young boy in a garden covering his face with both hands
A lot of people arrive at counselling already knowing their story inside out, having read the books and worked out exactly which parent did or didn’t do what and when, and they are baffled and often quite cross, with some justification, that all of this understanding has made so little difference to how they feel.
So why doesn't understanding my childhood make me feel better?
Understanding is a thought, and most of what we carry from childhood was never stored as a thought in the first place. Rather, it was stored as a felt sense of what happened when you needed someone, or when you made a mess, or how much room you were allowed to take up. That lives in the body and in your reflexes rather than in the logical part of you that can explain it. So you can give a perfectly articulate account of why you want to cry or feel nervous when someone is annoyed with you because the explanation lives in your brain and the reaction lives in your body.
Is insight a waste of time then?
Not at all, and I would be a poor therapist if I said so. Insight is useful and often a relief because it tells you that you are not mad or making it up, but this is only the start of the work. Plenty of people stop there and keep refining the story, adding more detail and more theory in the hope that the next piece of understanding will be the one that shifts something, when what they actually need is to experience something with another person who holds space for them, noticing and bringing to gentle awareness that reaction.
What does help?
Good old fashioned Relationship. Being with an attuned ‘other’ who stays interested when you say the shameful thing, and who does not look away or need you to be fine, gives your body a chance to learn something that no amount of reading could teach it. That learning is gradual and often unspectacular and it tends to show up in small ways. Maybe you said no to a thing, or did not apologise for taking up space, or that someone was short with you and you recovered in seconds rather than minutes or longer.
Will I always feel like this?
The conviction that this is simply how you are and always will be is one of the things that shifts over time. It tends to belong to the part of you that learned early on that hoping for something different was dangerous, so the fear of staying stuck is partly the pattern speaking rather than a forecast about your future. Feeling better rarely arrives as a single moment either, it creeps up on you and one day you notice that something which would once have flattened you has simply passed through.
If any of this resonates, I offer a free 15-minute introductory chat with no obligation. Sessions are in person in Norwood Junction (SE25) or online across the UK, and you can book via siobhantowland.co.uk/contact.
