One of the things I’ve found myself thinking about more over the years is how much my understanding of therapy has changed.
When I first became a therapist, I was deeply drawn to insight. That probably isn’t surprising. I’ve always loved ideas and theories, and I genuinely enjoyed trying to understand why people think, feel, and behave the way they do. I could happily spend hours reading different schools of psychology, connecting ideas, and trying to make sense of people. If I’m honest, I approached myself the same way. I believed that if I could understand the pattern well enough, change would naturally follow.
Looking back, there’s an irony in all of this that still makes me smile. Today I spend much of my time practicing Somatic Experiencing and helping people become more aware of their nervous systems. Yet for much of my own life, I felt far more comfortable understanding my emotions than actually experiencing them.
I’ve often joked—and it’s completely true—that I’ve been with the same therapist since moving to Nashville, and it took me nearly two years to cry in her office. It wasn’t because I didn’t trust her. I trusted her deeply. It wasn’t because I didn’t have feelings. I had plenty of them. What felt unfamiliar was allowing myself to stay with them. I could talk about my emotions with ease. I could analyze them from every angle. Feeling them in my body was something else entirely.
Around the time I was deciding on post-graduate training, I found myself choosing between psychoanalytic training and Somatic Experiencing. A close friend and colleague listened patiently as I talked through the decision and then offered a piece of advice I’ve never forgotten.
“Study what you’re afraid of.”
She knew me well enough to recognize that I was comfortable living in ideas. My body was another story. Her advice changed the direction of my career, but it also changed the way I understood change itself.
Over the years, I’ve realized that many of the people who come to therapy are extremely insightful. They know why they people-please. They understand why they keep choosing emotionally unavailable partners. They recognize that they’re still hoping a parent will one day become the person they’ve always needed. Eventually, though, many of them arrive at the same place I did. They understand.
But, now what?
We can analyze a relationship to death. We can understand exactly why we keep returning to the same family member, hoping they’ll finally become who we’ve always longed for. We can recognize that we’re exhausted from overworking or that we’re constantly putting everyone else’s needs ahead of our own. We may even know exactly what we want to say the next time someone crosses a boundary.
Then the conversation begins, the phone rings, or someone we promised ourselves we wouldn’t call reaches out, and suddenly all of that insight seems much farther away than it did the day before. For a long time, I assumed this meant we needed more insight. Now I think it points us toward something different.
One of the books that helped me think about this in a new way was A Liberated Mind. In it, psychologist Steven C. Hayes writes about psychological flexibility—the ability to continue moving toward what matters, even when difficult thoughts and emotions show up along the way. That idea stayed with me because it shifted the focus from understanding ourselves to learning how to live differently, especially in the moments when our old patterns are most active.
I found a similar thread in trauma literature. In The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk explores how overwhelming experiences can continue shaping us long after they’ve passed. In What Happened to You?, psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey describe how repeated experiences influence the way our brains and nervous systems anticipate the world around us. Although these books approach healing from different directions, There is a common message running through all of them: understanding is important, but experience is what allows lasting change to take root. That idea fits closely with what I see in my own practice.
From a somatic perspective, our nervous system is learning all the time. It notices what happens when we ask for help, express anger, disappoint someone, reach for comfort, or tell the truth. Over years of repeated experience, it develops expectations about relationships, safety, and connection. Much of that learning takes place outside conscious awareness. By the time we understand a pattern intellectually, our nervous system may have been rehearsing it for decades.
I’ve found that this is often where therapy begins to look different. Instead of asking only why someone repeated an old pattern, we become curious about what happened just before it. Did their breathing change? Did their chest tighten? Did they suddenly feel responsible for someone else’s emotions? Those moments often tell us something that insight alone cannot.
As I think about it, this probably isn’t surprising. My dissertation was on voice and self-authorization in adolescent girls. Even then, I was interested in what helps someone become more fully themselves and what gets in the way. Looking back, I don’t remember feeling as though I had much of a voice growing up, at least not in the way I understand that word now. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized that if I wanted to become someone who could speak honestly, I couldn’t wait until it felt comfortable. I had to begin using my voice before I fully believed I had one.
That happened slowly. One difficult conversation led to another. Sometimes I would say what I needed to say and spend the rest of the day replaying the conversation in my mind, wondering if I’d said too much or not enough. I certainly wasn’t immune to overthinking. Other times what I said fell on deaf ears. I realized it was much more about speaking it than how it was received, but this took time.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized the same thing was happening in therapy. My own growth hadn’t come simply from understanding why I struggled to use my voice. It came from the repeated experience of using it anyway. Little by little, my nervous system learned something my intellect couldn’t teach it. I could tolerate the discomfort. I could survive the anxiety that came with speaking honestly. Eventually, what had once felt almost impossible became less unfamiliar.
I still love insight as much as I ever did. I still think understanding ourselves is one of the great gifts of therapy because it helps us replace shame with compassion and confusion with clarity.
I just don’t think insight is where change happens. I think it’s where change begins.