It was not yesterday, nor was it even last week. I read a good book. It’s called Worth. It’s by a woman named Marisa Franco and it has a lot of delicious psychological theory in there and it made me happy. It also made sense of something that occurred in our house. I believe it was last night. I’m trying to recall past dates and they’re getting very tumbled. Was it last night or the night before that we had a delicious feast, Ro? Feast? Night before that. Night before left. Okay. 

So Ro, my lovely partner, one of my lovely partners and her mother, the lovely Paula, they were cooking a festival feast for our family. We were in a celebrating kind of mood and so they went and got a roast and they put in all these fresh organic vegetables from the garden and it was all amazing and they were cooking away and it went on for some time. The cooking of huge amounts of vegetables. I mean, it was a cornucopia of bounty. And then it got close to dinner time and Ro said to everybody, “Get ready. Find all the stuff you need.” I always mix up a prebiotic drink and whatever. 

So she said, “Get your special drink ready. We’re having dinner.” So I put everything together and then I went into the kitchen and it was such an odd scene. Ro and Paula were just standing there vacantly. They weren’t doing anything. They were just looking kind of into the middle distance. And what had happened was this: They took the roast out of the oven and were not satisfied with the way the vegetables had cooked up around the roast. So they had taken the vegetables out of the roast pan, and they put them on some cookie sheets, and they were baking the vegetables and waiting while the meat rested.

I did not know meat had to rest once it was that completely deceased. And by the way, we always, I know there are some people, I’m not even going to argue with the vegans, but we do have happy cows. We go to a place with happy cows. Anyway, they were waiting for the vegetables to cook and the meat to rest. And I just came in and I said, “How’s it going?” And Ro looked glum and she said, “It didn’t really work.” 

And I looked at the roasting pan and in the bottom of the roasting pan were remnants of vegetables, these little tiny sort of dissolved clumps of what looked like it had once been a vegetable. And I thought, “Good Lord, that did not go well. All those vegetables cooked down to this?” It was maybe a cup—and I’m talking about from a table full of vegetables. So it all disappeared in the oven and boiled down to this very tiny state. 

And I just walked in there and saw them with the meat and these tiny bits of vegetables, staring into the middle distance without doing a thing. And I thought we were all ready for dinner. And so I decided—nobody said anything—I just froze there looking at them like, “What are we going to eat?” And they didn’t say anything. And I decided that the vegetables had melted in the oven into this tiny, tiny pile and that they were grieving. And so I tried to be respectful of their grieving. And then I said—the silence had got to be too much for me—and I said, “What is happening?” And they said, “We’re letting the meat rest while the vegetables cook.” And suddenly everything changed for me, and life was better again. And there was harmony in our home instead of grief and sorrow over the disappearing vegetables. 

So the reason I’m telling you all this is Memory Reconsolidation Theory. Of course. So if you’ve ever had therapy or read a self-help book, which would pretty much be all of us, I would hope, if you’re on this particular podcast, you probably are familiar with the idea that you have lots of memories, and a lot of them are of things that didn’t really feel great. Some really bad socialization, maybe trauma, maybe lots of trauma. And those memories, woo, they’re harsh. And once they’re there and they happen, they’re stuck in your brain—or so psychologists used to think. 

But then there was this man named Karim Nader or Nader, don’t know how to pronounce it, but he did some work with rats right around the turn of this century. And what he did—this is why I could never be a research psychologist; it involves hurting the feelings, at least, of rats. So what this guy did is he sounded this beep, and he shocked their little rat feet until they would get a stress response just at the sound of the beep. And then he reliably tested them that he would beep, and they would panic, they would feel bad. And then just before re-triggering the memory, he gave them an anti-anxiety drug. So now the thing went beep and they were basically high so they just lay there. And then the next day after they were no longer high, he took them, he measured their frequencies or whatever and he sounded the beep. They did not react. Their memories had reconsolidated around a different experience in which the shock didn’t have such a powerful negative effect. 

Okay. So this is how this works. It’s amazing. They’ve actually traced the biochemical pathways in which this happens. So you’ve got these synapses in your brain. Every memory is just a set of synapses, nerves that are connected and wrapped with a sheet of myelin that help you remember a certain thing. Now, when you recall a memory, what happens is that for a brief time, about four to six hours, the memory is what they call open or labile—it’s subject to change. So when it gets activated, it sort of goes into this more active state, or when it gets open, it goes into this more active state. And at that point, if you introduce something that doesn’t match your interpretation of the original memory, then it changes the memory. And then after the five-hour window is gone, six at the most, it reconstitutes, reconsolidates the memory. But now, it’s a different memory. It’s literally a different memory. 

Now, you are not changing the facts of the memory. So if you had an episode of abuse in your childhood or something or something terrible happened to you, nobody’s saying you’re going to erase the facts of that experience. What it erases is the negative impact. And you can do it, I mean, I gave you a silly example of me and Ro and Paula in the kitchen where I had one interpretation of what they were doing, and then they told me what was actually happening. And I was like, “Oh, okay. They’re not angry at me. They’re not grieving. Everybody’s just waiting for the meat to rest.” And suddenly it had a very, very different emotional resonance for me. And I started to realize that I have spent large chunks of my life reconsolidating memories, and I didn’t even know I was doing it.

So for example, there was a person I knew in graduate school who was really together, very elegant, very chic, and I always felt really ashamed around her. She always seemed to have it so together. And I was like, “My whole life falls apart all the time,” and I kept getting pregnant and whatnot. I was married, it wasn’t like I was just—nevermind. Anyway, you see how I am, right? You see how I am. And this is a source of shame. It would be for you too. 

So once I ran into this woman and we got talking about graduate school and I finally just said, “I felt like such a hot mess talking to you. There’s so much shame about how together you were and I was such a mess.” And she said, “You thought I was together?” She said, “I wasn’t together. I was armored. I was stuck. I was rigid and you were flexible and you were open and you didn’t mind saying what you thought, and I envied you.” And I literally had to go home and lie down because I was busy for the next three to five hours reconsolidating a memory. 

And now in my memory, I meet that person and there is no wave of shame. There is this wave of compassion because I understand now what she was going through. I’ve let her know what I was going through and I hope it reconsolidated for her too. So both of us were ashamed of the way we showed up because we thought the other was shaming us. And in fact, the opposite was true.

So if I look back at my time in therapy long ago or just how I deal with any recollection now, I spend a lot of time deliberately seizing that opportunity when a memory is open to reconsolidate it with something less painful.

So, I thought, here’s what I want to do on The Gathering Room today. I want to reconsolidate one of your memories, whoever you are. And there’s another study that I read that shows how we can do that. It’s very, very simple. So I would like you to remember something negative that happened to you when you were a kid, not something horrible, horrible, horrible, but something like, I don’t know, having a bad experience on vacation or having a bad experience with a friend or not doing well on something at school. Something that is not life-and-death horrific, but in your memory when you go there, it goes, “Ew, ouch, ow, that wasn’t good.” Okay?

Now, once you’ve got that memory open—so just recall it for a few seconds. Remember what happened. You might feel like “Eee…” a little squeamish about it. That’s okay. That’s why we’re reconsolidating it. Now what you have to do is tell me—you don’t have to tell me, you’re in Czechoslo—the Czech Republic. Oh my God, I am such a hot mess.

What I’d like you to do is think for yourself about one good thing that you can trace to that experience. So in my case, I go back to the experience with my friend, and I think what good thing came out of that? All right. When I saw her again, I was upfront with her because I wanted to talk about what I’d experienced. That was a good thing. It led me to memory reconsolidation. 

If I think about the time in the kitchen, I’m standing there going, “What is happening? I don’t know what is happening.” If I think about something good that came out of that experience, which was the day before yesterday, first of all, I know now that meat needs to rest. Secondly, I know that it’s impossible for a table full of vegetables to melt down into a tiny, tiny pile in a sauce pan. And also, oh, I talked about it at dinner, and Ro and her mom both got really, really laughing, like laughing very hard. So they had to lean over, and that was delightful. 

So if you think about any little thing, and it could be like later I told a friend about it and I got comfort. Somebody said, “Oh, that sucks that that happened to you.” Or someone said, “Well, look at it this way.” Or you were able to reexamine it and say, “Actually, I was kind of brave on that day. It wasn’t so bad. And I’ve been braver ever since.” Something like that. Anything, any little thing. 

 

What’s happening is that there are biochemical signals that are actually churning up the proteins in your brain where that memory is stored and reconfiguring them into something different. They can actually watch this process. It is a physiological thing. It deconstructs the physical scaffolding of the memory and then puts in the new experience and sews it back up again. So people who did this in an experiment where they wrote about something negative that happened, one group wrote about something positive that came out of the negative experience. The other group did not; they just did the memory the same way. And after they had been tested, they all came back two months later—they had both groups describe their memories again and then they compared the two accounts. Sure enough, the people who thought of something positive that came out of the memory now remembered the memory as having positive aspects. It was literally a different memory. It wasn’t “the bad thing that happened when my family moved.” It was “the bad thing and also the good thing that happened when my family moved.”

So you can see that having reconsolidated it, and if you reconsolidated a lot of memories that have negative charge, put something positive in them, you’re actually walking around with a brain full of good experiences instead of a brain full of bad experiences. And it’s the same brain and it’s the same memories. You’ve just reconsolidated the emotional impact of these memories. And so they get lighter. 

And I really think if you went through all… We’re all carrying around a big backpack full of sledgehammers and other heavy things, all the bad things that happened. And if we start taking them out one by one and saying, “Yes, but what good thing came of that?” it’s not just Pollyanna smarminess. It is literally changing the construction of our brains and giving us a bedrock of something that was always more positive.

And then you realize your interpretation of events really, really isn’t closely adhering to the structure of the event. The facts that happened remain the same and no one questions them, but the emotional carryover, the psychological burden we carry away from them is fundamentally different after we reconstitute those.

So, if a lot of bad things have happened to you, I am so sorry—and you don’t have to struggle with the heaviness of that in the same way for the rest of your life. If you can reconsolidate the memories, you can turn them into something much airier, much more buoyant, maybe even something that will lift you up instead of dragging you down. So as I said, I’ve spent a lot of my life doing this and I want to spend more now that I know Memory Reconsolidation Theory. So I mean, I don’t know it deeply, but I know of it. And now you do too.

So let’s do our meditation, our Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation because it’s from within space, silence, and stillness that we can reexamine a negative memory and see the positives that came out of it. But that is not the meaning or purpose of the meditation. The meaning and purpose of the meditation is to get in touch with who we actually are, the being driving this changeable brain and learning to use the machinery of it more effectively for our own joy. So let’s find the one who is doing all this activity.

You can start by getting comfortable, letting go of having to do anything for the next 20 minutes and asking yourself the peculiar question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?Can I imagine the distance between my eyes and the screen in front of me? Phone, computer, if there’s no screen, whatever’s in front of you. Can you imagine the space between your eyes and the thing they see? Can you imagine the distance between the top of your head and the base of your spine? Can you imagine the space inside the molecules of your rib cage? Can you imagine the space in the atoms that make up your heart?

Can you imagine the stillness in which your heart beats? The stillness in which your brain is moving and changing? The stillness that connects every one of us on this broadcast through space and time. The stillness unites us all.

Can you imagine the silence beneath every sound on earth, beneath every sound in the universe? Can you imagine that your awareness extends through the space, the silence, and the stillness to connect with each other being in the universe? Can you imagine that the universe is loving you back?

And of course, you don’t ever have to answer those questions. They are just meant to prime the brain to wonder because it’s wonder that takes us into things, knowing that they aren’t stable, knowing that they aren’t rigid, knowing that we can literally change our past even if we don’t try to change what happened.

So let’s do some questions here. 

Question: “Is it more powerful to revisit memories in the first or third person?”

I haven’t read anything about that, but I would guess in the first person. I would guess that the first person is more powerful. “Oh, that is not the way it happened to me. The way it happened to me is this good thing came out of it as well.”

Question: “What if nothing good came out of it?”

Hm. It’s very interesting. I’ve had many situations in my life where initially I could literally see nothing good coming out of it, where it was going to destroy my life, and it actually did. When my son was diagnosed with Down syndrome, when I started having flashbacks of childhood abuse—both those events trashed my life, the life I had at that time. But the life I subsequently created, due in part to those difficult circumstances, has brought me where I am here.

I’m not going to be so pushy as to say that your experiences all had good things that came out of them, but you are still obviously on your feet and thinking, on your feet and able to wonder. So even if it’s Nietzsche’s dictum “that which does not kill us makes us strong,” if you got nothing more than endurance out of it, that’s still something. And the goal here is not to think of something that redeemed all the negativity of that. The goal is to think of one tiny thing connected to that. For example, “I was never that naive again.” “I learned to discern when people had negative intentions.” “I became more sensitive.” “I became more aware of danger.” Anything. The idea is to add any positive element you can think of.

And here’s the thing about the human imagination: It really is limitless. I had to go a really long way to imagine anything good that would come out of my son’s diagnosis. I know that seems really childish to me now, but I was only 24, and I was pretty childish. And I had to start taking into account things like, “I’ve been having some interesting metaphysical experiences since this pregnancy began. There’s something going on here I don’t understand. Maybe the whole materialist view of the world is not accurate. Maybe I can throw away the whole Western worldview and think about perfection as something utterly different than anything I’ve ever heard about.” It was a long trip, mentally, but I’m sure happy I did it. And now it seems ridiculous. It’s like so much good came out of it, and I can’t believe I didn’t see it at the time.

Again, I’m not trying to push that on your experience, but I am saying there have been a lot of times when I didn’t think that I could come up with anything and it turned out that there was just this cornucopia of wonderful things that came out of it along with enormous pain. Don’t get me wrong, it hurt.

Question: “I’ve also had this experience, but I didn’t know what it was called. I could only do this after years of therapy, working through the hurt, trauma, and grief. Is it safe to say therapy should precede this?”

I think it is therapy. I think it’s the essence of therapy to remember something with a therapist or maybe a group of people in the room and have them validate you in a way and give you a perspective you may not have had at the time. So it introduces something different into the memory right there. I don’t think you could go far wrong by, if you’re haunted by a memory to say, “Let me see if I can think of something that was a blessing that came from this, some kind of depth or transcendence or lucky break or decision I made that led to something good because of this.” I don’t think that that is going to harm you before you get therapy.

Plus, not everybody can afford therapy or has access to a good therapist. But I really think if you write in a journal the things that happened to you—first of all, they’ve shown, James Pennebaker’s work shows that people who just write down negative experiences, even if it brings up pain in the moment, have significant lasting positive effects on their wellbeing. And if you say, “Okay, here’s this negative thing that happened,” and then go back to your journal and think, “What good came of that? What good came of that?” I really would suggest journaling as a way to deal with this for those two reasons that writing it down helps. And then it gives you a little bit of a record so that you can go back and say, “Oh, I was so crushed that my high school boyfriend dumped me, but without that, I never would’ve been in the relationship I’m in today.”

You can see things in hindsight and I don’t think that you’re going to destroy yourself that way. I don’t think it requires a professional to help you see that something good came out of something really terrible.

Question: “I can’t think of anything good about that day at school with the bully. Just keep digging?”

Well, for example, have you ever been more compassionate to other people who have been bullied? Have you felt more activated when other people are being bullied so that you’ve taken political action like voting for a person that you thought would help? In other words, are you more aware? You can start looking at things like that because one of the first gifts given us by trauma and negative socialization is the gift of empathy. And when we’re lost in the “It shouldn’t have happened, it was terrible,” those things are true. It shouldn’t have happened, it was terrible. Yeah, I completely agree. Nobody should have done that to you. 

But even before you can find a lot of positives yourself, you can see how it changed you into a kinder, more compassionate person. And if it didn’t make you a more compassionate person, maybe it made you tough. There’s almost always, if you kept living, you took something away from that experience and it might have been wounding, but I just don’t believe it’s nothing but the capacity to be wounded and wounded and wounded.

I think the only reason we’re alive after those experiences is to be able to start making meaning of it. And when I was in high school and I read Viktor Frankl, who in the death camps in Germany started composing in his head the book Man’s Search for Meaning, when I started reading how he had brought the search for meaning into his experience at Auschwitz, I started thinking, yeah, that’s pretty impressive finding something positive in something that unfathomably horrible. And yet there was Viktor Frankl setting out to do it, and he has changed the world with that book and with his other books and his other work. Yeah. Some people, it seems the worse the world treats them, the more incredibly heroically they rise to help others and themselves. So yeah, keep digging.

Question: “How to stop the fear or, as Liz Gilbert said the other day, the terror? It’s often unfounded and it feels like armor.”

Yeah. When you’re in terror, you’re probably rewinding a memory and replaying a memory of terror without reconsolidating it. And it can go over and over and over again and just dig the same tracks in your brain. And actually each time you think about it, it’ll get wrapped with myelin again and it will feel more convincing. But if you bring in that tiny bit of positive—and I love to cite this example because Liz Gilbert, before she wrote her world-changing memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, that sold 30 million copies, was in a place that felt like there was nothing good about it, nothing. And the only tiny thread of hope she had was that she wanted to learn Italian, and that little impulse turned into this incredible memoir that was so wonderful. And you think she wasn’t terrified? She was terrified. I’ve had it personally confirmed to me. She was terrified.

But when she looked back in that memoir, she said, “Here’s the good that came out of it. Here’s the tiny little thread of joy in it: Italian.” And from there came this amazing artistic career, really. So I’m glad you brought up that example.

Final question. Oh, this is a summary from Ro saying a lot of questions from people saying, “I can’t find anything positive in my experience.”

Okay. So I know we’re at time, but I would love you to read a book called Left to Tell by Immaculée Ilibagiza. Look up Left to Tell. This is a woman who survived the genocide in Rwanda, hidden in a secret bathroom in a preacher’s house with five other women, I believe it was, tiny, tiny, tiny room. They were in there for the hundred days’ war, the whole hundred days. They barely ate. They were in constant terror for their lives. And it is the most redemptive, joyful, grateful piece of work. 

When I read Viktor Frankl’s work, Immaculée Ilibagiza’s work, the experiences of people, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, all these people have gone through literal hell, and they are finding a way. In that book, Immaculée Ilibagiza says that one day she decided she was going to learn English and she said, “I felt like the luckiest person”—and she’s still in that bathroom! Like, talk about finding something positive to say. And I gave that book to someone I know who doesn’t see the good in things saying, “Look at this.” And she said, “Well, of course, she was lucky enough to have that experience.” And I was like, “You’re not seeing this. It was horrible. There was nothing lucky about it.” But there is something about her that is the creativity of the storyteller that has decided to reconsolidate a memory and thereby change a truly horrifying past into something illuminating.

Wow. If people can do it, I think we can all do it. And it is a challenge, and we don’t set out to do it, but let’s set out to do it today because we’re not just going to change now and going forward. We’re going to change everything we’ve ever experienced. And I know it can happen. I really do. So good luck with that. And I will see you again soon on The Gathering Room! Bye for now.