You Understand Your Childhood. So Why Do You Still Feel This Way?

You’ve done the work

You've been in therapy before, maybe more than once. You can name the patterns, trace them back to childhood, and explain exactly why you react the way you do.

Your chest still tightens before difficult conversations. You still lie awake running through tomorrow's problems. You still feel that familiar wave of dread on Sunday nights, or the urge to disappear when someone needs too much from you.

You understand your story. So why hasn't understanding changed how you feel?

The limits of insight

Most traditional therapy focuses on insight. The idea is that if you understand why you do what you do, you can think your way to different choices. And insight is valuable. It helps you make sense of your life and stop blaming yourself for patterns that started long before you had any say in the matter.

The uncomfortable truth is that insight has a ceiling.

You can narrate your childhood with precision and still feel that pit in your stomach before every meeting. You can know exactly why you over-function in relationships and still do it anyway. You can understand that your perfectionism is a survival strategy and still feel crushed when you make a small mistake.

This isn't a failure of effort or intelligence. It's a matter of where the patterns actually live.

What's different about working with the nervous system

Somatic therapy starts from a different premise: that lasting change requires working with the nervous system directly, not just talking about it.

This doesn't mean ignoring your history or abandoning insight. It means adding a layer that's often missing. We slow down enough to notice what's actually happening in the body, right now. The tight jaw. The held breath. The impulse to fix, flee, or freeze.

From there, we work with those sensations and impulses rather than just analyzing them. Over time, the nervous system learns that it has options beyond the old automatic responses. The grip loosens. Not because you've figured anything out, but because your body has had a different experience.

When insight isn't enough

If you've done therapy before and walked away with a clear understanding of your patterns but not much relief from them, you're not broken. You're not bad at therapy. You may have simply been working with only part of the picture.

The body holds what the mind can't think its way out of. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop analyzing and let your nervous system catch up to what you already know.

Taking the Next Step

If this resonates, I'd be glad to talk. I work with adults who've done the insight work and are ready for something deeper. Request a consultation to see if we're a good fit.