You can understand yourself incredibly well and still find yourself responding in ways you no longer want to.
You can know where a reaction comes from. You can understand your childhood, relationships, family dynamics and the experiences that shaped you.
You can even recognise what is happening while it is happening.
And still, it happens.
For me, this is where therapy becomes particularly interesting.
Understanding matters enormously. But human beings are not organised by cognition alone.
We respond through our bodies, nervous systems, emotional learning, relationships, family systems, adaptations and the ways we learned to stay safe, connected and functional in the world.
I like to think of all of this as our operating system.
The operating system underneath
Our conscious mind might say:
“I know I don’t need to take responsibility for everyone.”
“I know this person is not going to abandon me.”
“I know I am safe.”
“I know I don’t need to work this hard.”
“I know I am allowed to say no.”
And yet another part of the system may still respond as though the opposite is true.
That response is not stupidity, weakness or failure.
Usually, it makes sense when we understand what shaped it.
Perhaps taking responsibility kept you connected to people you needed.
Perhaps vigilance helped you anticipate danger.
Perhaps achievement became associated with safety, belonging or worth.
Perhaps saying no once carried a genuine relational cost.
These responses are often intelligent adaptations to earlier circumstances.
The difficulty comes when something that once protected us continues running long after the circumstances have changed.
That may show up as hypervigilance, as feeling intensely reactive to certain situations, relationships or memories, or as wanting to run away, hide or shut down when nothing in the present seems to call for it.
The family system becomes part of the operating system
We also need to understand the system we grew up inside.
It is not only about what happened in the family, or whether there was obvious trauma, addiction, volatility or dysfunction.
It is also about who you learned you had to be in that system in order to belong.
Could your parents tolerate all of you?
Was it safe to be fully yourself?
Were some emotions welcomed while others were too difficult for the family to hold?
Did you have to take care of a parent’s emotional state?
Did you learn to scan the room, manage tension, stay small, be useful, be easy, be competent or hold everything together?
Or perhaps you were the golden child.
The successful one.
The one everyone admired.
The one who was expected to be exceptional.
Was there space for you to fail?
To not know?
To be confused?
To disappoint someone?
To be vulnerable, ordinary or a little bit messy?
Sometimes the adaptation is to become invisible.
Sometimes it is to become indispensable.
Sometimes it is to become perfect.
All of these responses can make complete sense within the system in which they developed.
The difficulty comes when we take an operating system built for one environment and unconsciously apply it everywhere else.
Into relationships.
Into work.
Into friendships.
Into parenting.
Into leadership.
Into rooms that no longer require us to perform the role we learned so well.
And then we wonder why we are exhausted.
Why we are constantly monitoring everyone else.
Why failure feels unbearable.
Why we feel responsible for keeping things stable.
Why we still find ourselves asking:
Am I welcome here?
Is this safe?
Who needs me to take care of them?
What version of me is acceptable here?
Do I still have to get this right?
Part of the work is making these invisible systems visible.
Not so that we can blame our families.
Not so that we can make another list of things that need fixing.
But because what remains unconscious can continue organising us without our knowing it.
Once something becomes visible, choice becomes possible.
Sometimes simply seeing the system clearly creates a shift.
You realise:
Oh. I learned to do that there.
I don’t actually have to do it here.
That is the movement from unconscious adaptation to conscious choice.
Sometimes we explore these dynamics through conversation or parts work.
Sometimes we work more experientially or use Family Constellations to make roles, loyalties and relationships within the system more visible.
The aim is to bring what has been operating in the background into awareness, so that it no longer has to run the whole show.
I am interested in more than the story
We talk in therapy. Of course we do.
Language, reflection and understanding are important parts of my work.
But while we are talking, I am also paying attention to the rest of the system.
What is happening in your body?
What is your nervous system doing?
Where does activation appear?
Where do you shut down?
What happens when we touch a particular subject?
What roles do you automatically take in relationships?
What feels threatening even when your rational mind says it should not?
What belongs to your present life, and what may have been learned somewhere much earlier?
What family or intergenerational dynamics may still be influencing how you experience yourself?
Depending on the person and what emerges, I draw from psychological, somatic, trauma informed, relational, systemic and experiential approaches.
Where it is relevant and meaningful to you, the work can also include intuitive, energetic or spiritual dimensions.
I don’t believe one model explains a human being.
We are more complex than that.
Change does not always need to feel effortful
A great deal of self improvement is based on consciously overriding ourselves.
Try harder.
Set better boundaries.
Stop overthinking.
Choose better partners.
Be more confident.
Regulate yourself.
Think differently.
Sometimes that is useful.
But sometimes it leaves people working incredibly hard to manage responses that are still being generated by the deeper system underneath.
I am interested in what happens when we work closer to the source of the response.
Because when something changes there, the resulting shift can feel surprisingly natural.
You may realise that you simply don’t feel as responsible for someone anymore.
Something that used to trigger you has less charge.
You say no without spending three days feeling guilty.
You stop being drawn into a familiar relational position.
Uncertainty is uncomfortable, but no longer feels dangerous.
You take an opportunity you would previously have talked yourself out of.
You experience the same situation and realise that you are no longer the same person inside it.
You haven’t necessarily learned a better script.
Something underneath the script has changed.
The same theme can return without you being back at the beginning
I don’t believe change means an old issue never appears again.
Life is rarely that linear.
Sometimes we meet the same theme at different stages of our lives, but we are not necessarily meeting it from the same place.
The questions become:
What is different about the way I am meeting this now?
What is this experience asking me to grow?
What capacity is being developed in me here?
Sometimes a recurring experience seems to do two things at once.
It can exorcise something that no longer belongs in the way we are living, while exercising a part of us that needs to become stronger.
Perhaps an old need to be rescued begins to loosen while the part of you that knows you can stand on your own becomes stronger.
Perhaps people pleasing begins to fall away while courage and self trust are being exercised.
Perhaps the need to control everything weakens while your capacity to tolerate uncertainty grows.
So returning to a familiar theme is not always evidence that you have failed or gone backwards.
Sometimes another layer is being excavated.
Sometimes something old is being released.
Sometimes a part of you that was underdeveloped is being asked to come forward.
For some people it can be useful to ask:
What is the deeper purpose of meeting this again?
Not because every painful experience needs to be romanticised or given some grand meaning, but because sometimes the experience is developing something in us.
Learning to feel what we once learned not to feel
Part of this work can involve becoming more able to experience emotion.
Many of our adaptations developed because certain feelings once felt too overwhelming, unsafe or difficult to hold.
So we learned ways not to feel them.
We intellectualised. We overworked. We controlled. We pleased. We distracted. We shut down. We stayed busy. We looked after everyone else.
Those strategies often made sense.
But feelings we cannot tolerate do not necessarily disappear. They can continue influencing our choices, relationships and nervous systems underneath the surface.
So part of the work is not simply understanding emotion, but developing the capacity to experience it without being overwhelmed by it.
To feel grief without disappearing into it.
To experience anger without becoming frightened of ourselves.
To tolerate uncertainty without immediately trying to control everything.
To feel disappointment, fear, longing or vulnerability and remain present.
This is part of how we build emotional musculature.
And as that capacity grows, we can move through life with more resilience, curiosity and less need to protect ourselves from every difficult feeling.
Life is not a straight line
I don’t think the aim is to get from A to B in the most perfect way possible.
Life is more like a series of snakes and ladders.
We move forward. We get knocked sideways. We take detours. We repeat things. We discover things we could not have understood earlier.
For me, the question is not simply:
“Where did I go wrong?”
It is also:
“What did this experience show me?”
Sometimes we walk straight past the red flag.
Sometimes we choose the relationship, job, situation or path that, in hindsight, we wish we had avoided.
But I don’t think the only useful interpretation is that we failed.
Even difficult experiences can build musculature.
They can develop resilience, discernment, courage, clarity and a stronger sense of self.
They can show us what we will no longer tolerate, what we value and who we are becoming.
That does not mean we need to romanticise painful experiences or keep choosing the longest possible detour.
It means we can become more curious about what life is showing us.
I like to think of this as a spiral of becoming.
We may return to familiar themes, but not necessarily from the same place.
Each time around the spiral there may be another layer to understand, another part of an old wound to work with, another capacity to develop.
We build capacity as we go.
Hopefully, we notice sooner.
We learn faster.
We recover more quickly.
And sometimes we discover that even the road we would never choose again gave us something important.
What are we actually working towards?
Not perfection.
Not a permanently regulated nervous system.
Not a life without difficulty.
And certainly not becoming endlessly fascinated by everything that might still be wrong with you.
I am interested in greater freedom.
The freedom to respond rather than automatically react.
The freedom to choose yourself without unnecessary guilt.
The freedom to stop carrying what belongs to someone else.
The freedom to take risks, make changes and expand into parts of your life that once felt unavailable.
The freedom to experience difficult moments without disappearing into them.
The freedom to enjoy what you have created.
And perhaps most importantly, the freedom to become increasingly interested in living your life rather than constantly fixing yourself.