the rest of our adult life. Why? It would just simply be too cumbersome to always be walking around willing to learn how to be human again fresh every day. With no assumptions about what’s about to happen and how I should respond. Once we have the learning down we just automate it and assume that those rules are gonna stick with us and we can use them in an unconscious way moving forward.

The problem is those expectations or rules don’t always serve us anymore. Why? Well they’re based on a reality we’re no longer in. At the very least we are no longer the same. We’re not the same people. We’re adults now and as adults we have different capacities and different options. We’re also very likely around different people and it’s nice if our brain can like get that memo.

Now certainly we do learn from our adult experiences, but usually those learnings exist in different memory systems so that the new learning exists in parallel and in competition with the old without necessarily changing what we originally learned. Therapies like CBT do a good job of bolstering or strengthening the new learning so it can compete and perhaps even override our original felt sense of reality. That produces incremental change which is a good thing but it’s a slow process compared to transformation change. Also unlike transformational change, learnings achieved through incrimental change are subject to being overridden by our older maps of reality, particularly during times of stress.

What is Transformational Change?

But today I want to talk to you about transformational change, to borrow a term from Bruce Ecker. In transformational change we actually go to the original learning itself, update it with new information, so that then whatever symptoms or struggles were launched by this belief: “I can’t trust people, so I must keep people at a distance” or “I have to always please people, so I can never show my true feelings.” Whatever the troublesome behavior was that was associated with this belief is, through transformational change, the belief can be permanently rewritten and behavior can change without constantly having to try to override or convince ourselves that it is a good idea to do something that is different than what our original learning taught us.

So those original learnings traditionally have been called schemas so we’ll use that term. So some examples of schemas are

“In order to get attention I have to be perfect” or it could be “I have to be bad to get attention.”

“If I let myself feel sad I’ll be rejected and then I’ll be alone with the sadness in a way that’s so overwhelming that I have to find a way to not let myself feel sadness.”

“My passion will be too much for people so I must mute myself and when I’m starting to feel excited I’ll feel anxious instead.”

“If I take pride in my work my insecure mother will feel threatened so I’ll never take pride in my accomplishments, even if it means I won’t move forward professionally.”

We Can Rewrite Our Implicit Memories

So these underlying associations and beliefs about how the world works, these schemas, they exist in something called implicit memory. Now scientists used to believe that implicit memory once it was encoded cannot be changed. The good news is now we know that it is possible to update our implicit schemas. I went over the science of that in the last video on memory reconsolidation so let me just give the take-home point and then we’ll discuss application.

The bottom line is that if we want to change a schema held in implicit memory the first step is to reactivate it. We have to bring it into conscious awareness in a felt way. The second step is to provide disconfirming experiences, in other words, to have experiences or evidence that actually conflicts with the predictions made by our schema. Basically we need to have an experience that proves that our old mental map of reality does not line up with our new experience of reality.

Once the schema has information that really disconfirms its belief, it enters that learning mode that I mentioned earlier. It’s as if the brain says “okay, I’m listening. I just had an expectation and it’s not how things played out. Maybe I need to update my view of reality.” The schema begins to at least open to the possibility of learning and change. Now let’s talk about how to apply both parts of this transformational change process: the reactivation and the disconfirmation.

What is Reactivation?

If we want to change our unconscious schemas about reality we have to first make them conscious. This really is possible and it’s usually even possible to put them into words. Why? Because even though they were unconscious they’re usually highly specific. Like “if I’m not perfect, I won’t get love.” The reason we try to put them into words is simply so we can feel that we’re on the right track. We’re not using language here in a cognitive insight manner alone. It isn’t enough just to have the right words and rationally, theoretically, maybe assume I think this has something to do with the fact I wasn’t loved as a child.

We need to get the exact words and have them be felt. In fact, we use the words to almost ping off our unconscious. It’s like if we have words like “if I let myself feel good about myself I’ll become arrogant and narcissistic like my mother.” When we say those words, if they are right on with the schema it’s like our whole being will reverberate with how true that feels. It’s like “yeah, I mean I know intellectually that may not be true, but it feels true!” So as we’re exploring we put things into words to make sure we’re on the right track and to open up that “yes” inside that says absolutely that feels true to me in a visceral way!

So step one then is to really get to discover what the contents of the implicit belief are. What do we really believe and reactivating the schema in a felt way? Now let’s talk about how to do that, because the truth is it does take some inner exploration and not everybody is equally comfortable or as familiar with inner exploration. Let’s address that head-on. First, there’s a good chance that for this really to be sufficiently done we’ll need the help of a therapist. Why, because most of us don’t know how to take something that’s more unconscious and make it conscious. Why, because most of us had parents that didn’t speak the language of the brain or mind in the home. In other words they didn’t seem curious about the child’s in our world and help them and teach them to reflect and understand their own internal process.

Our Parents May Have Conditioned Us to Be Emotionally Illiterate

Often times parents fail that because honestly they themselves don’t know how to do that work or maybe they’re threatened by something that the child might feel or that the child might know. Like let’s say the child was able to put their experience into words and noticed “hey mom that hurts me when you do that!” Well the mom may not want to hear that. In a case like that, the brain isn’t learning, isn’t having chances to learn how to track its own internal signals and bring them all the way out into a verbal expression. In fact, it may be learning just the opposite that to survive and get loved it’s better just to push those things out of awareness.

So many of us actually have schemas that say, unconscious beliefs that say: “it’s safer not to know myself.” “It’s safer not to know what I feel or what I know or to really get what’s going on around me.” So if you’re someone who is in therapy and finds themself saying “I don’t know” a lot, then you may need to be curious about what kind of schema might I have that’s making it dangerous for me to know myself, to know my needs, to understand and have access to what’s going on inside?

The truth is, many of us came from families where it wasn’t that safe, or at least encouraged, to know ourselves. So given that’s the case, when we start inner growth work we have to appreciate we’re asking our mind to do something very new and perhaps that it may have beliefs about like: “don’t look inside, no one wants to know that.” “No one’s gonna find you interesting.” “Whatever I find there people can’t handle.” “Maybe I myself can’t handle it.” “No one really can handle the true me or my true needs.”

How to Facilitate Transformational Change in Therapy

So if you think that might be you then chances are you will need a therapist present with you to say: “tell me, I’m so curious.” When this question comes from someone who both seems interested and safe, and if the invitation is really clearly given and we feel safe, which does sometimes take a second to establish chances are the information will begin to come. That’s because this way of being able to understand and speak from a deeper part of ourselves is a very natural thing for the brain to do. As long as it’s given a clear invitation that feels safe, with a little bit of patience, information and insight may come, even if it never has before.

When it comes to this internal exploration work, I just want to give encouragement to try. Most of the time we just haven’t tried yet. If you do decide to look inward, remember this process is not rationally based. Sitting down and thinking about yourself or trying to analyze yourself is probably not going to be helpful and is different than developing internal awareness. A famous analyst named Christopher Bollas developed this term: “the unthought known.” I just love that term, the unthought known. See our brain really does know things, it’s like it just hasn’t had the thought yet.

When doing this work, sometimes it’s as simple as asking the question and a realization comes. My clients are often struck by how this information bubbles up into awareness. I might ask a client “hey, just turn and ask your mind: what’s so bad about leaving my husband, what am I so terrified will happen?” Very often a clear answer will occur to them. Often the answer simply comes with us asking the question and then shutting off thinking and really listening for a response.

So if you’re thinking this sounds a little bit like mindfulness, absolutely! As an aside, I know I said try not to think so much, but you know the forms of mindfulness that say “okay, just don’t think,” I tend to find those too difficult. So maybe an easier way then just saying don’t think is really more orienting toward listening. So asking a question and just paying attention. What’s gonna come up? What feelings do you notice? What image arises? What thought bubbles up?

Connecting Words to Feelings

Sometimes it does take some practice to decode those or begin to find words for them. I think of it like learning to read Braille. I imagine if I were suddenly trying to learn to read Braille, that moving my hand across the page, I would be pretty convinced, if I didn’t know better, that there was nothing meaningful there to find. It would just feel like a chaotic and random texture. But if I let myself keep trying and feeling it and feeling it and tracking it and learning and making patterns, let my mind do what it does, make patterns, suddenly the brain will start to decode it and make it meaningful.

So in a similar way that it would take you a little time and practice to learn Braille because something in the brain literally has to be developed, it takes a little bit of practice sometimes to learn how to make sense of the images, the little impulses, the impressions that begin to come to mind. Through practice we are able to connect these dots into an overarching reality or thought or truth that we can actually put into words.

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Therapy Techniques for Reactivation

There’s all sorts of techniques that people have developed to make this process easier, many of which use imagination. One of my favorites is what’s called doing parts work. In other words, picturing these little schemas as a little person. As crazy as that sounds, when we picture that as a little personality or a little creature, person inside our mind it makes it easier for the brain to both ask questions and listen for answers. Simply because the brain is just much more accustomed to dialoguing with people. So if you picture it in that way the brain is just on more familiar territory.

These little schemas, they have within them, a worldview, an expectation of reality, emotions, impulses and behavioral patterns. So if you think about it in a way they are like these little simplified people or personalities. So actually the metaphor, that image helps the brain collect what otherwise could seem impossibly complex into one image because we’re used to people being that complex. We’re used to them having a take on reality and a behavior so that image actually will capture for us, make it more concrete for our mind, if we tune into a behavioral pattern or a critical inner voice and say okay if that were a person what would it look like?

Okay that’s me at 10 years old, curled up, I’m scared and I’m telling myself that it’s not safe. Or that’s a part of me that’s like really tough, it’s like a little scrappy little inner part and she’s angry. So we might begin to have an image like that simply because then we’ve more localized that schema and can more comfortably begin to have a conversation or relationship with it. So we might ask the little girl who’s in the corner: “okay, what are you doing there?” “Why are you so scared?” Why are you curled up?” “Why are you disconnecting from everybody you love?” Then if we asked it kindly, which interestingly the rules of relationship still apply, like if we go to a part of our mind and are critical like “God, why are you so afraid get over it!” We’re not gonna get information. Yet if we go nicely and really sincerely ask then that part will give us the response back and begin to open for us the information that is held in that part of the brain.

So there are many forms of therapy that work this way with parts most famously internal family systems. There is even a book called self therapy that teaches you how to work with your own parts in that manner. Whatever technique you use the important thing is to figure out what your mind believes. When you’re approaching that mission the first step is to start with where you’re suffering. Figure out what point of suffering or what pattern that either causes me pain or causes me to get stuck, what is it that I don’t like about my own way of processing life.

It’s easiest if you can start with a behavioral response like something you actually do like criticizing yourself, or nagging your husband, or shutting down when someone’s giving you a compliment. You can also start with just an anxious feeling or a depressed mood. Either way, begin to bring it into focus. If you do it with parts work you might see a person or you might just find it in your body like this is where that place lives. Then other images like a black hole or an animal might come. Then sure enough information will begin to come into awareness like associations that can give some meaning as to what the beliefs that underlie either that feeling or that behavioral patterns. Let’s say the pattern is self-criticism so you might tune in, you might picture the inner critic if you want to do it with parts, and ask it what are you afraid would happen if you stopped criticizing me? Again that’s what we’re getting toward, what are you afraid would happen if you stopped doing X Y & Z?

If you don’t want to do parts work, you can just tune into God when I’m feeling self-critical there’s like this tightness in my chest. You might just stay there and say okay and fill in the sentence: “I must be self-critical, I must tell myself I’m bad because if I don’t…” and just see what comes. Try it a number of times. “I must tell myself I’m bad because if I don’t…” Begin to let the coherent meaning, like the way that this actually does make sense and it is in a weird way adaptive or a solution to a problem, beginning to assume it’s there and letting that information emerge. If it really doesn’t feel like an adaptation, like it just feels like sadness and maybe you can even identify a part like that’s me at 10 years old when my dad died or something. Or it may be more like a memory of an emotion or an emotional truth of like aloneness, because there really was a time you were alone. In that moment the the next step would be to just show up for that part and give support, love, self compassion, connection in a way that is actually a disconfirmation. It’s a disconfirmation because you’re saying yes there’s a deep sense of aloneness but I’m here. Sometimes just giving care to a place that simply scared or hurting can be a wonderful first step.

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By the way, if you have a trauma history it is advisable for you to do this with the help of a therapist. Really though, that can be helpful for anybody. That being said, I really wish that this process of transformational change was more available to all of us. In my fantasy future we would just do this with friends, certainly with our children, maybe with a teacher. It would just be a part of everyday life to slow down and get in touch with and really have a sense for what’s driving our feelings and our behaviors.

Non-rational Thought is Not Irrational

If all that seems like a little out there for you, too touchy-feely or kind of new age-y or something, this is not new age-y at all, it’s incredibly rational. I mean it’s kind of a funny thing because literally by nature it’s a non-rational process but there’s definitely a logic to our schemas. It’s very rational to do this non-rational process because until we update our old maps to reflect our current reality we are actually behaving very irrationally!

Because it’s just the nature of reality that our brain is processing all sorts of information non-consciously, and it’s the nature of reality that we have to use other forms than just logic to get that information. That we have to and that we can even if it’s a little bit more in a felt way. It may require using creativity, imagination or mindfulness, but that it is possible and logical to access and try to understand yourself. So that’s my little pep talk for us all learning to understand ourselves and you’d be surprised how much can shift just by making the implicit more explicit. If you’ve gone as far as to be able to put into words and really have a felt sense for what your implicit schemas and your marching orders for how to be human are, you’ve done the hardest part already.

What is Disconfirmation?

So now let’s talk about disconfirmation. I spent a lot of time talking about reactivation because making the unconscious, conscious is the step that people struggle with the most. I wanted to provide examples and highlight why the reactivation is such a critical part of transformational change. This process is so important that in coherence therapy which Bruce Ecker developed, at the end of each session, the therapist will really get clear about the schema identified in that session and will write the words out on an index card to give to the client with the homework assignment being: read this card that says the the words of your unconscious belief morning and night and really feel how true it feels.

Now some of my students were like “well isn’t it gonna convince them more?” No it won’t convince them more, their brain already believes this. It could not be any more convinced. Writing it down and rereading it just helps the brain get out of the habit of this being unconscious. This process anchors the schema in conscious awareness. It also opens up a chance for the disconfirmation to come. So for instance if somebody has on their card, let’s say it’s a woman, and she has” nobody cares about me.” Then she if she reads the card in the morning and then goes out you know to the kitchen and there’s her loving daughter or husband wanting to give her a hug.

To Notice the Disconfimation We Need to Pay Attention

Now it’s not that that hug is the first time she’s ever gotten love from her daughter or her husband, but it will land in a new way if she was just consciously aware that on some unconscious level she really believes that no one loves her. So by having it activated right there that’s activating that neural net where the memory lives. Then when the disconfirm happens that changes the implicit memory to now be opened for change. It goes into that learning mode. So now a five hour window opens where if she even just thinks of the hug again, or just any other additional disconfirmation, then the new information will come in that will forever erase the idea that nobody loves me.

Now I know you may be thinking, well what if that woman doesn’t have a daughter or husband to love her? Well the bottom line with that is we’re not trying to introduce an airy-fairy version of reality. We just want the brain to be really conscious of its reality and then walk around in the reality that the person actually lives in. Because there’s a good chance those are pretty different. We want to help people to update their schemas based on their actual lived context, not based on some idealized version of reality.

So if they’re still an abusive relationship and they’re still not safe, the brain should still believe “I’m not safe,” because that person is gonna have to be on guard and preparing. That being said, then the schema to work on first might be something about “this is what love looks.” Focusing on something that keeps them in that relationship. For example, through this process they might discover the unconscious belief: “I don’t deserve to be treated any differently.” So
there still might be a schema to work with.

The Disconfirming Evidence of Being an Adult

We’re only trying to bring people into reality as it is and there’s a pretty good chance that it is different than our expectation of it. You may think nothing’s changed since I was a child. I’m still alone. I’m still around unsafe people or cold people who are not nice to me, but the one difference that is always the case is that you’re no longer a child facing it. Your adult brain has more options available than it did when we were a child. I think some of our lingering sense of disempowerment and angsty frustration, or helplessness, or collapse often comes from an underlying association that tells us we’re weak or that there’s nothing we can do when really that is no longer true.

It’s there though because it certainly was true when we were young.  We are pretty disempowered when we’re young. So that feeling can pull forward. But at the very least that’s a disconfirmation we all have available. Recently I was working with a client where I asked him to ask himself, this is an IFS technique, I asked him to ask that schema, that part, how old does that part think you are? He looked at me and he said “oh my gosh an answer just came, it said you’re 25. Absolutely of course you’re 25,” when really he’s 45. He just looked at me like wow this is real stuff. Even with something as simple as in that example, don’t assume your brain has even caught up to your real age. Now I know intellectually we all know what our real age is. But on a felt level when we’re kids we’re just getting the lay of the land. What is it to be human and one of the things that could get encoded is there’s nothing I can do. I’m powerless. These problems are too big for me because in truth they really were when we were young.

The Disconfimation of Self-Acceptance

On a similar note, one other disconfirmation we always have the potential to access is self compassion. Let me explain why that’s a disconfirmation. You know when we’re children and we’re alone, we’re really alone. So that implicit felt sense “I’m alone, I’m small, there’s no one there for me,” it’s true! But when were adults there’s always an adult available for us that can give comfort, ourselves! Even self-given comfort like “oh I’m here, I care about my feelings, I care about my experience,” can be incredibly powerful in terms of being comforting and resourcing.

So if you’re not good at self compassion there’s a good chance that’s because you simply haven’t got the schema online enough yet. How I see it in my office is that usually if that early learning is really made conscious, if they really get it: “wow, I really believed I didn’t deserve love” and they can look into that little kids eyes that feels that way and get it, usually because we all tend to have empathy for suffering, usually care begins to flow naturally without as much effort.

Now as wonderful as self-love is, if you’re wanting to change your original schemas and some of them are about relationships it probably wouldn’t hurt to also put yourself around some love or
seek out communities that are safe and supportive. Even just noticing the love that’s already there or the positive empowering experiences or hopeful experiences in your current life. When you notice disconfirming positive experiences, linger and put your awareness on them.

You see it takes the amygdala 20 seconds to register a positive experience. Whereas it takes only a quarter of a second to register a negative experience. So when we have good things happening to us, ones that may disconfirm our schema, we want to actually get in the practice of paying attention to those. When good things happen give yourself at least 20 seconds to take it in. That experience will then get internalized as a possible disconfirmation to use, either in the moment or later. So while you’re getting in the habit of noticing and lingering with the positive, of course it would also help to put yourself in new contexts where positive things are more likely to happen.

Other Avenues For Disconfirmations

I think group therapy is a great option. I’ve seen people witness all sorts of new things and have all sorts of new powerful learnings in group therapy. Other avenues for disconfirmation of relational schemas are communities like a church or even relating directly to God if that’s a reality for you. We could talk for a long time about how to use spirituality for the transformational process. You know feeling what you really believe and then turning to God to see what returns by way of a deeper truth. That could be an amazing disconfirmation. Or, of course, you can see a therapist to help facilitate this disconfirmation for you through their presence or through imaginal work.

Hopefully it’s clear that there’s not one way to achieve the process of transformational change. There’s lots of ways of achieving the reactivation of making the implicit explicit, whether it’s journaling or mindfulness or parts work. There’s also lots of ways of finding the disconfirmation, whether it’s self compassion work or being around new new people and new contexts or even simply filtering through your life experience to see if you already have the disconfirmation.

The disconfirmation can even be an experience from the past. It could be a disconfirmation that’s already somewhere living in your brain, something the brain knows, it just hasn’t connected and integrated to shift the first original take. For example you might notice: “okay, I’m really getting a sense that my anger will make people reject me, but you know my cousin, one time I got mad at her and she actually talked to me about it and we got closer through it.”

We Can Fully and Permanently Rewrite Our Maladaptive Schemas

So when you have both: reactivation and disconfirmation, however you get there, the next step is to let them both be an awareness at the same time. Tune into the original schema and feel how true it feels, “my anger is going to push people away.” Then tune into the new learning or the disconfirmation, which again can’t just be an idea, it has to feel true to the brain as well, and just go back and forth a few times. If you simply do that, it gives the brain the chance to actually update its view of reality. It doesn’t take long, but once that update happens it’s permanent.

I wish you the best in your journey toward transformational change. Whether it’s through journaling or parts work or prayer or therapy. I encourage you to find some way to really know what your brain believes. In its heart of hearts, what does your brain believe from the past and then let it come in contact experientially with the reality of your present. In our next video we’ll focus specifically about achieving transformational change in therapy and how to deepen your experience and get the most out of the process.

 

We all know that it is difficult to change deeply ingrained, emotional learnings, such as ‘I am unlovable,’ or ‘Others need me to be perfect.’ However, the science of memory reconsolidation clearly outlines a series of experiences that, if the brain moves through step by step, can open its neural networks for relearning. Most therapies find a way to facilitate these steps (either knowingly or unknowingly).

But before we go into how to use memory reconsolidation for healing (topic of the next video), let’s quickly look at the science of this powerful form of neuroplasticity, and why memory reconsolidation opens such a hopeful path toward change.

Memory Reconsolidation: How to Rewire Your Brain

I remember when I was first starting out as a psychologist my father gave me a piece of advice that he’d received from his mentor. He said, remember people don’t come to you with their problems they come to you with their solutions. So now if I see someone, for instance, who
has a rage problem or a problem with overeating, I think how was raging or overheating a necessary solution to some problem that they faced?

So if you’re wondering how could raging be a solution to a problem, well let’s say when that person was young his father would target his younger brother with a lot of aggression and the one way that that child figured out to protect his younger brother was to engage dad with his own anger so that he himself became the target. In this example, the problem then would be his little brother getting hurt and the solution would be the rage.

So these learned solutions exist within these little maps of reality that teach us through experience what to expect from life and how we should respond. We call those little maps “schemas.” There’s two parts to a schema, first it’s what to expect and second how I’ve learned to respond to best protect myself or protect my group or get what I need. So these schemas are by default unconscious. Why? Because they exist in something called implicit memory.

If you learned about this in school you’ll remember that explicit memory would be like learning and remembering what the capital of France is. Implicit memory would be more like learning to ride a bike. When you’re learning to ride a bike your brain is having experiences that teach you how to respond in the future. For instance, when I feel a slight shudder on my right side I need to slightly lean left or I’m going to fall over. Now that is not consciously learned but it is stored and very useful to our capacity to ride a bike, even if we can’t verbalize what we learned.

In the same way we learn to ride a bike we learn the motions of being human. Again, they’re not conscious because they exist in the same way
that learning how to ride a bike exists – as an implicit memory. Now until about 15 years ago scientists believed that implicit memory couldn’t be changed so therefore our field looked for ways to override or control that implicit learning. Forms of therapy like CBT were created to teach people how to use logic and try to control the more implicit knowing or override it so that the implicit memory wouldn’t have so much control and they could regulate their emotions and behaviors more effectively. This process creates something called incremental change which is a good thing.

However, now we know we can actually go into the implicit learning or memory itself and update it. When we do that we get transformational change. So by transformational change, I mean when the symptom or struggle disappears and remains gone without continued effort or a lot of maintenance. So let’s look then about how to change implicit memory. First though, lets go over again how memory gets stored in the first place. So an event or learning happens and for a short time stays in short-term memory. If it’s trivial or not important to us then we will forget about it but if it seems important to our future survival or if it’s emotionally charged then it will be more likely to go into long-term memory which it does through a process called memory consolidation.

You see memory exists a neural net that holds a pattern. The pattern holds the elements of that experience or memory together and secures them into place. In fact, it’s through the consolidation process that the learning gets secured so that that pattern can be stabilized. So just to give a metaphor, which is just a metaphor, so don’t take it too seriously, but it’s something like editing a document on a computer. We’re editing the file and then we close the file. We may even condense it into a zip file for storage but then it’s in a less editable format. Implicit memories are a little like that, they’re fixed and in order to change them you have to unzip them, open the file and then bring them back into a format that is workable for making edits.

So as I mentioned, scientists used to believe that once these implicit memories are secured into place they could not be changed, but in the early 2000s they started to wonder – does memory really just consolidate and that’s it or does it ever open again for new learning? If it did open up, possibly through simply being activated, it would need to be reconsolidated to get secured back into place. So they began, starting with the assumption that reconsolidation maybe is a thing. Since the process of consolidation happens through protein synthesis then they should be able to interrupt the process through using a protein synthesis blocker, If indeed the memory did need to be reconsolidated after being triggered then a protein synthesis blocker would interrupt the reconsolidation and therefore disrupt the memory and actually that’s what they found.

They found that they could condition a mouse to fear a bell, so that’s implicit learning. They then would trigger that memory by sounding the bell, introduce the protein synthesis blocker and then thereby disrupt the mouse’s ability to reconsolidate the association between danger and bell and through doing that, through that chemical method, they found that the fear conditioning could actually be erased. The fact that it might be possible to change these memories is really good news. If you’re thinking it sounds kind of scary, like an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, kind of thing, it’s not like that at all. We’re not trying to change people’s autobiographical memory or their conscious recall of the events of their life. More what’s being targeted are the unconscious beliefs about the nature of reality and how we must respond that were gleaned through those experiences.

Now that we’ve had about 15 years of memory consolidation research under our belt, it’s pretty clear the sequence of experiences that the brain needs in order to activate memory reconsolidation without the help of chemical aids. First, you have to bring that memory into an open state. That is accomplished first by activating the memory by recalling the details and feeling the emotional experience of the memory. This is called a reactivation. The second step is to introduce an experience or information that proves the belief about reality held in that memory is incorrect.

Once that happens there’s about a five hour window where that memory becomes what is called “labile.” That means it’s open to being changed. If in that time-frame an additional experience comes that disconfirms – they call it “disconfirmation” or “error prediction,” and proves that that original perspective or belief about reality cannot be true. When that happens then that information is taken in and either completely changes or at least just updates and tweaks the original schema before it gets once again reconsolidated in a new implicit memory that more accurately maps to the reality of the present moment.

So to summarize, the two key ingredients are reactivation and disconfirmation and there’s all sort of deep experiential therapies that really help people transform their implicit beliefs whether or not they even think about this process in terms of memory reconsolidation. When we look at what is happening in a powerfully transformative session what you always find is both reactivation and disconfirmation.

For instance, forms of therapies where the client is guided to feel once again what it felt like to be young and to enter into that old reality and to feel it consciously, like, “I’m not safe if I share my feelings.” That would be reactivation and then the therapist is actively there, not judging their feelings making it safe to have their emotions and even calling their awareness to that new reality, like, “notice how is it though for me to be here with you and not judging you right now.” That would be a disconfirmation. In that moment, that schema that says, “if I have my feelings I’ll be judged so it isn’t safe” actually could get updated.

Another example are therapies that do inner child work where you visualize yourself at a certain age and really go in and ask “what is the view of reality that I learned at that age” and really making that view of reality conscious, that would be reactivation. Then perhaps the client
imagines going to that inner child and telling them their version of reality or just proving a different version of reality through being able to show up. So that that schema “I’m alone” or “I’m not lovable” can be erased.

So that would be activation and disconfirmation. When the brain vividly witnesses two realities, the reality from the schema and the reality of what’s actually happening in the moment and those realities cannot actually both be true at the same time it kind of freaks the brain out. It’s like an error message gets sent, but in a good way so the brain says “wait a second, I guess my predictive model is not doing such a great job predicting reality it may be time for me to update it.”

Now that’s not going to happen if that original model isn’t activated first that’s why these things have to have a felt or visceral component to them. If it’s just cognitive that isn’t enough or if we’re having all these kind of disconfirming experiences like “I don’t believe I’m valuable but I’m being valued by all these people,” it may not necessarily land on the original memory or the neural net that holds that memory unless we first activate that original net, really let it be felt and conscious.

Then as new information comes in if it feels like valid compelling information like through a lived experience or irrefutable proof then that can come in and actually work to change the original schema. So when a reorganization happens on that implicit level like that it produces
transformational change which is much more powerful than simply having to force ourselves into new behavioral habits, against the will of some deeper part of our mind that’s saying “don’t do that if you do that it’s going to lead to a bad outcome.” If we don’t address that original belief then it’s like we’re constantly fighting an uphill battle.

Now it’s Bruce Ecker (Coherence Therapy) who originally linked or noticed a link between what he calls transformational change and memory reconsolidation research so he started out just trying to understand transformational change which he did through videotaping his own sessions and reviewing hours of videotape of his work as well as clinical material from other people’s work. He wasn’t the only one doing this, Diana Fosha (AEDP), among others were really trying to study what actually produces change in sessions but he was the one to notice and outline a set of steps that were always present when the client had a therapeutic breakthrough and once he delineated those steps he noticed these are the same steps that happen in memory reconsolidation.

So this is a cutting edge paradigm shift within our field and I hope more research is done and more training is done in these methods because I have a prediction that we’re about to have a leap forward in terms of the effectiveness of psychotherapy which is really exciting and kind of about time. So if you’re wondering how to use these steps in your own therapy that I go over in the How to Get the Most Out of Therapy video, but before we end this video let me give the take-home point which is: while our deep early learnings, the ones that we developed during childhood and at that time perhaps protected us, but now cause us pain or at least stuckness, while it’s not so easy to change those, we now know they actually can be reliably changed as long as the steps of memory reconsolidation take place.

I don’t mean to make this sound like a magical fix or super easy. It does take work but if we have the principles in mind we can be more strategic about how we approach that work. Again, with the first step of really activating our implicit knowings, knowing what, in our heart of hearts, our brain really believes and letting that be fully conscious and felt and then second, having experiences that disconfirm or at least update that original view of reality so that our approach to reality can transform.

So how to buckle in and direct yourself toward the goal of transformation using memory reconsolidation will be the topic of the next video: Transformation: A Deeper Kind of Growth.

If you’d like to listen to a podcast with Bruce Ecker, you can check out this Therapist Uncensored’s episode:

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For general information about Memory Reconsolidation, Coherence Therapy and Bruce Ecker:

http://www.coherencetherapy.org/

If you’d like to read a detailed summary of memory reconsolidation research you can find it here:

https://www.coherencetherapy.org/files/Ecker_2018_Clinical_Translation_of_Memory_Reconsolidation_Research.pdf

Why do therapists obsess about childhood? Why would experiences from so long ago still impact us today? The answer is pretty simple. It rests on the fact that our ‘issues’ are not actually defects; they are modes of responding that we LEARNED. When does this learning happen? Well, mainly during childhood! After all, our brain can’t wait until we are adults to try to figure out how to respond to life! It starts on day one, and works on overdrive throughout our whole childhood to develop mental maps of reality about threats and how to manage them. This is how schemas are formed.

The problem is, once our brain has learned something over and over, it stops questioning it’s reality. In this way it can ‘automate’ its response and work more efficiently. Childhood matters so much because when we are younger we are more open to learning. After all, by the time we are adults, haven’t we learned everything we need to know? The brain sure thinks so! This is why changing as an adult is so difficult!  Of course there are exceptions to this, for instance when a new experience is particularly intense (think of trauma, or for that matter a therapeutic breakthrough!). Or when we use therapy techniques to trigger memory reconsolidation (which we will talk about in the next video). But generally, our schemas – our conditioned (learned) emotions, behaviors, and perspectives tend to stick with us into adulthood. Hence why our childhood experiences (or more accurately, what those experiences teach us) are at the core of everything!

Video Transcript of How Schemas are Formed

How our Schemas are Formed

We all know that our experiences during childhood can have a huge impact on our later well-being. In the last video we talked about the fact that childhood leaves an imprint through teaching us both what to expect from reality but also what is the best way to respond to reality. It does so through creating these little like maps or templates about how the world works which are traditionally called schemas. Our schemas teach us two things: what is about to happen and how should I respond to that event. To give an example, let’s say every time a child shares an accomplishment they’re punished by an insecure, competitive mother. Well their brain’s little map of reality will be: “sharing accomplishments leads to punishment” and within that map will be the adaptation: “I won’t share my accomplishments then.”

That assumption works great in that original context but if it’s played forward and generalized to other people who aren’t mom, which the brain will do, then suddenly that person as an adult may be finding that they’re not sharing about their successes at work and are feeling held back professionally. That person may be very frustrated with himself for being so timid at work without realizing the deep learning that timidity is linked into: there was that first experience with mom when it really worked to protect an important relationship.

Now relationships are a huge part of this learning but really all aspects of a child’s experience, from culture, to medical issues, to experiences at school can have a deep impact in their understanding of how to adapt to their reality, which are our schemas. Recently I was working with a client who had an interesting response to stress and as we tracked it down it really came to some deep learnings she had around her experiences of having asthma. So really it could be any notable life experiences we have as children, it’s just that one of our most powerful experiences of the world is our relationships with our parents. It’s like our parents are our world in a way when we’re young. Why? Because, evolutionarily speaking, without mom and dad we would die. So it’s an innate sort of imperative to preserve that relationship so mom and dad will love us, so that they’ll take care of us.

Our Schemas Were Designed to Keep Us Safe

Of course there are some adaptations that happen around how to make mom and dad love us, like how to please mom and dad. I think that’s ones we typically are more aware of, but let me actually focus on something just as powerful which is the ways we learn to adapt to make mom and dad function well, to keep mom and dad intact. Why? Because we need mom and dad to be doing well in order to sufficiently take care of us. So the child in a way learns to behave to stabilize mom and dad or or at least try to bring out the best in them. So if the child does something and it causes mom and dad to falter they’re less likely to do that again. In some very general sense the child learns to become the child that the parent needs them to be.

Let me give an example, let’s say the child shows some very natural anger but the parent, perhaps because of their own abuse history, in response to seeing the child’s anger looks scared and freezes for a moment. The child is probably going to pick up on that: “uh oh, my anger just seemed to mess with mom” so that’s immediately kind of frightening for two reasons, One because mom’s not here now emotionally to support me and two, mom looks scared so there must be some real danger. Then if the mom recovers and she comes back and reengages that may not be such a deep learning for the child.

But if she doesn’t recover quickly, let’s say she pulls away and gets cold, or gets depressed the rest of the day, or punishes the child then the child is learning: “okay, I guess my anger is associated with danger.” That becomes a schema: “my anger scares mom and when mom is scared I feel ashamed and alone.” So then of course the child will try whatever they can figure out in order to not be angry. That might be cutting off from their emotions. It might be shutting down their vitality and getting depressed. The solution could be disinvesting in life so that they don’t have disappointments and don’t get angry. It may just be covering the anger with a sort of sickly sweet kind of response whenever they’re actually upset.

Schemas Can be Passed Down From Parent to Child

So the child has learned two things: “anger is associated with danger.” That’s the expectation and then the adaptation would be “I’ll do whatever I can figure out to not let myself feel my anger.” Now the reason I use an emotion like anger as an example is that experiences paired with emotion are the learnings that are most likely to be imprinted. Also emotional moments are the experiences most often mishandled by the parents because maybe they themselves often have defensive schemas regarding emotions from their childhood. It’s not just anger that parents often have trouble with. It could be sadness. That’s one that’s very often dropped or mishandled by parents, perhaps because they’re scared they won’t be competent to help or they don’t want to fall into their own despair.

For one reason or another, it is very common for parents to leave their child alone in the face of sadness. Perhaps even to punish or shame them for it. But even if they just neglect their child’s sadness and don’t sufficiently step in to help, then that leads the child alone with the emotion of sadness which is not how mother nature intended it. When a child is alone with strong negative emotions, it is by its nature overwhelming. If they’re in connection it can be manageable, but for a child’s system to be alone with an emotion like grief or rage is by it’s nature overwhelming. As a result of this experience, the schema will become: “sadness is linked to aloneness, which is linked to overwhelm” and the adaptation will be: maybe I won’t let myself have my sadness, or I’ll distract myself in any way possible. I’ll get into playing video games, or drinking, or just covering up the sadness with anxiety instead.

Honoring Our Schemas as Adaptations instead of Defenses

Now these adaptations I’m mentioning we would traditionally call our defenses. I just think the word “defenses” is slightly critical in it’s tone, whereas the word “adaptation” really honors the fact that we needed to shift our response in this way. It helped us to do so. It allowed us to survive our childhoods a bit more intact. So far we’ve been looking more at the adaptations to help mom and dad function well like: “mom and dad can’t handle me being angry so I’ll learn not to have anger,” or “they can’t handle my neediness so I’ll not have needs,” or “they can’t handle my independence so I’ll learn to not step into my own uniqueness and opinions and strength” or “they can’t even bear to look at their own faults” so the child might have to learn to be blind to those faults.

Then finally the child may have to adapt in order to just survive mom and dad. So if mom and dad are abusive or intrusive, what does the child need to do to mitigate the damage of that? You know put up walls, go numb, dissociate perhaps, be incredibly pleasing so as to not be a target. In either case, the child is learning schemas about how to bring out the best and avoid the worst for mom and dad. If I could put it another way: “how do I need to act in order to help mom and dad survive me and order in order to help me survive mom and dad.

I know that last statement was kind of general and I just meant to capture a lot of what tends to cause people suffering later. Often it comes down to experiences with mom and dad or siblings but that’s not the end of the story. Any significant life experience that we learned from and adapted to can have an impact on our later functioning or our later response to life. In fact, socioeconomic status has a huge impact in these schemas that we’re talking about because it’s a different world with different requirements that require us to adapt.

Our Schemas are Hard to Change, But it’s Possible!

However the learning happens, it’s likely most of it’s going to happen during childhood. Why? Our brain is in the most active learning phase during that time. It’s trying to develop mental maps of reality to figure out as quickly as it can how to survive in this world. Unfortunately once the schema has been ingrained through lots of experiences or through one big experience which we would call a trauma, it doesn’t as actively continue questioning that map of reality as we move into adulthood. However, it is possible to use a process called memory reconsolidation to go back to those early templates of reality, those original schemas and update them even once we’re adults. The theory and science behind memory reconsolidation is what we will explore in the next video: Memory Reconsolidation: How to Rewire your Brain.

We all think of ourselves as a little crazy. But the truth is, we aren’t! Our brain is guiding us to respond in ways that it actually learned (through experience!) are more likely to lead to our survival. So why are our choices sometimes so seemingly unhealthy?

The bottom-line is this: our brains are incredibly adaptive. The problem? Well, what is adaptive during childhood (when our brain is in full-on learning mode), is not necessarily adaptive later in life. This is an incredibly important issue for us all to deeply understand, so we can reflect with compassion upon how our own frustrating patterns, attitudes actually at one point helped us to survive.

 

Video Transcript from Your Issues Make Complete Sense

 

You’re not Broken, Weak or Crazy!

So our emotional issues make perfect, coherent, even rational sense given our real experience with the world around us. This issue is very close to me because often I hear people talking as if they are broken or weak or just being difficult or crazy…and that upsets me because I truly believe that our brain is doing what it is doing for good reason. Now there’s some scientific explanation for that, which we will go into. But also that just makes logical sense. Like, why would our brain be trying to mess with us? Even our behaviors that we think of as irrational or self-defeating, on some level our brain really does believe that those choices will end up best for us, or for our group. These beliefs are based on experiences from our past. What we think of as our ‘patterns’–at some point they were necessary adaptations for us or at least are built on assumptions about how the world works. While they might seem irrational are actually drawn from real experience with the world.

Your Brain is a Prediction Generating Machine

So in the last video we talked about what our emotional reactions are based on. I’ll just say the same thing again, just try to say it in a slightly different way this time. So think of it like this: if every experience you had with life, especially as you are a child, which is when you’re learning how to be alive…that all those experiences are like data points coming at you. Now, your brain is having to constantly make sense of those data points by finding some pattern. I think of it like when you see a sheet with data and you have to do statistical analysis to actually draw the pattern, to figure out the pattern from what otherwise would look like chaos.

Well, that’s actually what the brain does, through a process called statistical learning. Actually the brain is constantly doing unconscious statistical analyses to see what is associated with what. What is probabilistically likely to happen together. The reason it does that is so that it can make predictions from the input about what is about to happen, and also predictions about how to respond. So those predictions, those unconscious statistical comparisons between what’s happening now and comparing it to what we experienced in the past, and the patterns we develop to understand the world and respond to it, that’s going on all the time. It’s the base of our emotional reactions, and honestly most of our behavior.

When it Comes to Our Reactions, Past Experience is More Powerful Than the Present

So if a certain smell is associated with dad being drunk then in the future our brain will remember that such that when we smell that smell we will predict that means danger. Because statistically speaking that smell is associated with danger. Now rationally we may know that that smell does not mean that dad is in the room or present, but that’s not how the brain works. The brain just knows statistically speaking that smell is associated with danger and also statistically speaking this fear response, like running to my room to get away, is associated with more protection for myself.

So that’s constantly going on, running in the background in what we would call the unconscious. So it’s unconsciously always preparing our body and perceiving reality through the lens of how what’s happening now is likely to be understood. Essentially, what is the likeliest explanation based on my previous experiences? But to continue with this metaphor, if now as an adult you are struggling, it is not because your brain has done a bad job taking it’s experiences and all those data points and finding the patterns and making meaning, it is simply that those experiences you had, those data points are a skewed sample. That’s it!

What Was Adaptive in the Past, May Now be Maladaptive For Your Present Life

In other words, the world you started out in, which is most powerfully your family of origin. When your brain is learning these patterns and figuring out what to expect and how to respond to life, that world differs in important ways from the world at large. Or perhaps that original world, those original data points, simply differ from your life now as a single adult, or in the family that you’ve created. Or simply the reality and family that you want to create, because the truth is, most likely, the world you learned and adapted to is not the world or reality that you’re trying to create for yourself.

So that’s a big problem for the brain. The ways that you were conditioned, basically to survive your family of origin, may vastly differ from the set of imperatives of building a beautiful life. That’s really important to understand because sometimes we’re so frustrated by what we may think of as our own resistance or irrationality or our seemingly self destructive impulses. But underneath those behaviors, our deeper imperatives, that at one time were really, truly what we needed to do to survive the world.

If our Brain is so Malleable, Why is it so Hard to Change?

You may be wondering, if my brain is so great at adapting why doesn’t it just continue to adapt? Continue to learn and make new assumptions and make new behavioral patterns that actually fit what’s in front of me now? Well here’s the rub, our brain if left to it’s own devices doesn’t actively update it’s view of reality. Once the brain feels that it knows something, either through a million repetitions of experience or one big powerful experience which we would call a trauma, it doesn’t just always stay open for continued input.

Actually it would be pretty cumbersome to live in a world where we were always that open to learning. If we woke up every day in a childlike state of open mindedness and naivete of what we’re going to find and how we might try to respond, the world would just eat us alive. Imagine how totally overwhelming it would be to try and make sense of all the sensory input and decision points you would face if you couldn’t rely on some basic assumptions about reality.

So there’s good reason that our brain doesn’t always just shift with every new moment and try to learn life anew every day. It allows us to function in the world. Plus if you think about it, for most of our evolution the world we were born into was pretty much the one we were going to stay in. You know it wasn’t like today where maybe you have an abusive family but then you go off and make another healthier family. Or you move from one side of the world to the other side of the world. We would have had our little tribe of thirty people and pretty much whatever we learned in childhood was going to be adaptive during adulthood. So this personal growth mission it’s a bit of a new thing for the brain. It’s a little bit tricky for the brain to change deeply in that way. It doesn’t mean it can’t do it, there are actually very clear steps to unlock the brain to learn again, which of course we’ll be talking about in a later video.

How Could Harmful or Self-Destructive Behaviors Have Been Adaptive?

Another important point I want to make if you’re thinking: so I understand that my early learning may not be adaptive in my adult life, but it didn’t seem adaptive even in my childhood? How is it adaptive for me to check out at school, or start using drugs when I was twelve, or never assert myself with my dad, or beat up my sister? That’s a really great question! That brings us to a really important point and that is: while some of these early adaptations don’t seem good or maybe they really are not healthy or productive, they were from the perspective of the brain, the lesser of two evils.

So let’s say your brain learned: I need to rage any time somebody criticizes me. So that response, raging is going to have huge costs. Yet if you as a child were in a family system so steeped in shame where you were often attacked and criticized, your system might have learned: I need to push that back and go to rage as a way to protect itself that. Otherwise, the greater evil is that my whole sense of self being becomes crippled and my capacity to engage in this world disabled through the shame. Therefore I must rage instead. Furthermore perhaps this rage was normalized in our family but if I accept the shame and freeze up, disengage or fail to be as productive then my family will shame me even further. So in order to function and be productive, the child will reject the shame and embrace rage as a shield to protect them from this toxic environment.

Just to drive this point home a little more, let’s say that same child, when in the face of shame learned: if I let myself freeze and go to a non-functional state I also can’t protect my younger brother from dad’s aggression. So I’ve got to keep myself strong and steeled for the sake of protecting my younger brother. For me, the tragedy of this is the fact that it happens so unconsciously! These adaptations are out of awareness and all the child will experience is “hey I’m raging a lot more” or “I get in trouble a lot more” and as they grow into an adult it might be really easy for the explanation to be: “I must just be an angry person” or even worse: “a bad person” or “a person who doesn’t care about others.”

The Tragedy of Believing That We Are Defective

It’s such a tragedy because the whole reason the rage behavior got set up is because the child did care about his younger brother and was needing to protect him! Or maybe it was just to protect his own sanity or his own body, but that’s also completely valid. So this is why earlier said that it’s so upsetting when I hear people judge themselves without really exploring deeper to see what is truly driving that behavior. Asking ourselves: what experience has really taught my brain that it is imperative for me to do that thing or avoid doing this other thing?

So in my work with clients it’s just never been the case that we were exploring underneath to see what’s driving the behavior and at the bottom we just came to: “oh the deal is, you’re just a terrible person.” That’s never the explanation! Of course it isn’t, it’s never the explanation that that person is just bad, weak or stupid. There’s always a coherent, understandable set of imperatives and learnings that came in emotionally. That really can help us both understand and then therefore not judge what we think of as our “emotional issues.”

So in the next video we’ll go over this in a bit more detail, connecting it to attachment theory and giving more examples. But the final message that I’d like to give in this video is this. If you’re suffering it isn’t because anything is wrong with you or even how your brain is working. Your brain has done its job of helping you adapt. It’s just that your early childhood experiences required you to adapt in ways that have some huge costs. Now those costs, like the lack of capacity for joy, peace or closeness, those costs might have been worth it when you were younger, but there’s a chance that they are no longer worth it anymore. So allowing the brain to realize that and perhaps make some new adaptations as an adult is what healing is all about.

We all know that our our emotional issues can cause us to respond in ways that sometimes feel irrational and perhaps even harmful, particularly when faced with certain triggers. But why is that? In this video we will demystify our emotional responses and behaviors and understand why our brains evolved to run more on ‘learned instincts’ than on logic. These instincts go by many names: schemas, emotional conditioning, implicit memory. Whatever name we use, it is deeply important that we understand this aspect of our nature, as in truth it tends to run the show (especially when we are triggered!). Once we understand the hidden logic that drives our emotional issues we can begin to develop more compassion towards our emotional reactions. So let’s dive in!

Transcript for Our Emotional Reactions: What Are They Based On?

Our Emotional Brain

So in this video I’d like to explain what emotions are, or more broadly how our brain processes information that isn’t just logical or conscious. Because the truth is we all know that we are constantly having emotional reactions to things and I believe it’s really important to know what that’s based on. But for a moment let’s forget about emotion and just talk about the brain because the brain has more than one way of processing information. Now rationality or logic is the one we are most familiar with because it’s the most conscious and purposeful. We really love rationality because we have control over it. It allows us to solve new and complex problems plus logic is less reflexive and reactive so it’s our most flexible system.

That being said, I’d like to make the case today that the non-logical ways in which we process information are just as valid and perhaps even more important for our survival. We colloquially call these reactions our “emotional reactions,” and while we tend to think of them as illogical, I’d like to make the case that they are not. I mean they may be non-logical, they’re not logically derived, but they are based on something that is just as smart and that is lived experience. For these parts of the brain, the proof is in the pudding.

The Hidden Logic of Our Emotional Reactions

This is a really robust system that allows us to move through the world without dying. I learn: hey I did this and I got hurt, so I’m not going to do that again. I may not know the logical reason I got hurt. In fact, these parts may not care about logic or reasoning at all. They just know this happened and this was the outcome. So I’m going to learn through my experience not to do that again or to do more of this other thing that seemed to produce a good outcome. So through millions of repetitions of experience the brain learns: what to associate to what.

It’s kind of like in classical conditioning we learned in school where the dog learns to associate the bell with the arrival of food. So now the bell means the arrival of food. There’s no rational reason that a bell should mean food or that perhaps asking for what I need should mean getting hurt, but if that’s what we see happen in our lived experience, our brain will hook that up into a pattern. Not only of what to expect, like bell and food but also of what to do next. Like how do I need to adapt to respond to the situation to get the best outcome.

Emotional Conditioning

I have a sensory input, my brain learns what’s about to happen next and it also learns just through trial and error what should I do in that situation? So a little map of reality is set up which we call a schema, that takes the sensory input, what I expect is going to happen next and how I should respond. This all gets established through conditioning basically, through creating a map of reality that’s non-conscious and lives in a deeper part of our brain.

These networks of associations can be quite complex. Perhaps asking for what I need is associated with getting hurt. To some degree just people in general might become associated with getting hurt. Or the smell of the person that hurt me the most might be associated with getting hurt. It’s really important that our brain makes these connections and links up reality in this way because it is a very efficient way of predicting and preparing for life.

Emotions are Fast, Logical Thinking is Slow

The truth is as much as we love rationality it takes so much time and energy to come to a rational, logical conclusion and decision. I think of rationality as processing information through a straw. It takes specific pieces of information and then works them with a lot of effort and purposeful attention. Whereas the non-logical ways that our brain works is like processing an ocean’s amount of information quickly and efficiently.

This is really important because when these schemas, these little maps of reality are hooked up then as soon as something happens then everything is immediately laid out for us. There’s a sensory input, we know what to expect, how to respond, how to even shift our bodies to do the actions that we are preparing to do. So sensory input and BOOM everything is laid out. That’s a very efficient system that allows us, particularly in moments of danger, to respond effectively. The other beautiful thing about these schemas is that they can work in the background non-consciously.

Can you imagine if we had to be consciously aware of every decision or information processing that our brain was doing? Even things like driving to work are partly possible because we can automate so much of that. I mean picture if you had to drive to work, if you had to make every turn and look over your shoulder because you rationally realized that that was the best idea, versus just knowing through experience and not even having to think about it? I know I’ve had moments where I’ve driven to work and I could barely remember even getting there because it was so easy for my brain to do that, I didn’t even have to be aware of everything I was doing.

Logic is Too Slow for Survival

While I know we love awareness and being in the present moment it would actually be exhausting to have to show up to every moment learning fresh, figuring our as if for the first time what to do. And that is true particularly for moments of danger. Why? Because in moments of danger it’s important that we respond quickly, we don’t want to overthink our movement, going into fight or flight, protecting our self, so especially in moments of danger these more implicit, they are in the background developed through experiential learning and through our schemas of what to expect and how to respond, that part tends to kick in more when we feel threatened. Or even just under stress.

This is why when we are under stress it can feel like swimming upstream to try to slow down and think through it and be rational. Which I realize is really frustrating. It’s really frustrating when we feel highly stressed or highly emotional, how it can feel like: why am I doing what I’m doing? Because again the less conscious and purposeful parts of our brain are wanting to take over. That being said, this is what has helped us survive as a species.

Our Emotional Reactions Are a Window Into Our Unconscious Wiring

So it’s not that these processes are bad, it’s just to learn how to interface with them in a way that we can understand how we are wired and adjust it to be truly adaptive. What I think is fascinating, therefore, when we track our body and our emotional response it’s like a little window where we can peek into how the less conscious parts of our brain are making sense of this moment. It even gives us some idea of how this moment compares to our past or prime our brain for how we should respond. So I find that really fascinating especially for people who have high emotional intelligence or emotional awareness, that that actually in itself can be some data into just how our system is set up. What is the world that we unconsciously expect to be coming toward us and how have we learned to respond.

So I hope this explanation of our emotional reactions makes some sense. I think it’s just so important that we understand some of the basic systems within our mind because I believe when we understand something it’s harder to judge it. If we can appreciate that our emotional issues rest on deeply learned associations and expectations of how the world works, then we can see that our emotional issues, to a degree, really make sense. The fact that our emotional issues make sense is the topic for the next video, so let’s go there next.