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What 20 years as a somatic psychotherapist taught me about the gap between knowing and changing.
I see it almost every week.
Someone sits across from me—articulate, self-aware, often deeply intelligent—and describes a pattern they know inside out. They can name it. Trace it back to childhood. Explain exactly why they react the way they do in relationships, at work, under stress. They’ve read the books. Done the therapy. Journalled. Meditated. Understood. And still, the pattern runs.
Not because they haven’t tried hard enough. Not because they lack insight. But because insight, on its own, was never going to be enough to change it.
This is the gap I’ve spent 20 years working inside: the space between understanding a pattern and being free of it. What I came to learn, slowly and then all at once, is that the gap isn’t a thinking problem. It’s a body problem.
Let me explain what I mean:
When something difficult happens—a rejection, a conflict, a moment of shame—most of us feel it in the body before we’ve consciously registered what’s going on. A tightness in the chest. A dropping sensation in the stomach. A sudden impulse to withdraw, to hide, to fight, or to go still. These responses fire faster than thought. They don’t wait for permission. They don’t care what we understand.
This is the nervous system doing what it was designed to do: protecting us from threat. The problem is that many of us are still running protection strategies that were built for situations we outgrew decades ago. The child who learned to shut down in the face of anger is now an adult who shuts down in meetings. The teenager who learned to perform in order to be loved is now exhausted from performing in every relationship.
We can see the pattern. We can name it so well. But naming it doesn’t change the body’s response—because the body never got the memo that the original threat is over.
I didn’t always work this way, you know? Early in my career, I trained in more traditional approaches. And they worked—to a point. Clients would gain insight, develop understanding, build frameworks for thinking about their behaviour. Real progress.
But there was a ceiling. A place where the talking reached its limit and the pattern kept cycling. I watched smart, committed, self-aware people hit that ceiling again and again, and I started to wonder if the problem wasn’t them. Could I be missing something?
That question changed the course of my career. I trained in somatic approaches—modalities that include the body directly in the therapeutic process and see the person as a whole system. Not as a replacement for talking, but as a way of reaching what talking alone couldn’t access. What I’ve been noticing since then is something I wish I could bottle and hand to everyone working in this field: when the body is included, things move differently.
I don’t mean dramatically. I don’t mean cathartic breakthroughs every session (though those happen too). I mean that something shifts at a level the client can feel but often can’t articulate. A pattern that has been running for years starts to loosen. Not because they’ve understood it better, but because they’ve finally met it where it truly lives.
A client once described it as, “the difference between reading about swimming and getting in the water.” I’ve never found a better way to say it.
I’m not writing this to argue that talk therapy doesn’t work. It does. I’m a psychotherapist, and conversation remains at the heart of everything I do. But I’ve come to believe that for some patterns—the deep, persistent, body-level ones that resist insight—the conversation needs to include the body. Not instead of the mind, but alongside it. As the next layer to be explored.
The tightness in the chest has something to say. The shutdown has a history. The impulse to withdraw carries information that no amount of journalling will surface on its own.
When we slow down enough to listen—not with our analytical mind, but with our attention turned inward, toward sensation and impulse and the quiet signals the body has been sending for years—something opens.
Three steps I use in practice.
When someone comes to me having already done years of inner work—the therapy, the books, the self-inquiry—and they’re still running the same pattern, I don’t ask them to understand it better. What I ask them to do is different:
Step one: identify the discomfort underneath the pattern.
When the pattern fires—that familiar reaction—there’s almost always something underneath it. A fear. Something the pattern is trying to protect you from going any further toward. The first step isn’t to analyse it or explain it, but to ask: what is this protecting me from? What am I afraid would happen if I didn’t react this way? Sometimes just naming that fear—even quietly, even if imprecise—is enough to create the first shift.
Step two: move toward it, rather than away.
Everything in us wants to manage, distract, or explain our way out of discomfort. But the pattern persists because we keep turning away from it. What I’ve found—consistently, across my years of practice—is that the most effective move is the counterintuitive one: approach it! Not all at once. One small step toward the feeling, then a pause. A moment of deliberate stillness, a slow breath, a walk around the block. Then another step. The nervous system needs to learn, through repeated experience, that proximity to this feeling won’t destroy you. That you can be with it and survive.
Step three: notice what changes—in the body, not the understanding.
After sitting with something difficult, most people immediately reach for analysis. “What does this mean? Why did I feel that?” Resist the urge. Instead, check in physically. Is there less tightness than before? More space? A quieter quality to your breathing? Sometimes there’s an unexpected sense of calm, even fatigue. That’s the body’s signal that real work has happened.
What you’re looking for isn’t a new insight. It’s physical evidence that something has shifted. However small. However momentary. That’s the beginning of the pattern changing.
Sometimes the way forward isn’t more thinking. It’s a different kind of attention.
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