I see now how this could happen, and evidently it happened to you.
It has not happened to me, even though I used it quite aggressively e.g. to instil objectively false but useful beliefs.
I am trying to work out what is different… I did this as part of the IFS (Internal Family Systems) process, as a more powerful way to resolve exiles that are hard to fix.
I suspect maybe the difference is that in IFS they make a huge deal about honoring the ‘parts’ including exiles. In your terms this would be the unhelpful beliefs. You need ideally to fully accept that they are there for a reason and have good intentions. In IFS it is a common rookie mistake to try to shove ‘bad’ “parts” (in IFS terms) away prematurely and tell them to stop doing or believing that thing right away. If you do this they will often resist vehemently in open or in covert ways. Once you do get to know them, appreciate them, acknowledge their good intentions, they are then often very willing to form the intention to change, and in this case they will not resist.
So my suggestion would be to try to get to know the ‘false’ belief better and to acknowledge why it is there, the good it did, the good intention behind it—and with associated beliefs—there can be quite a complex structure of chained beliefs and practices. Only then do you ask it, are you happy with the current set-up? Would you like to change anything? Ask if you do really want to change the belief in every bone of your body. Usually at this point it is pretty easy to change and you are done.
If the ‘exile’ *wants* to change but cannot then the UTEB techniques can be very useful. I will give one example.
As a very young student I had a vicious and sadistic teacher. Apart from her beatings, she employed psychological terror tactics seemingly designed to maximize our terror and helplessness and humiliation. I had frequent flashbacks which I see as a form of hyper-vigilance whose intention was to keep me safe. I tried all the usual techniques for resolving my flashbacks. We are here now, she is dead, I have adult resources that can protect you, I can hold you, etc, etc. These helped a bit but not entirely.
So when everything else did not succeed entirely I tried the “nuclear option”—rewriting history. I implanted a belief that the very first time she exhibited her toxic behavior a group of parents stormed into the classroom, beat her up, threw her out of the school, and warned her never to set foot in a school again, which she never did (in the rewritten history). We reverted back to our previous teacher who was lovely. This worked, even though—at some level—I know it is false. I think it worked because all the parts of me were united in resolving this issue and there was no internal conflict apart from the ongoing feelings of fear and anxiety being too strong.
So again I think you may perhaps have had some residual internal conflict about changing the belief and this may be why you did not succeed at times. I hope this helps.
Two notes
1. People may confuse what I did with a revenge fantasy. I don’t think revenge fantasies are very often useful. This is different because the bad thing, in the rewritten history, did not happen. There is nothing to revenge.
2. Assuming my post makes sense to you, it may illustrate why the seemingly preposterous IFS model can be quite useful—it gives you a powerful language and structure for dealing with all these internal complexities.
I suspect maybe the difference is that in IFS they make a huge deal about honoring the ‘parts’ including exiles. In your terms this would be the unhelpful beliefs. You need ideally to fully accept that they are there for a reason and have good intentions. In IFS it is a common rookie mistake to try to shove ‘bad’ “parts” (in IFS terms) away prematurely and tell them to stop doing or believing that thing right away. If you do this they will often resist vehemently in open or in covert ways. Once you do get to know them, appreciate them, acknowledge their good intentions, they are then often very willing to form the intention to change, and in this case they will not resist.
So my suggestion would be to try to get to know the ‘false’ belief better and to acknowledge why it is there, the good it did, the good intention behind it—and with associated beliefs—there can be quite a complex structure of chained beliefs and practices. Only then do you ask it, are you happy with the current set-up? Would you like to change anything? Ask if you do really want to change the belief in every bone of your body. Usually at this point it is pretty easy to change and you are done.
This agrees with my experience.
So when everything else did not succeed entirely I tried the “nuclear option”—rewriting history. I implanted a belief that the very first time she exhibited her toxic behavior a group of parents stormed into the classroom, beat her up, threw her out of the school, and warned her never to set foot in a school again, which she never did (in the rewritten history). We reverted back to our previous teacher who was lovely. This worked, even though—at some level—I know it is false.
My model of “rewriting history” is that it still requires something that your mind believes could in principle have happened, and is a way of integrating those true beliefs in the form of an experience which an emotional part can believe in. Part of what’s going on in such a memory is a fear that if this were to happen again, there would be no way to escape the situation, and you would be totally helpless. A parental intervention is something that could in principle have happened even back in that situation (even if its imagined concrete manifestation was a bit over-the-top), so once the “stuck” part of the mind has updated on it being at least possible to get out of the situation, it can relax a little and allow other relevant information to be updated.
I think that the feeling of total helplessness, in particular, is a big factor in trauma memories—the therapeutic literature seems to argue it, and it also makes sense in theoretical terms. If you get into a state where absolutely nothing you do can make any difference to the negative situation that you are in, that could get almost unboundedly bad. From that perspective, it’s not surprising that upon detecting the potential for such a situation, some parts of the brain would become obsessed with bringing up the possibility of that situation, until a way had been found to avoid it.
There was a related excerpt in Unlocking the Emotional Brain, which talked imaginary re-enactment; taking some bad situation that you were in, and imagining how you yourself had gone about it differently. This would update your belief that there was nothing that you could have done in that situation, and make the memory less traumatic. But it notes that the therapist should ensure that an alternate way of acting would in fact have been possible:
As understood in terms of the therapeutic reconsolidation process, enacting the natural, self-protective response is de-traumatizing because the experience of the empowered response creates new knowings that disconfirm and dissolve the model and the feeling of being powerless that had formed in the original traumatic learning experience.
It is important to note that the re-enactment technique is appropriate only if the original situation in fact gave the client early signs of danger or trouble, so that in re-enacting, the client can respond sooner and more assertively and self-protectively, and in that way can experience the ability to avoid harm. An example of a trauma that is inappropriate for re-enactment is the experience of a bomb exploding. In that case there is no way to respond more self-protectively, so re-enactment would only be re-traumatizing. In such cases, different techniques of traumatic memory transformation are needed.
Given that quote, it is interesting that “someone else could have come in and helped me” re-enactment sometimes works. It is not entirely clear to me why and when it does (it doesn’t always seem to help me), but one belief that people sometimes internalize from e.g. being terrorized by an authority figure is that they are worthless and deserved the terrorizing. If you know that parents generally would not accept this kind of a behavior from a teacher, then that belief contains the generalized belief of “no child deserves this kind of a treatment”; which, when applied to the original memory, may be a way of turning that abstract belief concrete and removing the belief that nobody would care about that happening to your childhood self. (Just wildly speculating here.)
So my suggestion would be to try to get to know the ‘false’ belief better and to acknowledge why it is there, the good it did, the good intention behind it—and with associated beliefs
Yes, I suspect you are right. This is something I had never done with my problems before I read UtEB, and I have found it one of the more useful insights (it would have been worth me reading the book just for this even without the rest of the model), but it is definitely not a habit yet. It’s entirely possible that I hadn’t properly completed this step before I tried to acknowledge the juxtoposition.
I think there is a simpler explanation. All our thoughts are driven by needs. When needs for safety are not met in a particularly overwhelming fashion, it gets stuck in our minds as trauma—meaning we are in a constant state of anticipating it might happen again. All our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs just follow from that fear and trying to protect ourselves from that outcome.
What you imagined was a scenario where your needs for protection/safety were completely met—you were protected and the trauma never occurred. As the emotional part of our brain sees imagination and memory as the same, this resolved the trauma.
Being internally aligned may have made the concentration to do that easier, but I think it’s the strength of your imagining and your felt sense of your need for safety being met that changed the way your brain stores the memory (moving it from the amygdala/danger center to the hippocampus/long term storage).
In other words, your body was stuck in a constant state of needing to experience safety, and your imagination made that experience of safety happen (by imagining throughly enough for it to *feel* real), which met that need to experience safety.
As the emotional part of our brain sees imagination and memory as the same, this resolved the trauma
I think you are talking about something downstream from the problem OP reported. What you said explains why changing the memory would help. But I think it is not relevant to the question of whether you *can* change the memory.
If there are parts of you that think that holding on to the memory and to whatever partial solutions you came up with at the time are important, you will have trouble changing that, no matter what the benefits would be after the fact.
And of course given the traumatic nature of such memories, holding onto them and to the solutions you found do tend to seem very important. Books and reports of therapy are full of examples of this kind of thing.
I see now how this could happen, and evidently it happened to you.
It has not happened to me, even though I used it quite aggressively e.g. to instil objectively false but useful beliefs.
I am trying to work out what is different… I did this as part of the IFS (Internal Family Systems) process, as a more powerful way to resolve exiles that are hard to fix.
I suspect maybe the difference is that in IFS they make a huge deal about honoring the ‘parts’ including exiles. In your terms this would be the unhelpful beliefs. You need ideally to fully accept that they are there for a reason and have good intentions. In IFS it is a common rookie mistake to try to shove ‘bad’ “parts” (in IFS terms) away prematurely and tell them to stop doing or believing that thing right away. If you do this they will often resist vehemently in open or in covert ways. Once you do get to know them, appreciate them, acknowledge their good intentions, they are then often very willing to form the intention to change, and in this case they will not resist.
So my suggestion would be to try to get to know the ‘false’ belief better and to acknowledge why it is there, the good it did, the good intention behind it—and with associated beliefs—there can be quite a complex structure of chained beliefs and practices. Only then do you ask it, are you happy with the current set-up? Would you like to change anything? Ask if you do really want to change the belief in every bone of your body. Usually at this point it is pretty easy to change and you are done.
If the ‘exile’ *wants* to change but cannot then the UTEB techniques can be very useful. I will give one example.
As a very young student I had a vicious and sadistic teacher. Apart from her beatings, she employed psychological terror tactics seemingly designed to maximize our terror and helplessness and humiliation. I had frequent flashbacks which I see as a form of hyper-vigilance whose intention was to keep me safe. I tried all the usual techniques for resolving my flashbacks. We are here now, she is dead, I have adult resources that can protect you, I can hold you, etc, etc. These helped a bit but not entirely.
So when everything else did not succeed entirely I tried the “nuclear option”—rewriting history. I implanted a belief that the very first time she exhibited her toxic behavior a group of parents stormed into the classroom, beat her up, threw her out of the school, and warned her never to set foot in a school again, which she never did (in the rewritten history). We reverted back to our previous teacher who was lovely. This worked, even though—at some level—I know it is false. I think it worked because all the parts of me were united in resolving this issue and there was no internal conflict apart from the ongoing feelings of fear and anxiety being too strong.
So again I think you may perhaps have had some residual internal conflict about changing the belief and this may be why you did not succeed at times. I hope this helps.
Two notes
1. People may confuse what I did with a revenge fantasy. I don’t think revenge fantasies are very often useful. This is different because the bad thing, in the rewritten history, did not happen. There is nothing to revenge.
2. Assuming my post makes sense to you, it may illustrate why the seemingly preposterous IFS model can be quite useful—it gives you a powerful language and structure for dealing with all these internal complexities.
This agrees with my experience.
My model of “rewriting history” is that it still requires something that your mind believes could in principle have happened, and is a way of integrating those true beliefs in the form of an experience which an emotional part can believe in. Part of what’s going on in such a memory is a fear that if this were to happen again, there would be no way to escape the situation, and you would be totally helpless. A parental intervention is something that could in principle have happened even back in that situation (even if its imagined concrete manifestation was a bit over-the-top), so once the “stuck” part of the mind has updated on it being at least possible to get out of the situation, it can relax a little and allow other relevant information to be updated.
I think that the feeling of total helplessness, in particular, is a big factor in trauma memories—the therapeutic literature seems to argue it, and it also makes sense in theoretical terms. If you get into a state where absolutely nothing you do can make any difference to the negative situation that you are in, that could get almost unboundedly bad. From that perspective, it’s not surprising that upon detecting the potential for such a situation, some parts of the brain would become obsessed with bringing up the possibility of that situation, until a way had been found to avoid it.
There was a related excerpt in Unlocking the Emotional Brain, which talked imaginary re-enactment; taking some bad situation that you were in, and imagining how you yourself had gone about it differently. This would update your belief that there was nothing that you could have done in that situation, and make the memory less traumatic. But it notes that the therapist should ensure that an alternate way of acting would in fact have been possible:
Given that quote, it is interesting that “someone else could have come in and helped me” re-enactment sometimes works. It is not entirely clear to me why and when it does (it doesn’t always seem to help me), but one belief that people sometimes internalize from e.g. being terrorized by an authority figure is that they are worthless and deserved the terrorizing. If you know that parents generally would not accept this kind of a behavior from a teacher, then that belief contains the generalized belief of “no child deserves this kind of a treatment”; which, when applied to the original memory, may be a way of turning that abstract belief concrete and removing the belief that nobody would care about that happening to your childhood self. (Just wildly speculating here.)
Yes, I suspect you are right. This is something I had never done with my problems before I read UtEB, and I have found it one of the more useful insights (it would have been worth me reading the book just for this even without the rest of the model), but it is definitely not a habit yet. It’s entirely possible that I hadn’t properly completed this step before I tried to acknowledge the juxtoposition.
I think there is a simpler explanation. All our thoughts are driven by needs. When needs for safety are not met in a particularly overwhelming fashion, it gets stuck in our minds as trauma—meaning we are in a constant state of anticipating it might happen again. All our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs just follow from that fear and trying to protect ourselves from that outcome.
What you imagined was a scenario where your needs for protection/safety were completely met—you were protected and the trauma never occurred. As the emotional part of our brain sees imagination and memory as the same, this resolved the trauma.
Being internally aligned may have made the concentration to do that easier, but I think it’s the strength of your imagining and your felt sense of your need for safety being met that changed the way your brain stores the memory (moving it from the amygdala/danger center to the hippocampus/long term storage).
In other words, your body was stuck in a constant state of needing to experience safety, and your imagination made that experience of safety happen (by imagining throughly enough for it to *feel* real), which met that need to experience safety.
I think you are talking about something downstream from the problem OP reported. What you said explains why changing the memory would help. But I think it is not relevant to the question of whether you *can* change the memory.
If there are parts of you that think that holding on to the memory and to whatever partial solutions you came up with at the time are important, you will have trouble changing that, no matter what the benefits would be after the fact.
And of course given the traumatic nature of such memories, holding onto them and to the solutions you found do tend to seem very important. Books and reports of therapy are full of examples of this kind of thing.