It can be incredibly powerful to understand where our reactions come from. Making sense of ourselves can soften shame, and instead of thinking, “What’s wrong with me?”, we can begin asking, “What happened to me, and what did I learn from it?”
But understanding something intellectually doesn’t necessarily mean that our nervous system has learned something different. I have previously written about the difference between our logical and emotional minds, and how we can know something intellectually while another part of us continues to respond as though it isn’t true.
You can understand that conflict is not necessarily dangerous and still feel your whole body tense when someone becomes angry with you.
You can recognise your tendency to people please and still find yourself saying yes when you desperately want to say no.
You can know that you are safe now and still feel, somewhere deep inside, as though you aren’t.
In my practice, I’ve noticed that this stage, when you begin to gain insight and understand your patterns, can be one of the most confusing for many people. Perhaps you can explain exactly where your patterns came from and yet still find yourself reacting in the same way. This is because insight is not the same as change. In therapy, this is often where the deeper work begins.
When insight meets real life
It is one thing to look back at a reaction and understand it afterwards. It is something very different to recognise what is happening while you are in the middle of it.
When someone doesn’t respond to your message, for example, you might know that your fear of abandonment comes from earlier experiences. But in that moment, knowing this doesn’t necessarily stop the familiar rush of anxiety. Your thoughts speed up, your body tenses, and you may feel an overwhelming urge to send another message, withdraw, seek reassurance, or convince yourself that you don’t care.
The work is not to tell yourself that you shouldn’t feel this way.
Rather, it’s about beginning to notice: Something is happening in me right now.
That small moment of awareness can create space between the feeling and the response.
And this space matters. It is where the seeds of change are planted.
Staying with what you feel
When we experience anxiety, dread, shame or fear, our instinct is often to make it stop. We seek reassurance, avoid the situation, overthink it, try to control the outcome or retreat completely. All the while, thinking we’re dealing with it, managing it, doing the work.
This can keep us caught in a constant loop of trying to fix ourselves and feeling that we are failing. It can also be the point at which we begin to feel that therapy isn’t working, that we’re stuck, and that we simply cannot find our way out.
But a crucial part of healing is learning that we can experience an uncomfortable feeling and allow it to be there without immediately acting from it.
You can feel anxious and wait before sending the message.
You can feel angry without attacking.
You can feel the urge to withdraw and choose to stay present.
For many, this might sound like ignoring your emotions or forcing yourself to be calm. But what you’re really learning is to become curious about what the feeling is asking you to do, and to give yourself enough space to decide whether that response actually belongs to the present.
What belongs to now?
Once we can pause, we can begin asking different questions:
What actually happened?
Is this about now, or is something old being stirred up?
What am I assuming has happened?
What does this situation remind me of?
How old does this feeling feel?
Sometimes the answer will be that something genuinely needs our attention in the present. Other times, we may realise that the intensity of our reaction is connected to something much older.
The aim isn’t to dismiss the feeling by telling ourselves, “This is just my trauma.” That can become another way of avoiding what is actually happening.
Instead, we are learning to distinguish between what is happening now and what our past has taught us to expect.
Meaning…
You might still feel anxious when someone becomes distant, but choose not to chase them.
You might still feel afraid of disappointing someone, but tell them what you actually need.
You might still feel the familiar urge to shut down during conflict, but stay in the conversation.
The feeling may still be there, but you can choose differently anyway.
Over time, these small experiences begin to teach us something that intellectual understanding alone cannot:
We can tolerate uncertainty.
Someone else’s disappointment does not necessarily mean abandonment.
Conflict does not automatically mean danger.
Setting a boundary does not mean losing a relationship.
We can feel afraid and still be safe.
This is how we begin teaching our nervous system that things are different now.
Healing isn’t erasing the past
A common misconception is that once we figure out what’s “wrong” with us, we need to get rid of it in order to be considered healed.
But healing doesn’t necessarily mean that the old reaction disappears. More often than not, it means noticing it sooner, catching yourself halfway through the old pattern and choosing something different.
There is no eraser that can remove your past as if it never happened. Your experiences are a part of you. Healing simply means they stop controlling you.
And sometimes, you will still do the thing you’ve been trying not to do.
That doesn’t mean you have failed, rather that you’re learning something that takes practice: how to stay present when an old part of you is convinced that the past is happening again.
And slowly, through all those small moments of noticing, grounding, questioning and choosing, we begin to teach ourselves:
That was then.
This is now.
I am here.
And I can choose what happens next.
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