Is there a pattern that keeps showing up in your life, no matter what you try? You’ve tried to understand it, tried to discipline it, and maybe spent years reading books and listening to well-meaning experts and gurus. It still comes back, and that isn’t because you haven’t tried hard enough.
Insight and willpower come from the thinking part of your brain, but patterns like this are stored in the emotional part of your brain, as emotional learnings. They don’t respond to logic and that’s why understanding a pattern doesn’t change it.
Early in life, you learned something about how to stay safe, maybe that being agreeable kept you safe, that your job was to take care of everyone else first, or that you had to be perfect to be valued. That lesson was stored as an emotional memory, below conscious thought, where reasoning can’t reach it. Back then it protected you, and now it handicaps you. Until that emotional learning updates, the pattern stays and runs your life.
You procrastinate because somewhere early on, you learned that trying and falling short meant being humiliated. Not starting feels safer than risking that again.
You can’t make decisions because you were criticized as a child and never knew whether you were getting it right. Now every choice feels like a test you might fail.
You people-please because you learned that when someone was upset with you, you might lose them. Saying no still feels dangerous.
You criticize yourself because you learned to get there first. If you find the flaw before anyone else does, it hurts less.
You overthink because you learned that missing something could get you in trouble, so your mind never stops scanning.
You avoid hard conversations because conflict once meant someone yelled, left, or went cold.
What you learned as a child isn’t permanent. Researchers have found that when the brain recalls an old emotional learning, it briefly becomes open to being updated. This is called memory reconsolidation, and it happens when two things are true at once: you’re feeling the old learning, and your brain experiences something that plainly contradicts it.
In our session, we start with the pattern itself, usually a recent time it showed up and what it felt like. We follow that feeling down until we find the learning underneath, the old rule your brain has been quietly following, something like “if I make a mistake, I’ll be rejected.” Often it’s the first time you’ve heard it said out loud, and it tends to make sense of years of behavior all at once.
Then we find what contradicts it, something you know now that your younger self had no way of knowing. While you’re feeling the old learning, we bring the two together. Your emotional brain can’t hold both as true, so it updates. This isn’t something you argue yourself into. It’s closer to the way you stopped believing in Santa Claus: once you knew, you couldn’t go back to not knowing.
This means sitting with some uncomfortable feelings for a while, and memories from childhood may come up on their own. You’re in control the whole time, and we can slow down whenever you need to.
Life still hands you the same moments, like the deadline, the hard conversation, the request you’d rather turn down, but you meet them without the internal battle. Often that’s when people realize how much energy the old pattern was costing them.
We start with a complimentary conversation about what’s keeping you stuck and whether I can help. If we both agree to go ahead, you book one 90-minute session. After the session we set up a 30-minute follow-up to confirm and reinforce the change. $450.
This is coaching, not therapy. If you're in a mental health crisis or need treatment for a clinical condition, please work with a licensed mental health professional.
A Personal Story
One of my first experiences with memory reconsolidation happened in 2012. I was living alone in a house in the forest outside Vancouver, Washington. I loved being out in the woods and enjoyed the solitude and quiet.
Shortly after the end of a 10-year relationship, I began having terrifying bouts of fear, usually sometime between eight and ten in the evening. Nothing was happening, and there was nothing I could identify that I was afraid of. I would suddenly be overwhelmed by a horrible sense of impending doom. I wondered if I was going crazy.
I had been studying memory reconsolidation and had experienced the process while working on other issues with two therapists, including Bruce Ecker, a pioneer in applying memory reconsolidation to create lasting change. So one evening, instead of trying to escape the fear, I decided to sit down and follow the process on my own.
I stopped being afraid and fighting what I was feeling and became curious about it. As I stayed with the fear, memories began returning that I hadn't thought about in more than 30 years.
When my sister and I were children, our parents would occasionally leave us home alone while they went to a friend's house or a party. A few times a year, our alcoholic uncle would call while they were gone and threaten us.
My sister would answer the phone, begin sobbing and hand it to me. I would then listen as our uncle threatened to come to the house and kill us.
I was probably about seven when this started, and it continued for several years. We knew he lived only a couple of hours away, so the danger felt completely real. We were terrified he could reach us before our parents came home.
We would panic and call our parents. They reassured us that nothing would happen, but I don't remember them coming home to comfort us or help us feel safe. The calls were never discussed afterward.
Eventually my uncle stopped harassing us, and as I got older, I completely forgot about the incidents.
I hadn't consciously connected those childhood experiences with the fear I was having decades later. But my brain had recognized a familiar pattern: I was alone, it was dark, and nobody was there to protect me.
I stayed with the feeling and began talking to the part of me that still felt like that terrified seven-year-old boy. I told him that what had happened should never have happened, that of course he had been frightened, and that he wasn't alone anymore. I was the adult now, and I would never allow anyone to do that to him again.
Then I felt the anger arise. In my imagination, I confronted my uncle and told him exactly what I thought of what he had done. I allowed myself to feel the anger of an adult protecting a frightened child, something I had been incapable of doing when I was seven.
My father had died by this time, so I also confronted him in my mind and allowed myself to feel the sadness and anger of not having been protected.
I didn't try to talk myself out of the fear or convince myself that it was irrational. I stayed with the frightened part of me while bringing something into the experience that hadn't been there originally: a capable adult who could protect him.
Then, in a way that felt almost magical, something shifted.
The fear was replaced by a physical sense of being safe, cared for, and no longer alone. I could still remember the phone calls, but the emotional charge attached to them was gone.
I had given that frightened child a new experience, one that directly contradicted what he had learned years before. He was no longer alone and powerless. The danger was over, and someone was finally there to protect him.
That happened 14 years ago, and the fear has never returned. I've traveled the world, lived alone and found myself in many other unfamiliar situations without ever experiencing it again.
That night became one of the most important experiences of my life. Since then, I've used this process to change numerous other patterns that had kept me stuck, succeeding where insight, determination, and willpower hadn't been enough. It fundamentally changed my understanding of what makes lasting personal change possible.