The secret to long lasting change
(congruence experiments and building new roads)
Hi, tiny sparks readers and listeners! Two quick notes for you: first, a gift! I created this free ritual guide for another area of my work, Field Day, where I create tools and practices to help you engage more deeply with the world around you. As a supporter of my work, you can find it free here. Second, I started a Patreon! For years, people have asked me to create longer-form video, and I really have such a passion for teaching and helping people get unstuck from old patterns. If you’d like to join me (it’s free!), you can do so here. Thanks for being here!
There’s something uniquely painful about realizing you’ve lived most of your life as the planner, the analyzer, the observer, but not the one actually in the experience, actually living your life.
Imagine being a brilliant travel agent who knows the ins and outs of every destination, every charming street in Paris, every hidden café in Rome, every sunrise spot in Bali, but you’ve never boarded a plane or even left your hometown. You’ve curated itineraries for everyone else. You’ve researched the culture, imagined the meals, read all the menus, and watched all the YouTube videos. You know exactly how to do it and help everyone around you plan their trips. But you? You just keep getting stuck.
Not because you don’t want to go (you secretly desperately want to go), but because somewhere along the line you learned that it was safer, less risky, quieter, less overwhelming to stay home, planning, thinking, and scanning.
This is the experience of those of us who have complex trauma, emotionally immature parents, and early developmental ruptures. Maybe you consider yourself a people pleaser, a perfectionist, an intellectualizer. If you see yourself in this, you’re not alone.
Many of us who grew up in emotionally unpredictable environments learned that to feel was to risk. To be present was to be vulnerable. To speak from the gut, to cry at the wrong moment, to show too much joy or too much fear or too much of anything was dangerous. Even if it wasn’t outright physically dangerous, it was enough to make us feel misunderstood, criticized, missed, misattuned to, or met with silence.
Over time, the pathway gets built in our brain: it’s safer to think, to not have needs, to not rock the boat, and to not be ourselves, but to be what others want us to be. It’s safer to analyze than to act. It’s safer to plan the trip than to go on it.
From the outside, people with relational trauma often look very self-aware. But inside, it feels like being stuck at home with your bags packed, itinerary in hand, boarding pass ready, but you never actually get in your car and drive to the airport.
And if you’ve ever sat in a therapist’s office feeling like you already know everything, feeling like nothing they say is new or surprising, but also nothing seems to change, you might be here. These patterns, like intellectualization, are brilliant, adaptive, and often socially rewarded. But it’s not the same as being present in ourselves, being authentic, making change, and having what we want in our lives.
You might be asking - okay, we get it, yes this is us, what do we do with this awareness???
The first step in creating new neural pathways and new habits, what I call the self-remapping process, isn’t to stop thinking so much or to drop into the body (the overthinking and disconnection are symptoms, not behaviors to be managed!).
It’s not to force yourself to feel more.
It’s simply to get curious about your internal map, the routes that are available to you now, the routes that are encoded as safety roads, and the roadways you want to travel on but that don’t exist yet.
What road are you hoping for? Where do you want to go that you haven’t felt safe enough to move toward? Is it deeper relationships, more authentic expression, finally allowing yourself rest or creativity or softness or risk? You don’t have to get there yet. But it helps to know what you’re aiming toward. Without clarity about where you want to go, it’s hard to recalculate and update your route.
Once we name the destination, we start asking: why hasn’t the route formed? Why is my brain so focused on keeping me on the same old roads?
The answer is not because you’re lazy, broken, or not trying hard enough. More often, it’s because your early map, the same map you’re using now, doesn’t include a safe, tested route to that destination. It might have hundreds of roads, but none that lead where you want to go.
The atlas might be full of routes like “anticipate what everyone else wants and deliver it perfectly,” or “never show sadness because no one knows what to do with it,” or “if you share your excitement, someone will laugh at you.” These routes were carved from lived experience. They were protective. They helped you survive. But they don’t necessarily help you arrive where you want to go.
The good news: we can build new roads!
To build new pathways in our brain, we don’t start with forced vulnerability, behavioral management, or performative breakthroughs. We begin by noticing and observing. Noticing the moments that already contradict the old story.
These moments are what I call congruence experiments. These aren’t big dramatic shifts, they’re small, real-life moments where we pause just long enough to notice what we usually do, and try something just slightly different.
Let’s say you always over-apologize in conversations. You notice your boss is tense at work after a big meeting and immediately assume you did something wrong. You feel tight, tense, and feel pressured to immediately begin apologizing and detailing ways you can make things better, even when there’s no evidence that you did anything wrong at all. Your boss could be upset or tense for a million reasons.
A congruence experiment might look like this: the next time that happens, you wait 10 seconds. You feel the urge to apologize, but you just breathe. You observe, in the moment or later on, what was happening for you in your thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. What old roadways does your brain and nervous system want to take? Do those feel familiar? Where might you have learned those? In that 10-second pause, even if you go on to over-apologizing, you’re doing construction on your brain to build a new roadway in your atlas.
That moment is small, but boy, is it powerful. Your brain expected a road to go one way, and you gently chose a different turn in that moment. As you continue to try a new roadway, eventually you get feedback that makes the new roadway even stronger.
If the person doesn’t get mad or reject you, if nothing bad happens, your brain logs that moment as new data and starts to say - hmm, maybe, possibly, potentially, other people being slightly upset isn’t dangerous.
That’s how rerouting begins. Not with pushing or perfection, but with these tiny shifts in real time that say: (maybe) I’m allowed to try a new response. (Possibly) I’m allowed to stay with myself for a beat longer. (Potentially) I’m allowed to learn from what actually happens and know I can handle whatever comes.
Congruence experiments are not about proving or controlling anything. They’re about showing your brain and your nervous system, little by little, that another way is possible. And they only work when your brain has pathways that are safe enough to try. That’s why the noticing comes first. The observing is the work. You notice the urge to perform, to fix, to hide, and then you wait. Just ten seconds. Just long enough to ask, is there another way through this moment? Could it be possible that interaction last week wasn’t as dangerous as it felt like it was?
That’s the work. That’s how we update the map.
So what can you do right now?
Here are some small steps to update the routes in your brain:
1. Catch the moment when the survival roads are activated
Practice neutral observation. Oh, I’m analyzing instead of feeling again. Oh, I’m criticizing myself again. That simple awareness is the beginning of changing the route.
2. Pause after connection.
If you share something with a friend, a therapist, or even in your journal, notice what happens in the pause that follows. Is there a flicker of discomfort? A moment of relief? A tiny part of you that feels seen? Let that moment linger for three seconds longer than usual.
3. Look for the mismatch moments.
Track one time this week when something went better than your brain predicted, when you expected rejection but felt accepted. When you were more you, the world didn’t fall apart. Observe it and remember, you’re building a new road; it takes time, but it’s happening, one tiny moment at a time.
And, for my journaling friends, here are a few prompts to explore (or take with you to therapy!).
When I think about the destination I long for but won’t let myself reach for? Is it more rest, more connection, more authenticity, more space to care for yourself? What do you notice in your thoughts, emotions, and body sensations as you imagine that? (Just imagining that is a congruence experiment and is actively updating the routes in your brain!).
What’s one memory where I learned that being seen, felt, or known wasn’t safe? What did I do in response? How has that shaped the routes I travel now?
What’s a recent moment when I felt slightly more like myself than usual? What was different? Did I notice anything afterward, emotionally or physically? How does it feel to think about it now?
Wishing you wellness,
*trisha
~Here’s a picture of some rolling hills and curious sheep in the English countryside.
~It’s the best fruit season ever! If you’ve been around for awhile, you know how much I enjoy peaches and all sorts of peach recipes in the summer. Here is one- a peach and burrata caprese salad that I plan on making a lot this summer from Lindsey Eats…I mean, can you go wrong with peaches and cheese? I may even add some hot honey to spice it up!
~You all know I have a thing for birds, and over at Field Day, I have just released a hand-illustrated by me bird deck (pre-order only)! I saw this post by Morgan Harper Nichols, and the combination of her writing and illustrations with birds is just *chef’s kiss.* Be sure to click on the post to read her words and learn more about blue jays in the process!
This is such a wonderful piece! I’m a therapist and have shared it with several clients~we have all found it so soothing and encouraging to read, and have loved the bite-sized practices. Thank you so much for the work that you put into this space!!
Love the format in which you presented the internal family systems and how shows up in us. And how to spot the moment to choose a change, for new neural pathways. Visually, coincise, on point. Thank you for this short lesson. Altough i’m familiar with the concept, i loved how you brought it up.