You can Understand Yourself & Still be Human

I had a thought recently that has been quietly reshaping how I think about healing, both personally and professionally. Many people come to therapy believing that if they can just understand why they are anxious, reactive, or stuck in a pattern, they will finally feel better. And most of us already have plenty of insight. We know the origin story. We know this goes back to childhood. And yet we still find ourselves caught in the same loops.

I see this often in my work with chronic pain and stress, and it has been coming up again as I teach Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). Pain makes it especially clear how quickly the mind goes into problem solving mode. How much energy we spend trying to fix, manage, or eliminate uncomfortable experiences. What I keep noticing is how often what we call healing is actually just more fixing. Beneath it is a subtle belief that something about us is a problem or that once we understand this better, we will not feel this way anymore. Insight can be helpful, but insight alone rarely creates change. When it becomes another way to argue with or get rid of our inner experience, it often backfires.

In MBCT, we focus less on changing thoughts and more on changing our relationship to them. The problem is often not the thought or feeling itself, but how we respond to it. When we stop treating thoughts and emotions like emergencies, they often loosen their grip. They become experiences we are having, not problems we need to solve. To be clear - this does not mean toxic positivity or giving up. It means allowing what is here to be here before deciding how to respond. From that place, change tends to emerge more naturally.

This is something I am practicing myself. I notice how quickly I try to fix parts of myself and how easily self awareness turns into self correction. What I am committing to instead is meeting those moments with compassion first and remembering that I can handle what shows up, even when it is uncomfortable. Clients often say to me, “You must think I’m crazy,” or “I doubt you have thoughts like this.” And I want them to know that I am human too. I have anxious thoughts. I have spirals. I still mess up and make choices I wish I had handled differently. The difference is not that I am immune to these experiences, but that I have practiced relating to them differently and trusting that I can notice, repair, and try again.

Therapy is not about one person being fixed and another being broken. It is two humans sitting together, creating space, remembering that thoughts are not facts and feelings are not emergencies.

Sometimes the most radical step is not figuring it out, but staying with your experience long enough to respond with awareness rather than habit.