“I Know Why I Feel The Way I Do”…So Why Don’t I Feel Different?
Understanding vs. Processing Trauma
By Lindsey Novakowski
For a lot of clients who come to counselling, this ain’t their first rodeo. I meet many people who began their journey a long time ago, and have done a lot of reflecting and have reached solid conclusions about the why and the how behind their patterns. Understanding how past experiences shape your current reality, like relationships that were modelled to you growing up, a specific memory that has stuck with you, or the unspoken rules you internalized about how to act and be, is an important piece of the counselling experience. Many people I meet with may have even already reached a point of acceptance, forgiveness, or have begun to shed layers of guilt and shame about their pasts. However, insight doesn’t necessarily always lead to emotional resolution or a felt sense of safety, and it can be incredibly frustrating to know why you are the way that you are…but to still feel stuck.
It’s a common pattern that shows up for people who have already invested a lot of time and energy into working on themselves. This could sound something like:
“Everyone in my family was _____, so I’m that way too.”
“I was always told I was too _____ when I was a kid.”
“They always got mad at me if I did ______.”
It’s also common for these insights to come with a disclaimer.
“…but I still feel anxious when _____.”
“…but I still push people away when _____.”
“…but I still get overwhelmed and then I _______.”
This is a often a point where people start to feel discouraged and lose momentum. If you know where these patterns came from, shouldn’t it be easy to just…do things differently? The reality is that insight doesn’t always equal change. Especially for deeply held core beliefs or heavy emotional wounds, logic and reason alone can’t always shift how you feel.
A lot of the work in traditional talk therapy involves what’s called “top-down” processing: understanding something in a new way, reframing it, or looking at it from a different perspective. This isn’t a bad thing! As Aristotle said,“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom”. However, trauma responses might need a different approach because they’re “bottom-up”: they live in the nervous system and can show up as physiological and emotional responses that may have developed before you even had the capacity to think your way through them.
When we consider how your system may have learned over time that something wasn’t safe or that you had to cope in a certain way to survive, that feeling of being stuck actually makes a lot of sense. Rather than viewing it as a personal failing, it opens a doorway to explore, is there maybe something deeper here that needs my attention?
When we look at past experiences through an EMDR lens, we can see how certain experiences, emotions, or beliefs can get “stuck”. Even if things make sense logically, your nervous system may still be holding onto the past in a way that feels unresolved and still shows up in the present. Approaches like EMDR that incorporate “bottom-up” processing can help the brain and body sort through stored experiences so that they don’t feel as overwhelming or activating. The work shifts from analyzing and explaining, to re-experiencing and then integrating in a way that helps reassure your nervous system that you’re safe now, or in a way that lessens the emotional intensity of a memory. Often this can even include aspects of “top-down” processing, such as coming to a new conclusion or uncovering a new truth about an experience. Over time, this can help reduce the emotional intensity of memories, and create space for new ways of responding to triggers.
If this sounds familiar, I want to reassure you that you aren’t doing anything wrong. It might just be time to go deeper than thinking and to explore an approach that works more with how you feel. Often, this is where change truly happens.