Sunday, 17th May
For a long time, I worked as if insight were the lever. You help the person see the pattern. You trace it back to where it began, the moment it was laid down. You give them language for what they've been doing without quite seeing it. Once they can see it clearly enough, something tends to move.
It's a reasonable model, and it works for many presentations.
What I kept encountering, was a profile where it didn't. Their descriptions of patterns were usually accurate, and the insight had landed years before they came to see me. The pattern was still running.
Paula Prober, who has written extensively about psychologically gifted and complex adults, framed a question recently that stayed with me: why does therapeutic change feel slow when the person is already highly self-aware? It's a question I hear often from insight-rich people who can already name the pattern, explain the origin story, and describe themselves with striking accuracy, yet still feel fundamentally stuck.
There's something accurate in the question. There's also something worth examining in the assumption underneath it.
The accurate part is that high-achieving professionals tend to enter clinical work with a degree of psychological literacy that makes standard explanatory frameworks feel reductive. The assumption worth examining, is that insight ought to be the lever.
What I've observed, is that insight and analysis applied inside a stuck pattern tends to produce more sophisticated descriptions of the stuckness. The mechanism used to move through, articulate, and name is often the same mechanism the pattern is running on.
Which is, granted, a slightly frustrating thing to land on.
The work that tends to shift these presentations operates at a different level than the explanation. Not deeper. Different.
It's harder to integrate than identifying patterns or your core belief, and it tends to produce less of the early-session clarity that makes both, client and therapist, feel the hour was well spent.
One concrete version, if you want to try it this week. The next time the pattern arrives, notice the urge to describe it. That urge is usually what the work has trained you toward. Instead, don't act on it. Sit with the felt sense for as long as you can stand. Most people in this profile, in my experience, find a few minutes genuinely difficult (and confronting difficulty is the work here).
Two things I find particularly interesting: The urge to articulate, when you watch it, and what tends to be left when you don't.
It does, in my experience, tend to produce a shift in the pattern itself, rather than another precise description of it.
However, as always, hold it lightly. The 'not-describing' isn't the 'new' thing to do well or perfect. It's a small experiment in what stops happening when description stops.
Shoni
Dr Shoni Marshall-Edwards
Clinical Psychologist · AHPRA PSY0004030165
Alba Psychology · Online · Australia and New Zealand
P.S. The subscribe link, if you want more of this: albapsych.com. If you know someone sitting on years of insight that hasn't quite moved them, this one might be worth forwarding.