When Change Happens Fast: A Real Case of Automatic Change

Years ago, I worked with a woman who had been violently abducted and forced into a car.

There aren’t many experiences more terrifying than that.

She survived—thankfully.

But from that day on, she rarely felt safe.

She sought the best psychological help available in her city and went through the so-called “gold standard” treatment for PTSD (exposure therapy: relive the trauma over and over, until it hurts less).

Exposure therapy can be extremely unpleasant. In real-life settings, research shows dropout is common, often approaching half.

She bravely stuck with it, trusting it would eventually help.

But it didn’t.

In fact, she felt it made things worse.

When she came to me, we worked together for two sessions.

In the first, we eliminated nearly all the trauma—the flashbacks, the hyper-vigilance, the constant feeling of threat.

But one cue hadn’t changed at all: the sound of a car door slamming still sent her into panic.

That sound—something she heard just moments after her abduction—had become glued to terror through Pavlovian learning.

The “gold standard” manuals would have told her to listen to car doors slamming, over and over again, hoping the fear would fade.

But that’s a slow, blunt, and often ineffective process, and she’d already done a full course of it before seeing me.

Here’s What We Did Instead

One of the things that made her feel most alive was music.

So in the second session, I asked her to imagine hearing her favourite, most upbeat, high-energy song in her mind’s ear—a song that made her feel on top of the world, happy and alive.

As she was hearing it, feeling that energy and aliveness, I asked her to mentally replace the kick drum with the car door slamming sound—as if a music producer had seamlessly sampled it into the track.

Everything changed instantly.

She was now hearing a cue that once triggered panic¹, but in an empowering way. Instead of it being part of an abduction, it became the drumbeat of her favourite song.

From that moment on, hearing a car door slam reminded her of that song and all the good feelings, not the fear.

The heart of the intervention took about fifteen seconds.

And when I followed up with her a year later, she was still enjoying a totally normal life.

I didn’t follow a one-size-fits-all recipe.

I invented the ‘music-car-door technique’ just for her, because she loved music and it fit what she needed.

(I’ve only used it a couple of times since, when it fit other clients too.)

The Science: How This 15-Second Shift Happened

In neuroscience terms, this created what’s called a prediction error: the brain’s prediction that the sound meant “danger” was powerfully contradicted.

When a prediction no longer fits experience, our brains naturally update what they predict going forward.

So, instead of predicting danger upon hearing a car door slam, her brain now predicted the feelings of energy and aliveness from the song.

(For more on how predictions play a central role in emotional responses, see: Burning Cars: Why Your Brain Keeps You Anxious (And What Actually Changes It))

Notice what I didn’t ask her to do. I gave her no coping techniques to practise, no homework assignments, I didn’t try to reason or logic her into feeling better, and we didn’t talk endlessly about her problem.

The Take Home Message

When we work with the way your brain actually works, making sure to customise everything to fit the beautiful uniqueness that is you, change tends to happen incredibly fast, automatically, and even effortlessly.

Not every case unfolds in fifteen seconds like this one did. Some patterns require multiple sessions. And sometimes effort is essential.

But we never want to make the mistake most approaches make: relying almost entirely on effort while ignoring how fast and easily the brain can automatically update its responses.

The goal is always the same: that being the way you want to be, as a person, is as effortless and automatic as the problem once was.

You don’t need to have been through something this extreme.

Every human has certain cues (situations, people, sights, sounds, thoughts, sensations, etc.) that ‘trigger’ an unhelpful response.

Those can change quickly too.

And if you’ve been through something hard, please know: there’s always a way back to feeling safe, free, and alive again.

You’re not broken.

Your brain simply learned a response that made sense at the time—and it can just as naturally learn to respond in a way that feels right for you now.

Footnotes for the Scientifically Curious

1. For precision, I use the word “trigger” as a colloquial term. Emotions aren’t mechanically triggered by external events; they’re constructed, based on predictions the brain generates as result of past learning, context, current body signals, and other factors. ↩︎