Insight is not therapy.
“Insight is the booby trap of therapy,” Lori Gottlieb writes in her beautiful memoir, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.
Ironically, this is what feels so good in therapy. We love finding new connections and connecting the dots in our own stories. We love discovering the reason why we’ve responded to our kids and husbands in anger. We want to unpack and share the information. But oftentimes we don’t know where to go with the information.
Insight is a major foundation to change, but it’s not changing. It’s therapeutic, but it’s not therapy. Insight is also not why people get into therapy.
My clients are high functioning. They are at the top of their firms. They at the top of their classes. They are the breadwinners of their families. They have graduate degrees. They are the super moms. These individuals come into my office, knowing what the problem is, and how they want to address it. They’ve talked about it with multiple people at multiple different times. They read all the books and listen to all the podcasts.
And they all tell me the same thing: “I’m stuck.” They are not wrong. Their insight just hasn’t changed them. Insight won’t.
It’s not that they have made incorrect conclusions about themselves. They know their family history. They’ve Dr Googled their way through anxiety and depression, but until this point, nothing has transformed them.
That’s because insight is not transformational. It’s just information. Information is data points. It’s a Bible verse. It’s a number in your checking account. It’s a task list. It’s social norms. It’s a work meeting. It doesn’t change anything about anyone because it can’t.
Information is not transformational because it was never intended to be. What changes us, what truly transforms us, is experience.
Until we experience the information, until we experience the practice, until we experience who the Bible is talking about, until we experience the relationship, we will not change. When we have the experience of someone else empathetically holding space for our emotions to experience profound change.
I never thought my story was a hard one. And truly, it is mild in comparison to others, which is why I never thought anything of it. It wasn’t until I shared it with a deeply kind, deeply intuitive, and deeply knowledgeable practitioner that I experienced what Dan Siegel calls “feeling felt.” I finished sharing my story with her, my own eyes dry, to look up to the tears in hers. It was uncomfortable at first, but life changing. She gave me the gift of not just empathy, but the experience of empathy. By feeling grief for me and with me, she allowed me to be transformed by my story. I was no longer facts and figures—I was a story. Past, present, and future. This was almost 10 years ago and I still take so much from that experience.
Change is a full-step process. Information speaks to the brain, and experience speaks to the body—our nervous system, our emotions, our behavior.
Who in your life gives you the space to be empathetically heard and understood? Who makes you feel real and seen? Who validates and gives resonance to your experience? Who authentically allows you to feel felt?
It’s probably not the (well meaning) person that jumps in to fix or to give advice. Plenty of my clients have that in their friend group when they come into my office. And indeed, there are times where we talk about advice and decision making.
But what is truly transformational is the experience created between two people that accept, acknowledge, give meaning to, and create a space for the insight to change us from the inside.
