The Memory Rewrite

Martha Beck (0:02)

Welcome to The Gathering Room Podcast, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. So I think yesterday, or no, that would be a week ago, or wait, three weeks ago.

I know that at one point, I was on Zoom talking about the book I am going to talk about today. 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 Marissa 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 last. 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, huge amounts of vegetables. I mean, it was a cornucopia of bounty. And then it got close to dinner time, and Rose 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. Rose 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 it on some cookie sheets, and they were baking the vegetables, and they were 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 like, 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 like 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. And like all those vegetables cooked down to this, it was maybe a cup. And I'm talking about a table full of vegetables. So it all like 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 bit of vegetables staring into the middle distance without doing a thing.

And I thought that, I mean, 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 just 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, they're harsh. And once they're there and they happen, they're stuck in your brain. Or so a psychologist used to think. But then there was this man named Kareem Nader, or Nader, I 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, you know, 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 he, 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 re-consolidated 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. 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, once I, 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. Like, 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, never mind. 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 just, I felt like such a hot mess talking to you. And I always like, there's so much shame about how together you were. And I was such a mess. And she said, you thought I was up 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 like 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. You know, something that is not life and death horrific. But in your memory, when you go there, it goes, ee, owch, 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. It might feel like ee, a little squeamish about it. That's okay. That's why we're reconsolidating it. Now, what you have to do is tell me, or you don't have to tell me, you're in Czechoslovakia. This, the Czech Republic, oh my God, I am such a hot mess.