Linking: The Secret to Rewiring Painful Memories
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I'm doing really well, Forrest.

I've been looking forward to doing this episode with you today because this episode is going to touch on a major part of Rick Hansen material. This is the L-step in the heal process for linking. And linking is a powerful method for reshaping emotional memory based on the idea that we can use positive experiences that are happening right now to reduce the hold old negative experiences have on us.

We've mentioned linking on the podcast frequently, but we tend to dance around it a bit when we do because it is both a very powerful intervention and one that comes with some disclaimers. But we normally just say, hey, this has some disclaimers and that we never really go into them in detail. So that's what we're doing today. I've been really looking forward to this one. I think it's great material. Before we get into it, I do want to give you a couple of quick reminders. First, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet and you've been listening for a while, hey, subscribe. It would really help us out.

Second, you can find us on Patreon at patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And for just a few dollars a month, you can support the show and get a bunch of bonuses in return, including transcripts of the episodes. Then finally, Rick has an upcoming online workshop that's focused on healing insecure attachment. It starts on April 26th, and you can head to rickhansen.com slash attachment to learn more. Use the coupon code beingwell25 to receive a 25% off discount if you choose to register for it.

So, Dad, I would love to start with you just giving a very, very quick overview of linking here, and then we'll go into it in much more detail throughout the episode. Okay. So something happens, and think about three distinct approaches to it in yourself. So let's say that somebody has cut you off on the freeway or in some other setting been rude to you or scary or mean. All right. What can you do?

One, you can become completely hijacked by your reactions. You can become identified with them, carried away by them.

Second, you could, in the moment, have that reaction. I'll call it a negative reaction while also having something else going on in your mind. A perspective like, wow, what a jerk, but man, I don't want to get into a road rage confrontation here where you're talking yourself off the ledge, or you might surround your emotional reactions of anger and fear with spacious awareness. Now you're really tuning into yourself.

whatever. There's positive along with negative. That's the second thing you can do. Okay? And then a third thing is that maybe a little later when things have settled down enough, you might directly think about, okay, what's a positive or useful perspective or attitude or strength that I could grow for all kinds of purposes, including dealing with that sort of situation? So

In the moment, there's no sense of the negative. You're strictly just growing the positive. You're only trying to produce more flowers in the garden of your mind. Okay, all three of those are good. We're gonna talk about the second one. We're gonna talk about the combination of two things in the mind at the same time. We're toggling quickly back and forth between them.

Linking is widely used by people in general. Just being mindful of pain is a kind of linking. You're surrounding that pain with spacious awareness.

Being with a therapist in which, let's say you're talking about some childhood material in which maybe you were shamed or criticized or abandoned or dismissed, exiled, and the therapist says, okay, can you also be aware right now of my presence with you, my attention, my support,

my warmth? Can you be aware of that at the same time with your pain and even potentially get a sense of the positive warmth in the presence sinking in and touching those hurting places inside?

Any one of those is linking. And what I've gotten really interested in is how to do linking super effectively, like turbocharged linking, including based in some understanding of what's happening in your brain when you do it so you can do it really well. Great. So to kind of summarize what you just said, linking is when some new positive experience, like the warmth of that therapist that you were describing, coexists with something else that we think of as being negative or uncomfortable or painful.

an old memory, a feeling we have about ourself that maybe includes some self-criticism inside of it. Whatever it is that you're doing, whatever is going on in the mind, you're kind of turning both of these on at the same time. And hopefully, by making the positive experience bigger and stronger, big flashing lights around it, you cause it through some

partially understood but not tremendously well understood process to kind of infect the negative experience in a way that we like, sort of slowing it down and soothing it over time. So a big question is, why does this work? How is this happening inside of the brain? And the truth is that we don't really know, but there is some plausible theory that's tied to it. Memory in general is really, really complex.

complicated. So when we're doing stuff to intervene with memory, it's important to keep in mind that we have some understanding of what's going on here, but it's definitely an imperfect understanding. So we know that we have a negativity bias. This means that various stressful experiences are prioritized for storage in your brain, particularly into what's called implicit memory. And these are all of the kind of residues of lived experience that shape our expectations,

the ways that we relate to other people, and even kind of the background tone of what it's like to be Rick or what it's like to be Forrest. Now, if our understanding of the mind is correct, memory must be based on some kind of physical change to the brain.

which is wild to think about, right? That there's actually something that's happening inside of your brain when a memory is being formed. And these changes are referred to as memory traces. Once memories are consolidated from short to long term, so they kind of move from being in whatever part of the brain is handling short-term memory versus the part of the brain that's handling long-term memory, we think of them as being pretty stable. So those memories don't change that much.

The thing is that every time we recall something, it does tend to change a little bit. So something is happening where like the fish gets a little bigger every memory is kind of the classic version of this, right? So when we call up a memory trace, it enters a very brief period. We don't really know how long, but it's fairly brief of what's called reconsolidation. So this means that the memory has become unstable and therefore is open to change.

And one of the primary ways that the brain learns is through something that's called association. So when two things appear in our awareness at the same time, they kind of affect each other, right? And this is Pavlov's dog, right? You ring the bell, dog gets the treat.

When we're doing linking, we're basically trying to take advantage of this whole process. We're basically reconditioning ourselves. We're calling up that old memory alongside some kind of positive experience. That old memory has become unstable a little bit. It's not quite as kind of like glued down. And we could get to

fill that old memory with some more positive content or view it through a different light or go, hey, that was then, but this is now. We're deliberately associating a similar, hopefully more positive experience with that old painful stuff. So that's neurologically as near as we know what's going on inside of the brain. How did I do there, dad? That was freaking awesome. I was just sitting there. I was in my happy place. I did a lot of prep for that one. That was my happy place there. Yeah.

And as you well know, when we use the word learning here, we're mostly not talking about what's called episodic memory or explicit memory. As you said in the beginning, we're talking really here about shifting implicit memory, the residues of lived experience, the somatic markers in the body, the

patterns of contraction or expansion, the attitudes, the expectations, the frames of reference, the models of relationship, the sense of self and mood, for example, as well. So yeah, that's the really important stuff. And that's what we talk about shifting through linking. You got it.

It's probably worth mentioning that there are a million other approaches in psychology that do something kind of similar to this, like variations on EMDR are doing something that's kind of along the lines here. You can almost think of it as a play on exposure therapy in sort of a very, very generalized kind of way. We're having a new experience and we're letting that new experience land very deliberately. Is there any other way that you think about how linking relates to other common approaches here, Dad?

There's been a long standing understanding in clinical psychology that somehow a positive alternative to what the client is walking in with is good. And somehow, kind of magically- It's a good way to put it. It's good. Yeah.

It has an effect. I got to tell you, I remember this cartoon in the New Yorker, which these two stereotypical gray beard professor types, both male, because that's when the cartoon was done, are putting mathematical equations on this ginormous blackboard and just covering it. And then at the very bottom, the final term to make the equation work, the fellow scrolls, and let there be light.

I remember a version of this that the text is something like, "And then a miracle occurs." Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you are. So somehow. Totally, yeah. So whether it's Freud's notion of interpretation, creating a kind of a cognitive realization that ripples through the person's emotional motivational structure, or later on notions of the so-called corrective emotional experience, there's definitely been this history here

Then more particularly, we certainly have all the work that's been done, including by people like Steve Hayes, a really brilliant guy and been on the show before. In terms of behaviorism and cognitive training, how is that actually done? And then I really want to call out the work of Bruce Ecker and colleagues in coherence therapy. For me, my inner geek, my clinical geek,

just jumps up and down happily when I read papers by Bruce and his colleagues and coherence therapy. And I'll get into some of the detail a little bit later on when we talk about disrupting reconsolidation during that phase of the learning and then relearning process. So those definitely would be other people. I appreciate their efforts. For myself, what I've done in particular, I think, is

relate linking to the broader process of self-directed emotional learning broadly that I summarize, whose evidence-based methods I summarize in the HEAL framework with the L-STEP. And I've really tried to think about the actual how of people doing linking for themselves.

rather than it distinct from it being done to them or for them by a therapist. And some kind of clinical process. Yeah, or a meditation you're listening to. That's all awesome. I'm not against it. I'm saying, and also honoring agency and autonomy. Hey, what can we do for ourselves? So I've done a lot about that and we'll get into the details of that.

Great. So every time that we talk about linking on the show, we'll say some version of, "Linking's really great, but it's sort of this optional fourth step in your overall framework. It comes with a lot of caveats. We'll get into them sometime and then we never get into them." So if linking is so great, what's the problem with linking? Very good. To be able to link, positive and negative, and I'm going to use that language,

you have to be able to do three things. One, you have to have the executive control over attention and your own mind to be aware of two things at once, including two things that are sometimes polar opposites. Like on the one hand, the sense of being left out and

you know, dismissed as a kid, while today, a sense of being included by people you really like, right? You're aware of two things at the same time. People who are very young or demented or delirious or really drunk have a hard time holding two things in awareness at once. Second criterion or prerequisite is that you can avoid being hijacked by the negative.

When you're deliberately doing linking, and we'll get into some examples of that, where you deliberately are aware of something positive and then bring up an awareness of some negative material that is well matched to it,

and we'll talk about matching a little later on, it's quite easy to get hijacked by that negative material. And I've been in trainings that I'm giving with very experienced therapists who were sobered by how quickly the mind can get hijacked by the negative. So you have to be able to not get hijacked by the negative and to retain that awareness of two things. And then third, you have to keep the positive bigger. You want it to win. You want to get on your own side here.

And you have to be able to keep the negative kind of off to the side of awareness with the positive big and vivid in the front. So that's foundational. And then there are two cautions here.

The large point is that we can grow inner strengths of various kinds. We can grow happiness, we can grow executive functions, self-worth, commitment to exercise, commitment to sobriety, etc. We don't need to do linking to grow flowers in the garden of the mind. Linking is about how we manage the weeds that are there. And it takes into account the weeds.

Second, for some people, linking is too risky. Like I said, they can't do it. The trauma material is too fresh. They're too vulnerable. They don't yet have enough inner capabilities to remain mindful and to keep some separation between themselves and the negative material. They shouldn't do linking yet. But that said, in general, linking for me is...

It's in the top five DIY personal healing, growing and awakening methods I know. It's profoundly effective and powerful, particularly when you use it in ways in which the positive is deliberately matched to the negative that you're working with. To try to boil that down to a list for people to keep in mind here, in order to do linking effectively,

First, you need to be able to have the positive be bigger and stronger than the negative. So if you're using a potent traumatic memory where the negative is really, really big, that's going to be hard to do. If the negative memory is very fresh, if it's recent, if you're kind of still getting the scab over the wound, that's going to be really hard to do. If you're immediately flooded or overwhelmed, it's just not going to be able to do that kind of a process. It's just not going to work.

It also can't be an intellectual exercise. This is something that you talked about in some detail in the book we wrote together, Resilient Dad. The feeling of it,

as you said earlier in this episode, the kind of somatic markers in the body is really what we're going after here. And that's particularly true if you're trying to work with negative material that's a little older, it's a little developmentally younger. We've talked with other people like Bruce Perry in terms of dealing with old traumatic experiences, how what's often best for interacting with those is a level of meeting the material that's kind of where you were at at the time

So a seven-year-old is not really going to respond super well to this very intellectual process or very intellectual exercise. Simple language, strong feelings, that tends to do the best.

And then finally, things work best if you have a kind of matched experience. If you're trying to deal with an old painful memory that's about a lack of self-worth, having experiences in the here and now where people are validating you, supporting you, saying that you did a great thing, really kind of pumping you up in that way that could plausibly be matched to that self-worth issue, wow, you're going to get a lot more mileage out of that. So before we get into

an example of doing this that I hope will give people a good sense of what they can do on their own. I do want to do a quick detour into if something goes wrong, what to do. So if you do kind of get hijacked by your negative material when you're engaging in this process, what can you do, dad? Right. It's like on an airplane. I want to put on the safety belt before we get into this basically. That's right. That's right. And say, you know what? If we're about to crash, here's what to do, right?

Yeah, exactly. The airplane safety instructions. If you find you get hijacked by the negative, truly just pull out. Stop doing it. Distract yourself.

walk around the room, get a glass of water. I mean, this goes to general advice about what to do when negative material comes up. That's certainly true. To try to get some breathing room around it. And to be clear as a framework, sometimes all we can do is just be with the negative. We're not really yet able to soothe it or ease it or bring wisdom to it. The best

we can do is to be mindful of it with compassion for ourselves. Yes, we are then linking mindfulness and compassion to the negative material, but it's sort of like we're holding on for dear life while we're being swept along by that whatever it is that's come up for us. That's the best you can do. You're not going to be trying to do the metacognitive activity of linking. You're just too swept away.

That's really true. Be careful also about who you want to win or what do you want to win? It's as if inside us sometimes are traitor characters who undermine us and trick us and

Maybe all our parts have good intentions at bottom, even if they're misguided in how they're applied. But sometimes there are parts of us that just keep weird. We get fascinated by the negative or we feel like we need to revisit it.

we're punishing ourselves yet again. Be really wary of those parts of you that suck you into the negative beyond its sell-by date. When it's no longer valuable to you, what is sucking you back in? So you want to make sure you're standing against those. And then last, do behavioral stuff.

you know listen to a forest podcast watch one of forrest's phenomenal videos lately i've gotten weirdly fascinated with believe it or not rapper shorts on youtube all right eminem is the man so so whatever distracts you okay good i think that's great advice dad particularly you know firing up some other videos of ours good plug good plug buddy we'll be right back to the show in just a moment

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So I would love for you to give a practical example of this so that we could really walk through it. And you can give us kind of the guidance with it. And I'm up for you pretty much taking this wherever you want to go here, Doug. There are two ways into linking in terms of how we start. One is that, let's say, we're rolling along and then we get reactivated.

we get as we would put it in the old days in the human potential scene we get plugged in like we stuck our finger into the socket and i'll use a common example you know in my in my marriage i'm rolling along i think i'm being a really good boy you know i want approval i'm getting the job done and then my wife your mom says something that is effectively critical you know she's

finding fault with something I'm doing, or she wants to correct it in some way. She's well-intended. It's not horrible. But because I grew up with well-intended but fault-finding and anxious parents, even though I've done a lot of inner work, because I've done a ton of linking, this material is on the 0 to 100 intensity scale, it's usually banging around a 3 or a 6, which is great, but it's still there. Okay. So now I'm

I'm triggered. And as you said, that emotional memory material that was just hiding in the shadows until your mom, let's say, was a little critical, when she's critical and it's reactivated, it gets constructed very rapidly within a second or so in the neural substrates of consciousness. It's gone from that seed into its full expression in the neural substrates of consciousness. And I'm feeling irritated,

demeaned, inadequate, sad, mad. Okay, I'm plugged in. What do I do? Well,

Very useful. And the clock's ticking here now. The first second or two, I notice I'm reactivated. The next few seconds, you know, normal life, maybe a little longer. I start bringing to bear some soothing to myself, some kindness, some awareness. So yeah, it's my old stuff with my mom and my dad. Okay. And then I'm reminding myself, don't be a jerk. Don't act it out. You know, manage yourself. All that's really good. Then what do I do?

I could do some linking. I could bring in an awareness that your mom totally loves me, my wife totally loves me. I could bring in an awareness that I'm not perfect, but in the asset column, I've got a fair amount of stuff there I can remember and feel good about my own worth in relationship to. And then I'm aware of two things. I'm aware of the negative material,

and I'm aware of positive material that's matched to it. For example, if your mom has, let's say, criticized me and I pull up or turn toward a sense of gratitude, that's nice, but it doesn't relate to what is a social injury. It doesn't relate to my sense of worth embedded in relationships with other people. So I'm looking for something that's matched.

so that's going on and then what i'll do is i'll mainly focus in my mind on the

the nice positive feelings that your mom actually really loves me and i'm a worthy being that kind of mushes together in a blend off to the side little ricky was you know harassed by his parents on a daily basis for somehow being wrong and now and this will get into some of the details of this why don't i do it kind of right now there are three levels of linking if you think about it

The first is to be aware of the large positive material that's matched to the negative while just having the idea of the negative. That's the safest of all. So I might have just the idea that when I was young, I was criticized a lot. Okay, just the idea. With trauma material, this is a safe way to do it.

The second level of doing linking is bringing the positive more into contact with the negative. So I'm aware of the feeling of the positive. I'm also aware of the feeling of the negative, the sense of sadness and smallness and anger at the injustice of the criticism, going all the way back to when I was young. I'm aware of the negative material in a richer way, but I'm not overwhelmed or hijacked by it.

And then the third and most powerful level or depth of linking is in which I feel the positive material really going into the negative, really making contact with it so that this sense of worth and being loved is going into these younger layers in my psyche that felt sad and lonely and angry and misunderstood and mistreated. And it's going into them.

and they're receiving it. They're budging. They're opening to it. They're allowing it in. A version of this that I've done, dad, that could be certainly pretty potent. So be thoughtful about whether or not you want to try this yourself.

is almost like imagining the younger version of me if it's a time-bound issue, if this was associated with a particular moment in time, sort of like seeing the experience of the older version of me that now has more positive experiences around whatever this issue is. It could be a self-worth issue or a social acceptance issue or something like that. You kind of have a memory of a moment in time. For me, maybe I'm like 13, 14 years old or something. And

you can kind of embody that version of you and see it perceiving your older self, now having all of these positive experiences associated with that wound. And some version of that, that kind of mentalization process of it can be really powerful for people.

Well, thanks for mentioning that. That's a really sweet spin on it. The little angle, if I got it right. Very often I've heard people talk about the perspective from the adult part or the adult time. Oh, seeing the younger part. Yeah, for me, the other way around is in some ways more effective. Yeah, because you're kind of like,

you're centering the hurt experience to an extent, which then kind of allows what you're receiving to be the positive experience. I don't know, that works for me and may or may not work for other people. Sounds good. So in all of this, dad, as you're going through this kind of a process,

I've heard you say some version of, I do linking every day. I do it for five, 10 seconds. It happens fairly briskly. I receive it, it works, I move on. How does that version of the practice work? How are you speeding this up? Yeah. So

I was saying there are two ways into this. So one way is you start with a negative, you've been reactivated, you be with it for a little bit, maybe do some releasing related to it, and then you want to let in a positive alternative that's matched to it. And linking is a really good way to do that. So just that three-step process is a really good little roadmap for people.

The other way in is if you know the places inside that are wounds or lacks. Wounds were due to the presence of the bad, lacks were due to the absence of the good. And this could be from your past, it could be really quite current. So if you know your own psychology,

Maybe growing up, something was really missing for you. For me, a lot of what was missing was the sense of being included as a valued person. That kind of in a summary was pretty thin soup for me. So if you know that about yourself, you can ask yourself, what, if it is more present in my mind, would really help with that? What is the medicine that would address that lack or be like a soothing balm for that wound?

very briefly, a framework for thinking about what is matching has to do with our three primary needs for safety, satisfaction, and connection. So if a wound or a lag is primarily

related to one of those three needs, then resources, experiences, pardon me, experiences and inner strengths that also relate to that one of three particular needs are best matched to it. I used an example previously that if the issue is in our connection system in which we feel devalued, let's say, or not included, gratitude will not really match to it.

So if you know what for you is, think of it as your vitamin C. If you have scurvy, if a particular lack of vitamin C is your issue, consuming protein or taking iron pills will not really help you. You need vitamin C. So what's your vitamin C? And if you know your one or two or three top

key experiences to have in this life and key strengths to grow inside, then as you go through your day, you can look for opportunities to experience them. And then when you do experience them, you can, if you choose some of the time, help them to sink into those places inside of wounds or lacks. It's not like you're borrowing trouble because you're not going to be hijacked by the negative. You're just

healing yourself. You're being kind to yourself by taking in resources right now that are matched to the old pain. And you can do that through linking. So either way in. And man, when I stumbled on this one, Forrest, when I was, I don't know, a freshman in college, I felt like I had found the medicine, which is a process. This process is the medicine we need. Look for the

resources, I call them, the authentic beneficial experiences that are well-matched to the underlying wounds or lacks, and then look for them, help yourself to have them, and then use them to link to that old negative material again and again. And that's, man, that's a fundamental way to help yourself.

So I was talking with Elizabeth about linking before we did this conversation. She was very interested in it as a trauma therapist herself. And she raised an interesting point about linking that comes from her perspective working with people who've gone through some really difficult things.

And what she said was some version of, and I hope I'm paraphrasing her correctly here, people with a trauma history can struggle to apply this because they get kind of blended with a part. So there's a part of them that is still extremely tied to the experience, just like we were saying earlier, and it's easy to get kind of overwhelmed or carried away by that. For people where that is the case, are there things that they can do that you would want to call out here?

that can plausibly either take the sting out of it over time so they start to be able to work with that material, or things that might help them stay more in their adult self so they get less kind of hijacked by that part. Have you thought about this much? I have. And Elizabeth is, of course, always extremely insightful.

her videos and her channels and everything are really worth paying attention to. Yeah, I think so too. I mean, I'm a little biased. I'm marrying her, but anyways. So let's see here. For some people, let's say, here's an example. Let's say someone was frequently bullied as a child, and including in ways that were just horrible. Maybe physically abusive,

and they had no power. They couldn't do anything about it. So then we could ask ourselves, okay, given that history with a lot of compassion around it, what would help if it were more present in the mind? Maybe experiences of strength, agency, self-determination. You're the person who gets to decide. Right. Beautiful. Right off the top. Excellent. So yeah, you could see how that would be. Okay, that would be matched.

So now you're in conversation with your therapist or with yourself, and your therapist says, "Hey, let's work on your sense of being strong, having agency," because when you were young, you were immobilized. You couldn't do anything. You couldn't escape. Maybe some expression around anger. Also, I could imagine being a piece of this, but yeah. Okay, great.

But to me, Elizabeth is getting out, and I've experienced it myself with clients, is just that framing is problematic because it just pulls up the negative. So if you start identifying the positive you're trying to grow, the resource, the strength you're trying to grow, the medicine you're trying to grow inside this person, if you associate it with the negative, it's immediately sucked into that vortex.

So it becomes a little tricky because there's no way to not know that you're building this strength over here to deal with this wound over there. For the purpose of that thing over there. Yeah, totally. It's implicitly present. Yeah, but as much as you can, you just separate it out. And this goes to what I said earlier that you can grow roses in the garden. You can grow flowers in the garden that are useful for a person without yet addressing the weeds.

And so it becomes more about just reinforcing that sense of here and now essentially is what you're saying. Here and now strength, here and now determination, really build that. And then you start testing. Can the person, do they have the executive capacities with this material? People can have executive capacities. In your awareness, can you imagine two balls? One of them is black, one of them is white. You can kind of see both of them in front of you.

People have the executive capacity to do that, but can you be aware of feeling really strong and determined alongside old feelings of helplessness? Boom. Sometimes people just can't do that. So you have to grow the capacity to hold them both and become increasingly nimble inside the theater of your own mind. Here, I want to add that often when we actually do this, we're really guided by intuition.

Like you stumbled on this intuitive approach, which I've never heard anyone talk about ever before, to take the point of view of the young wounded person.

being looking at the experience of someone in your case, 20 plus years later, having a very different experience today. And yet that could be valuable for that person. So following your intuition, you might think that your vitamin C is something or other that's well matched, but

When you do the linking, you start realizing there's a yearning for something different, or it's a particular thing that you didn't realize was so central that really, really, really made a huge difference for you. So let your intuition be the guide here too. So I think that would be my response to the thing that Elizabeth is saying. Yeah, it definitely happens. And there's some things you can do. The way I would put it too, Forrest, is that

We haven't yet talked about what I call the eraser protocol. It's a little bit like the born identity or this is the eraser protocol. I'll explain this. And Bruce Eckers work, people can, is in a very elaborated and brilliant discussion of this that I'll summarize very, very briefly when we get to it in just a second. But often the truth is every time we think about that X, we feel like shit. It's never going to go away.

When we think about it, we feel like crap. We're mad, we're sad, we're embarrassed, we feel unworthy, we want to collapse. This whole wave of sleepiness and avoidance comes over us, we start dissociating. It just happens. And sometimes the best we can do is to encapsulate. In effect, we're not denying it, we're not suppressing it, but we're no longer living there. It's sort of like

If the psyche is a vast estate, there are certain tar pits in it that we recognize they're part of all of who we are, but we put a fence around them.

And we build paths that lead in other directions. And that's as far as we can get. And that's really, really good. And we inhabit the rest of our estate, right? And because that's where the flowers are. That's where the good stuff is. And sometimes we go back to the tar pit because I want to really stress too, that's part of who we are. And

in a funny way, realizing that, man, that tar pit was terrible. It was sticky, it was hot, I drowned in it again and again, and people kept throwing me in, right? And yet, I'm not in the tar pit now. I'm not. I got through it. I'm different from that. And that can bring an appropriate sense of nobility and self-respect to yourself in your relationship to that part of your psyche and your own history.

One of the tricky parts about doing a podcast like this is inherently we're speaking to a large group of people who have a very diverse set of experiences and a very diverse set of needs. And part of the job of a listener to not just our podcast, but any podcast, is to figure out what in it is for you and what in it is not for you. So there's going to be some stuff that we talk about on any episode.

That just isn't for you. It's not talking about your problem. It's offering a solution that probably just isn't going to work for you very well. Guess what? That's okay. That's life. That's the nature of a big platform like this. And part of being a discerning listener is kind of getting better and better over time at being able to say from kind of like a place of inner authority or inner knowledge, you know, that's probably not for me. Or, you know, that seems like it's really for me and I should try that on. Or, you know, that seems like...

not delicious medicine. I'm going to want to spit that one out, but actually end of the day, I'm going to get some mileage out of that one. So I'm going to try it on a couple of times, whatever it is for you. Yeah. Oh, that's very good. A very, very appropriate kind of thing to say. Do you want to hear about the erasure protocol? Yeah. I mean, you piqued my interest. What's this? I'm not sure if I've ever actually heard you talk about it this way. I'm going to be a little technical that it will make sense. Here we go.

So as you said, when we learn, the brain forms associations based on lasting changes in neural structure or function. These are lasting changes. Those associations are formed, and commonly they're formed between a stimulus and a response.

I'll give you two examples of associations. One association is an authority figure. And let's suppose that this neutral stimulus, an authority figure is not inherently good or bad.

scary or safe, they're just authority figures. So there just is an authority figure around somewhere. Yeah. But in your childhood, your authority figures were really mean to you and scary and unloving, cold and dismissive. So you associated a lot of negative material to authority figures. Different example, a sports bar. A sports bar, you look at it from the outside,

sports bar, neutral stimulus. It's not inherently positive or negative. And yet for you in your history, as someone who has a real issue with drinking and drinks too much and has a lot of associations with sports bars, what do you do?

So one thing you can do is, like I'm saying, you can do counter conditioning in which you start to just massively counter associate positive stuff to disrupt that connection between the neutral stimulus and the problematic experiences or behavior. So for example, you would just associate a lot good experiences with authority figures.

You would focus on them, you would look for them, when they happened, you would highlight them, you would prioritize them, you would marinate in them. Those new associations are laid on top of the old associations, but the old associations are not yet erased. And as much research shows,

they can come roaring back with a vengeance. If, for example, in your life, you bump into an authority figure who's like those old assholes when you were young, well, all that material that associated

negative feelings to authority figures. It's not gone anywhere deep in the basement of the mind. It's just been covered over. And now, boom, it can come roaring back with a vengeance, even more intensely than ever. Same with people who try to be sober or kind of manage their use of drugs and alcohol. They go along just fine, but then, boop, they slip, and those old cravings associated with that substance

come roaring back with a vengeance. They have not yet been erased. Clear so far? This is a serious problem in psychotherapy and clinical practice and in people's lives. How do we actually erase the association between the neutral stimulus and what's problematic? This is where the eraser protocol comes in.

Now, the simple version of it initially was done with rats using drugs. So basically, rats would hear a bell initially during the training phase, and they would then soon thereafter have a puff of air in their face, which they don't like. Rats don't like that. So fairly quickly, they're smart, they would associate that when that bell rings, something bad's going to happen.

So then you put them in a situation and you start ringing the bell, even before the puff of air comes, they start doing the rat equivalent of shivering, quavering, wanting to withdraw, being scared. That's the training phase. Then in the eraser phase, what they would do is they would take the rats who'd been trained to fear the neutral stimulus, the bell,

They would bring them into a situation in which the bell would ring, but nothing bad would happen. So the bell would ring, nothing bad would happen. And then sometime during the next hour or so, they would be injected with a drug that inhibits certain kinds of protein synthesis in the memory-making machinery of the brain. What the scientists were doing was

reactivating the learned emotional memory trace by ringing the bell. And then during the so-called window of reconsolidation,

When that, as you talked about earlier, when that learning is being reconsolidated, reconcretized in physical changes in the brain, they would give the rats a drug that would disrupt that reconsolidation. And so then the next time they exposed that trained rat to the ringing of the bell, they were chill. They were fine. They were no longer traumatized.

Gotcha. So theoretically, and this is animal studies, this is not human studies, a rat brain is different from a human brain, although there are certainly some similarities to them.

There is some plausible way by which you could totally uncondition a person to a stimulus. That's the point that you're making here. By disrupting the reconsolidation, you can erase it. So how can we do that? Yeah, so how can we do that without injecting ourselves with a protein synthesis tool? Hundreds of smart people worldwide wearing white lab coats are looking for drugs that humans can tolerate because we can't tolerate the drugs that they give to the rats. Okay?

Drug-free approaches essentially do this. So you can imagine this in your own life. You would expose yourself to the neutral stimulus, which for you is a trigger, an authority figure, a sports bar, something else, while not feeling upset. You're not getting reactivated. You're just exposed to it.

But you've gotten to a point whether it's through doing other approaches or you're just somebody who's kind of emotionally stable in that way and kind of emotionally solid, so you can be around that thing without being actively activated by it. That's correct, right? That's exactly right. Cool. So you need to get to that point already. Yeah, that's where a little bit of training and prep can help. But then what you do is that during the next hour, deliberately, three or more times during the next hour, you

Again, bring to mind the so-called neutral stimulus, the trigger. I'll just call it the trigger from now on. You bring to mind the trigger while continuing to feel fine after that initial exposure. And you can just do it for about 10 to 30 seconds each time.

And what you'll be doing is disrupting the reconsolidation of that trace in memory during that crucial, labile, vulnerable window of reconsolidation. And has this been worked up into... You mentioned somebody else who did work in this territory. Bruce Zachary, yeah. I'm forgetting the name. Bruce Zachary, yeah. And is this something that he's worked up into sort of a protocol?

Yeah, there are published studies on this that deal with addicts in which they expose them to paraphernalia while maintaining their sobriety and that starts to disrupt the cravings associated with the paraphernalia. Bruce is extremely good at developing protocols in coherence therapy, Bruce Ecker, where he lays it out. But the structure is essentially the same thing. You're exposed to the trigger.

while at the same time having a disconfirming alternative sense of yourself, sometimes with beliefs where you remind yourself, no, this authority figure is not trying to kill me. I'm fine. I'm strong. I can get away. I'm standing here. This is not going to ruin my life. You're doing all that sort of stuff. And then during that window of reconsolidation, you go back to it. You

You go back to the trigger while still feeling neutral or positive, and that keeps disrupting the consolidation of that negative linkage. That's the eraser protocol. And I wrote about it in some detail in Hard Boring Happiness, exactly how to do it. Yep. Great. And the key detail about this, which does seem like a bit of a stumbling block, is that the stimuli does have to be neutral.

So it can't be negatively loaded. And so if you're somebody who's currently working up to a point where that stimuli already has a lot of content attached to it still, you're going to have a difficult time applying this particular practice. But you could plausibly use some linking to get to a point where maybe the stimuli is more neutral, at which point you could try to do this. Am I reporting that accurately? Yes. And the point I would really want to underline is...

The great ally is reality itself. In other words, you could take the authority figure if, say, your boss is a classic authority figure, including big, physically holds privilege of different kinds, but it's not a jerk. So the reality is you were exposed to the authority figure, but in reality, it all went fine. It all went fine.

And you're really staying with the fineness of it all. In other words, that it wasn't bad, that it wasn't badness of it all. And you're returning to that association, in effect, of the trigger to the experience of nothing bad, all fine, or put it this way, all fine.

you know, all is well, the night watchman, all is well. And you're doing that deliberately at least a few times during the next hour after you were exposed to the trigger. Well, it's a really interesting protocol. And

If it really does accomplish that, then that would be a total breakthrough in a lot of what we're trying to do here, particularly if we can get to a point with it where there's a good pathway to getting to neutral with the stimuli, and then there's a good process after it for really...

taking any of the additional sting out of it or really working with the traumatic memory in a way that turns the charge down to the point at which it's pretty much neutral. It's actually really cool because you think most of the time, whether it's in therapy or just kind of on our own, we have this corrective emotional experience. Here's the realness of it all, right? Very often, we have opportunities for a corrective emotional experience. We don't even notice the opportunity, okay?

Second, if we notice the opportunity for corrective emotional experience, we feel it and it kind of washes through our brain like water through a sieve. Third, we actually take in the corrective emotional experience and we grow that particular flower a little bit more in the garden of our mind. Or we could even say, fourth, even better,

we link that corrective emotional experience to the negative material in ways that actually function to soothe, ease, reduce, even replace that negative material. That's really, really great. And then fifth, maybe even best of all, a handful of times over the next hour,

We deliberately bring to awareness a relevant trigger while still feeling just fine. You know, see, the way I put it for us, you could understand that each one of those steps is less and less common while also being more and more powerful and influential and effective, including the very last one. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

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Now, back to the show. So I've got a couple of really common yes buts, retorts, questions, thoughts that people tend to have about linking, and I would love to hit you with them. First of all, how long does it take to see results from this? Like if you do this practice, when will I get better? Depends how bad the negative material is and how often you do the practice.

Very often people experience immediate relief the very first time they actually do this. To give it somewhere around half a minute to a few minutes, sort of straight. There's sometimes kind of a reverberating in your mind back and forth between the negative and the positive. Keep being determined for the positive to influence the negative, not the other way around.

Very often people experience a startling amount of benefit right then and there. And part of it is that if you think of it, Forrest, there are really three things that are happening. There's the negative material, there's the positive material, and then there's the overarching guiding and

benevolence toward yourself so that you want to help that thing to occur. And for many people, just that itself is a big bonus to realize that you can mobilize qualities inside that are benevolent toward yourself and can look to an available resource. The positive material

generally must always be authentic. There's some examples where we deliberately imagine things that have not happened and or could never have happened. And we know that, we're not psychotic, but we're using that in the mind to heal some old stuff, maybe all the way back to our infancy.

But most of the time, it's very authentic. So it's good stuff. You know, you're guiding yourself. So that affects people. And then I would say longstanding, huge life patterns. You know, I still get a little twitchy when your mom is critical, but wow.

To go from on the zero to 100 scale of reactivation from an 80 or a 90 down to a three to six or a one to two, I mean, that's a lot of progress. Another common one that I hear people say is some version of my negative experience feels pretty specific.

And I'm having a hard time finding that matched experience that you're talking about, or I'm having a hard time thinking of a category that would make sense for what's happening for me. What can I do? Can I do this sort of generally, or is there a different way that I should be thinking about this?

So if you're looking for what could be a very high value, you know, you and I did one of, I thought, your top brilliant episodes on 90-10. You know, what's the 10 that gives you the 90? What are the little things that produce big results? Okay. So if you're feeling into, all right, what's one thing that I could really focus on developing inside myself these days? How do I find that one thing? What is that one thing? Especially if it's not immediately obvious. So here's some questions.

First question, what would have made all the difference in the world back then? Maybe back then your previous job or relationship or back then all the way back to childhood. And not particularly what circumstances, events or settings or people would have made all the difference in the world, but what experiences would have made all the difference in the world back then?

and then look to have those kinds of experiences these days, which you internalize and can also draw on as appropriate for linking. The second question would be, have there been times in your life in certain settings or situations or activities in which, wow, you really flourished?

You really flourished. Maybe it was summer camp when you were a kid, or maybe it was a special conversation with someone on a long bus trip, whatever it might be.

What's going on in those settings? What are you experiencing inside yourself? What's really going in inside you? That too could be a clue for what would be super good to develop more of these days to make a real difference for yourself. And then a third clue is kind of simply to ask yourself, wow, after all I've been through and all I've done to grow and heal and okay, all the good stuff, what does my heart still deeply long for?

deeply long form. That too is a guide to your vitamin C or to what might be really good for you to develop these days. So I say that's kind of in general. And then in particular, I find that it's usually fairly clear with a little bit of inquiry, what would be the matched resource

for a particular issue a person has, especially if we get beneath the surface to what's really going on. What is the deep wound? What is the deep lack? What is the unfulfilled longing? And then when you get down to that level, it's usually pretty clear

What would really help if it were more present for that person? And after, you know, I've gone down this road with people sometimes, and after about 10 minutes of inquiry, and you can do this kind of inquiry for yourself, if you're still with yes, but, yes, but, then it's time to pop up to that bird's eye view that asks, wow, what would it be like for you to not have this issue anymore? And would that be okay with you?

That's a classic therapist question. What are you like when this tendency is not running? Or what would you really like? And do you want that? Is that a real choice here? And then just the last thing I'll say about this for people in this territory is that sometimes, going back to what Elizabeth was saying,

The medicine they really need is too much associated with reactive material to take it. So let's suppose that a person who was perhaps sexually molested as a child, a corrective emotional experience, an appropriate vitamin C for them, let's say, would be to have perhaps an erotic partner who is completely safe and nurturing and wonderful.

And to even imagine having that could be itself a corrective experience. But for them, it's way too charged. They're not ready for that. So let's suppose, but to enable them to rest in and be open to a really vulnerable and nurturing romantic relationship, it would help them to feel safer with people in general.

just an ordinary platonic relationship. So we would work on that to build up capacities to enter into what they really, really most specifically need. But even then sometimes you find that, oh, for this person to be able to just be comfortable in a group of friends or have ordinary platonic companionship with somebody, they have to manage their anxiety better

for being in relationship altogether. So we have to start with increasing anxiety strengths so that the person can be in platonic relationships so that they can eventually be in a true nurturing romantic relationship. And sometimes you have to think that way as a clinician, or if you're trying to help yourself, you can help yourself by thinking that way.

Gotcha. I think that's a great point, Dad. And also a good note to end our episode today on. We've covered a lot of material during this episode. It is a great process. It's also really the fundamental for how you work if you want to work with those painful past experiences. This is such a

well-defined approach that you have. It's a process that most people can apply, or at least most people can apply some version of even if it's the slightly toned down version of this whole thing. And you've just laid it out here so clearly. So I really appreciate that, Dad. Thanks for doing this. Oh, completely my pleasure. And I want to honor the people I've learned from to really summarize. I mean, this is kind of pretty much the 411. Yeah.

you know, at least the cliff notes of how to really leer a lot of negative material inside your own mind. I had a great time talking with Rick today about linking, and this was a bit of a throwback episode for us. We haven't had an episode in a while where we really dive in to a specific psychological technique, a tool that you can apply in your own life like this, and discuss it in some detail.

And linking is such a great tool to do this with because so frequently on the podcast, we mention linking and then we give a bunch of disclaimers about it or say, oh, you can try this on if it works for you, but it doesn't work for everyone. Or, oh, if you do this, you're going to want to be thoughtful about these different things. And so we finally got an opportunity to talk about it in detail and talk about what all of those different things that you should be aware of are.

The basic idea of linking is pretty simple. You're trying to hold two things in mind at the same time. A more positive experience that's happening to you ideally right now, and a more negative experience, something that happened to you in the past that led to there being some patterning of your implicit memory.

Implicit memory is the residue of the experiences that happen to us. This is what affects your expectations of life, how you relate to other people, and your overall sense of self-concept, the things that you assume you're going to be good at and bad at, the kinds of people that you tend to get along with or not, the sorts of situations, how Rick was mentioning toward the end of the episode, a sports bar or an authority figure, the kinds of things that tend to make you a little bit less uncomfortable to be around.

What we're trying to do technically is work with memories in the brain and to kind of take advantage of the memory making process. Whenever we recall a memory, whenever we think about something that happened to us, it becomes subject to change. The classic example of this is how the fish always gets a little bit bigger. It's normal for people to change their memories over time. But how can we take advantage of that process? How can we use good experiences in the here and now

to take some of the charge out of negative experiences that happened to us in the past. And linking is Rick's way of answering that question. There are also a bunch of other ways to answer that question. There are many techniques in therapy that essentially try to do something that's kind of sort of similar to linking. Rick's big contribution here was thinking more in terms of what could people plausibly be able to do on their own without the assistance of a trained medical professional.

I've gotten a lot of value out of linking as a practice, particularly related to feelings of low self-worth, lack of comfort with other people, a little bit of social awkwardness. And that was a very painful experience for me. So I've needed to do some work as an adult

around those feelings. And a great way to do that for me is to really notice and pay attention to when there is a matched experience, when something is going good for me socially these days, and to really take that in and have that be the big strong thing in my awareness while I have this other sort of background experience of, oh yeah, for me in the past, this other thing was true.

And what I just said of like, oh yeah, this used to be true for me, that's a know-it approach. That's the easiest way to interact with linking. Rick also talked about two other ways that you can interact with it. First is feeling it. You can allow a felt sense of the negative material to come in, even while staying with the positive material that's happening right now. So this might be more of a somatic sense of what it felt like for me emotionally to be that excluded younger version of myself.

And then the third version, the sort of deepest version of this, is to go into it. This is where you actively imagine the more positive experience that's happening these days kind of invading the negative one and transforming it into something warmer and more gentle and more accessible for you.

That last one can be a little hard for people. For starters, it's the strongest, it's the most intense, and also can be a little unintuitive. Like, what do you mean the good experience goes into the negative experience? So the version of this that I've taken on in my own life is trying to essentially adopt the perspective of the part.

So I think about things from the perspective of that younger version of myself. I kind of embody the younger version. I think of what it would be like to be that younger version. And then I imagine the current experience and me as that younger self being able to see what is going on in my life as my adult self these days and to perceive that positive experience and feel that positive experience that's happening to me right now as if I am that younger version.

And there's something about that that I've just really gotten a lot of mileage out of. For some reason, it feels more accessible to me. It feels more somatic and more based in the body. It also feels sort of more earnest in a way. I'm not sure if I quite have the right language to describe it, but if you feel like it's appropriate for you to try it on, give it a try and let me know what you think.

Few cautions around linking. For starters, the positive material needs to be bigger and stronger than the negative material. Second, if you are working with really intense material, it's probably best to do it with the assistance of a therapist or psychologist, some kind of mental health professional. Also, it's generally best if this is not just an intellectual exercise. If there's some real feeling tied to the whole thing, that's going to make your life a lot easier here.

And then finally, as another thing to keep in mind, this tends to work best with a matched experience. So if you're having self-worth challenges, or if you know that your personal pain point is related to self-worth, you're going to get the most mileage out of this if you're able to link a positive experience that relates to your self-worth.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I got a lot out of this one personally. If you've been listening for a while and you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, please take a moment to subscribe. That really helps us out. If you're watching on YouTube and you would prefer to be listening to our podcast feed, you can find us pretty much everywhere you listen to podcasts. We're on Spotify, Apple. We used to be on Google, RIP Google Podcasts. That used to be one of my favorite platforms, but

Farewell. You were beautiful while you lasted. You can also find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And for just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and get a bunch of bonuses in return. Finally, a little reminder here about Rick's upcoming online workshop focused on healing insecure attachment that starts on April 26th. And you can learn more at rickhansen.com slash

attachment. If you decide to get the course, you can use coupon code beingwell25 to receive a 25% off discount.

Once again, thanks for supporting the podcast in so many different ways by watching, by listening, by subscribing, by supporting us on Patreon, whatever it is that you're doing. Hey, by telling a friend about it, that's probably the best way to support the show. It means so much to us. I had this wonderful experience recently where I was invited to do a city arts lecture in San Francisco with Diego Perez. He's known as Young Pueblo. That's his pen name. You can find him on Instagram under that name. And we had like 1,300 people in attendance. This experience was totally wild. It was so cool.

And it was only possible because of the podcast, because of everybody who watches and listens and comments and does the whole thing.

And it was this really great moment where I was able to have such a visceral experience, and maybe that ties to what we talked about today with linking, of like, wow, this has gone so well. And just frankly, my deep appreciation of all of the people who take the time out of their day or out of their week to turn on the show and care about this kind of very specific positive psychology content that we do on the podcast. And yeah, so again, thank you for this. Until next time, I'll talk to you soon.