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. 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 (a recording will be available if you can't attend live!).
I’m also launching a consultation group for therapists this summer! If you’re curious about deepening your work with clients who feel stuck in protective adaptations and attachment wounds, come join me for an 8-week exploration.
Our current 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'd like to explore the science behind this shift related to the body and somatic work, a new article has just come out in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience reframing the body keeps the score idea toward a predictive brain model, and I wrote my own piece on this a couple of months ago which you can read here, both of which make a really lovely companion to today's episode on somatic work.
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.
Don’t forget to vote on our next book!
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Hi everyone, and welcome back for our book club of Unlocking the Emotional Brain. If you can believe it, this is actually the last case in the book about the different modalities and how they all use the same unifying process of memory reconsolidation. If you’re just joining us, the idea behind that is we’ve often talked in therapy about how one of the things that works, no matter the modality, no matter the therapist training, is the relationship between the therapist and the client.
New research is emerging to show one of the reasons why that relationship might be so important is because it actually allows spontaneous reconsolidation, meaning updates of old predictions the brain is making. So just having a strong relationship with your therapist, just, it’s actually a very important part of the therapeutic process, can actually update your brain about what it’s like to be in a safe relationship, what it’s like to be seen, what it’s like to have someone who’s curious about you, and then you get to learn that process too. So far we have gone through some of the major therapeutic modalities like internal family systems and now today somatic experiencing to look and see how memory reconsolidation plays out in that process.
This conversation is even more important right in this moment as a major article has come out talking about the idea behind the body keeps the score and shifting from that idea that trauma is held sort of in the body or in the tissues of the body to this predictive brain model and the predictive brain model is this idea that our brain is constantly gathering data about our experiences and then using it to form predictions or templates about what’s to come. We might call these things parts, we might call them schemas, we might call them survival strategies, but all of them are made up of the thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, and impulses that our brain uses to help us best show up in every situation based on what it predicts the outcome is going to be. These predictions can be very useful because they can help us get through our day-to-day lives without having to think about every single thing we do and they hold all kinds of context about how we’re meant to behave when we’re at school, when we’re at work, when we’re out in public, but when we have challenging experiences in our life and attachment ruptures and major traumas that we go through, that data too becomes part of the predictive model and that is where it can look like trauma is stuck inside of us.
What really happened is all of that data went into your brain’s predictive model and now your brain is predicting, for example, that every time you feel big feelings or quote-unquote bad feelings, you’ll be sent away, you’ll be punished, you’ll be abandoned. And this doesn’t have to be because you had a quote-unquote major trauma in your life, but it can be because you grew up in a family with parents who never learned how to be with their own emotions. They didn’t learn it from their parents.
So when you have the normal emotions of a child, silly, messy, loud, playful, maybe you’re angry, maybe you’re sad, maybe you have a meltdown or a tantrum, which is all normal for a child, if the parent doesn’t know how to handle that and they send you away or they punish you for it, your brain learns to predict over time, oh, in order to keep relationships, to make my attachment figures happy, to be safe, to be in connection, to be good, I need to shut down these emotions and voila, you have a person who can become hypervigilant about their emotions. They might feel a lot of tension in their body, maybe especially around new people or authority figures and a person who goes throughout their life intellectualizing things rather than feeling things. This is what really happens with trauma, not necessarily that is stored in the tissues of our body, and so healing from this, the unifying property of all of this, is updating the predictions.
That includes the predictions your body is making. We want to update the predictions so that your body no longer needs to be hypervigilant and tense, and there are many different ways to work with that, but they all use the same unifying process of memory reconsolidation, which is where we can take an old experience and a new experience at the same time, and the brain will take that new data in and essentially reorganize its predictions so that the old prediction no longer feels as true to the brain because of the new data, the new experiences, and thus you will no longer have the hypervigilance, the intellectualization, etc. So today I’m excited to dive into this case about somatic experiencing since somatic work is such a key part for many people of shifting their experience, and if you want to read more about the article that came out or the article I wrote on this a couple months ago, I will link them here.
We’re also going to be voting today on what our next book is going to be. I also held a little vote on Instagram, and so we had some ideas there of what people would like to read, but please do cast your vote for the next book that we’re going to read. I think we will begin our next book in June, and the rest of these cases in this book I will do on sort of an ad hoc basis as special little bonus episodes.
So thanks for being here and let’s dive in. So as stated, in this case we’re going to be discussing somatic experiencing. This was a model developed by Peter Levine, who was kind of founded on top of some of these older models that were focused on a bottom-up approach, and bottom-up approaches focus on the felt sense, body sensations.
This is kind of where we get the term of like somatic work or body work versus a top-down approach that focuses on thoughts, behaviors, meaning. And so somatic experiencing is founded on this idea that stress and trauma are stuck states in the physiology. So if you think about like the window of tolerance model, there’s this idea that we can kind of get stuck in these states of activation, fight and flight, and stuck in these states of deactivation, essentially hypo, arousal, shutdown, freeze, and fawn.
So you could think about it as if our body were a car, that our body might get stuck with the gas pedal on, it might get stuck with the emergency brake on, or you might get stuck in both states at the same time, which is hitting the gas with the emergency brake on. So the idea behind somatic experiencing is to kind of complete some of these self-protective and defensive responses that didn’t get to happen. The idea being that oftentimes something is traumatizing because something really hard or stressful happens to us and we never get to have completion or an end around it, right? So maybe we get into a car accident and it’s so overwhelming and stressful dealing with the police and the other person and all of these things that our body never gets to feel the completion that now we are safe.
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So it’s not a form of exposure therapy. It’s not a type of therapy that is like, now tell me every single piece of the memory and we’re just going to watch you get flooded with emotion and then your body will learn it’s okay. Instead, it’s a very gentle approach.
They’re very big on titration. The word titration meaning little bits at a time so that we’re not re-overwhelming the body. Now, this is the very first modality that I trained in as a therapist and so I’m excited to look at this case a little bit more together to understand how somatic experiencing might correlate with the therapeutic reconsolidation process we’ve been looking at here, which we know is the process to activate that memory reconsolidation.
I’m so glad that we’re doing this case together because I think in this idea of shifting from the body keeps the score and it’s held in the tissues to the predictive model, somewhere along the way we got the idea that we shouldn’t be doing somatic work. It’s not necessary. Or other people got the idea that it’s the only way to heal.
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Very often intellectualizers are taught it’s the only way to heal. And what I like about getting to read this book together is we can see somatic experiencing and other bottom-up approaches are just one way to activate that same process of memory reconsolidation. And body or somatic-based work can be incredibly helpful for many people.
But it is not the only way to access memory reconsolidation. That being said, we know these predictions, these schemas, these parts in our brain are stored with context. So there is always a body-based component to it, whether you’re aware of it or not.
For example, intellectualizers and perfectionists may often feel nothing in their bodies or just tension. And that lets us know that some of the context, some of the memories and implicit learning stored in the brain are around the need to brace and to shut off their experience. That’s that driving the car with the emergency brake on.
They learn to override themselves. So somatic work might be a difficult place for them to start because they don’t feel anything in their body at all. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do somatic work.
They might really enjoy it. Or later on down the line, as they’ve gone through some memory reconsolidation, they might be more drawn to it. But it’s so good to know we don’t have to get really fixated on what the right type of therapy is and whether we should or shouldn’t do body-based therapy.
All types of therapy are valid. And as we’ve seen here, all of these different modalities have the capacity to carry out memory reconsolidation. So you can pick whatever car you like.
You’ve probably heard me use this analogy before. You want a Lexus, you want a Toyota, you want a Honda, whatever. But is the engine right? Is the engine using these neurobiological mechanisms of change that we know are necessary, like memory reconsolidation here, like metacognition, which is learning to observe ourselves like this really curious wildlife observer.
So if you have felt pulled between that of what is the right type of therapy for me to do, know that it’s important for you to pick the car that works for you, quote unquote, just to understand that as long as the car has the engine of these mechanisms of change, then they’re all getting us to the same place, which is updating these learnings in our brain so that we can live in the present without having to also live out the past at the same time. So this case, the person is named Bonnie, and Bonnie is also a mental health therapist. And this is a demo done by Peter Levine in a training.
And Bonnie presented with this sort of very sudden, dramatic change of personality that she had seen develop several months earlier. So she had generally experienced herself as this really well-balanced, functioning, assertive person to someone who was sort of submissive and explosive. And she was finding that this huge shift was jeopardizing her relationship with colleagues, and that she had a lot of feelings of self-hatred and self-criticism around this kind of submissive, explosive behavior.
So this exploration of what the symptoms are, quote unquote, from a coherence therapy perspective, what the strategy is, survival strategy, from a norm perspective, fulfills that TRP, therapeutic reconsolidation process of step A. We have to know what the symptoms are, what are the things you’re not wanting, and what are the things you’re wanting. So then Peter Levine asked her to remember an encounter with a colleague where she could see this sudden shift in behavior. So great, we know that this is step B of the process, where we are wanting to activate those old implicit learnings, those schemas, those parts, those protective strategies, to show us the problematic pattern, to show us the prediction the brain is making.
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Because if we don’t know what that is, we can’t work with it. So in our own process, we want to know what happens when this gets activated within us. What happens when you need to set a boundary with someone, or ask your boss something, or have a need, or when a strong feeling comes up, we want to know what happens in that moment.
So when Bonnie is asked this, she kind of gets hunched over. And Peter reflects this back to her, you know, I notice that you get kind of hunched over. And when she’s asked to describe how that feels, she talks about how it makes her hate herself.
She feels this really, really strong self-loathing. And when they go back to the body, right, somatic-based model, what do you notice when you feel this self-loathing? And she said that her heart and mind were racing a million miles a minute. And then she noticed this really sweaty, smelly, hot sensation on her back.
And she starts feeling nauseated. So you can see here that they’re kind of following, tracking, being curious, her felt sense experience. There are thoughts and curiosities too, right? Like this idea that makes her hate herself, but they’re really following what’s happening in the body and being curious about that.
So at this point, Bonnie gets very agitated. She kind of gets pale. She wants to get up and leave the room, but she keeps tracking it and staying with it in this demo with Peter, and it diminishes.
Okay, so we have this ebb and flow of sensation, which often happens. The sensations will come up and they’ll feel very, very big. We’ll feel the need to manage them in some way.
But in a somatic experiencing session, when you slow things down, you have the therapist with you providing some co-regulation and you follow the little pieces, then much can be revealed. So in this case, the tension started rising again on the back of her right arm and shoulder. And she started to feel this impulse to kind of push her elbow backward.
So in this case, Peter is putting his hand there as a support so that she could push her arm back into his hand with resistance. And then she starts to have this shaking and trembling and her legs start moving. So we’re kind of getting clues that something is playing out here, right? Some implicit learning is happening where she’s following the impulses in her body.
And we know impulses can come from implicit learnings. There can be body sensations that come from implicit learnings. These come from our past experiences and they’re stored in our brain, where our brain says, hey, you need this context right now.
You need to feel these body sensations and feel these impulses so that you can respond appropriately and keep yourself safe. Thus far in this case, we still don’t know what happened to Bonnie to make her feel these experiences. And that’s okay, because actually in somatic experiencing, you don’t always have to have the full story right away to work with the sensations that are arising.
And sometimes the sensations don’t necessarily have words with them right away. Sometimes the words come later. And so that’s why this can be a really interesting model for people who don’t necessarily have words about what happened to them or why they’re feeling these sensations or acting out in these ways that don’t make sense to them.
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But sometimes their body can kind of tell a story. And so when we talk about the body telling a story, what we’re really saying is the schema or that part or those implicit learnings, that’s the brain setting off all of the context that includes thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, and impulses. So while one of us, for example, might be a very cognitive forward person and we only have words, we don’t feel the feelings, we don’t feel the body sensations.
Other times we might be able to access body sensations that don’t have words, but they all stem from the same place in our brain, these implicit emotional learnings. So as they continue tracking and being curious together, and while this is quite a short case in the book, in a somatic session, there’s a lot of slowing things down. This session might have moved more quickly because it’s a demo and Bonnie is also a mental health clinician.
She’s obviously training in somatic experiencing, so she might be able to move much more quickly. In regular old garden variety therapy, this might happen over many, many sessions, but there’s a curiosity, there’s a noticing, it’s just the same as all the other cases we’ve been talking about. Metacognition, we’re being the curious wildlife observer.
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We’re not making assumptions that we know what the answer is, we’re gathering data, and that’s a very important part of the therapeutic reconsolidation process. We need to gather data about what schema is playing out, what is it keeping us safe from, what is the emotional learning happening here. So as the case goes on, her arm is kind of pressing backward, her body shaking decreases, and she starts to feel like she could move if she wanted to, and she feels this desire to be propelled forward.
And suddenly she has this image of a streetlight and this couple that had helped her and she said, I got away. And she remembers this moment 18 months earlier where she had been walking home and was attacked. A man grabbed her and used a knife to threaten to kill her if she didn’t cooperate, and she somehow managed to kind of break free and ran away, and two people helped take care of her until the police could come.
And so her body was remembering in these moments what had happened to her. In her life, she sort of returned to normal. That’s what she thought, that’s what she felt.
But it was about a year later that these behavioral responses started happening where she would feel this very submissive and then volatile response. And you can kind of see here, she talks about how she was kind of molded up against this man as he was holding a knife to her throat. And we can kind of think about that as like her body and her brain were deciding in that moment how to best keep her safe.
If someone’s holding a knife to your throat, you can’t fight back against them, it would be dangerous. And so there was almost the submissive nature, as you’ve heard of the fawn response, right? This fawning to be as safe as she could in that moment. Remember, these are all responses that our brain is generating very, very quickly to best determine how to stay safe.
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So that submissive fawning is never, ever, ever a choice. It’s your brain determining in microseconds how to best stay safe in a situation. So really, we can see it makes sense that she would have this sort of submissive collapse, and then this explosion when she was in this situation where her safety was threatened in so many ways.
And so that is what we kind of see playing out in her life. Now, she said after the session that she felt more and more back into her former self, and could feel capability and empowerment. So that’s the final step of the therapeutic reconsolidation process, right? Cessation of the symptoms.
Essentially, what do we mean by that? That doing this session where her body could sort of go through what had happened in a different way and feel the like pressing and running away and what she would have wanted to be able to do in that moment, that her brain could take in that learning and say, oh, that was really scary, but I’m safe now. And so we can see that some memory reconsolidation has occurred for these symptoms, quote unquote, these strategies to cease, to be turned down. So as they’re analyzing in this case here, we can make the hypothesis that in this event, she formed and acquired two emotional learnings.
Remember, we acquire these learnings from experiences. Our brain takes the data in and parses it to figure out what we need to learn to stay safe. And so one of the emotional learning the quality of this man being there in the submission and the sweaty, smelly, hot, nauseating.
And then the other was this urgency, urgency, urgency to be totally submissive, to not be killed, right? Her life was literally at stake. So this sweaty, smelly, nauseating feeling and this submission to stay safe kind of got fused together. These are the emotional learnings that happened for her during this attack.
Her system learned to predict to say, fast submissiveness in all encounters is the way to stay safe. So the brain is now predicting that any encounter with a person requires submissiveness from her. And yes, that can happen from this traumatizing experience.
That learning gets fused in there to say, this is what I must do. If someone tries to make me do something against my will, I’ll be killed unless I respond with this submissiveness. That schema was incredibly strong.
And this is the way we would understand it in memory reconsolidation in the TRP process. And so there’s such an important step here that we want to discuss where we’re looking at the step C, right, which is where we need that contradictory knowledge. I love this case because it demonstrates how in body work, but in other types of work too, that’s not always obvious.
It’s not always a clear juxtaposition disconfirming experience. This is important because the number one question I get is how do I make myself have a disconfirming experience? And that in itself likely stems from an urgency to want to feel better, which is so valid, but we can’t always force create disconfirming experiences. And sometimes they even happen without us knowing.
So what we can see here is that sometimes these schemas, right, so this one, if someone tries to make me do something against my will, I’ll be killed unless I respond with submissiveness. When it becomes, when we become aware of it, this is why I emphasize metacognition and observing. When we become aware that that’s what was happening, she wasn’t aware that’s what was happening.
It was stored deeply in her unconscious brain. But when it was brought to light in this session, she suddenly became aware of like, wait a second, in that situation with that person, it was true, but it’s not true with everyone else. She wasn’t able to have that conscious awareness, that metacognitive awareness from herself to her other parts in an IFS term, right, from the adult consciousness to the child consciousness in a NARM term.
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She wasn’t able to observe that experience within her. It was deeply held away. Her brain, you know, you think our brains kind of don’t want us to see behind the veil.
They don’t want us to see these things. That’s the way it’s designed. Because if we see those things, and we suddenly think it’s safe to not be submissive, then our brain thinks we will be killed.
So our brain will use anything and everything to try to keep us on what it thinks are the safe pathways based on the predictions that it’s making. So it’s actually in this session that she could become aware it was happening, that that was enough contradictory knowledge to create step C in the therapeutic reconsolidation process. So that’s so cool to notice, because disconfirming experiences can come in many ways.
And that’s why I often think like, sometimes you think you know the learning, but you don’t. It’s really an excavation. And you keep going down through the layers ever so gently.
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And sometimes then you just hit upon the disconfirming experience. It’s you seeing what’s happening. It’s you relating to yourself in a different way.
It’s you having enough data to put the full picture together and suddenly saying, oh my gosh, that makes sense. So I really appreciate this case for demonstrating that. You know, and then holding that contradictory knowledge is what carries out the steps one, two, and three that kind of disconfirm the schema and update the old learning, the old prediction through the reconsolidation process, right? That’s the prediction error.
And this predictive model is what everybody’s talking about. When they’re saying it’s not that the body keeps the score, it’s that the body is part of the entire narrative that the brain is holding. And just one more interesting piece about this case is that she didn’t really have this experience for the first year.
And so we don’t know why it got reactivated, right? It could be because of the anniversary. There could have been something like elevated stress can bring these up. It could have been her encountering someone who had that like dominating or sweaty, smelly male experience.
There could have really been a variety of situations, maybe something where it required a lot of assertiveness from her, where the brain could have gotten alarmed into bringing that prediction back up. That can happen. Sometimes predictions get reactivated well after the learning occurred.
And that can make it even more confusing if you’re trying to get to it through insight alone. Because you’re like, nothing has happened. Why, why, why am I stuck in this? Then you might criticize yourself or try to counteract yourself through behavioral management, which as we know, can only get us so far.
It doesn’t lead to the reconsolidation, to the update of the predictions. So something I really love about somatic experiencing is that curiosity, that noticing, right? Because we know these juxtapositions can happen even if the client doesn’t verbalize or know that the disconfirming experience has happened. But it’s from the therapist to be able to say, what just happened? What are you noticing? What just shifted? These are big things we would use in somatic experiencing.
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Allows the client to become aware of what’s happening in that moment. Oh, yeah, I’ve always felt so tense in this place. And just now, I noticed a little lightness.
And how is it to that lightness? Actually, it’s okay. Actually, it kind of feels good. So even in that moment, there’s a disconfirming experience potentially that you always had to be tight and braced.
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Right now, you’re a little less tight and braced. And it actually feels okay and even good. That might not seem like a big deal to you.
But it can be a huge deal to the brain and body. And that’s something I really love and value about somatic work is we can shift things in such subtle ways that can have such long lasting consequences. And it accesses things that we don’t always have the words for.
You might not think as an intellectualized or a perfectionist that you’re bracing all the time, you might not have a sense of that. But maybe it just comes out through like jaw pain or migraines or whatever else it is. But sometimes, as you start to do this work, and you start to become curious, not just about your thoughts, not just about your emotions, but also about what’s happening in the body, you start to notice even the numbness is a sign, right? Even the fact that you feel nothing is a sign.
But there will be little clues and cues like tension in certain places. And when that shifts, and we can notice that it shifts, and that it’s safe and okay that it shifts. There’s the metacognition again, right? There are a lot of layers.
When we make the implicit explicit, that’s when we can have these disconfirming experiences without even knowing it. Anyone who’s ever worked with me knows that sometimes it’s annoying, how slow I take things, and how much I’m kind of pausing and carefully, gently interrupting to ask them to observe what they’re noticing and how it is to notice that. Because I know sometimes we don’t get past three sentences of a story.
And we could spend a whole session being with the implicit, making it explicit, and seeing huge shifts as a result, without having to overwhelm ourselves with the story, with the analyzing, with the hypervigilance. And so somatic and body work can be a really, really useful way of doing this. This is actually why, too, I like practices like glimmer practices.
And if you were following me on Instagram, you know that I do the glimmers most every Friday where we come together and share our glimmers. And you also know that I’m not a big behavioral person, right? I’m not really focused on skills and things like that. But why do I like little things like glimmers? Weirdly enough, it might seem wild.
But even something like glimmers, which is where we walk around our lives, and we just notice little tiny things that might make us say, oh, this is nice, or oh, I like that. They don’t have to be big things. We don’t want them to be big things.
But even just noticing a little something like, I’m looking out my window right now, very gray, gloomy day. I don’t really like that kind of weather. But I see a little seagull perched on the roof across the way.
I love seagulls. They’re such sweet little birds. And so I just noticed a little like, oh, that’s nice to see.
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Like, I love to see him perching over there, kind of hiding out from the rain. And so just that is a little different thing for my brain. If my brain were feeling really tight, intense, and one of my learnings was that nothing was safe all of the time, and something bad’s always going to happen if something good happens.
These little tiny moments of like, not just seeing something I like, but naming it to myself and noticing how I’m kind of like, oh, that’s nice. That actually sends a little signal to my brain of like, hey, maybe everything isn’t dangerous all the time. And the noticing of it too helps make the implicit, we’re seeing things we like all the time, color, shapes, whatever it might be.
It might be sounds, et cetera. Making it explicit helps my brain take in the data and make a new prediction that says, oh, even amidst a cloudy, gloomy day when maybe I don’t feel that good or whatever it might be, something can be okay too. So we can be integrating little things like this all of the time, not to try to counteract ourselves.
That’s very important. Not to try to say you have to do this so you change and feel better, but to just notice with curiosity, what happens when I see something I like? I can notice my thoughts, emotions, body sensations. Maybe I feel just a tiny settling and that’s all new data for our brain.
So this was an extra long episode today. Thanks for bearing with me. I have a lot to say about somatic work because I’m super passionate about it, but I also have not liked the way it’s been co-opted onto people so that people who have trauma think that they just have to figure out the right way to stretch their hips or pay tens of thousands of dollars for programs to feel better.
You don’t have to. And somatic work can be a very valuable part of the process of healing from trauma. We need to make sure that we’re activating that memory reconsolidation process and making the implicit explicit.
Thanks for being here. Don’t forget to vote for our next book, and I hope you have a great week or weekend ahead. Take care.
A few reflective questions:
If you imagine being asked to set a boundary, ask for something you need, or let a strong feeling come up, what happens in your body? Is there tension somewhere, a bracing, a numbness, or an anxiety?
When you notice something you like, a color, a sound, a small creature out the window, what happens if you name it to yourself and stay with it for a moment longer than usual? Does anything shift, even slightly? Do you slow down or become more anxious? Do you feel tighter in some places and softer in others? Does your breathing speed up or slow down?
Where in your life might your brain still be predicting from an old experience that has passed, asking you to brace for something that might be different in the present?
