tiny sparks, big changes

Trisha Wolfe
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tiny sparks: finding your way in the world by building your resilience. all things trauma, nervous system regulation, intellectualization, people pleasing, perfectionism, and more. trishawolfe.substack.com

  1. How does Internal Family Systems Facilitate Healing?

    3H AGO

    How does Internal Family Systems Facilitate Healing?

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.com 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. If you’d like to learn more about getting unstuck and making lasting change in your life, I have two upcoming classes: 5 Steps to Change and Finding a New Story. 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 Part Two of the book, where the authors begin walking us through different therapy modalities and showing how they create transformational change through memory reconsolidation. Today, we’re focusing on Internal Family Systems. This section of the book is especially meaningful to me because one of the most common questions I get is how to know what kind of therapy actually helps people change. What matters most is not the name of the modality, but whether the therapy engages the mechanisms of change the brain requires in order to update old emotional learnings. Different therapies can look very different on the surface. They may use different languages, structures, or techniques. But underneath, when real change is happening, they are often doing something very similar. They are helping an old emotional learning become active while something genuinely different is experienced at the same time. That process is what allows the brain to reorganize and let go of patterns that once made sense but are no longer needed. In this episode, we’ll walk through case examples from IFS to see how this process unfolds in real sessions. We’ll look at how observing and being with ourselves in an emotion can help rewire old learnings we may have held for decades. My hope is that by the end, you’ll have a clearer sense of what to listen for, whether you’re choosing a therapist, doing your own inner work, or simply trying to understand why certain approaches finally help when others haven’t. (0:00 - 2:51) Hello and welcome back to our read-along book club where we are reading Unlocking the Emotional Brain. It is the book about memory reconsolidation and coherence therapy and we’re walking through it together where I guide you and translate the information in this book, talk a little bit about what it really means beneath all of the technical terms, and share with you how you might apply this in your life. I think this part of the book is one of the coolest parts of the book because it’s where they take their time and they go through these different models of therapy. This week, we’re going to look at internal family systems and examine how that transformational change of memory reconsolidation takes place using that model. I love this so much because one of the most frequent questions I get is about what type of therapy should I do if I’m an intellectualizer, if I’m a professionist, if I’m self-sabotaging, and of course the answer is at the end of the day there is no one right type of therapy modalities. And even the type of therapies discussed in this book, the therapist may not always be using the steps for transformational change, but it is possible because these modalities have all the things required to make that memory reconsolidation process happen. When we’re talking about these types of therapy, we’re not talking about the organization itself. There’s been a lot of things in the news recently about internal family systems and things that have happened within that organization. Just know when we’re talking about IFS, what we’re really talking about is parts work applied in this specific way. Parts work also comes from schema therapy. Coherence therapy in its own way uses parts work, though it may not refer to it as such. But when we think of parts work, parts are really a story humans have given to bundles of thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors in our brain. So all of those rules of engagement that we develop over our life, all of those implicit learnings are stored with context. And that context is the thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors that we experienced when they were happening. The choices we had to make about how to show up in our lives, to stay safe, to stay in connection. All of those things are stored in our predictive brain. And they’re bundled together often in these patterns that go together. So for example, an intellectualizer part may be a part of you, quote unquote, that is a bundle of implicit learnings where you learn to turn down your emotions, disconnect from yourself. Maybe you feel sort of numb or nothingness in your body. You analyze and ruminate and think all of the time. And the behaviors might be that you never slow down, you never fully connect with yourself. (2:51 - 7:23) You’re always going to the next to-do list, the next planner, the next thing. So we might call that a part in certain types of therapies. We might call that a schema in coherence therapy. We might call that a survival strategy in NARM. But all of those things mean the same thing, which they are those rules of engagement of the way that you learn to be in the world. And we can have different experiences of those rules of engagement based on what’s happening in front of us. For example, you might be an intellectualizer, quote unquote, that might be the part of you that you’re most familiar with. Those might be the strategies that you’re using in your everyday life. But you may also have a part that is a people pleaser. So based on the relationship you have the person who is in front of you, you may shift out of that intellectualized state and shift into this part of you that is very hypervigilantly attuned to other people and trying to make things okay for them. Or you may also have a part of you that is very critical alongside of an intellectualizer. Remember, again, these parts are just bundles of thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. So when we’re talking about these therapeutic modalities like internal family systems, we’re not talking about the organization itself because I’m not really qualified to make comments on it because I’m not involved in that organization. But we’re talking about the modality and how parts work might be used to make transformational change. Now one last thing before we dive in, we’re actually getting pretty close to the end of this book. We have a couple more weeks of talking about these different therapeutic modalities. But then there’s a really interesting part three where they go through some of these cases. And so I’d love to hear from you if you would like us to go through some of these cases together. I think it could be really interesting to really dive into some of these cases and look at these unique ways that they’re using coherence therapy. And so as long as that sounds good to you, then we will keep going. But if you would rather curtail part three and not go into the cases and move on to another book, it’s okay to let me know that too. So please feel free to comment, hear a reply, and let me know about going into part three. If we go into part three, it’s if we don’t, it might be closer to the end of March. And then you can also let me know if there’s another book you’d like to see about what comes next. I have some ideas in mind, but I’d love to hear from you. Is there a book about a therapeutic modality or boundaries or having needs or whatever it might be that you’re curious about? You would want to know how we can apply this lens to it of implicit learning, survival strategies, and making change? Let me know and we can start looking toward what comes next. So back into chapter 10, which is talking about internal family systems, and they lay out for us here right off the bat, how much this idea of parts or sub-personalities has been used in the therapeutic world. Of course, this very early idea from Jung, which many of you may have heard of, of the archetypes, right? But this has been a part of many types of therapy, transactional analysis, ego state therapy, gestalt therapy. There’s been parts work and sub-personalities and ego states all throughout the history of psychotherapy. If you were with us when you read No Bad Parts, then you might already be familiar with this, but Internal Family Systems was developed by Dr. Schwartz using that parts language to talk about parts of our experience that carry that emotional memory, referred to as a burden, of these unresolved intense sufferings, of these ruptures that we’ve experienced in our lives. And so they are kept away from our consciousness. And so the parts of us that are kept away in Internal Family Systems are called exiles. And then there are other parts that operate to protect those exiles, to prevent them from being access

    15 min
  2. How EFT and EMDR Create Lasting Change

    FEB 6

    How EFT and EMDR Create Lasting Change

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.com Episode Overview In this episode, we continue exploring Part Two of Unlocking the Emotional Brain, examining how memory reconsolidation works within two powerful therapeutic modalities: Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Through detailed case studies, we unpack what "changing emotion with emotion" actually means and why bilateral stimulation in EMDR creates lasting change. The Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process Step A: Identify symptoms (what and when) Step B: Uncover implicit emotional learnings (the gut-level beliefs) Step C: Access contradictory knowledge (the juxtaposition that updates the brain) This is the same engine of change across all effective therapies and in self-directed work. Practical Applications Observer Stance Practice slowing down and watching for subtle patterns. Self-criticism, helplessness, and hopelessness often hide in language that sounds very adult and rational. Notice statements like: "I never follow through because I'm an idiot" (sounds factual but reveals an implicit belief) "There's nothing that can be done" (helplessness) "That's just how I am" (resignation) True accountability sounds different: "It's been challenging to follow through, and I'm curious why, because I genuinely want to do these things." The Core Bind Most of us hold both the old learning and the contradictory knowledge simultaneously. This is the bind that keeps us stuck. Therapeutic work (or self-work) is about consciously experiencing both at the same time so the brain can update. Different Paths, Same Mechanism Whether you journal, walk, do somatic work, or attend therapy, the mechanism of change is the same: identifying implicit emotional learnings and creating experiences that contradict them. Find the approach that works for your nervous system and trust level. Important Notes Not all therapies work for all people at all times Complex trauma may make highly emotional approaches (empty chair, intense EMDR) overwhelming The practitioner, your trust in them, and your current capacity all matter These approaches never focus on symptom management (breathing, grounding) during the reconsolidation work itself - they target the underlying templates creating the symptoms

    12 min
  3. The Therapeutic Relationship as a Tool for Transformation

    JAN 23

    The Therapeutic Relationship as a Tool for Transformation

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.com Understanding AEDP and Memory Reconsolidation: A Deep Dive into Transformational Therapy Episode Overview This episode explores Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) and how different therapy modalities create transformational change through memory reconsolidation. Using the case study of "Daniel," a 40-year-old divorced father, the discussion illustrates how therapeutic presence and attunement can help clients update deeply held emotional learnings about relationships and safety. Key Concepts Memory Reconsolidation Explained The process allows the brain to unlearn old emotional patterns that no longer serve us Unlike exposure therapy (which builds distress tolerance), memory reconsolidation actually updates the original learning generating the emotion Requires accessing both the belief/cognition AND the feeling that makes it powerful The emotion is how our brain makes meaning out of original experiences AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) Core Principles Focused on transformational change from attachment trauma Emphasizes experiential process - there must be activation and feeling in the present Based on reparative attachment through corrective attachment experiences The therapeutic relationship itself can create memory reconsolidation The Experiential Component Why experiential matters: Needs activation - a feeling in the present of these learnings Not enough to only intellectualize Even just talking and being in relationship with a therapist activates emotions, body sensations, and memories The secure base of the therapeutic relationship is incredibly important for creating change The Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process in AEDP How AEDP Implements the Steps Unique approach: Steps 2, 1, 3, V, and A & B occur intermittently throughout Activation of the disconfirming experience: Therapist constantly asking "How is it for me to say this? How is it for me to be here with you?" Reactivation of symptom schema: Repetitions of "how it was versus how it is now" Observation (Verification): Noticing what is different - how the activation is different, how symptoms are different, increased ease For Therapists The Containment Strategy: Don't follow yourself or your client down into strategies and symptoms Always come back to the present Always notice: "What are you actually noticing? What's actually happening for you in this moment?" For Self-Work When working on your own: "What's it like to let myself name that it's sad right now?" Even without tears or body sensations Slow down from intellectualization This seemingly small step is actually quite significant Memory Reconsolidation vs. Exposure/Habituation Exposure Therapy: Builds distress tolerance Brain learns "I can feel this and survive" Useful but doesn't update original learning Still have to do management strategies Memory Reconsolidation: Updates the original learning generating the emotion Touches a piece of the feeling WHILE simultaneously holding contradictory evidence Brain reorganizes data model Probability of old pattern decreases (99% → 70% → eventually almost nothing) The Split Screen Metaphor Imagine a movie screen split down the middle: Left side: Old experience Right side: New experience Both held simultaneously for brain to reorganize Key Takeaways Disconfirmation experiences don't have to be as big as you think - even tiny moments of noticing difference matter The therapeutic relationship itself is transformational - co-regulation with therapist creates new experiences for the brain Titration is key - little bits at a time, not flooding with emotion Present moment focus - constantly bringing awareness back to "what's happening right now" Spaciousness over pushing - allowing room to notice differences rather than demanding full emotional expression

    11 min
  4. Why different therapies work the same way

    JAN 9

    Why different therapies work the same way

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.com Chapter 6 pulls back to show us the bigger picture: how all the different therapy approaches - IFS, EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and more - work through the same underlying process when they create real, lasting change. We explore the decades-long specific factors vs. common factors debate in therapy research, and what it means for your own healing journey. In This Episode: Why different therapy modalities are like different vehicles crossing the same terrain The Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process (TRP) steps - a quick refresher The therapy research debate: Is it the techniques or the relationship that matters? Why feeling safe and understood is essential but often not enough on its own Memory reconsolidation as the mechanism of change - and why the mechanism isn't the whole story What this means for your therapy or self-healing work Key Takeaways: When deep, lasting change happens in therapy, the same underlying process is occurring - regardless of which modality is being used. The therapeutic relationship creates the safety you need to do vulnerable work, but the relationship alone usually isn't enough to produce transformational change. You need both. Memory reconsolidation is the engine of change, but you also need fuel (safety, readiness), a road (observation, curiosity, awareness), and often a driver (therapist or your own developed capacity). What looks like sudden or accidental change is usually the result of lots of prior groundwork, including building a felt sense of safety and capacity to observe ourselves differently through metacognition. It's okay - and even helpful - to understand what your therapy is actually doing. It's your brain and your healing. Connect the Dots: To NARM: The adaptive survival styles in NARM are examples of the implicit emotional learnings we've been discussing. The TRP framework helps explain how those survival styles can be transformed, not just understood. To IFS: When you're working with parts in IFS, the moments of transformation often involve the same juxtaposition experience - an exile holding old pain encounters new evidence (often through Self-energy or an updated understanding) that contradicts the old belief. To Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: The terms of attachment we discussed in Chapter 5 - those unspoken rules about what's allowed in order to stay connected - are exactly the kind of implicit learnings that need to go through this reconsolidation process to truly shift. Questions to Sit With: In my own therapy or self-work, am I getting to the feeling of the old learnings, or mostly talking about them? Have I had experiences in my life that contradict my old beliefs or where something different happened than what my brain predicted? What happened when I did? Where in my life am I doing the observation and curiosity work, even if change hasn’t happened yet in the way I want it to? Coming Up Next: Part 2 of the book walks through case examples from different therapy approaches - showing how the TRP unfolds in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, IFS, and more. We'll get to see the theory in action!

    10 min
  5. Beyond coping: using new experiences to rewire the brain

    JAN 5

    Beyond coping: using new experiences to rewire the brain

    (0:00 - 1:23) Hello, my friends, and welcome back to our Substack Book Club. We have a lot of new people here, and so this is going to be a free episode for everyone to listen to, to learn a little bit more about what we do in our book club here. Just to catch you up, we’re currently reading Unlocking the Emotional Brain, which is the seminal book on coherence therapy and memory reconsolidation. Memory reconsolidation is the process by which we can update the old learnings in our brain. So if you found your way here because you consider yourself an intellectualizer, a people pleaser, a perfectionist, you find yourself stuck in traditional therapy because you already understand a lot of things. Maybe you’ve tried nervous system regulation, but you can’t quite seem to get unstuck. It’s likely because you have old unconscious learnings referred to as implicit emotional learnings that are like pathways in your brain. They are things that happened to you in your past that formed roads in your brain that said, this is the safe road to go down. So if every time you had emotions, or you had needs, or you were yourself, you were criticized, or sent away, or punished, or bullied by your peers, or you had parents who, for whatever reason, couldn’t show up for you, then over time, the learning would be, if I have my needs and I am myself, I will be criticized, or I will lose connection. (1:24 - 2:28) And so then that shows up in the present where we mask, we put our true selves away, we stay up in our thoughts, and no amount of insight will change that process. So this book really helps us to understand how we can make long-term change. If you join our book club, you also get access to all of the old episodes where I have gone through Healing Developmental Trauma, a wonderful book covering NARM therapy and helping us understand this process a little bit more, No Bad Parts, a book on internal family systems, another book that can support memory reconsolidation, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, which is often very important learning for many of us to understand how our early experiences may have shaped our present-day lives. So thank you so much for being here. Whether you are a free or paid member, you help support my work just by listening, liking, engaging, and commenting, and it’s truly an honor to get to share this information with you. This is going to be a recap episode of what we have explored in Unlocking the Emotional Brain so far, and next week we will dive back in. (2:30 - 3:03) So many of you have read every chapter and taken notes along with me, and some of you may be listening while you do the dishes or go on a walk, and you haven’t cracked the book just once, and that is all completely welcome here. You get to show up in the book club at the level that your system has capacity for, and I love getting to translate these books into everyday understanding to help us actively make change in our lives. So let’s walk through some of these ideas together, and I do want to name again that Unlocking the Emotional Brain is not exactly an easy, cozy read. (3:03 - 6:00) It can be pretty clinical and dense in places, but the reason I chose this book anyway is it’s because something so incredibly important, which is transformational change in therapy, transformational change in mental health, transformational change in how we show up in the world, not just symptom management, not just insight, not just telling you that for the rest of your life you’re going to have to use force and fear and to regulate your nervous system every single day just to be in the world. Now, of course, if you know me, you know that I support nervous system regulation work, and I support insight, and all of those things are wonderful, but they alone do not create transformational change. We have to figure out how to shift these patterns at the root because journals and planning and coping skills do not address the root of why we have these learnings, and this process for transformational change is called memory reconsolidation. We can think of it as if we’re updating the maps, the atlas, the GPS in our brain. Underneath those metaphors is the same basic idea that our brain can revise old emotional learnings from memories of things that happened to us in our lives under certain conditions, and that is the core of what this book is about. Think about your brain as a big excel spreadsheet or a big filing cabinet. In all of the experiences in your life, your brain files away and stores the data, and it puts it into themes like a big zip file. So if you had a series of memories that again told you that when you experience emotions, people will pull away from you, then those get filed into a big folder, and because the potential to lose connection with others is coded as survival, because it is in our brain, because we are wired to have connection, then that learning gets moved to the top as a critically important survival learning. So all of these memories the brain sorts through and said, this has happened a lot, so frequency, so this is something I want to hold on to, and then this has happened and it was really intense, so intensity. So frequency and intensity are what the brain uses to categorize what is an important memory to hold on to versus what isn’t. This all happens unconsciously, so you yourself may not have memories of these specific events, but your brain puts them into a file and then creates a learning. Think about a learning like a rule. The brain is using the data to say, I’m going to predict what’s going to happen in the present and the future based on what’s happened in the past, and I’m going to use that to shape the way that you yourself see the world. It changes the lenses through which we perceive reality to try to keep us safe. Because if the brain is predicting that feeling our feelings and being authentic is going to lead to losing connection, being sent away, being punished, which feels survival oriented, then of course the brain is not going to want to let us be authentic and connect easily. (6:00 - 6:47) So then, for example, we might perceive the people around us as more critical than they are. We might perceive situations as dangerous, like going to meet new people, because if we are ourselves we won’t get to form a new connection, when in actuality they are not dangerous. This all happens below the surface and forms these patterns or parts that we as humans have learned to call intellectualization, people pacing, perfectionism, my anxious part, we have a lot of different names we’ve given to it. But those are all bundles of memories and emotions that create rules. If we in the present want to update those rules, we have to follow this process called memory reconsolidation. And that is one of the key neurobiological mechanisms for change. (6:48 - 16:23) This book walks us through that process. So let’s break down what we’ve covered so far in learning about this process. What we talked about in the very beginning is the difference between symptom reduction and transformational change. So it is possible to reduce our symptoms or to change our experience through behavior change, through force, through willpower, through quote-unquote motivation. So therapy could help you maybe feel 20% less anxious, or feel fewer panic attacks, or go to the gym more often, and that’s absolutely not nothing. Those reductions in symptoms can feel like a really big relief. But oftentimes that reduction happens through management. So we learn how to use strategies to manage our brain and what a gift that we can do that. But I’m guessing if you’re here, you don’t want to have to spend the rest of your life doing symptom management and using force. The reason why that thing that gives you a reduction doesn’t change the pathway in your brain is because it’s still in contradiction with an old learning. So going to the gym every day to take care of yourself through management strategies, habits, and force doesn’t contradict an old learning that says taking care of yourself is selfish. So it requires vigilance at all time to use the strategies to override your brain, which is often why we fail quote-unquote at setting new habits, or we do it for a couple of months and then we stop, or we use management strategies but we still kind of feel stuck, empty, disconnected, or unsure of ourselves. tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Transformational change is completely different. In these moments when we can create transformation, we are rewiring the learning that we had. We are rewiring our brain itself so that the brain updates its prediction. It updates its data model. It is so cool that we know now that we can do this. It’s not just about having new experiences. I want to be super clear about that because it’s kind of the in thing right now to talk about how you don’t need regulation, you just need to have new experiences, but they are missing a key part of the process, which is that the new experiences must explicitly target the old learning and they must be incremental, meaning they have to be little bits at a time. But as we do this process, we can update through transformational change these emotional learnings and then we don’t have to use management strategies, force, fear, every single day because the old learnings that say if I’m not perfect I will lose love, if I have needs I’m selfish and I’ll hurt others, if I show feelings people will withdraw, those things can be rewired and the learnings can be updated. So now instead of predicting a 99% chance of something dangerous is happening, the brain realistically says maybe there’s a 5% chance that something could happen if I myself and I have needs. And then what happens is if we have needs an

    22 min
  6. Terms of attachment: the unspoken rules running your life

    12/06/2025

    Terms of attachment: the unspoken rules running your life

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.com Hello and welcome back to our book club read-a-long of Unlocking the Emotional Brain! If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks, where we explore a chapter from the book together (you can also listen on Spotify!). I help translate the theory into everyday language and show you how to apply it in your own life. We also gather twice per 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 powerful mechanisms for true and lasting change. It helps us understand how healing actually happens after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up with emotionally immature parents. If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this kind of work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience, including live sessions, current 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 community possible, and I’m so grateful you’re here. This week, we dive into chapter 5, which goes further into attachment and the role it takes in shaping the way we see the world as adults. We know it’s not always attachment, that other things like societal and existential concerns can also create trauma patterns and survival strategies, but attachment sure plays a significant role! This chapter is incredibly dense, but it can help us continue to observe ourselves with more neutrality and understanding (and maybe even compassion!) when we’re examining behaviors we don’t like in the present day. Let’s dive in and learn more! (0:00 - 4:15) Welcome back, read-along friends, and thank you so much for being here. If you’re new here, this is our book club, where we dive into different self-help and therapy books, and every two weeks I release a little podcast episode, breaking down a chapter for you and helping you to understand how you might apply this in real life. You can read along with me, but you don’t have to. You can never pick up the book at all and still get the gist from these episodes. So I’m so glad you’re here as we continue to dive into Unlocking the Emotional Brain, an incredibly dense and incredibly informative book, and I think actually today we’re going to continue our exploration of chapter five, and we may not even get through it all. We’ll see. I want to, but it’s such a dense chapter and such an important chapter that I want to make sure that we take our time. Don’t forget that we have our first of two live meetings for this book coming up on Sunday, December 14th, and that is at 12 p.m. Eastern Time. You’ll receive the link in a separate email coming this week, but that’s 12 p.m. Eastern Time, Sunday, December 14th. Don’t worry if you can’t attend live. The recording will be sent out to all paid members, and thank you so much for being here and supporting my work. So you may remember, as we just briefly touched into chapter five last time, the chapter five explores attachment, and is it always about attachment? And so we know that, especially in modern discourse, there’s somewhat the idea that all roads in therapy and all problems that present in therapy can be tied back to attachment with our parents, and this chapter really dives into some of the attachment science and looks at this idea that there’s often more going on to our experience than just attachment with our parents. It doesn’t mean that attachment might not be involved in some way, meaning our connection to the world around us, to peers, etc., because we know that we are pack animals and we are biologically wired to want to stay in connection with those around us. But does it always come back to a childhood attachment experience with parents? And let’s talk a little bit about that. We know that unlocking the emotional brain is all about emotional learnings and how the experiences we have in our lives and those emotions that go along with them form implicit, meaning unconscious, memories and learnings within our brain that direct our behaviors in our present-day lives. Those learnings can come from, certainly, attachment relationships with caregivers, but they can also come from social contexts like schools, friendships, bullying, racism, layoffs, and also existential experiences. And this is what I don’t see talked about too often, so I’m so glad they mentioned it here, like illnesses, accidents, loss, or confrontation with our own mortality. All of those experiences can create these schemas, and you can think of schemas like templates within our brain, for thoughts, emotions, behavioral sensations, and behaviors. And those schemas hold up those if-then rules. If this happens, this is what I must do to stay safe, to stay in connection, to be loved, to be well, etc. And those all get held in the same place, that emotional, implicit, unconscious memory. And this is part of the emotional coherence framework. So instead of arguing about whether attachment or social class or temperament or whatever is more important, instead we know that the brain doesn’t care which category the experience falls under. If something happens, and you might have heard me say this, if it’s frequent or if it’s intense, no matter the source of the experience, then the brain will file that as a learning in the brain. (4:16 - 4:36) And so that could include, like, implicit learnings and procedural learnings could include riding a bike, handwriting, things that don’t really have a lot of emotion stored alongside of them. But when there’s emotion stored alongside of them, then those emotional, implicit learnings become even stronger. So it’s all these rivers flowing into one wide delta. (4:36 - 10:06) One river might be attachment. One might be social experiences. One might be existential experiences. One might be your innate genetic sensitivity. But once those rivers meet in the delta, all of that water blends together. And so what we’re living with in the present is our felt-sense experience of all of the things that make us us. And this can be important because sometimes people will ask me, well, is it possible that this didn’t come from my childhood? And the answer is yes, of course. We can experience environmental, emotional, developmental, and attachment ruptures at any time in our life because we’re always developing. We’re always experiencing the world and relationships around us. And you may remember the case of Raul, which we discussed briefly last time, where he experienced a major rupture in his adult life that created this sense of intense rage. And it didn’t come from a chaotic childhood. It came from a major betrayal from a business partner in adulthood that wrecked his career and threatened his security. And so his emotional brain learned in his adult life after this rupture that broken agreements destroy lives and that rage would protect him from feeling powerless. And that if he let go of rage, that felt like giving up on justice. Those are the implicit emotional learnings that came out of this adult experience. It’s much more than a simple mom, dad, caregiver experience. And so if the therapist had assumed that that had to come from the parents, then classic sort of reparative attachment work would not have touched the schema. So whether you’re a therapist listening or whether you’re an individual who wants to do this in your own life, I think it’s important to hold that lens of curiosity. And that’s why I’m constantly emphasizing curiosity, neutrality, and observation. If you’ve listened to any of my work, you’ve heard me say a million times about observing, observing, observing. Observing is the work. Noticing is the work. And you’ve heard me compare it to an archeological dig or to being a wildlife documentarian. In this book, they call it an anthropologist, that we are learning how to observe and gather data without making assumptions, without letting all those lenses color our experience. And so that’s why it’s very important, therapist or individual, to observe ourselves with this curious lens instead of trying to project what we think the experience might be about. That’s why we use all of these different experiences. Like if you’ve looked in my five steps to change guide, that’s why what I say is to imagine what you want for yourself, whatever it might be. And then you follow the thread from there. You look at the detours that come up. You look at the learnings underneath of that. And sometimes it’s surprising because sometimes the learning is something unexpected. Like this person could have very easily assumed, well, maybe I’m angry and rageful because I never saw my parents be angry. So I never learned how to manage it. And hey, maybe there could be a thread of that there, right? But this learning very clearly in this case came from this person’s adult life and working with those learnings and reconsolidating them is what allowed him to have space. So all this to say, attachment is incredibly important and it shapes a huge amount of our internal atlas, but it’s not the only thing that shapes us. And not all of our symptoms are attachment derived with our caretakers. They can also be from the world around us. And what I mean by that is we are always navigating attachment relationships with partners, with friends, children, even colleagues, right? We’re in connection with people all the time. So we can think about it as connection related and not necessarily parent caregiver attachment related. So while we’re not explicitly exploring attachment here, I think it’s important to talk about some of the attachment types they talk about in this chapter to see what kind

    13 min
  7. When healing becomes another project (free podcast)

    12/03/2025

    When healing becomes another project (free podcast)

    Hello, tiny sparks readers! Have a new podcast episode for you today about my thoughts on the endless optimization of healing. Before we dive in, I want to share something tender and exciting. I have just started writing a book and was recently accepted into a 12-month writing program to help bring it to life, with the hope of it landing in the world in 2026. If you want to be part of that process and help me actually make it happen, you can join me over on Patreon, where I will share in-progress pieces, reflections, and the middle of shaping this work. There are a few tiers, including one that offers a live meeting every month where I answer your questions personally. If this episode landed for you and you want to support this book growing from an idea into something you can hold in your hands, your presence there really does make a difference. In addition, becoming a paid subscriber here supports my writing, too, and you get to join our wonderful book club! Whether you’re a free or paid subscriber, thank you for being here. If you have questions, curiosities, or things you’d love to see addressed in my book, don’t hesitate to drop me a line or leave a comment below! (0:00 - 2:44) Okay, today I want to talk about something that might sound a little bit strange coming from someone who literally teaches about healing for a living, but I am so, so tired of the self-help industry and especially the social mediafication of the self-help industry. Of course, I am not tired of people wanting to feel better. Of course, we want to feel better. And of course, we are trying to find any amount of information we can to help us feel better. And I’m not tired of those of us who are curious or want to grow or want to explore nervous system work or trauma healing. But I am so tired of the way that healing has been turned into a product for us to consume and complete and be perfect at and overachieve at and try harder at, like a course you have to pass or some kind of project that you have to finish. And if you are someone who tends to live in your head, who’s always been the high achiever, the eldest daughter, the responsible one, the intellectualizer, you probably know exactly what I mean. You go into this idea of healing or being more present in your life or getting unstuck, moving toward what you want for yourself, using the same tools that have always worked for you. You research, you read, you analyze, you organize the information in your mind. And once you set your mind to it, you decide that you’re going to do this right. And the internet is set up for the parts of us that think that we can do this perfectly by making a plan and trying harder and researching it to the bitter end. That is what the self-help world, especially the self-help world on social media, is built upon. And it gives us this steady stream of little bite-sized promises. Do this journal prompt, reflect on your year, say an affirmation, set a boundary, cut contact, breathe in this way, no, breathe in that way, cold punch, don’t cold punch, stretch your hips, drink your water, take your supplements. And there’s this message that if you can get the formula just right, if you do enough, if you try hard enough, if you’re good enough, you will finally be okay, feel good, have the life you want, and specifically have the life that you might see represented on social media. People who seem so happy, so successful, perfect family, perfect house, perfect friends, plenty of money. And so it’s normal that we’re drawn toward these things. We want there to be something that we can do that will make us feel okay. Of course, some other part of us also deeply resists that because it feels impossible. We feel stuck in this bind of needing to be perfect to be okay, but feeling like it’s impossible to actually follow through with all of those things. And that’s not because there’s anything wrong with you. (2:44 - 4:58) It’s because our brain works based off old learnings getting landed into the present. It’s so, so understandable that we want something to be a checklist that we can move through and complete. We want to fill out a worksheet. We want to make a few meals, take a few supplements, do some deep breathing, and wake up in a completely different place with a different relationship to ourselves and to the world. A different job maybe, a different personality, a different partner, a different relationship to money, whatever it might be. But that’s not how these patterns that were built for survival reorganize themselves. And for those of us who grew up reading the room constantly, reading people around us constantly, knowing the sound of everyone’s footsteps and whether it meant they were happy or angry, then people-pleasing, intellectualizing, perfectionism, overachieving are not random bad habits and they’re not personality traits. They are learned responses to our environments. If we learned that having big feelings got us shamed or ignored, then shutting down those feelings makes a lot of sense. If you rewarded and celebrated every time you achieved or functioned so well, took on more and solved the problem, then of course that learning would get set up in your brain to say, this is what makes me good and worthy. And many times it’s subtle, right? Like sometimes we had very clear trauma or sometimes it was very clear that our parents criticized us when we had emotions or sent us away. But oftentimes it’s so much more subtle than that. It’s an ongoing experience of being misattuned to. If you are a joyful, playful little child born to parents who are under immense stress and they themselves are intellectualizers or incredibly rational people who don’t know how to deal with their own feelings, it’s not that they might hurt you or punish you when you have feelings, but they themselves might become overwhelmed. And so then we learn, uh-oh, when I am playful, silly, joyful myself, people around me get overwhelmed and that makes me feel stressed and unsafe because I need my caregivers to be okay. (4:59 - 5:42) Or maybe it’s our peers, maybe it’s our teachers. And yes, we can have experiences in our adult life that impact us as well. But all of these things get coded in our brains as roots of safety, worth, value, and connection. So then you come into healing spaces because sometime in your life, and it’s usually later on in our life, it starts to take more of a toll. And maybe we notice physical symptoms, maybe we feel slightly depressed, disconnected, anxious, but we’re not sure why, kind of stuck or dissatisfied in our lives, and we want to fix those patterns. But things start to get slippery because we might feel this pull into healing and we turn it into another pattern. tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. (5:42 - 7:05) We want to be good at it, we want to solve it, we want to get an A in therapy, we want to do trauma recovery work, check it off the list, let them be codependent no more, get our body to stop keeping the score, and then we will be good enough to deserve to rest and relax. And this is where self-help becomes so incredibly toxic because so much of it mirrors the very same culture that we have already been mired in and are already burned out from. There is a focus on progress, optimization, and improvement of our behavior. Even somatic work has become an idea that you need to optimize your nervous system, you need to optimize your body. If you’re an intellectualizer, you just need to learn how to track your body. Somatic work, somatic work, fix your nervous system, stretch your hips, and then you can let all your emotions go and then you will be well. So it’s pressure, pressure, pressure, morning routines, five-step systems, and very, very tidy before and after stories, which just feeds right into those beliefs. And the brain says, see, if you just try hard enough and plan enough and analyze enough, and then you can finally be worthy and be good. And these other people did it. Why can’t you? Why can’t you be more productive, more regulated, more aligned? Why can’t you follow through with these activities? And so maybe you try it. You know, you see the posts on Instagram and you give it a try. You do the journaling, the affirmations, try to track your body. (7:06 - 14:35) And for a little while, that can feel exciting. And we get a little dopamine, we get a little oxytocin, we feel a spark that this will be the thing, the thing that finally makes it okay for us to say no, to be present, to want something different, to have needs, to not have to worry about being disapproved of, to not have to explain ourselves and criticize ourselves constantly. But then eventually something happens. Either we turn on ourselves or we stop doing the things because we’re tired or exhausted, or some part of our brain says, nope, that’s not safe. You’re going off the survival pathways. Maybe someone gets disappointed in us. A relationship shifts and boom, we’re right back in those old patterns, overthinking, overexplaining, over-apologizing, over-criticizing. And now that we have all these self-help messages, when we see that happen, because of course we can observe it, right? We can observe these things happening. Well, the only answer is that it must be something wrong with us. And then we get fed this message that we’re too self-aware. And then maybe we go to therapy and we even get told we’re too self-aware for therapy. We already know so much, so why are we here? Which again just feeds into this idea that something must be wrong with us. The mindset, the discipline, we’re not doing enough. We’re self-aware, we can’t make the change. We can’t even fit in in therapy. Something really must be wrong with us. We must be our eyes at everything. Healing is fake. Noth

    20 min
  8. Every symptom is coherent

    11/21/2025

    Every symptom is coherent

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.com Hello and welcome back to our book club read-a-long of Unlocking the Emotional Brain! If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks, where we explore a chapter from the book together (you can also listen on Spotify!). I help translate the theory into everyday language and show you how to apply it in your own life. We also gather twice per 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 powerful mechanisms for true and lasting change. It helps us understand how healing actually happens after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up with emotionally immature parents. If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this kind of work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience, including live sessions, current 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 community possible, and I’m so grateful you’re here. This week, we dive into chapter 4, which goes further into the process of the Therapeutic Reconsolidation Process and emotional learnings. This chapter further refines our understanding of how these emotional learnings can get embedded deep in our subconscious and affect nearly everything we do. Many of us experience this when we feel like we KNOW all of our patterns, we know HOW to change them, but we can’t seem to get unstuck. You’re not alone - let’s dive in and learn more! (0:00 - 3:03) Welcome back, book club friends. So excited to dive into unlocking the emotional brain again together this week. If you’re new here for my book club slash read along, there’s no need to even have the book. You are welcome to join in and listen as I walk us through popular self-help and therapy books and break them down into become easier to understand and talk about how to apply this your everyday life. So as I was looking through my notes for this week’s episode, I noticed how on every single page of the chapters, there was something I wanted to talk about with you. And so I really enjoy that we can take our time together. And sometimes that means flexing and flowing from our schedule. So I’m going to be talking a little bit about chapter four this week and a little bit about chapter five, but I’m going to push our live meeting out because I want to make sure we have time to get through some of these major concepts before we meet for the first time, so that you can ask any questions or curiosities you might have. So let’s actually plan for our live meeting to be Sunday, December 14th at 12 o’clock Eastern time. And you will receive a Google meet invite for that, where we can join in together, have a little fireside chat. And of course, if you’re not able to join live, you will receive the recording. And now let’s dive in together. So I didn’t even really get to go into chapter four last time because we were talking about chapter three. And the case there was so fascinating. I’ve thought about it so much because I think that understanding of the person who really struggled with being able to speak up in meetings, and that case really helped us understand the symptom coherence, but also to not make assumptions in our own lives as we’re exploring what these underlying routes, these old neural pathways, these old learnings might be. So when the person in that case was talking about struggling speaking up in meetings, it might be easy to think that he lacks self-confidence, maybe he didn’t see confidence in his family, or maybe he was criticized by his peers, and so he worries about being judged when he speaks up. But in that case, what we saw as they went through the process together to map out this old learning, what they found was he was actually afraid that if he spoke up, he would become this extremely assertive aggressor in a way that his father was. And so I think that’s an incredibly interesting observation to make because it really shows us how every symptom is coherent. Every symptom is emotional logic. It makes perfect sense in the system, even if it doesn’t make sense in the present. And so we’re going to talk a little bit more about that today. But this idea that every symptom is coherent is something we’ve seen in all the books that we’ve read together so far. In the NARM book with the exploration of survival strategies, in No Bad Parts, internal family systems, talking about how there literally are no bad parts. All parts serve a protective purpose. (3:03 - 4:40) And then in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, where the author very clearly laid out the adaptive strategies that we may develop if we grew up in an environment like that. And so I love getting to continue to explore this thread together because it’s at the root of all the work that I do, and it’s also just founded in neuroscience. These implicit learnings that get created, these neural pathways, these routes in our brain that get created, are all in response to something that is happening, something that happened to us. And it doesn’t matter if you find it logical in the present. It made sense in the moment, and it was a strong enough experience that your brain held onto it as a pattern to try to keep you safe. And so it’s very common that these patterns form through both frequency and intensity. And so that’s just something to think about that these experiences might not stand out to you. You might not have a clear memory from your childhood or from your adult life where you can see a pattern form, but they may have been small, frequent experiences. Or you might say, well, this was just a one-time thing. How could it impact me in that way? Well, the intensity may have been very, very large to you, to your experience, through your perception. And so as we continue to follow these threads together, and as you might be curious about your own life, I hope that this can offer a different lens that you can use to observe your own experience. And that’s why part of the process that I created, my five steps to change model, is about observing and mapping these things out with curiosity and neutrality. (4:41 - 5:33) And so chapter four, again, really emphasizes this idea that is so critically important when we’re understanding people’s experiences of environmental rupture. And it’s this idea that there is the thing that the person is afraid will happen. And then there is a survival strategy that tries to solve it. And so there are two different sufferings that can be experienced. But the survival strategy, the pattern, the implicit learning, the adaptation, the part, however you want to think about it, is the lesser of two sufferings. Whatever we perceive will happen in that moment of an environmental rupture and attachment failure feels so big, so life or death, that we would rather shut down our own experience, shut down our own needs, than feel that feeling. (5:33 - 10:37) That is the situation that gets these patterns encoded in the brain, where it says, if the choice is being eaten by a tiger, or shutting down my own needs, then I can handle shutting down my own needs. I can go into a functional freeze and just intellectualize and take care of everyone else’s needs. I can definitely handle that suffering. But of course, over time, that suffering wears on us more and more and more. And it can build up resentment and disconnection and a stuck feeling. But when these learnings get formed, the two sufferings are the choice between what can feel like obliteration or annihilation, or shutting away some part of us. And over time, that just becomes part of our behavioral pattern. It becomes part of our procedural manual. So we have a whole atlas in our brain of maps, and those roads are made up of survival roads. But the roads that lead to having needs, moving toward what we want for ourselves, feeling good, feeling joyful, feeling playful, being in the present moment, those roads are underdeveloped. No funding has gone to them over the years. So they might be non-existent, or they might be just little dinky back country dirt roads with a lot of potholes that our brain said, maybe, possibly, potentially, we can go down that road. Very infrequently, if the circumstances are exactly right. But no, most of the time, I’m not going to allow you to go down that road. Because again, the idea is that going down that road will lead to some suffering that is so terrifying. So in this chapter, they are talking about the coherence therapy model, which uses memory reconsolidation to dissolve these schemas, these schemas that are made up of these implicit emotional learnings. And you can think of schemas just like the parts, just like the survival strategies. But to dissolve these schemas, it must be brought into awareness, we must map the route out and connect to the emotional learning that is underneath of that, not just intellectually, but in the moment to feel and touch a piece of that. Because accessing the emotion around that is what allows us to reconsolidate that memory, aka update and organize the pathway in the brain and start to form new neural pathways. So there are a few more interesting cases in this chapter. And one thing I really value about this book is how much they use these cases, because it really helps understand the theory and put it into practice. And so one of the cases in this chapter is about Ted, a man in his 30s, who sort of self-described as a drifter, he had a difficult time holding a job, had a hard time committing to anything, and really kind of lived in those patterns of chronic underachievement. And so again, it would be easy in a traditional model

    14 min
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About

tiny sparks: finding your way in the world by building your resilience. all things trauma, nervous system regulation, intellectualization, people pleasing, perfectionism, and more. trishawolfe.substack.com

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  • Creator
    Trisha Wolfe
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    42
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Trisha Wolfe
  • Show Website
    tiny sparks, big changes