Regenerating Images in Memory (RIM): What It Is + How It Works
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Regenerating Images in Memory® (RIM®) is a body-centered emotional processing method developed by Dr. Deborah Sandella that helps us heal old emotional wounds, process difficult emotions and memories, and change deeply rooted beliefs and patterns that may be operating beneath our conscious awareness. By working directly with these deeper layers of our experience, RIM can help create meaningful changes in how we feel, how we see ourselves, and how we respond to the situations and relationships in our lives.
RIM is also my very favorite emotional processing tool, both because of how profoundly it changed my own life and because of what I now get to witness in my clients and students every day.
I first came to RIM as someone who truly needed it, after years of trying to understand and heal patterns that I could make sense of intellectually but couldn’t seem to truly shift. RIM helped me create meaningful changes in my anxiety, inner critic, and long-standing emotional patterns that I had spent years trying to heal. And even after years of practicing and facilitating this work, I’m still amazed by the clarity, relief, and real change I see happen when old wounds and patterns finally have a chance to heal.
In this episode, I’ll explore what RIM is, how it works with the body and subconscious, the role of memory reconsolidation, and fascinating new research into what happens in the brain during a RIM session. I’ll also share some of my own experience with this work and why it has become such an important part of both my personal healing and the work I do with others.
Dive into this episode now to learn more!
Episode timing:
00:00 - Why Do We Keep Repeating Patterns We Understand?
04:55 - How RIM Healed My Anxiety and Inner Critic
09:29 - What Is Regenerating Images in Memory (RIM)?
12:49 - How Does RIM Work?
12:58 - RIM and Memory Reconsolidation
17:28 - RIM's Surprising Similarities to Psychedelics
21:01 - How RIM Helps Us Access Our Deepest Feelings
25:02 - RIM, Self-Love, and Emotional Healing
25:42 - Final Reflections: Healing Beyond Understanding
Resources:
Find all my Guided RIM Meditations here!
Why Do We Keep Repeating Patterns We Understand?
Have you ever wondered why you feel the way you feel, or think the way you think? Why that one thing triggers you so much, or why certain patterns in your life just keep repeating no matter how much work you do on yourself? Where do our feelings actually come from? And when we have emotions that feel out of control, confusing, or just out of alignment with who we truly want to be, is there anything we can actually do about it?
I think about these questions all the time, because so much of healing eventually brings us face to face with the fascinating reality that there is so much happening inside of us that we don't consciously choose or control. We can understand ourselves incredibly well, know exactly how we want to feel or respond, and still find ourselves pulled into an old reaction or pattern before we've even had time to think about it.
Current neuroscience tells us that the vast majority of our thinking, feeling, behavior, and motivation happens outside of our conscious awareness. Many of our present-day emotions and perceptions can be shaped by implicit narratives that were created unconsciously in early childhood and still live on in our bodies. Our triggers and reactive moments can come from old wounds and stuck emotions from the past that long to be seen and healed. And those confusing behaviors and motivations that sometimes feel so out of alignment with our true needs and desires are often self-protective strategies created by a younger version of ourselves that pop up automatically before we even have a conscious thought.
These old wounds, stuck emotions, and implicit memories can remain alive in our bodies and subconscious, affecting how we think, what we believe, the decisions we make, and how we experience ourselves and the world around us.
This is where RIM can be such a powerful emotional processing tool.
My Personal Experience With RIM
I'm so passionate about sharing RIM because it has truly made such an incredible difference in my own life.
For most of my life, I struggled with immense anxiety and an inner critic so loud that, honestly, my inner world just felt full of self-hatred. I was the ultimate people pleaser, working so hard to manage how everyone around me felt while completely ignoring my own feelings, needs, and desires. My inner world was basically chaos even though I appeared pretty functional on the outside, and I desperately wanted to heal that.
So I tried so many different things. I tried meditation, spiritual work, traditional self-help, and even nine years of trauma therapy with a good therapist who was trained in both Hakomi and EMDR.
And a lot of those things helped me a little. I feel genuinely grateful and privileged that I got to explore so many things. But through all those years, my anxiety and self-hatred only seemed to decrease a tiny bit at a time, and the deeper patterns just weren't shifting in a significant way. What I understand now is that everything I was trying was still primarily working at the level of my thoughts and cognitive understanding. And so the roots of my issues weren’t truly shifting.
Then I found RIM. And the first time I tried it, I immediately realized it was different. It felt like finally getting to access some of the deeper levels of what was happening within me. There was a relief and a clarity and a release that was more profound than anything I had felt before in my healing journey.
So I threw myself into it. I immediately began taking classes, receiving one-on-one sessions, and started the process of becoming a certified RIM facilitator because I knew that this was what I had been seeking for so long. Within three months of practicing RIM, my anxiety decreased by about 50%, which actually blew my mind. I had been trying so hard and for so long to heal my anxiety that I didn’t even think that was possible.
The changes were remarkable. And, of course, when my anxiety decreased that much in three months, it’s not like that was the end of my healing journey. In fact, it felt like just the beginning of a much deeper, more effective, and more loving journey than I’d been on up to that point.
Now, I’ve been practicing RIM in my own healing journey for about seven years, and I occasionally get anxious situationally, but it’s no longer a seemingly irrational emotion running my life from within. And even more amazing is that I have almost no inner critic. My inner critic visits me maybe once or twice a month, which is wild given the way the cruel voice inside me used to be constant. I didn’t even think it was possible to have such a quiet and loving inner world. I never thought I would be free of my inner critic.
And what is extra amazing to me is that the experience of healing with RIM feels really integrative and grounded. RIM doesn’t overwhelm my system or push me into places I’m not ready to go, like some of the other modalities I tried. It feels gentler than that. And it feels more holistic as well, as if I’m finally getting access to places within me that had been longing to be seen for years. Connecting with these deep parts of myself in this way is how many of my old patterns have naturally shifted from within.
This is why RIM is my very favorite self-healing modality, and why I use it with my clients and students every single day. I just find it to be such a beautiful and profound process, and even after years of working with it, I'm still amazed by what can happen when we have a way to access these deeper places within ourselves and actually give them what they need to heal.
What Is Regenerating Images in Memory (RIM)?
Regenerating Images in Memory was created by Dr. Deborah Sandella, a psychotherapist with over 40 years of experience, and it has been practiced and refined over decades with hundreds of trained facilitators and thousands of clients around the world. There is also new peer-reviewed research beginning to explore what happens during RIM and why it may be so effective.
One of the things that makes RIM different from many other healing approaches is that it helps us drop beneath the surface of our thoughts and connect with deeper levels of our emotional experience so we can make real changes at the roots of our issues.
Because here's the thing. So many of us have done real and earnest work on ourselves. We've read books, gone to therapy, and developed real self-awareness and insight. And often we even have a pretty clear picture of our patterns, and yet we still feel stuck. We can still find ourselves triggered in familiar ways, or controlled by emotions that we understand on a cognitive level but can't seem to shift. And sometimes we're not even fully sure why we feel the way we feel; we just know that something is affecting us that hasn't been fully acknowledged yet.
That gap between understanding and actually shifting is important. Cognitive understanding, as valuable as it is, doesn't necessarily have the power on its own to shift the emotions, patterns, and wounds that live in our bodies and subconscious. Emotional memory can operate through sensation, image, and feeling, affecting us automatically before a conscious thought even forms.
RIM gives us a way to work directly with this emotional material.
Rather than only talking about our experiences and analyzing them, RIM invites us to explore our inner world through the body, imagination, sensation, and feeling. During a RIM session, you close your eyes and are guided by a facilitator as you turn your attention inward and allow imagery, emotions, and physical sensations to arise naturally.
Things that have been sitting just below the surface, quietly wanting to be acknowledged, finally get to be seen. And the relief and clarity that can come with that acknowledgment are real and tangible. RIM isn't just helping you understand your experience more clearly. It's helping you actually move through it and integrate it, so that it no longer has to live in your body as unfinished business.
And even though RIM can reach deep levels of the psyche, my experience of it has been that it tends to feel gentle and safe. The changes can be profound, but they can also feel integrative and grounded, and that combination is something I find really rare and precious in this work.
How Does RIM Work?
There are several different aspects of RIM that I think help explain why this work can create such meaningful change.
RIM and Memory Reconsolidation
A lot of it has to do with something called memory reconsolidation.
Until the early 2000s, the prevailing belief in neuroscience was that our core beliefs and emotional patterns from childhood, once formed, were incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to change. It was believed that our emotional patterns were basically hardwired into our nervous systems, and that we could learn to manage them or cope with them, but that the patterns themselves were just part of us now.
Then researchers discovered something that changed that understanding completely. They found that under the right conditions, emotional learning could actually be updated in ways that create lasting change, a phenomenon known as memory reconsolidation.
In simple terms, this means that when we access an emotional memory under the right conditions, the emotional learning connected with that memory can actually change. This is more than simply finding a new way to think about something. It helps explain how old emotional patterns can shift rather than simply becoming patterns we understand better but keep repeating anyway.
For memory reconsolidation to happen, certain conditions need to come together. First, whatever has been operating below our awareness, quietly shaping our reactions and beliefs, needs to become accessible enough to be acknowledged and felt. This is something RIM does particularly well, and it's part of why RIM can reach places that purely cognitive approaches sometimes can't.
Second, once that old emotional pattern becomes active, we need to have a felt experience that is different from what the old pattern expects.
Let's say there's an old pattern of shame from childhood, one that expects criticism or rejection the moment it's seen. In a RIM session, when that shame surfaces and is met instead with safety, warmth, or real understanding, that mismatch can create an opportunity for the old emotional learning to update. The same can happen when old fear that expects danger instead meets calm, or old helplessness that expects to be stuck instead meets a real felt sense of capability.
RIM is one of the most effective ways I've found to create the conditions for this kind of deep internal shift to happen.
And when this deep rewiring happens, it's incredible to witness. I see it in session after session, and it still amazes me every time. There's often this spontaneous, visceral quality to it, like something finally clicks into place. People often describe the shift as sudden and surprising in how quickly it happens, but at the same time natural and right, like something that just makes sense deep within. Feelings and perceptions can sometimes shift right there in the moment rather than only through months or years of practice. It is one of my favorite things about this work, getting to witness that kind of real change happen right in front of me.
I often say that when we dive into the subconscious, we connect with both the wounds and the wisdom that live within us. RIM isn't only about finding the places that are hurt and helping them heal. As we work with those wounded places, we can also begin reconnecting with parts of ourselves that may have gotten buried underneath them: our own clarity, strength, intuition, self-trust, and sense of who we really are.
And I think that's part of what makes this work feel so deeply integrative. We're not just trying to get rid of an old pattern. We're helping the wounded parts of ourselves come back into relationship with the deeper wholeness that's already there.
What Happens in the Brain During RIM? Psychedelic-Like Effects and New Research
There's also a fascinating new study that gives us an early glimpse into what's happening in the brain during a RIM session.
A peer-reviewed study published in 2025 in Frontiers in Psychology measured brain activity during RIM sessions using EEG. As a session progressed, the researchers observed a shift away from frontal activity associated with conscious, verbal, and analytical processing and toward temporal activity associated with more intuitive, emotional, and nonconscious processing.
Then, toward the end of the session, frontal regions became more active again while temporal regions remained active. The researchers suggest that this may reflect a process of integration, where our more conscious, analytical mind comes back online alongside what we've accessed at a deeper, more intuitive level.
I find this so meaningful because it points to exactly what we've been talking about. RIM can take us into a depth and a kind of nonlinear, felt experience that talk and analysis alone just can't reach. It may help explain why RIM can create change that feels so different, and so much more complete, than approaches that stay primarily at the level of thought.
Interestingly, these patterns also have some parallels with what researchers have observed with psychedelics. Psychedelic research has similarly found changes in frontal activity during intense, imagery-rich experiences, along with changes in communication and integration across different areas of the brain.
And the similarities to psychedelics weren't only in what was happening in the brain.
The researchers also measured participants' altered states of consciousness using a scale commonly used in psychedelic research. Participants reported experiences that included changes in their sense of self, a sense of transcending time and space, powerful positive emotions, and a profound sense of meaning. Many also described experiences that were ineffable or difficult to put into words.
One participant who had previously used psychedelics twice even said that her RIM experience was in some ways stronger, while also giving her a greater sense of control.
I’m not saying that RIM and psychedelics are doing the exact same thing in the brain. And doing RIM doesn’t feel like you’re tripping. But this preliminary research suggests that RIM may produce some psychedelic-like subjective experiences, alongside brain activity patterns that share interesting similarities with findings from psychedelic research, without taking any substances at all.
There was one more important finding. After just one RIM session, participants also reported significant improvements in anxiety, depression, stress, and motivation.
I find it incredibly exciting to finally have some preliminary scientific evidence for something RIM facilitators have witnessed for decades: that RIM seems to help us access a different kind of processing than thinking and analysis alone, and that may be part of what allows such meaningful shifts to happen.
RIM, Deep Listening, and Somatic Emotional Processing
There's another important piece of how RIM works: it helps us deeply listen to what's actually happening inside of us.
So many of us are carrying feelings, needs, desires, and stresses that we've learned to ignore, judge, suppress, or simply power through. And when we finally learn how to listen to those parts of ourselves, it can be an enormous relief. We begin to attune to ourselves in a different way, getting curious about what we're actually feeling and what those feelings might be trying to tell us.
You've probably heard phrases like "the body keeps the score," "your issues are in your tissues," or "you have to feel it to heal it." These are all different ways of pointing toward the idea that our experiences can continue to live within us at a feeling level, even when our conscious minds have moved on.
And when I say that we need to get in touch with what's living in our bodies and subconscious psyches, I'm not saying that we all have deeply repressed memories or huge traumas that we've blocked out. That's actually extremely uncommon.
What's really common is to have feelings sitting just below the surface that we haven't fully admitted to ourselves, or experiences from our past that are still affecting us deeply but that we've minimized or rationalized our way out of.
We've been profoundly conditioned to disconnect from our true inner feelings. We learn to minimize, deny, judge, suppress, ignore, and rationalize our experiences. And because we identify so strongly with our conscious minds and our thoughts, we can spend years reflecting on something without ever really feeling it in our bodies.
And so there can be unprocessed emotions and unacknowledged feelings living within us that continue to have a lot of power in our lives, often without us even realizing it.
When people finally access these places in a RIM session, I hear things like this all the time: "I was just trying to power through and couldn't admit to myself how much I was hurting." Or, "I didn't realize that affected me so much." Or, "I thought my self-doubt and anxiety were coming from something else entirely, but now I can see the roots are deeper than I let myself acknowledge." Or simply, "Something in me knew this all along. I just wasn't listening."
And it's generally incredibly relieving to finally acknowledge these things. Even when it means we have to grieve something or look at something differently, there's often a deep sense of recognition that comes with it. It can feel less like discovering something new and more like finally becoming conscious of something that some part of you has known for a long time.
There's a clarity to it, a feeling of coming back into alignment with yourself. It feels deeply natural and familiar, in a way that intellectual insight alone often doesn't. It's the difference between understanding something about yourself and actually feeling the truth of it from within.
And this kind of deep listening can completely change our relationship with ourselves.
We begin to actually know our true feelings, needs, and desires. We can attend to parts of ourselves that may have been longing for our attention and care for years. And we can reconnect with our own inner knowing and with what actually feels true for us. There's so much clarity that can come from finally listening to ourselves instead of continually overriding what we feel.
This is how I’ve had such significant healing around my anxiety and inner critic. And to me, this is also one of the foundations of tangible self-love.
Because we never really feel loved in a relationship where we don't feel listened to. And I think the same is true in our relationship with ourselves. When we learn to turn toward ourselves and really listen, we're showing ourselves that our feelings matter. Our needs are worth knowing. The parts of us that are hurting are worthy of our attention and care.
And it's amazing how much can begin to shift when we finally listen to what's been there all along.
What RIM Can Help Us Change
RIM gives us a way to work with ourselves at a level that's deeper than our thoughts. When old wounds have a chance to be experienced and processed instead of only talked about or understood intellectually, we can begin to make meaningful changes in patterns that may have been with us for years. And now we're beginning to have research that gives us a glimpse, at the level of the brain, into what so many of us have experienced through RIM in our own bodies.
So I want to invite you to consider a couple of questions.
Is there a pattern in your life that you understand really well, but still find yourself repeating? An old fear, hurt, or emotional reaction that you've thought about, talked about, maybe even worked on for years, but that still has a hold on you?
Is there something you understand intellectually, but when it gets triggered, you still feel it just as deeply in your body?
If something comes to mind, there may be a deeper layer of healing still available to you.
This work has truly changed my life, and I get to watch it change the lives of my clients and students every day. It is such an honor to do this work and to share it with you.
Experience RIM for Yourself
If you want to experience RIM for yourself, you can find guided RIM meditations here! Doing a guided RIM meditation on your own is different from working one-on-one with a certified facilitator, but it can still be a powerful way to begin exploring your inner world with support.
If you want to learn more about RIM itself, the RIM Institute has research and additional information available, and Dr. Deborah Sandella's book, Goodbye Hurt and Pain, is another beautiful place to start.
I’d also love to hear from you. Did anything here make you go, “Oh, that's me”? Or do you have other questions about RIM? Please let me know.
Karena Neukirchner, Certified RIM Facilitator
About me
Hey, I’m Karena!
I’m a somatic emotional healing coach here to help you quickly identify and heal the subconscious blocks, old emotional wounds and self-sabotaging core beliefs that are holding you back!
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