The secret instruction manual in your brain
On the set of rules we unknowingly live by
This is entry #2 in a series of shorter-than-usual posts following a client through the memory reconsolidation process. Read the first entry here.
If you’ve been in my orbit for a while, you’ve probably heard me mention implicit memory.
What we usually mean when we say ‘memory’ is episodic memory, which tells us what took place, when, with who and so on.
Implicit memory is different. It contains what our brains see as the key takeaways from significant things that happened. It’s full of rules or predictions about how things work—basically important generalisations that we should remember in the future. If episode memory is the story, then implicit memory is the moral of that story.
All of which means: implicit memory operates as a kind of personalised instruction manual distilled from our past experience. It’s our brain’s invisible guide to who we are and how we can expect the world to work for us.
Let’s go back to my client, Max, to see this in action. His episodic memory held stories of all the times he didn’t do what he was supposed to do, starting all the way back to his tortured relationship to homework in grade school.
But his implicit memory held the core belief extracted from these experiences. The belief was roughly as follows: there is something wrong with you, and we know that because you keep being disappointing.
Max tried so many things to stop being this person. He once described himself as a ‘top 1% consumer of self-help content’ in terms of the amount of experts and ideas and methodologies he had tried before he found me.
That none of it worked had nothing to do with how hard Max tried or how much he wanted it.
It had to do with the most important fact about beliefs stored in implicit memory: they cannot be changed, except under specific conditions.
Which means: what goes into that instruction manual is set in stone, unless a certain process is followed (about which more later).
Consider what this set-in-stone quality meant for Max. Because his instruction manual contained those beliefs about his wrongness and being disappointing, he could not be convinced by any evidence otherwise. No matter how many people told him he was actually delightful or reminded him of data supporting his ability to keep at least some commitments, the rule stayed unchanged.
To change it, we needed to activate a mechanism that brain has for exactly this purpose. It’s called memory reconsolidation.
Over the rest of this series, I’ll describe the memory-reconsolidation (MR) process in more detail as I lay out exactly how Max and I used it to resolve his avoidance for good. In essence, though, MR involves leveraging what is called a ‘mismatch’.
In this usage, a mismatch is an experience (not simply a statement) that the brain will accept as contradicting the belief stored in the instruction manual.
Possibly you can already see the difficulty.
For Max, the mismatch would involve experiencing himself as fundamentally OK and not disappointing. But Max’s brain refused to entertain any suggestion that he was OK and not disappointing. So how exactly were we going to give him this experience? Isn’t he precisely wired to not have this experience? Isn’t the solution to the problem precluded by the problem?
On the one hand: yes. Welcome to my life as a coach! This is the puzzle I spend a great deal my time solving with my clients.
On the other hand: the puzzle can be solved. Time after time, we find a way to create an experience of the mismatch—and we re-write the manual.
It does takes my being wily and persistent, as well as clients showing up for my questions with as much honesty, intelligence and clarity as they can manage.
Luckily, Max has all those in spades, and we were able to corner his brain into identifying a mismatch it would accept.
But it definitely some doing, and some borderline trickery on my part.
In the next post, I explain how I went about it.
Read the next entry in the series here