The Neurobiology of Somatic Therapy for Attachment Trauma, Part 2: Memory Reconsolidation

Welcome back for part two in this series about the neurobiology of somatic therapy for attachment trauma. Part one emphasizes the importance of building the skill or capacity to notice or witness your experience, rather than drowning it in or being hijacked by it. This post will cover how somatic therapy helps clients to rewrite core beliefs about onesself and the world and build a sense of self-trust in your ability to feel and do things that have historically felt too overwhelming.

Parts - Your Inner World

Through noticing and tracking your experience, you can start to have a clearer picture of your inner world. As you notice what elements of the present moment stack up together - such as what sensations or thoughts or beliefs accompany anger, or what emotions accompany your pattern of drinking or doom scrolling - this helps to understand the different neural networks that are imprinted in your brain. In therapy, to make it less sciency, we often call these parts. 

For example, you might have an angry part who feels like they never get their way and, as a result, avoids getting too close to anyone. Or you might have a manager part who intellectualizes everything as a way to predict and control the outcome of situations. These parts all hold important emotional knowings that were shaped in early life or otherwise significant moments in your life. 

Differentiation and Linkage

Getting to know these different parts or energies is not about forcing them into a different pattern or some sort of compliance, but rather about coming into relationship with them to really understand their motivations, purpose, fears, and origins. 

In part one, I wrote about how differentiating from our experience is part of coming into that witnessing mind. Another way to think about this is differentiating from our parts; metaphorically stepping back or zooming out so that you can see things more clearly. Parts often have very strong agendas about what needs to happen in order to stay safe or get your needs met. This is important in certain situations where urgency is necessary for safety, but in many life situations, that level of urgency isn’t so necessary. Differentiating from the part, as you may remember from part one, helps to release neurotransmitters that slow down our reactivity and help us to be more curious, intentional, and creative about our responses.

Differentiating isn’t about completely distancing or denouncing the part. It’s important to stay close enough to be in relationship with the part; to see it as an important part of your system with crucial information that can help you. A common question an experiential therapist will ask to help you link or come into relationship with a part is, “how do you feel towards the part?” This helps to identify if you truly differentiated and in a witnessing mind state, or if there are other parts that are showing up to manage the initial part. For instance, if anxiety is the initial part you notice, shame or frustration may show up to manage or influence the anxiety. That’s ok - we can work with that! But that might mean that we are then working to differentiate from the shame or frustration.

What’s Missing From the Story?

Parts often hold very specific information about past experiences that are shaping their predictions about the future. For instance, the shame part in the previous example might know that, historically, anxiety has been “too much” for a parent. Frustration might know that anxiety “gets in the way” of getting work done. These perspectives make sense, but often don’t resolve the anxiety, instead they might create a pressure-cooker situation in which the anxiety is suppressed, only to explode in the future, or show up in a new way.

Practicing differentiation and linkage from a witnessing mind state, building in compassion instead of piling on more parts, we can create space to get curious about the knowledge the anxiety holds and where it was born. For instance, anxiety might know that making mistakes is “wrong.” This is actually an extremely common pattern in the clients I work with; they have learned that there is no room for mistakes, at work or in relationships. A common rewiring that happens is when we start to consider all the times they have made mistakes and things have actually been okay. Or when we confront the reality that while their father was really harsh about mistakes, that hasn’t been the case at work or in their romantic relationship.

Memory Reconsolidation

Neurobiologically, when this mismatch between what the anxiety knows is “always” true and what reality shows is only “somewhat” true, this is called lability. When that mismatch becomes clear, this is an opportunity for memory reconsolidation - when the emotional knowing that has always held true becomes more complicated than “always” or “never” and can reshape how we feel about ourselves, our relationships, or the world.

Memory reconsolidation is really important for those with attachment trauma or complex trauma, because it’s not just singular traumatic experiences that need our attention, but the way many traumatic experiences have constructed a certain worldview of who we are at our core, such as all the ways we are too much or not enough, or how the world fundamentally is, such as not being accepted by anyone anywhere.

This process can be extremely helpful for shifting symptoms such as substance abuse or engaging in sexual behavior with unsafe people, because those behaviors are often connected to certain emotional knowings about what we deserve or what helps us to manage our big emotions. When memories are reconsolidated, that’s a completely different foundation for which our behaviors to grow from. If we learn that mistakes are ok, and even that anxiety after making a mistake is normal and will pass, then we might not need to engage in an impulsive behavior that quickly takes away or changes our big, unmanageable emotional experience.

Change is Possible

If you suffer from attachment trauma, complex trauma, relational trauma, racial trauma, or developmental trauma (which are in many ways overlapping concepts) an experiential somatic method can be helpful for shifting the core truths and emotional knowings that lay under the surface of your more front-facing emotions, symptoms, and patterns. As a trauma therapist with nearly a decade of experience and deep knowledge of many experiential modalities, it would be my honor to support you in your healing. Schedule a free 20-minute consultation and we can talk.

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