How to change your past

On memory reconsolidation and using the brain to unlearn

Ever leave a meeting thinking, "Why did I just agree to that?" Maybe a wave of relief hits first, but then, dread. You bought yourself a breather... and a bigger problem next week. And somehow, this feels very familiar.

That’s emotional reactivity. Outdated code running your present life. It doesn’t care about your OKRs.

I recall many such scenes. Tense rooms filled with the clutter of frustration, a pulsing undercurrent of anger working its way to resolve disagreement. A raised voice from my boss directed at me, pushing for agreement. A sense of contraction - chest tight, heat in my ears. Fight's exhausted, nowhere to flee, now just freeze and brain fog. Inside, everything screams: just agree, get out, survive.

So I did. Of course I did. And the results were predictable - burnout, loss of trust, shame, resentment.

Why did I fold? Because it wasn’t really about my boss.

In those moments, I traveled far back in time. And what I really heard was my father's voice - loud, urgent, absolute... and terrifying. The emotional lesson replayed without the words: conflict is unsafe; compliance is survival.

We talk often about technical debt in startups. Rarely about emotional debt. But it’s everywhere:

• Saying yes when you want to say no
• Freezing when challenged
• Overcommitting to prove your worth
• Slow to fire when the new hire is clearly bad
• Avoiding candid feedback because it feels dangerous
• Getting stuck in analysis paralysis when stakes feel high
• Bypassing your own managers to feel "in control"

These recurring patterns are everywhere, but under pressure especially, they run the show. We may not see them in our bug trackers or KPI charts, but they shape everything. They are the invisible tax on everything you care about shipping.

It took me a while to see this. Or more accurately, to admit that I had no idea what was going on, and that I had a lot less control than I thought. I was burning myself out, and it was leaking into my team, my marriage, my kids.

So I asked for help. Found a coach and a peer group. And slowly, I started understanding my own code. I saw how much of my behavior was quietly driven by old conditioning that had nothing to do with the present moment. And with time, things began to shift. Not in the "and they lived happily ever after" way, but in a way that transformed my relationship with emotions, finding more peace in truth than in chasing feeling good.

This all came as a surprise, frankly, because I grew up in the hyper‑rational and hyper-masculine Soviet Union, which predisposed me to see things like therapy as weak, too hand-wavy, too "woo" in American speak. But as it turns out, I spent 40 years compartmentalizing my experience and living above the neck, treating the body as an annoying Uber driver for the mind and emotions as junk blocking good decisions.

Though I now had plenty of direct evidence of my own, I never really understood what made radical change like this possible, or how to optimize for it. But, as I recently discovered through my coach training with Aletheia, there is actually some fascinating research in neuroscience that helps explain the process of modifying or deleting the old code that runs our reactivity.

The science: memory reconsolidation

When something happens with strong emotion in childhood, the brain doesn’t just store the facts - it stores the emotional lesson. It writes that lesson into deep cold storage circuits so it can predict and protect you next time. And it's a gift of our evolution that this process is invisible to us in our youth. Just as it's a gift to discover its effects and retake our agency as adults. (Terms and conditions apply.)

Imagine, for example, eagerly raising your hand in 1st grade to answer the teacher's question. Your hand hovers, your pulse quickens, your throat tighten, and you feel both excitement and fear. You answer and get it wrong. In one version, the teacher smiles and thanks you for trying. In the other, the teacher mocks you and the room erupts in laughter. Heat rushes up your face, your body contracts, you want to disappear (hello, shame). The lesson your emotional brain stores may become: it’s not safe to take risks, to speak up, to act on excitement. Many of us carry some version of this into adulthood.

What surprised me is that, until very recently, the best science thought we could do was to counteract that problematic learning in some way, whether by regulating through techniques like mindfulness or breathing, or by exposure like practicing the thing (Toastmasters, anyone?)

However, in the late 90s, researchers mapped a different path: memory reconsolidation. In short, there’s a brief window when a specific emotional memory can be unlocked and updated. Here’s the three-step sequence, continuing the classroom example:

Reactivate: Bring the emotional memory online, not just cognitively (e.g. simply remembering), but somatically enough to evoke the expectation of the emotional learning. You don’t need high drama; you do need the specific "what I expect will happen" to be live in your system. Be that kid again: hand half‑raised, heart thumping, breath shallow, heat in your cheeks. Let it feel real.

Create Mismatch: Create an experience that violates the old expectation. Bring to mind concrete episodes from your life where speaking up was met with care and encouragement: a manager thanking you for candor, a colleague respecting your clear “no,” applause after your presentation at an all-hands. Replay the classroom scene but with support. The brain generates a prediction‑error signal: what I expected isn’t what’s happening. It now has the impossible task of holding two opposing truths at the same time.

Rewrite: This opens up a roughly 5‑hour window in which it's possible to overwrite the old learning with the new. Importantly, what updates is the emotional learning, while the factual memory remains intact.

I don't want to oversell this as some easy "magic pill," because, in fact, your entire system is built precisely to prevent the surfacing of these painful emotional lessons (terribly inconvenient!) But this research helps explain why the various modern therapeutic modalities are actually effective, because to be so they use the same underlying brain process whether they know it or not.

The leverage point

This isn't a call to drop everything and go to therapy. Or to simply geek out on the science.

I simply invite you to get curious. Curiosity is free and strangely potent.

To look inside and ask yourself questions, like:

• Where do I avoid saying what needs to be said?
• Where do I avoid making or keeping clear agreements?
• What conflicts continue to be swept under the rug?
• What do I wish I could do but keep making excuses not to?

Because growth in self-awareness makes change possible. You may not like all that you find, and that's why this takes courage.

As more truth enters your life, more willingness for discovery follows. You discover more clarity and agency in your life.

And one of the best things - compassion - blossoms.

You stop seeing people as broken.

Instead, you see everyone as always doing their best and the protective programs trying to keep them safe.

Even yourself. (Eventually)

And maybe that makes you better - as a leader, mentor, co‑founder, partner, parent. Human.

Think about how many hours you've spent on learning frameworks, tools, strategies, tactics?

And how many on the operating system that runs you?

We’re great at problem solving and debugging systems "out there".

But we may miss the biggest opportunity in our life when we ignore the system "in here".

The past doesn’t have to run your future. You can change the code. And if you could change that, what would you rewrite first? Start there.

PS: I coach a small number of founders and currently have open space in my practice. DM if you'd like to explore receiving powerful support from someone who's been in your shoes.

Sources

A Primer on Memory Reconsolidation and its psychotherapeutic use as a core process of profound change by Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic and Laurel Hulley

Memory Reconsolidation Understood and Misunderstood by Bruce Ecker

The Neuroscience of Enduring Transformation by Steve March