3 Reasons Self-Awareness May Be Stopping You from Changing

This post is for you if you’ve ever found yourself wondering why talk-therapy isn’t working for you; asking yourself after each session: “OK, now I know WHY I feel this way, but I don’t understand what to do about it.” Perhaps your therapist has even said to you, “You have all the insight you need, you’re done with therapy,” or something along those lines.

With the rise of mental health awareness and social media, it’s likely you’ve built some self-awareness and have the ability to identify your triggers, understand your childhood, or maybe even rattle off your limiting beliefs, attachment and communication style.

It’s a common misconception for people, including some therapists, that once you understand yourself well enough, you should be able to change. Except oftentimes, instead of the results you’re desiring, you end up knowing exactly why you do what you do and it feels even more frustrating that you still can't seem to stop doing it. 😭

You are aware of the origin of your overthinking, people-pleasing, and fear of rejection and you know why conflict makes you want to shut down. Perhaps you can explain your relationship patterns, anxiety, perfectionism, and avoidance, with the help of a therapist, self-help books, or some combination of both.

This is where self-awareness crosses over from an asset to simply frustrating. Understanding yourself can be an important part of healing and growth, but there is a point where more insight doesn't necessarily create more change. Many of my clients find that constantly analyzing themselves has become another way of staying stuck.

Reason 1: Self-Awareness Makes Intellectualizing Worse

Alright, before we go any further, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about about intellectualizing. I’m referring to the process of cutting off the felt sense of our feelings by using logic, reasoning, or analysis. You KNOW how it should feel or would feel, so what’s the point of going there? Case closed.

Ultimately, this makes a lot of sense when we don’t have the safety in our environments and relationships to support actually FEELING our feelings, and hey, what does that even mean anyway, right? OK, now it’s even more important to keep reading.

For many people, traditional talk therapy is incredibly helpful because it offers a safe place to talk, reflect, process experiences, and gain an objective perspective, but for people who already live primarily in their heads, more talking and analyzing can sometimes reinforce the very pattern they're trying to change. In these spaces, you may become exceptionally good at explaining yourself, describe exactly why you feel anxious, identify the childhood experience that contributed to your fear of rejection, explain why you have difficulty setting boundaries and you can even recognize the thought pattern that appears when you start to feel vulnerable.

Perhaps you’ve started to notice that explaining a pattern isn't necessarily the same as changing it and if you're someone who has learned to cope by thinking, analyzing, understanding, and figuring things out, this makes perfect sense because your brain is doing what it has learned to do. It is trying to make sense of the experience so that you can feel more in control of it.

Intellectualizing may have been a very useful strategy at one point in your life. It only becomes a problem when you can become incredibly skilled at understanding an emotional experience without actually experiencing and processing what is happening underneath it.

The part that is comforting if equally as horrifying because the more self-aware you become, the more sophisticated this process can get. You might spend hours asking yourself, Why am I reacting this way? Where did this come from? What does this say about me? If you're constantly trying to think your way out of your body’s response, you may find yourself going in circles.

The thing is, you have all of the explanations you already need, but you may need a different way of working with the experience and that’s where somatic therapy comes in. Instead of only asking, “Why do I feel this way?” you begin to explore questions like: What am I noticing in my body right now? Where do I feel tension, activation, or shutdown? What happens when I stay present with that sensation? This creates an opportunity to understand and meet the needs underneath the patterns at a level deeper than intellectual understanding.

Reason 2: Your Patterns Are Stored in Your Nervous System, Not Just Your Mind

Here's the part that can be confusing because it’s likely that objectively, your life has changed a lot and you consciously know you're safe, but your body may not agree. If your patterns were simply beliefs stored in your mind, then you wouldn’t find yourself continue to spiral after your friend tells you, “It’s no big deal.” Your body has to catch up and learn too.

Throughout your life, your nervous system “downloads” patterns to respond to certain situations in predictable ways. This is extremely helpful because if we want to survive, we don’t have time to think through how to defend ourselves on the spot, we need sophisticated automatic processes if we’re going to hit the brakes in time in traffic or dodge that toy car the toddler just through at our heads.

This means conflict may make your heart race and your body tense, maybe someone becoming distant immediately makes you feel panicked or following that boundary script creates an overwhelming sense of guilt. Maybe receiving criticism makes you want to defend yourself, shut down, or disappear.

Your therapist may preach and you may even tell yourself, This isn't the past. This person isn't my parent. I don't need to be afraid and yet your body reacts as if something dangerous is happening because knowing you're safe intellectually and feeling safe in your nervous system are not the same thing. When your nervous system has learned to anticipate threat, it can continue producing stress responses long after the original circumstances have changed. This is one reason simply understanding your patterns may not be enough to change them.

Your responses developed for VERY good reasons. Perhaps at one point, shutting down helped you get through situations that felt overwhelming, people-pleasing helped you avoid conflict, hyper-vigilance helped you anticipate what someone else needed, and perfectionism helped you feel like you could prevent something from going wrong.

These responses may no longer be necessary in the same way, but your nervous system doesn't automatically know that just because your conscious mind does. Somatic therapy offers you a way to become aware of these nervous-system responses and work with them directly. Rather than forcing yourself to “think differently,” you learn to recognize activation, tension, shutdown, or other bodily responses and develop the capacity to stay present with them.

You can learn that a sensation of anxiety doesn't necessarily mean you are in danger, tolerate discomfort without immediately reacting, experience having a boundary without automatically collapsing into guilt, and notice activation without allowing it to dictate your behavior. Over time, this can help reduce the intensity and automaticity of stress responses that have become deeply established in your system. Of course, the goal isn't to erase your past or pretend that difficult experiences never happened, but rather to help your system develop new experiences of safety, choice, regulation, and flexibility.

Reason 3: Self-Awareness Alone Can Be Frustrating

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from knowing exactly what you're doing, but still being unable to stop doing it. You KNOW you overthink, people-please, avoid difficult conversations, become defensive, choose emotionally unavailable people, shut down when you're overwhelmed and you know where some of these patterns came from.

If you’ve made it this far in the post, you are now AWARE that knowing doesn't automatically give you the ability to respond differently. In fact, sometimes increased awareness can make things feel even worse. Before the intellectual understanding of your pattern, you could simply react and respond in appropriate ways.

Now you notice yourself reacting in real time, watching yourself people-please and think, Why am I doing this again? You’ve learned to anticipate and you recognize yourself shutting down and think, I know exactly why I'm doing this. You feel yourself becoming anxious and think, I know this is my nervous system, but you still can't seem to change it.

That can create shame, self-criticism, and the belief that something must be wrong with you, but what if the problem isn't that you need more insight? What if you already understand yourself enough? What you may be missing isn't another explanation, but rather the skills and experiences that allow you to meet this pattern’s needs and respond differently when your nervous system is activated.

Knowing why you have a pattern doesn't automatically teach your body what to do instead and you can understand that you learned to avoid conflict as a child and still struggle to stay present during an uncomfortable conversation. You can understand that your perfectionism developed as a way to create safety and still feel physically unable to relax when something isn't perfect.

This is why self-awareness alone can become so frustrating because there is no shortage of insight. You just don't yet have the capacity to consistently do something different when the old response takes over. When we are operating from an intellectual space, we often assume it’s because we’re not trying hard enough, something’s wrong with us, or we haven’t learned enough about ourselves leading to more frustration and spiraling.

You May Not Need More Insight

Insight tells you what happened and can help you understand why, but understanding why you have a pattern doesn't automatically give you the ability to respond differently when that pattern is activated. You don't necessarily need to understand yourself more deeply before you are allowed to change. You may need to learn how to relate differently to the sensations, emotions, impulses, and stress responses that arise in your body and that is the benefit of somatic therapy to offer something different.

Instead of spending all your energy figuring out why you are the way you are, you can begin developing the capacity to notice what is happening inside you, stay connected to yourself, regulate your nervous system, and make choices from a greater sense of safety and flexibility. Self-awareness and assessment often shows you the pattern, but awareness alone doesn't change the pattern until you learn to work with the body that has been carrying the pattern all along.

You Can Understand Your Pattern and Still Change It

If you've spent years working on yourself, you may have accumulated an enormous amount of self-awareness. You may know your history, understand your patterns, be able to explain your reactions better than anyone, and if you're still struggling to create the changes you want, that doesn't mean you've failed at healing. It may simply mean you've reached the limits of insight as your primary tool.

Your patterns developed for VERY good reasons throughout your life and in fact, it is a function of these patterns to not always be able to access their origins. They were attempts to protect you, help you adapt, and get you through experiences that your system experienced as overwhelming, unsafe, or unpredictable. When we try to shame those patterns out of existence, force yourself to “just stop” or spend the next five years trying to figure out something you already understand, we often inadvertently make these patterns worse.

Somatic therapy gives you a way to work with the body that has been carrying these patterns all along. Through somatic approaches like EMDR and IFS, you can begin to notice what happens inside you when you're triggered, overwhelmed, anxious, disconnected, or afraid, and gradually build the capacity to stay present rather than automatically falling into an old response. Change can begin to feel less like forcing yourself to behave differently and more like creating new possibilities for how you can respond.

If you've spent years understanding yourself but still feel stuck in the same reactions, somatic therapy may be the next step because you're ready to work with more than your mind.

If you’re ready for the opportunity to experience something different in your body, schedule a no-cost consultation call here to talk more about your goals for treatment and how I might be able to help 🪴