It can feel like an out-of-body experience. One second we're our conscious selves; the next, we've snapped into our disappointed mother or furious father. Maybe it takes a second, but the words have already slipped out.
Nothing feels worse than knowing where you picked up that behavior and still not being able to act on it. Especially when that behavior has caused suffering, and now, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, you pass that suffering on to others.
Worse yet, you're aware of it.
Insight
Insight without action is often more frustrating than no insight at all. If you're not aware you've fallen into an old habit, you at least spare yourself a second round of disappointment: not only falling into the same hole again, but also realizing you broke the promise you made to yourself not to react like this ever again.
So why do we stay there?
Because insight alone is the safer choice. It's the familiar bed of self-soothing explanation for why something is the way it is. Explanations make sense; they're easy, they soothe rather than challenge. We can comfortably shift responsibility for the outcome we've created onto someone else, or onto a version of us that isn't anymore.
For the intellectual, it's like a drug. One explanation leads to the next. Another book, another podcast, another conversation about where it all comes from. It feels like progress. It isn't.
Worse yet, insight can hold us back. We get stuck in a loop: explain, seek more insight, explain again. Somewhere in there lives a quiet hope that if we understand it well enough, we'll be forgiven. That understanding alone will absolve us.
It won't. Understanding why you fall into the hole doesn't get you out of it.
Change
Change, on the other hand, is where the pain is. Change is a fundamentally physical process, and if you’ve lost weight before, stopped smoking, or quit any other addiction, then you are familiar with the sort of pain your body can produce to avoid having to change.
That pain can take many forms. Often without consciously realizing it. Even though you don’t want to react the same way you have in the past, your body simply takes the path of least resistance.
Reacting differently means actively going against your instinct, even when you KNOW what's true. And that's hard. It's hard by design.
Think about your body and brain as change-resistant by default. Simply put, old habits are cheap. Every time you react the way you always have, your brain takes a route it has taken many times before: automatic, fast, and with little effort. A new reaction has no route yet. You have to build it, one decision at a time, and that costs energy we evolved to save. The pain you might feel for failing to act on your insight comes later. Right now, when triggered, your body takes the path it knows.
What comes after insight
Insight is the foundation that makes change possible. Just as everything in our physical world once existed as someone's thought that then materialized, change starts with awareness, thoughts, and the story we accept or tell ourselves. Better yet, change starts with a decision. Over and over again. Small decisions that affect our behavior in the moments that matter.
Because I believe change happens in the brain and body, I take a somatic approach. When I'm triggered and/or challenged, I do three things:
- Locate it. I try to identify where in my body I can feel and recognize the discomfort, anger, or sadness. Is it in my stomach? In my throat? What does that feeling want to tell me? Do I want to move? Is it something I want to say?
- Breathe. Through the breath, I accept that feeling in my body. I observe it; I follow its movement, development, transition.
- Seek solitude, if I have to. I step away so that I might protect my loved ones from my learned behavior, which I'm in the process of changing.
Every time I successfully regulate my nervous system differently than I have in the past, I take a small step toward who I want to be.
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