Because it’s based on emotional (& somatic) memories, not cognitive ones
A lot of CPTSD happens precognitively, either before those kinds of memories are made (before age 2/3), or because the thing happened on a visceral emotional level and not understood at the time
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So any cognitive beliefs that come up from that will just be results of the underlying emotional generator
Fix the emotional schema, the downstream beliefs will take care of themselves
(emotional memory reconsolidation aka memory editing)
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literally all of my shit is like this lol
(although i continue to object to describing memory reconsolidation as "memory editing" 😩)
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fwiw I never looked into “memory reconsolidation” when I first heard about it from like years ago bc it sounded technical and I couldn’t imagine what it was
it was only when said memory editing that I was like Oh! That sounds easy lemme try it out
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yeah exactly the same here, it always sounded kinda strange, technical and idk, dangerous?
then I read more about it and realised it was basically what an old therapist was doing with me (different name) and it worked well and felt safe then, so I leaned into it
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Interesting, 'editing' sounds way more dangerous to me and also comes with a side order of 'clueless silicon valley tech guy messing with brain' associations, I guess because of the computer metaphor
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Not sure if I still 100% agree with that term, but I don’t think it’s totally off, matter of degree. Entering high energy states with psychedelics and changing dozens or hundreds of memories I really do think of as closer to editing, and is probably risky. Normal IFS less so
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For me I did the former a few years ago as a kind of booster after like ~1k hours of mediocre meditation. It got me to a good point and then since then my ifs/meditation has gotten way easier/better and now do fine-grained emotional reconsolidating that feels safer and softer
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I also do think you can easily change content in those high-energy states not just emotional tone. Now in meditation I can sort of do either I think maybe kinda (?) but usually choose the tone. I don’t know what’s exactly memory reconsolidating or how the mechanics work
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I’d also totally believe that the brain is a nearly lossless append-only database and by “editing the content” you’re adding a new memory and setting it as primary, even though the source to the old one is still around somewhere. But it certainly feels like editing
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i haven’t been following this conversation carefully but i’ll just report that i continue to find the concept of “memory editing” deeply violating for me personally, which is not commentary on whether anyone besides me ought to use it
I guess there’s the question of how soft/user-friendly this stuff should be. The three marks of Buddhism is ridiculously hostile to most people’s starting belief (there’s no self, nothing stays the same, everything is unsatisfying), but imo they’re totally right
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I don’t support being hostile for hostile’s sake. IFS is soft and user-friendly and it’s great. Although I do think it leaves out some of the less soft stuff that I think is important. eg I think IFS’ Self is BS, but they keep it bc people are scared of no-central-self being true
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IMO the right version of this process necessarily transcends-and-includes the existing memory and interpretation
in contrast to the lossiness implied by "editing"
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ie the old interpretation needs to be able to let go its hold, but safely, without losing anything it cares about
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yeah I think & I are functionally making the case that we (& many others) have parts who reject the entire process if framed as "editing", even if there's something good about it, thus for such people a different frame is required for full-fractal buy-in.
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loving the term "full fractal buy-in" 🔥
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