I've been on a memory reconsolidation mission since I was first introduced to it a couple of years ago.

Two missions, in fact.

One, to learn as much as I can and incorporate it into my coaching and mentoring.

Two, to share it far and wide.

Today, we're going to talk about memory reconsolidation and some of the techniques that you can use to help bring it about for yourself and for others. My guest is my daughter Yael Zivan who has been studying memory reconsolidation and experiential therapies with some of the luminaries in the field that we talk about in this episode.

I'm so happy and delighted that she is carrying on this mission in her way, bringing healing and support and compassion and love to people thanks to this recent neuroscience breakthrough, that shows us how to shortcut transformation and make it effortless and permanent.

In our conversation, we dive deep into therapeutic modalities and memory reconsolidation.

Yael shares her journey in transforming her own trauma into a passion and career, exploring techniques such as AEDP and Coherence Therapy.

We talk about the importance of self-compassion, understanding schemas, and innovative approaches to healing triggers and old patterns.

Today, we're going to talk about memory reconsolidation and some of the techniques that you can use to help bring it about for yourself and for others. My guest is my daughter Yael Zivan who has been studying memory reconsolidation and experiential therapies with some of the luminaries in the field.

And we'll talk about in this episode. And I'm so happy and delighted that she is carrying on this mission and her way, bringing healing and support and compassion and love to people. Through this neuro science breakthrough that we've really only had for the last 20, 25 years, that really shows us how to shortcut transformation and make it effortless and permanent.

So with that big a promise, let's not delay without further ado.

Yael Zivan. Welcome to the Plant Yourself podcast.

Thanks for having me, Howard. It's an honor to be here.

I'm going to talk about your work because you and I discovered memory reconsolidation and Transformation and trauma healing around the same time. And you have turned it into your passion, your obsession and your career.

And you know a lot more than I do about a lot of stuff. And I wanted to continue bringing to my audience these concepts. What what can you tell us about? Your own interest in this, because you're, you're an artist, you're a musician, you've you've done a lot of jobs and all this, and something about this really captured you.

Can you talk about what that is?

Or just, I now knew about these things that, that were traumatizing. And when you find out that you're traumatized, it can be good if there's a next step. But it does seem it The entire world accepts the fact that traumas may be permanent, or mostly permanent, or you have to work every day and pay a therapist a lot of money every day in order to get to a place where some of your trauma might have been down a little bit, just a little less spicy, right?

And maybe it's really expensive and you get somewhere and there's always going to be a way that can do it way better. I've always had this thought in my head. , and I'm learning more and more that it's actually true. And this felt like that secret knowing of, yeah, you could work really hard and try really hard and learn all these different things and you might get somewhere, or you could do this other thing and bippity boppity boop.

You're halfway there way faster than you ever thought was possible.

So what I wanted to talk to you about was several of the therapeutic modalities that you have been studying in depth that I have not, but also the one that we're both studying in depth coherence therapy.

Basically wherever someone's at, we're not gonna, we're not gonna teach them how to suppress their own internal knowledge and truth.

We're going to very gently and curiously get more evidence about why they feel that So if they have a symptom, you want to give me a symptom?

How about losing control in anger when you, let's say in a workplace you're having a discussion and all of a sudden. Some somebody questions an assumption underlying your proposal, and all of a sudden you feel like a heated flush of anger that you have to either suppress or lash out with or leak or excuse yourself.

Proverbial inner child is unburdened.

Gotcha. So I want to contrast that with the way I was taught to coach.

Mhm.

kind of behavioral symptom. So the first thing I do is, I ask them like how they want to be. Very similar to it. We're always going for the outcome. And I'm going to straw man this a little bit.

All you have to do is inhibit. Then we would work on strategies for inhibition. So breathing, relaxation , I, as a guy who's interested in the holistic human being, we would talk about sleep hygiene, diet relations, all this stuff, but it would all be to support the organism to, in that moment, be stronger than the impulse.

Yeah.

I would say the difference, yeah, what you're saying is you, there is an element of shame and there's an element of whatever that behavior is, it's obviously not serving you.

It is, it's there's an employee at your office Who Who is behaving badly, right?

And you're just like, why would I think that? I'm sure I have thought the worst thing of my entire life. I'm sure there was one thing that really hurt someone more than anything I could have thought. And now, I'll just think to myself, Yeah, we're not going to go down that route.

We're not, we're just not going to try and hurt our own feelings. The world does that good enough. So when you've created true compassion inner child work, what you notice is, you don't hate anyone else in the world. Because you see them the same way as you see yourself. Of oh they have schemas too.

In unmovable, right? You don't have the same kind of level of business experience that I do in these places. You have a lot of business experience that I don't have, but I don't think it's involved taking like Myers Briggs and disc and various kinds of tests and diagnostics that tell you how you are which is a message.

And then also, I don't know how much time you spend on linked in, but there's every day in my inbox. There's a flood of memes around be like this. This is good. That's bad. Be the source of light in your in your team. Don't be complaining fortune cookie advice, and it's all well meaning and it's all and for someone who's there, it's probably a good reminder.

I get triggered by it a lot because I'm like, it's not that easy.

say more.

If you're, treat everything like you're dealing with a child that's having a meltdown, okay? If you see a child that's having a meltdown, they don't have access to resources. And their meltdown is scientifically programmed to get them resources as fast as possible. But when your ego steps in, you're like, that's negativity. We need positivity. That's not helping anybody. So you need to get down at that level with that person and actually be like, what are you suffering from? What is it? What can I do? What the person needs to feel above all is that they are worthy of care.

And that they are worthy of being listened to and they're worthy of someone being curious about their inner world and being curious about their suffering.

Okay, you do this breathing and it works, right? So if someone's, their body is at a nine out of 10 on a daily basis, and I teach him how to breathe. By the way, I did a cold plunge this morning. First time in a year and a half. I went down to the pool and I did not shriek like a toddler. So this is and that definitely put me in a better mood in a lower state. What's the What's the advantage of and maybe for some people like that's absolutely the first thing you have to do, right? If someone's going to get fired, you like, okay, stop it. Here's how you stop doing it.

We're going to counteract because it's because the way you're behaving is a danger in some

But what how do you take things further than that?

There's so much going on when you're a child where you don't have control over your environment and you do learn tools in order to get you enough dominance to survive the, the hellscape,

right?

Yeah, invisibility, these are all these are all tools that you have when you don't have control over your environment at all.

. So one of the things that I, that keeps coming up in my mind as a, as an image is I'm thinking about, people in expensive business suits, like being grownups. And the way we're talking about them is that they're essentially still children in, a lot of their deepest motivations.

They're still trying to, impress Mrs. So and so or not get beat up by so and or. Or not be bullied or,

not aware of that. When you're so focused on the goal, whatever the goal is, safety, dominance, in order to achieve safety, something to prove that you were worthy of love or whatever, you don't even know what your actual motivation is. You're just on the autopilot of all, and when you're on autopilot, when you're on autopilot, you're letting all of your schemas drive the car.

Great, so a schema is the it's the code. It's what you're, when you're computer programming, it's the code. If x, then y. If someone gives me a dirty look, then I must retreat and see, did I do anything wrong? I need to worry about this. A schema is what your brain knows before you do. In order to make your human experience more streamlined, you learned how to pre program certain behaviors in emergencies. So If someone is about to hit you, the part of your brain that has the schema of duck will come in, right?

What do you do? Cause imagination is a great it's a great testing ground. And it works because it's the same coding, right? It's the same stimuli. So someone comes in, says something mean to you, you now in this moment can say, okay I'm trying to make a joke. I'm trying to be funny, or I'm trying, this is going to come up.

So let's come back to my imaginary person who gets triggered when someone questions an assumption upon which they based a proposal.

Okay.

And

so what we could do armchair. Is tell ourselves stories about why that person is like that, right? But and we could say okay, they have a schema of any criticism or any questioning means that

It might only be. Only Al can trigger me because Al reminds me somehow visually, energetically, cologne, whatever, who knows of, Uncle Joe, who used to put me down all the time because, whatever. Or it could be when anyone does it, or it can be when a woman who's younger than me does it, or and there's all this all this discovery to be done about.

Yeah,

Just really quickly distracting them like, Oh my gosh, crazy thing happened to me this week. Whatever it is. There are other things where you really want them in that moment and you need them to be present. But you know that it's going to be intense. You might ask them, Can you imagine that actors are playing what happened on a little screen?

And you're watching it like it's a TV show. Tell me what's happening. That's one way you can do it. Where it separates it. You can just be with the part. You can say, all right, this part that doesn't let you connect with anyone. I want you to visualize them and see them as like a a warrior dressed in like this.

I would say that's like my basic critique of civilization is that the people who could use a little bit of that, a little bit of the checking. So the people who are on top are those who lack the capacity or the inclination. So the rest of us. Who do care about other people and are not, malignant narcissists.

it's funny.

of

should mention that because I actually use that as a dicon disc confirmation in a couple of sessions where I say, do you know what the powerful are doing? And they don't feel bad about it at all. Stop being so hard on yourself. Like if you thought about all of the people that are getting paid millions and millions of dollars to promote wars and the worst thing that you've ever done, doesn't come close to two minutes of them on a random Thursday. What would it be like if you were to actually, let yourself have a fricking break, you see, if you're seeing the ways in which our society and our culture values and rewards, people's ethics

be very motivated.

had an image of like one of the big issues of our time is income inequality. I think the other big issue is guilt and shame inequality. Yeah.

Yeah, that's

if we felt a little bit more guilt and shame, we would be more generous and pay some money to these powerful people, right?

The more I look at the state of the world and the corruption at the top and the pain that the powerful inflicts upon us, all I can say is, as soon as you start loving yourself at the degree in which the powerful seem to hate you, and want you to hate yourself we might have a revolution on our hands.

Huh. Okay. So let's go back into some of the techniques you mentioned, the body double, where you're picturing someone just like you, or you're looking at a screen. A lot of this, I remember from when I studied neuro linguistic programming, but 20, 20 years ago which I think is a, it's a fantastic, yeah, you heard by the, you triggered a schema.

Yeah. Yeah. That's what they call

I'm not a perfect therapist, okay?

Oh man.

So much to unpack. But so a bunch of stuff that you've done that I don't really understand at all. One of them is AEDP, which I don't even know what it stands for. There's accelerated and.

dynamic psychotherapy, for sure, got you.

Yeah.

talk about that.

So that is it okay, so memory re consolidation is the room. And there are lots of doors that get you into that room. And one of those doors is AEDP.

One of those doors is IFS.

By either real experience or imaginal experience or new knowing or reflecting on old knowing. And then it's like double clicking on a cell in an Excel spreadsheet where all when you until you double click on it, you can't overwrite it. But once you've double clicked, you can then overwrite it.

And then so my person who would no longer be triggered when someone asks a question challenging their assumption, they'd be my gosh. Thank you for bringing that up. Let's take a look. I, I just went into this assuming that this was right. Maybe it's not. Let's look at it. And they can do it with joy and delight.

And they don't have to suppress

Yeah.

any kind of urge of antisocial. So there's, that's memory consolidation. Now take it away and

I'm noticing. I don't really have any tightness in my chest I'm feeling pretty open, I'm feeling pretty comfortable. Maybe I might feel a sensation of tightness in my throat. And then from there if I were working with a client Abba, how are you feeling in your body right now? Or Howie, father.

I'm feeling a little claustrophobic because it's afternoon and my office window is facing You know the West and so I had to close this the blinds. So all the light here is artificial So it stays so I don't have like slats across my face and I am missing a little greenery a little space I appreciate the Was it a monstera behind you?

Wolf

that but

So you're I'm appreciating your plant And I am I'm rooting for you

Let me just feel that. You don't have that. Actually it's like one of those things when someone's having a panic attack, you ask them what can you smell? What can you taste? What can you see? What can you hear? This physically just reorients your mind into I'm not in danger because I'm able to take this moment to see how I'm doing.

The other thing that it does Is it so your neocortex, the part of your brain that's whatever's on your computer screen, let's say. It's whatever the RAM is. I forget what the computer word is. But the top of your brain is just like all the tabs you have open, right?

It's harder to pin down, but it has such deep wisdom and such deep knowledge and data that, You have to mine that information very consciously and very gently with physical sensations. So I might say say you're going through something stressful. I might say, how do you feel in your body?

And once you can, But at the same time, when you touch that, you have to go and bring it up to the top and talk about it and then you go down and you go up. So you're, you can't let one part of that brain have too much power and too much reigning power,

Dom dominance.

That's the word. Thank you. So when you go into your body, you might not remember a word, but you're feeling. the truth of some emotional things that might have happened, and then when we go up here, that's when we can, edit it

And I was I suddenly thought maybe it is that the purpose of things like smoking. Okay. and smoking a cigarette. Like people smoke a cigarette to feel relaxed. They, they're, all, the ER nurses, are having like, every day is like the most day ever.

And then they want to come out. And so I wonder if that's a signal oh, I'm smoking. I wouldn't be standing here smoking luxuriously, inhaling, and exhaling this this leaf.

think it's deeper than smoking. I think the smoking part is just the excuse to go outside and not be at work for a moment as someone who worked in food service, it doesn't like the smoking is just, I'm going to take a break and actually be with myself for a moment and not be in here and not giving, not give all my energy to the boss and to the work I'm going to.

Yeah. Yeah.

right? Whereas when, when you're slowing down and I loved your metaphor of the open tabs. Because okay, if you ask me a question and all I have, I'm looking at my open tabs now, like whatever happens to be open now is probably not the ideal answer to your question, but it's it's my overlay.

This is my simplification map, and it reminded me of you mentioned the fast thinking system and the slow thinking system, which, which comes from Danny Kahneman the the, the professors who came up with basically invented behavioral economics, and their first theory, which I think they published in the early 70s, called prospect theory, and it was the idea that you will make decisions based on whatever is in front of you.

So

Yeah.

All right, so that if and what you're inviting people to do and what you did before you even answered the question was modeling this kind of slowing down, I entrained to your slowing down and I slowed down myself.

Now, all of a sudden I can search the whole the entire system. I can search the files that are on Dropbox that may not even be on my computer. But just, there's like ghost files there, but they're stored somewhere else. And I'm not just relying on what's in front of me, right? Like prospect theory was originally like if you show people to television sets for sale, and one of them is better and cheaper than the other one, all people will think about is which is better.

just re bought the exact same hair scrunchie only to lose it 700 times? What about that? What if that was the way that you spent your money? Yeah, and what you're, you started, you were saying something and it reminded me of something as well. It, just so much of the way that we were raised in schools and in workplaces is about, you need to know everything very quickly.

So if there's a math question, you better have that answer, right? Who the, who thought that was a good idea? Every time that I had to do like my math homework, I had so much joy out of it because I just sat down. I could take my time. I could use my little pencil. I could write my, all my neat little answers and do the work myself.

They're about don't starve, don't get like caught in the rain on a cold night, don't get eaten by a bear and don't let someone attack you. They are they are violent often. They, or they're fawning whatever it is, it's not actually your highest self. That's the most important part.

Boy, I suddenly just thought about improv. Which is possibly, which on the surface is a contradiction to what you just said. So

No, it's, oh god, it's so fun.

It's on your it's, when you're waiting to go up for your improv thing, I would often feel fear. Am I going to be fast enough? Am I going to come up with a funny line on the spot that I haven't workshopped?

mhm.

You have done improv a lot. You've taught improv. What's, what is it for you? Yeah

Yeah,

right? Like when you

that's why the imagination part can be so beautiful. You say, all right we're in this moment together. We're gonna rehearse it. What are other options that you could do? Obviously the way that I would go about helping somebody who has what you were saying is, I might be curious what was a time when not knowing something was really dangerous for you? What do you know about Being in a situation where you're in charge and someone usurps your authority. What? Does that remind you of

what do you feel in your body when that happens? Does your stomach roll over and you think about how your mom made fun of you in church, whatever it was Like there might be a core to that and another way you could go about it is all right Let's figure out resources.

Thanks for always bringing something new to the team. Thanks for giving me something new to think about. I really appreciate that. And then Deborah's face lights up and she feels valued and she feels safe and she feels included. And you feel like a beautiful leader who just brought something and energizing your brain will be like, Ooh, resource. New opportunity. New different way of doing something. But you can't get there by just being like, What if you were less of a bitch, Jonathan? I don't know.

Yeah. What I suddenly got was like dominoes. Like when, when my one person changes, Deborah's got schemas too,

Yeah.

right? And she just got a disconfirmation and the entire the culture like one leader can make such a huge difference. And I've seen this throughout my career where one, one leader with some sort of remarkable ability to lead other human beings.

I have a very good hand/eye and I've played a lot of different sports,

Same, dude. Same.

On Friday. I had a Padel lesson because I'm not very good at this sport. This European sport Padel and at first we're just I'm just warming up. I'm hitting everything back and apparently they're not good shots like they're not going to help me win, but I'm getting everything back.

I was good enough. Obviously, I wasn't good enough because I wanted to take lessons to get better. But in my like, there's a huge part of my psyche that's No, don't be worse. Stay the same. Don't be worse in order to get better. And so I think it's very equivalent to inviting people to just slow down and say, You know what?

I don't have to know the answer instantly. That was my defense was to be able to do that on command. That was like my lizard brain lassoed my neocortex and said, you perform, you be brilliant. You show off.

Mhm,

And then, yeah, and then you get other parts that are like, but also don't show off too hard because that makes you an asshole, right? You have to know everything, but you also have to not be that asshole.

I'm much more excited about seeing you massively change and improve your life and be a version of yourself that you didn't know was possible because you were never given permission or you were never given access to tools and resources to get you there.

Gotcha. And you have some examples just so that it can land as a, with specifics. Like what sorts of things can you help people with?

And the way I want to ask that is about like out, out external symptoms. Because a lot of the times we don't realize that our symptoms are schema based.

I have a thing with overeating when I'm nervous and I was just like, okay, help me stop overeating. Help me make smaller portions, put my fork down between bites, things like that, as opposed to, oh, that's a schema based on some sort, some, whatever.

And how do people find you?

You can reach me at yaelzivanhealing@gmail.com.

Spell that.

Y-A-E-L-Z-I-V-A-N-H-E-A-L-I-N-G. I know how to spell@gmail.com. And I hope to see you there.

Right back at ya.

I hope folks who are watching and listening some of them will reach out because you do have a gift.

I turn to you when I'm struggling with a client. I will confidentially describe some of the issues and you can help me see things more clearly. So anyone who's working with me also benefits from your presence in the world. Again, so it's yaelzivanhealing at gmail. com.

Okay, cool. I I had such a great time. Aba, you are my favorite person in the world, apart from all the other people that are also my favorite people, also in my immediate family.

you much.

Love you too. Thanks.

Bye.

Um, couldn't cover people felt very, very slow, so. Can I take some time off around the Christmas holiday to just relax and recuperate, still doing yoga on a daily basis. Uh, 15 minutes of strength, 15 minutes of stretch when I'm not working out with Jay on the beach. And I had another paddle lesson.