Why knowing yourself isn’t enough

In my last piece, the one about holding everything together, I wrote about how protective strategies don’t disappear just because we want them to. To build on that, I wanted to bring a connected challenge to change. 

Just because you understand yourself, doesn’t mean you can change.

I’m all for self-awareness (you must know that by now…), but insight alone isn’t enough.

Have you ever known exactly why you do something - where it comes from, what it protects - and still found that, under pressure, the old behaviour takes over?

For some its:

Overworking

Overthinking

Withdrawing

People-pleasing

Perfectionism

Procrastination

Passive compliance

Catastrophising

Numbing (screens, food, alcohol, scrolling)

Giving up prematurely

Insight, it turns out, is not the same as change.

Why Understanding Isn’t Enough

For most of human history, staying alive depended on detecting threat early, reducing unpredictability, and staying close to protective relationships. The oldest systems in the brain are built for this, and humans have become very good at two things: prediction and protection. 

What you learn in life shapes what you predict and what you protect yourself from.

• If anticipating others prevented conflict, you learned to scan and appease.

• If competence reduced criticism, being capable became part of who you are.

• If dependence led to disappointment, self-reliance felt like the safe choice.

When a strategy reduces danger often enough, it becomes automatic. The neural pathway becomes so well traversed that it fires faster than any other ‘choice’, and often without any conscious decision-making at all.

And while insight lives in the thinking brain. Change happens in the survival brain (the automatic part).

Under stress we default to what has been most rehearsed in similar states. We don’t act from what we know. We act from what has kept us safe before or at least what once seemed to.

This is why someone can understand boundaries and still say yes when they mean no. Why a parent who knows they need rest still stays up late scrolling. Why someone who longs for closeness pulls away when a relationship starts to matter. Why a person who wants to stay calm still snaps at the people they love most.

What Actually Produces Change

So if insight alone isn’t enough, what does produce change?

In my experience, across individuals, families, and high-pressure teams, three things matter.

First, skills: Insight without skills leaves people stranded. Emotional regulation, boundary-setting language, the ability to tolerate tension, repair after conflict, ask for help, pause instead of react, all of these are trainable skills. And they expand what becomes possible in the exact moments that used to trigger the old pattern.

Second, ‘Surviving the Storm’: My clinical supervisor used to say this to me whenever clients tried to change long-standing patterns: “They have to survive the storm.”

What she meant was this: When you stop doing the thing that used to make you feel safe, it will feel worse before it feels better. Your mind expects something bad to happen, because that’s what it learned before. But if the disaster doesn’t happen, or happens and you cope, then you’re into new territory.

Each time this happens, the brain’s predictive system is challenged to update. By experience (not thought) you begin to realise you can handle more than you thought, and that your biggest fears might not come to pass or if they do, you realise that you can live through it. For example:

• When you stop overthinking and the decision turns out okay.

• When you stop people-pleasing and you’re still wanted

• When something is imperfect and noone criticizes or shames you

• When you say what you really think and the relationship survives

• When you sit with discomfort instead of numbing it and it passes.

Each one of these experiences will contradict an old expectation. And when the evidence changes and you engage insight to learn from it, those protection systems reorganise.

Third, Your Social World: No one changes in isolation. The people and systems around you will either support the new behaviour or pull you back to the old one. 

This is why individual insight rarely transforms systems on its own. If a family, team, or organisation still depends on the old roles - the one who keeps the peace, the one who takes responsibility, the one who doesn’t complain, the one who holds everything together - protective patterns will quickly return, no matter how self-aware someone becomes. In practice, change means other people adjusting too. People will need time (and a willingness) to get used to you showing up differently and you’ll need time to get used to not rushing back into the old role.

As always, I hope something in this landed where it needed to.

If something did, you’re always welcome to reply. I read every message.

Matt