To exist is to change; to change is to mature; to mature is to go on creating one’s self endlessly.
— HENRI BERGSON
THE PRACTICES TAUGHT in the previous chapters help you establish a safe and strong neural platform for rewiring conditioned patterns encoded in your brain’s circuitry. Over time, these practices steadily strengthen the prefrontal cortex to do that rewiring and sustain the changes you create in your brain circuitry.
The actual rewiring, and the establishment of new patterns of coping, occurs through the three processes of brain change presented in this chapter: new conditioning, deconditioning, and reconditioning. All three processes can be used again and again as you discover more old strategies that you want to replace with more resilient ways of coping. These processes have a cumulative effect. The more you rewire into your brain skillful, resilient patterns of coping, the more competent your brain becomes at the task.
New conditioning creates new neural pathways in your brain. You learn new, more adaptive coping strategies that will then lead to greater resilience. We know that new experiences, and repeating those experiences, cause neurons in your brain to fire in ways that create and stabilize those neural pathways. To rewire your brain for resilience, you seek out new experiences that you know will encode these more adaptive coping strategies into your brain’s circuitry and repeat them.
For example, if you want to create circuits in the brain that help you remain calm, you seek out and practice experiences of being calm, as my client Sean did with his intention to wake up in a state of calm. If you want to create the circuitry that supports your competence in negotiating with customer-care representatives on the phone, you seek opportunities to teach your brain through experiences of doing that well.
The neural patterns of resilience that result from new conditioning can, over time, become automatic habits of coping. With practice, these strategies can even completely override the old, less functional habits. New habits of coping can become so steady, so reliable that you behave resiliently without having to think about it anymore.
Deconditioning creates the receptivity and flexibility in your neural circuitry that reopens your brain to learning and change, enabling it to unlearn old, less effective coping strategies. Deconditioning uses the awareness and acceptance that come from a compassionate mindfulness practice to shift the processing of your brain to the diffuse, “soft” focus of the defocusing network. The defocusing network generates a neural flexibility, allowing you to alter even patterns learned unconsciously and deeply embedded. Deconditioning creates a new mental “play space” in your brain, making it far easier to wire in the new strategies as you choose to.
Reconditioning helps you rewire the neural circuitry of an existing strategy by pairing that strategy with a new, more effective one. When the strategies are paired in your conscious awareness, the simultaneous firing of neurons encoding both strategies allows them to deconsolidate (fall apart), then reconsolidate (rewire) together a fraction of a second later. The neural firing pattern of the new strategy can supersede the old, often rewiring it completely, immediately, and permanently.
All three processes of self-directed neuroplasticity, like any conditioning in the brain, are neutral. They will encode either more resilient or less resilient patterns. They will more reliably encode better strategies for resilience when supported by the synergy of mindfulness and empathy — awareness of the process and compassionate acceptance of any responses that the process evokes. These processes have a global impact on brain functioning. They will help you recover many innate capacities in the brain in addition to resilience, such as motivation, equanimity, self-expression, creativity, and altruism. Resilience itself is a capacity that allows us to recover many others.
New Conditioning
New conditioning occurs through intentional learning from experience. By selecting experiences that can teach us new, more adaptive coping strategies, we deliberately create new neural connections — new pathways and circuits of resilience in the brain. We must be careful in our choices for that new learning. Rather than encoding more facts — cramming more data into the storage locker of memory — learning here means training the brain to respond in new and more effective ways to the challenges of our lives. We learn to take a moment to breathe, count to ten, focus on “what’s right with what’s wrong,” and regroup. We learn to listen to our wise mind amid the other voices of our “inner committee.” We learn how to ask for help in ways that people actually hear and respond to; we learn to receive and benefit from the help offered. As we expand our brain’s capacity to link the new strategies that come from these experiences into new patterns, we are learning to be more resilient. And the more we practice new conditioning, the more we are strengthening those structures in the brain that do that conditioning and help us learn.
When my client Bill learned to use new conditioning to override one particular old pattern, he was able to create a more loving connection with his partner, Sharon. Bill grew up feeling disappointed in his dad, who was never a reliable provider for the family. Bill’s way of handling his disappointment was with relentless criticism of his dad, which extended to anyone else who disappointed him. When Bill recognized how automatically and relentlessly critical he became whenever he felt disappointed by his partner, Sharon — maybe twenty times a day — he realized he had to do something to change.
When he came in for his appointment, we worked on new conditioning to change his response. Each time Bill noticed criticism beginning to flare, he was to be aware of what was happening in his body and brain and compassionately accept that it was happening. The inner tightening and clutching he felt when he became critical were a cue for him to pause and be aware. Then he would say to himself the words “Be kind!”
This process broke the old, automatic circuit of complaining and criticizing, creating a choice point. Bill could then begin to open up to empathy, compassion, and acceptance for himself and for Sharon. With enough good intention and diligent work, the process also opened up the possibility for them to find a better way through their difficulties.
New conditioned patterns and new habits of behavior can override our earlier conditioning, especially in realms of feeling, dealing, and relating to others. We redefine the self in relationship to triggering events and create a new reference point for coping. And as we develop and reinforce these new patterns for coping, we grow into our more competent and courageous adult selves.
Although Bill was able to put the new conditioning into effect immediately, it took six months before it became automatic. Eventually, he could drop into a sense of kindness whenever he chose to, and the old pattern of criticism or complaint was rarely triggered at all. The newly conditioned pattern — reacting to feeling critical with kindness — now lives side by side in Bill’s brain’s circuitry with the old pattern of being critical. Most of the time Bill can rely on it to override the older habit. The success of this new conditioning and the strengthening of the brain structures he needed to do it made it easier for Bill to make other changes. Integrating new conditioning with other old patterns became easier and easier to do.
Exercise 1: Creating a Better Choice through New Conditioning
1. Identify a habitual negative reaction — impatience, boredom, startle, temper, rejection — that you would like to use as a cue to practice rewiring your brain.
2. Identify the new response you would like to substitute: allowing, exploring something new, calming down, pausing to reflect, seeing the good.
3. Identify a positive code word or phrase you will use to break the circuit and cue yourself to change the channel in your brain: “Allow,” “Explore,” “It’s okay,” “Pause,” “What’s the good here?” The choice of words is up to you: what’s important is to use the cue as soon as you identify the trigger, to prevent yourself from falling into your old, conditioned reaction. You may choose a word that already brings to mind a state of resilience or well-being if you have one: “Love,” “Learn,” “Breathe,” “Slow down,” or “Open.” Practice saying your cue word to yourself while you’re in that actual state so that your brain conditions itself to shift to that state when it registers the cue.
4. Each time the trigger arises, practice the new pattern of response: say your cue word and shift to the state you’ve chosen as the new experience (for example, a genuine kindness) as many times as you need to for the new pattern to become the new habit.
5. Notice as the old pattern fades away into the background and the new pattern becomes more automatic. You have conditioned new learning in your brain, and you have learned that you can do so. Take in the sense of success and mastery as you experience the actual rewiring in your brain.
As part of his effort to change his old conditioning, Bill began to practice mindful empathy to open his awareness to the bigger picture of his relationship to Sharon. As he became more aware of the compassion and love in their relationship, he could relax and come into a deeper sense of inner peace and well-being. He felt a sense of his inner goodness, always accessible underneath all the learned patterns of coping, which brought him to a greater sense of Sharon’s inner goodness, too. With this new awareness, the grip of the old patterns of reactivity began to loosen. From the receptivity generated by his deconditioning, Bill was able to view Sharon with more kindness.
Exercise 2: Entering a Mental Play Space through Deconditioning
This exercise helps you use awareness of experiences of goodness and well-being to defocus from the worries and concerns of the personal self and relax into a spacious mental play space where rewiring old patterns of coping becomes easier to do.
1. Sit or lie down comfortably. Breathe slowly and gently into your belly, in and out. Breathe in a sense of goodness, a sense of safety and well-being.
2. Gently bring into your awareness the people and things in your life you are grateful for. Savor the gratitude throughout your body. Remember moments when people have been kind to you, and when you have been kind to others. Savor the feeling of kindness throughout your body. Remember a moment of feeling loved and cherished by someone, then remember a moment of your loving and cherishing someone (or a beloved pet). Savor the feeling of love.
3. Let yourself claim your own goodness. Notice any feeling of ease and peacefulness as you relax into this state; know that this state of spacious awareness and acceptance is the source of kindness, compassion, and goodwill. Trust that from here it becomes possible to change old patterns in whatever direction you choose.
Using mindfulness practice to shift to the defocusing network of the brain helps your brain become more trusting and receptive of new learning and new possibilities. The larger awareness can also help you let go of your previous conditioning. As you become more practiced at entering this defocused play space, you can apply this process of deconditioning to work past any trouble spot in your old patterns of conditioning, as discussed in part 2.
Reconditioning
Although new patterns of coping generally serve us well, they can be challenged when we are fatigued, stressed, or overwhelmed. When the brain switches into survival mode, it can easily revert to the default coping mechanisms tucked away in implicit memory. Even though we know better, we find ourselves reacting in old, less resilient ways: yelling, panicking, criticizing. If that old reactivity becomes dominant again, we can turn to the third process of brain change: reconditioning.
Bill returned to my office a year after our initial work together. Sharon had recently lost her job, and the financial strain was taking a toll on their relationship. Bill noticed that his old pattern of automatic criticism and judgment had resurfaced. His perception that Sharon was failing to be a good enough provider was triggering Bill’s old patterns of disappointment with and criticism of his dad. This time we set out to use reconditioning to rewire the implicit memories underlying the habitual criticism.
Reconditioning depends on an intricate neural mechanism that neuroscientists have been able to detect with brain-imaging technology only in the past ten years. This research shows that neural networks that constitute any individual memory (or thought or belief) spontaneously fall apart (deconsolidate) and then reconsolidate again a fraction of a second later. This is the naturally occurring process by which memories, thoughts, or beliefs change over time: for example, it’s why ten different people may remember the same car accident differently years later. It’s the strength of our conditioning — the repetition of experiences that cause repeated neural firings, which strengthen neural connections that create entire circuits of memory — that keeps us from losing all our learning as a consequence of this falling apart and rewiring.
Neuroscientists can now demonstrate how, under the right circumstances, we can choose to harness that natural deconsolidation-reconsolidation process to intervene between the deconsolidation and reconsolidation phases and redirect the reconsolidation. This is how reconditioning happens.
When we deliberately focus our attention on a negative memory we want to resolve or dissolve, the focused attention causes the neurons constellating that memory to fire at every level — from implicit body-based and emotional memories to explicit cognitive thoughts. Neuropsychologists call that process “lighting up the network,” making the old memory available for rewiring.
Using mindful empathy is a critical part of rewiring through reconditioning. It is essential to be able to observe the old experience rather than remaining embedded in it, which runs the risk of strengthening the old memory and retraumatizing us. In Bill’s case, we began by establishing a strong state of mindful empathy to safely hold this powerful process of rewiring the brain.
Once I was sure that Bill could keep one foot mindfully, empathically, in the present while he evoked a memory from the past, I asked him to remember one specific moment of criticism of his dad that we could use to begin to recondition his brain. Bill remembered a time when he was eight years old and his dad had come home with news that he had been laid off from the factory — again. Bill’s mom got upset and angry; Bill remembered that he had joined his mom in yelling at his dad and calling him a loser.
To light up the networks of that memory, I had Bill share as many details of his experience as he could: where he was standing when his dad came home, what he was feeling when his mom got upset, what he said to his dad, how he felt as he was yelling at his dad, how he felt afterward when his dad retreated to the garage, and how he was feeling now sharing this experience with me.
Once the memory we wanted to work on was lit up, I asked Bill to recall a more positive experience that directly countered the first memory: a happier moment with his dad, a moment of feeling kindness toward him. Bill remembered a time at about the same age when he and his dad played catch in the backyard. Neither one of them was very good at catching the ball, but they were laughing, goofing off, and having fun. Bill’s eyes teared up as he remembered the simple joy of that afternoon. He had felt kindly then toward his dad and felt a surge of kindness toward him again as he shared that memory with me.
Once Bill had lit up both the memory of criticism and the memory of the kindness, we had the groundwork laid for reconditioning.
The key to reconditioning is holding any two contradictory experiences or memories in awareness at the same time, a state known as simultaneous dual awareness, and to intensify the focus on the positive memory while also remaining aware of the negative memory we have chosen to rewire. This simultaneous awareness requires practice. If it is challenging at first, you can begin by switching back and forth between the two memories, always refreshing and strengthening the positive memory so that it becomes stronger. Eventually there can be a simultaneous awareness of the two memories. This creates the simultaneous neural firing that allows the two memories to reconsolidate together in a new network.
As Bill’s focused awareness strengthened the more positive memory of his dad, there came a moment when the firing of the networks that held that memory trumped the firing of the memory of criticism. Bill experienced this rewiring as an easing of the intensity of the emotions he had felt the day that he yelled as his dad: the memory no longer had the same emotional charge when he remembered it in session now. We repeated this reconditioning process several times. Finally Bill reported that the emotional charge connected with the negative memory had disappeared: it had gone “poof” in his brain. Once Bill rewired the implicit memory of criticizing his dad, the emotional charge that had unconsciously driven his behavior with Sharon was also simply no longer there. No longer so reactive to Sharon’s job loss, Bill was able to work with Sharon to deal more productively with their financial situation.
Reconditioning doesn’t change what happened before, but it changes our relationship to what happened before. It doesn’t rewrite history, but it does rewire the brain. You can practice this technique with memories that are not emotionally fraught. Eventually you can use it to resolve truly traumatizing memories.
Exercise 3: Out with the Old, In with the New through Reconditioning
This exercise is modeled on Bill’s experience of using a memory of a feeling of kindness to recondition memories of disappointment and critical feelings. You can use the exercise as written, if you wish; you can choose to recondition the pattern you worked with in the new conditioning exercise; or you can work with something completely different.
1. Settle yourself in an awareness of your own mindfulness and compassion for yourself.
2. Remember a moment when you felt a genuine kindness in your heart. If you are working on reconditioning a memory involving a specific person, it could be a feeling of kindness for that person, but it could also be for anyone else. Evoke the memory of that moment in as much detail as you can: when and where you experienced it, what you were doing or saying, what the other person in this memory was doing or saying. Notice whether you can feel now the feelings you experienced in your body then. You’re lighting up a resource of a very positive memory first, to stabilize the process of reconditioning.
3. Let the initial memory of kindness fade into the background. Now evoke the memory of a moment when you felt critical of the person you want to work with in this exercise. Evoke the memory of that moment in as much detail as you can: when and where you experienced feeling critical, what you did or said, what the other person did or said. Notice whether you can feel now the feelings you experienced in your body then. You’re lighting up the network of this negative memory as completely as you can, safe in the container of mindful empathy.
4. Now imagine feeling kindness toward the person you want to work with in this exercise. This experience of kindness can be a memory or an imagined moment. Visualize this moment of kindness in as much detail as you can, imagining what you’re saying or doing — as long as it directly counters the negative memory. Let the new experience of kindness become strong and steady in your awareness, feeling the kindness in your heart and in your body. You’ve now created a “neural sandwich” with the negative or traumatic memory sandwiched between the initial stabilizing memory of kindness and the countering memory of kindness you are using to do the rewiring.
5. Hold the negative memory and the new positive experience together in your awareness — simultaneously if possible (this capacity comes with practice), or switching back and forth between the two if necessary to get started. Refresh the new positive experience as needed to keep it steady and strong.
6. Eventually let go of the negative memory and focus your awareness only on the positive experience of kindness. Notice any shifts in sensations or feelings in your body; notice any shifts in your thoughts about yourself or the person you are practicing kindness with.
7. Recall the memory of the critical moment again; notice any decrease in the intensity or charge of this memory. Let it go again and return your awareness to the memory of the experience of kindness.
8. Repeat this process as many times as needed. Eventually the critical response will no longer be triggered at all or will simply feel like no big deal.
Reconditioning can be used to fully resolve trauma, whether the early attachment trauma described in chapter 2 or trauma experienced later in life. When using reconditioning in therapy with clients, I have witnessed them finish processing a trauma or phobia and say, literally, “Well, what was I so upset about?” The fact of the memory is there, but the feeling of the trauma is no longer encoded in the brain to trigger distress. When you are using reconditioning on your own, it’s best to begin by practicing with simple negative experiences. If you want to resolve an actual trauma, you may choose to work with a therapist trained in one of the trauma therapies based on reconditioning, such as EMDR. As you rewire your brain, you will learn that post-traumatic growth can be immediate; moving beyond the trauma can be permanent.
Pulling It All Together
In this chapter you have begun to use the three processes of self-directed neuroplasticity that can be used to strengthen the prefrontal cortex and establish new patterns of coping.
• New conditioning creates new neural pathways in your brain; you can apply it by seeking out new experiences that you know will encode new, more adaptive coping strategies into your brain’s circuitry.
• Deconditioning creates the receptivity and flexibility in your neural circuitry that reopen your brain to learning and change, making it easier to wire in new, more effective coping strategies.
• Reconditioning helps you rewire the neural circuitry of an existing strategy by pairing that strategy with a new, more effective one. It allows you to rewire old, default coping mechanisms buried in implicit memory.
As you become comfortable using the tools of self-directed neuroplasticity, you’ll find that you begin, in the words of the German neuropsychologist Gerald Huther, to “use the brain so that the potentialities built into it become fully realized.” As you replace your brain’s old, conditioned patterns of coping with better ones, you will notice yourself naturally developing the five Cs of coping. In the face of stressors like challenging bullying at your child’s school, you will remain calm. If your son’s life is derailed by drugs, you will see clearly what steps need to be taken next. You’ll immediately know and connect with the resources you need to bring a divorce to closure or rebuild a home after an earthquake or fire. You’ll have a new flexibility in your brain to become competent in the skills you need to rework your finances. You’ll have the neural receptivity to find the courage to face a friend’s mortality, or your own.
As you learn to use these tools to direct desired changes in your brain, you’ll develop a sense of mastery that gives you the confidence you need to tackle even bigger challenges.