The Internal Resistance Files
How to Change Your Memories
Come to a free masterclass on the freakishly powerful way to change your brain that no one is telling you about
A client recently came to me after getting a big, unexpected promotion. It was exactly the kind of job she’d wanted, so I expected her to be elated. And she had been — until she learned about a major fly in the ointment.
It turned out that the new role involved hosting multiple large-scale events, and my client — we’ll call her Alice — had a horror of public speaking. For Alice, hearing about these events was like finding out the job would require that she be regularly boiled in oil. It just wasn’t something she could imagine withstanding on a routine basis. But thinking about abandoning the new role felt like an even worse option.
Clearly the best solution was just to get rid of the fear. But what exactly could be done to free her from it?
How we answer that question has everything to do with how we think the brain changes. The most popular schools of therapy, coaching and self-help — including CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), mindset coaching, positive psychology and even meditation — pursue change by creating new neural pathways that compete with the old ones.
So in Alice’s situation, we’d challenge her existing thoughts and feelings about public speaking, notice where her fears are unreasonable and create alternative thoughts she could practice instead. In essence, we would build new neural pathways to ‘compete’ with the ones causing her fear.
This competitive-pathways approach can definitely be helpful. Although I was personally allergic to CBT (a story for another day), it’s famously supported by scads of scientific evidence. And emerging studies are showing good results for mindset coaching, which I have found it to be really useful in combating some unhelpful mental habits.
But the competitive-pathways version of change also has serious limitations, which are pretty much flagged right there in the name. When we use this approach, we’re building new pathways that will always be in competition with the old ones. The new ones will feel more powerful for the first few months, because of a recency bias in the brain. But unless the new thoughts are practiced more than the old ones, that initial priority will fade. (This is one reason that some changes that people see in therapy seem to ‘wear off’, as the recency bias wanes.)
And even if we do achieve that level of practice, there’s another problem. The higher our stress level, the more likely the brain is to revert to those old pathways. So Alice could diligently practice her new thoughts about public speaking and think she’s making progress — only to the have old pathways fire up when she needed the new ones the most.
But the competitive pathways approach isn’t actually the only game in town. There’s another way to change the brain, which avoids all the problems I just described.
It’s called memory reconsolidation — and if you’ve never heard of it, you’re in good company, because most coaches and therapists haven’t either. I only found out about it because I could see that the competitive-pathways approach was not going to cut it with the kind of people I coach. Internal resistance is sticky as hell, and my clients are smart and resourceful enough that they have already tried all the obvious fixes. I didn’t want us to just whittle around at the edges of the problem. I wanted us to be able to eradicate it. I needed a nuclear option. So I went looking for something capable of making more permanent, thorough change.
And that’s exactly what memory reconsolidation (MR) is. Unlike the competitive-pathways approach, MR actually changes the original thought pathway that is driving our behaviour. There’s no fading recency bias and no new thoughts to practice, because the old pathway has been changed. The effect has been compared to a ‘brain wipe’ by my clients, and it really is astonishing the first time you experience it. Not only do you think and feel differently, you find it hard to believe you EVER had the old thoughts and fears.
In Alice’s case, that’s exactly what happened.
She sent me a message a few days after we did the MR, saying, I feel like someone who never even had a fear of public speaking in the first place.
She was recently on TV and quoted in Newsweek. NBD. Not a problem. She barely noticed.
That’s how fully the pathways had been transformed. Her fear felt like something that wasn’t even part of her past, much less her present.
So why don’t more people know about MR? There are a few reasons.
For me, it took a while to decide to write about it precisely because it’s so powerful. I thought it was better just to let clients find out about its effects through experiencing it when we worked together, rather than to risk sounding like I was selling snake oil.
I changed my mind about that, though. I think people deserve to know that, even if lots of things haven’t worked to get them out of internal resistance, there’s something very efficacious they likely haven’t tried.
In general, though, I think the lack of knowledge comes from the fact that the brain science involved is relatively new. MR is a mechanism the brain has for updating what is called implicit memory, which is the strata of memory that stores rules about reality — e.g., things like Giving a speech will cause an emotional apocalypse. It was only recently that neuroscientists discovered that implicit memories could be changed, and even more recently that they mapped the steps required to trigger that process. Then, in the last 15 years or so, clinicians have started to put this research into practice.
The other reason is more contentious. Not everyone is willing to believe that MR is possible, especially with the kinds of experiences we term traumatic. We have spent a lot of time as a culture thinking of trauma as permanent injury. There are industries and careers built on this understanding. To accommodate MR into the way we think about psychological treatment will require something of a paradigm shift, and not everyone will welcome the change.
But luckily we don’t have to wait for the paradigm shift to get the benefits of MR. This is especially good news if you’ve been dealing with internal resistance, because MR is perfect for addressing its underlying causes. It gives us a way to shift the stuff that feels most sticky and intransigent, totally and permanently. It makes it possible to end the battle of you vs. you, completely and for good.
To find out more about how this process works, the science behind it, and whether it can work for you, come to my free Memory Reconsolidation Masterclass. Sign up here to get the zoom link and you’ll get a ton of info as well as the chance to ask questions. See you there!
