Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Unlocking the Emotional Brain. If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we slowly and thoughtfully explore this book together. You can also listen on Spotify. These episodes are meant to help translate dense theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change. We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time.
This book takes us deep into the science of memory reconsolidation, one of the most important mechanisms for understanding how lasting change actually happens. It helps explain why insight alone is rarely enough, and how healing can occur after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up in environments where our emotional needs were not consistently met.
If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience. That includes our live sessions, ongoing discussions, and the complete archive of past reads like No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m genuinely grateful you’re here and reading along with me.
This week, we’re continuing into the section of the book that walks through different therapy modalities, looking at how each one creates transformational change through the same underlying mechanism: memory reconsolidation. Today, we’re focusing on interpersonal neurobiology, a framework developed by Dan Siegel in the 1990s that looks at how our early attachment experiences shape these mental models, these big books of rules about how the world works, how relationships work, and how safe we are allowed to feel inside of them.
What I love about going through these cases together is that it keeps reinforcing something I think is so important: it doesn’t matter which modality a therapist uses. What matters is whether they are working with the right mechanisms. And those mechanisms, again and again, look remarkably similar underneath the surface. In this episode, we’re going to look at how interpersonal neurobiology activates the reconsolidation process, and we’re going to follow a case that shows something I find genuinely fascinating: how the patterns we carry aren’t always just ours. Sometimes we are holding something that traveled through the people before us.
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Hi and welcome back to our book club read-along of Unlocking the Emotional Brain. We are doing a deep dive into this book that tells us all about memory reconsolidation, transformational change, and the therapeutic reconsolidation process. And what all of that means is we are looking at what the mechanisms of change are within therapy.
What is it that allows us to actually create long-lasting change versus feeling like we always have to manage, to be managing our habits, to be managing our behaviors, to be reframing our thoughts. There’s a time and a place for those activities. But this book guides us into deeper understanding of how we can actually create transformational change and work with the root cause of our thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, and patterns in the present, rather than having to try to whack-a-mole down the symptoms that stem from them.
So it’s a really exciting book. It puts together a lot of research into this process. And we are now in the part of the book where we are diving into different modalities, different types of therapy, and looking at how memory reconsolidation plays a role in their process of creating transformational change.
This week we’re going to be talking about interpersonal neurobiology. This is a type of psychotherapy that was created by Dan Siegel in the 1990s, and it too has an exploration into emotional implicit schemas that have been formed in response to patterns of distressing interaction that we might experience in our infancy and in our childhood. So Dan Siegel has done a lot of wonderful work in this field, and let’s look at a little bit of how interpersonal neurobiology uses memory reconsolidation to create long-lasting change.
And before we dive in, if you are new here and you’re not familiar with some of these terms like memory reconsolidation or transformational change, you can go back and listen to the full archive where we have gone through each of these terms and talked about what that means from a mind-body component. So you can see a theme in a lot of these modalities that we’ve discussed so far, that there is this idea of schemas, patterns, parts, survival strategies, and interpersonal neurobiology holds that same idea that these mental models form by an individual and are part of what create our symptoms or our patterns in the present. Think of these mental models like a big book of the rules of engagement.
It’s all of the ways that you learned to interact with the world, positive, negative, and neutral. Not all implicit learnings or rules of engagement are negative. Some of them are pro-social, meaning they are about how we behave in the world to be kind to others, to be in community, to be in connection.
Others are about ourselves, our self-concept, how we see ourselves in the world and relating to others, and they can be pieces of our identity. And others are around trying to stay safe and in connection and prevent damage. And those are the ones that can generate symptoms in the present that come from this early, ongoing, insecure attachment in relationship.
And sometimes we can think about that as harm that we experienced in our early lives. And for some of us, it was very clear that there was harm. And for others of us, it’s less clear.
There wasn’t necessarily a direct harm experience, but perhaps like that earlier book we read, we had emotionally immature parents. Perhaps our parents were under a lot of stress themselves. So we got that slot machine parent where we never knew whether we were going to get love and connection or withdrawn or snapped at and sent away.
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All of those insecure moments in an attachment relationship can create these thought, emotion, body sensation patterns of us trying to figure out how to stay safe in this confusing world. So interpersonal neurobiology holds that same idea. They also, much like AEDP and some of these other modalities, hold the idea that the therapeutic relationship, the experience between the therapist and client, can create that reparative attachment experience that can help upgrade our brain functioning in the present.
So as we saw earlier in the AEDP model, the experience of being reflected to from the therapist or having the therapist be this safe, curious person when these patterns or emotions arise in itself is a disconfirming experience. And remember that disconfirming experience is where something different happens from what our brain is expecting to happen. In the predictive brain model, we call that a prediction error.
So if your brain is predicting that, for example, someone’s going to hurt you or send you away when you feel your emotions, and then you get to be present with this therapist that not only doesn’t send you away, but is so curious about them with you, that reflects them with you, that rides the wave with you, that is an experience where your brain predicted you would be hurt or sent away, but instead you get someone who stays in it with you. So a lot of therapeutic modalities hold the idea that that therapeutic relationship is in itself a disconfirming experience, which is part of the memory reconsolidation process. So then interversal neurobiology relies on the client’s felt-sense experience of the therapist’s empathetic emotional attunement, the guidance from the therapist for attending to, noticing, and naming these quote-unquote right brain activities where those implicit learnings are held or unconscious learnings are held, guidance for how to identify the way current triggers might resemble past experiences, and then cultivating all of that into an integrated awareness of what was suffered in the past, the idea being that that will end the projection of the past onto the present.
So again, we see very similar experiences between some of the models we’ve talked about so far, internal family systems, AEDP, EMDR, somatic experiencing, and this is why I always want to emphasize, and I love that this book goes through all of these modalities, it doesn’t matter what modality you choose, as long as they are focusing on these mechanisms of change, and as long as you feel connected to the model and the therapist, then you have everything you need to make a change, because they all kind of hold these same unifying concepts of the therapeutic relationship and the therapeutic reconsolidation process using memory reconsolidation, and interpersonal neurobiology is the same. Now this case is slightly different from some of the other cases we’ve seen, just because of the way that interpersonal neurobiology publishes and shares their information. This is a recounting of a therapist named Bonnie about their case, so it’s not quite as in-depth as some of the other cases we’ve seen.
However, I think it’s important to go through nonetheless to look at how interpersonal neurobiology might help us understand how we can activate this reconsolidation process. So in this case, the client’s name is Cerise, and Cerise came to therapy because all of her close relationships ended in her pulling away whenever the emotional intimacy became intense. So remember, this is step A of the process, symptom identification.
And I just want to make a little note about that off the start, that some modalities start with the symptom identification, others start with desire identification. So instead of what they want to move away from, they look at what they want to move toward. And I think interestingly enough, moving toward the desire is always the way that I have worked and found myself working in my own life and with my clients, because very often people will come in thinking that they have a very clear idea of what their symptoms are.
And again, we know symptom identification is step A in this process, but that doesn’t mean they know what they want. That doesn’t mean they know where they want to go. And because we know so much of the process of trauma, of having emotionally immature parents, of existing in the world in these difficult states, is that we get very disconnected from knowing what we want because of those lenses from our implicit learnings that color and change the way we view the world.
And so very often if I do ask people what they want, they might say something self-critical, or it might be around wanting other people to change their behavior, which of course makes sense. But it’s fairly typical that they might not have a sense of what they actually want for themselves. Because we are often disconnected from choice and flexibility and having needs, let alone having wants and desires, it can be really interesting to start with desire, what we want to move toward or wants, rather than what we don’t want to move toward.
Both are acceptable and valid, but since you’re listening to this not only for, you know, there might be some therapists who want to help their clients, but for yourself, it’s something you can be curious about too as you’re identifying all of your symptoms in step A of this process. You can be curious about what you might want for yourself that might reveal even more deeply held implicit learnings. You might not even be able to identify what you want for yourself.
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That in itself becomes the curiosity. What learnings do I have around wanting something, desiring something? So that’s a little side note from me, but models start differently, and I just want to notice that as we’re going together. And you are trying to apply this in your life to understand, starting with the symptoms makes sense, it’s part of this process.
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We can also be curious about what we’re wanting for ourselves, and very often our brain will then reveal even deeper symptoms there. Okay, so back to the case where they have identified that Ceres often pulls away when emotional intimacy becomes intense. And so in interpersonal neurobiology, they’re working their way through these childhood memories in which she had felt overwhelmed by her mother, but they didn’t really notice any change from working through these memories.
And so they tried to go deeper and deeper into this source of her fear, and she felt this backing away when she saw an image of her parents in their avoidance, so her parents avoiding each other. And so in memory reconsolidation process, the next step is looking at the underlying emotional learning. This is step B, right? So in this case, this self-protective distancing from her parents’ difficult relationship was looking alongside of, oh, that’s her pattern, right? She observed that in her parents, and then her pattern is distancing herself from her own potential relationship.
So there’s something about a learning here, about an expectation that being in any relationship, any romantic relationship, will have some entrapment into the misery that she saw her parents experience, right? So we know we’re always looking for the deeper learning. What are the rules we learned in our lives? And here we can see it wasn’t just about this avoidance that she experienced from her mother, but her parents’ relationship was so difficult, and she would have felt all the difficulty and pain in that as a child, and so her brain developed a learning that said, if I get myself into a romantic relationship, I too will be stuck in this suffering. So isn’t that interesting, right? We’re always looking for what does the brain think will happen? So if I let myself get close to someone, what does the brain think will happen? Do I even want to have a close relationship? That’s why I like looking at a desire approach.
So if you’re pulling away from emotional intimacy, do you want it? Do you want to be in a relationship? Is that what you’re really wanting for yourself? Because that would be revealing too. If that’s not what you really even want, why? And that’s where we might get to that learning too about any relationship being a trap. So I just want you to see that you can start in multiple directions and still come into that curiosity of what does my brain think will happen with this symptom? What is it protecting me from? What is this strategy? What is the lesser of the two sufferings? Remember, coherence therapy holds the two sufferings idea.
So there’s some suffering that is better to choose, in this case, better to kind of rupturing my own relationships when I get close to emotional intimacy, than letting myself get into this deep relationship and being trapped in misery. And we can see that laid out here. So as this case progresses, they’re looking to work with the quote unquote child states of mind and looking at these inner parents and talking about what was hurting or scaring them.
So many types of therapy use this idea of a child state. In internal family systems, we have the idea of parts, we have exile parts, manager parts, firefighter parts, all of which could represent these child experiences. In NARM, which is not discussed in this book, but we read the NARM book, if you want to go back and listen to that, they often refer to it as the child consciousness.
I want to emphasize here, implicit learnings can be acquired at any point in our lives, not just our childhood. But because there’s so much rapid development and attachment happening within our childhood, that’s very often why we look back there to see what we might have learned. We’re starting from scratch when we’re born, right? So we’re acquiring a lot of learning very quickly, which is why there’s often this focus on our experience when we were children, and what rules and learnings we may have acquired then.
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But of course, you can also gather learnings in your adult life too. When we’re talking about the consciousness or the child mind, what we’re really talking about is getting to that implicit knowledge, in this case, relating to her parents, looking at what she might have learned from this experience. And so in this interpersonal neurobiology case, the therapist is eliciting her knowledge and using the parent, each of the parents, as a representative of this process.
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So we’re connecting with this emotional learning that we didn’t know was there because it’s unconscious, right? So in this sense, they are connecting first with her father. So they’re looking at what has she internalized? What did she learn after observing with her father? And in this case, Cerise started to notice her body feeling that behavioral impulse to pull away when she felt a romantic partner coming in, wanting more connection. So this seems to imply that she learned that self-protective response of distancing from her father’s example.
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Okay, so that continues our information in step B of the process of memory reconsolidation, looking for those underlying emotional learnings. So they stay with this moment in the case, and they let her father know that they would stay with him. And she could feel this frightening loss of connection that her father had felt in the connection with her, with his depressed mother.
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Okay, so for her father’s experience, it wasn’t just about his relationship with her mother, but there was an experience he had with his own mother in which she was depressed and pull away from him. So her implicit knowledge, she learned from her father, who learned it from his mother’s emotional disconnection. So he learned to use that emotional disconnection to protect himself from the feeling of abandonment.
You can really see in this case how the patterns pass through generations. And this is the underlying quote-unquote schema, right? The pattern driving her relationship. So this ties up step B. We now know that there’s an expectation of emotional abandonment, and that is what needs to be unlearned.
So in this state, if you’re familiar with IFS The Parts work, which we talked about last time, the part in this case they are referring to as her father, you know, and that makes sense in this context where they really prioritize the early attachment figures, but this could just as easily be a part of us, right? We take on what we have observed and experienced, and we create our own internal parts. In this model, what they’re offering to this father part is this understanding, this comfort, this connection, things that had been missing for him throughout his childhood. And so that’s an ego state of her, as the authors call it.
Think of it as a part, a child consciousness, a survival strategy that she picked up and internalized from her father. And they are now offering to that part of her connection from herself, from her adult consciousness. She is offering to herself what she didn’t receive, which is that connection, that secure attachment from her quote-unquote adult ego state, right? The self with a capital S. And that is providing the disconfirming experience in this case.
So remember, in the therapeutic reconsolidation process, we find the symptoms, we find the emotional learning, we reactivate the experience, which they’re doing by going into this part. We provide the contradictory experience, which in this case is the secure attachment from the adult self and also from the therapist. And when we go into step three, it’s that we can hold both of those states at once.
And when we do that, the brain then reconsolidates the learning, meaning it updates the learning and says, oh, what happened in the past isn’t the same as what happened now. And she could feel this emotional release in the of that feeling of wanting to pull back. And so that disappearance of the somatic feeling that she was feeling, this desire to pull back, is the marker of transformational change.
It’s what lets us know that the learning has been updated. As the case goes on, they then work with her mother part, so the internal experience from her mother’s state. And this one doesn’t come quite as easily.
And I’m really glad that they both named this. It sometimes takes layers and layers and layers of work because the implicit learnings are tangled together to protect us, and because they all stack on top of each other through our lives. I always think of it like an archaeological dig.
We’re going through layers, and based on the era in which the layer developed, there will be different findings, different thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors associated there. And so in this case, they were talking about how as they worked with her mother part, they noticed the inner father watching the process and being curious. So that fearful response of withdrawing is no longer there.
And as they worked with the emotional layers from the mother, the internal mother, there was able to be this internal connected relationship. That dance of avoidance was over. And so after this happened, then her encounters with her parents and other memories, the clients, Cerise, they were softened.
They were turned down. The big emotional charge was not still there. So that is what this case looks like, and how we know transformational change has occurred is the symptoms are turned down.
The somatic symptoms, the cognitive symptoms, the emotional symptoms. Then she doesn’t have that same behavioral impulse to need to back away. And that is the final step, V, in this process, the behavioral and emotional freedom.
I just want to review again that this idea of the parent part, the adult part, and the child part are in many, many models of therapy. For example, transactional analysis is another one that includes those kind of ego states as parts. You can figure out what works best for you.
If you like thinking about it as your internal parent, if you like thinking about it from an IFS model with managers and firefighters, if you like thinking about the adult consciousness versus the child consciousness, it’s all about what works for you. I personally like to think about that idea that all of these schemas are really representations of what? Bundles of thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors related to the rules of engagement that we learned in our lives. And so each of those parts just represents different learnings like that archaeological dig, different layers of our experience developed at different times in our lives that our brain uses to predict what’s going to happen in the present versus what’s going to happen in the past.
I just so enjoy continuing to go through these cases with you because it gives us such a rich opportunity to learn together that there is no one right way to heal. There is just curiosity, observation, connection, excavation, and then building new experiences for ourselves. And very, very often the new experiences that we start with are internal, meaning how we relate to ourselves.
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And that gives us back so much agency, choice, power, and flexibility because we no longer have to rely on other people to give us those new experiences. Let me be clear, it is reasonable and makes sense to want the people around us to be safe and to meet our needs. And as we have agency, choice, and flexibility, those are the relationships we will feel drawn toward.
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But we do not need other people around us to give us the new experience that we’re wanting to be able to complete this memory reconsolidation process. And very often as we learn to meet ourselves in a different way, we will shift the way we show up in relationships in the present. And that very often leads to a change in that relationship as well.
So thank you again for being here. What a rich and interesting case this was. Based on your feedback, I think we’re going to go through all the cases.
We’re going to go through all the chapters and I’m so excited. I think I continue to learn so much. It’s my fourth or fifth time reading this book from these cases and I think it is the best way to see it applied.
It’s not just theoretical, then we really get to see it step by step. So I’d love to hear your thoughts, curiosities, what you learned from this case, and what you’re exploring. Wishing you a good week ahead.
