You know you don’t need to justify yourself.
You understand why other people’s judgement affects you so deeply. You have recognised where that need to explain yourself, reassure others, or make sure no one is upset with you comes from.
Then someone’s tone changes.
And there you are, explaining yourself again.
It is one of the most unsettling experiences of self-awareness: seeing clearly where something comes from and discovering, almost immediately, that understanding it is not yet enough to make it disappear.
Why isn’t understanding enough to change?
We tend to assume that once we understand where a behaviour comes from, we should simply be able to stop doing it.
But many of the things we learn about relationships are not learned through reasoning.
We learn them by living them.
We learn how much we are allowed to ask for, when it is safer to stay quiet, what might happen if we disappoint someone, how good we need to be in order to feel secure, and whether expressing a need will bring someone closer or risk pushing them away.
Over time, these experiences become expectations, ways of relating, and responses that can be activated very quickly.
That is why I can know perfectly well that a situation today is different and, at the very same time, feel as though it is not different at all.
Why do I keep repeating the same patterns?
What causes difficulty today did not necessarily begin as something dysfunctional.
At one point in our lives, it may have been an intelligent way of adapting.
Being highly attuned to other people’s moods may have helped in an unpredictable relationship. Asking for very little may have protected us from rejection. Doing everything well may have created a sense of safety or worth.
The problem is not that we learned these strategies.
It is that sometimes they continue to activate long after the situation itself has changed.
So we can repeat the same patterns while being completely aware that we are doing it.
And this often makes the experience even harder: the original difficulty is joined by judgement towards ourselves.
“How can I still be here, after everything I’ve understood?”
Sometimes understanding can become a defence
There is something more subtle too.
Sometimes we become extremely good at understanding ourselves.
We recognise our patterns, reconstruct our childhood experiences, and can explain why we choose certain relationships. Sometimes we can even anticipate what our therapist is going to say.
And yet we may still be observing ourselves from a slight distance.
We know that we are frightened, but it is harder to notice what is happening as the fear arrives.
We know that we seek approval, but it is much harder to tolerate the moment when we choose not to look for it.
We know that we need to set a boundary, but when we finally do, guilt appears.
In these moments, understanding is neither false nor useless.
But it can become a very sophisticated way of keeping some distance from what we are actually feeling.
The task is no longer simply to understand ourselves better.
It is to move closer to what happens inside us precisely when we try to do something differently.
Change does not happen through words alone
Psychotherapy can certainly help us make sense of our history. But the work does not necessarily end when we have found a convincing explanation.
In relational psychoanalytic work, for example, some of our ways of being with others can become visible as they emerge within the therapeutic relationship itself.
Sometimes they appear in words.
At other times, they appear in a silence that suddenly becomes difficult, in the need to reassure the other person, in the fear of disappointing them, or in the body becoming tense before we even know why.
When certain reactions are connected to traumatic experiences, therapy may also involve working with the ways those experiences continue to be reactivated in the present, integrating approaches such as EMDR where appropriate.
The point is not to replace an explanation with a technique.
It is to allow something we already understand intellectually to become, gradually, a different experience as well.
Setting a boundary and remaining there while the guilt arrives.
Not immediately filling a silence.
Asking for something without knowing what the answer will be.
Stopping, even briefly, from having to prove our worth.
It is often in these seemingly small moments that we begin to discover that what we have always done is not our only possibility.
Knowing where something comes from does not mean it is over
Perhaps, then, the question is not:
“Why am I still behaving like this if I already understand it?”
Sometimes we already know perfectly well why.
A more interesting question may be:
“What happens inside me when I genuinely try to do something differently?”
The anxiety that rises. The guilt. The urge to go back. The feeling of being selfish, cold, wrong, or simply different from the person we have always known ourselves to be.
It is there that we begin to meet what, until then, we may mostly have understood.
And slowly, an old way of protecting ourselves can stop being the only possibility.