When Insight Isn't Enough

On the neuroscience of knowing your patterns — and why understanding them is not the same as changing them.

The surplus of insight

Oftentimes, through my own practice and my observation of others, it is clear that a very common issue is not a lack of insight, but perhaps a surplus of it. I find it useful to consider this in the context of residing within double consciousness. In other words, one part is simultaneously watching another part do the very thing we've spent years or perhaps decades learning and analyzing. The experience of residing within this double consciousness can carry a rather demoralizing quality — sometimes one of frustration and confusion — because insight was supposed to be the medicine itself. However, knowing a pattern and creating a real shift in that pattern are not the same problem.

A brief neuroscience of why

Insight itself resides in the prefrontal cortex — the area of the brain that is the witness, the narrative maker, and the language-using mind. In contrast, patterns reside in the limbic system and within the body itself, often operating older and faster and below our own conscious awareness. We can look to Daniel Siegel's hand model of the brain here to further break down this understanding (Siegel, 2010). Siegel lays out the image for us: the cerebral cortex on the top, the limbic system underneath, and the brain stem at the very base. Looking at this structure, we see that insight happens at the very top and patterns are held much lower in this neurological hierarchy.

What may be even more fascinating is that the human limbic system processes and responds approximately 200 milliseconds before the prefrontal cortex is even becoming aware that something is happening (LeDoux, 1996). In other words, the pattern has already fired before insight can come through and intervene. We can also look to Hebbian learning to further understand this. The phrase "neurons that fire together wire together" may be known as a cliché, but would a cliché exist if it weren't something worth speaking to over and over again due to its undeniable truth? Through habit and learning, we understand that patterns are grooves and neural pathways laid down through repetition (Hebb, 1949). Insight alone does not reroute these grooves or neural pathways — what does reroute them is return and repetition. This tension between insight and pattern is not a flaw in you. It is simply a feature of how the mind works.

A note in support of therapy — with an additional perspective

I am a long-time and deeply dedicated client with my own psychotherapist, and I find it important to share that I deeply respect the practice of therapeutic intervention to the point where I am currently training to engage in this work myself. As mentioned previously, language is a cortical function. Many insight-based approaches work at the level where the understanding of pattern already exists on a deep level. Bessel van der Kolk helps us to understand that pattern and trauma are not stored as purely narrative or story — instead, they are stored within our own physiology (van der Kolk, 2014). Furthering this idea, Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory helps us to understand that our nervous systems are always scanning below the level of conscious awareness, and that regulation happens at that level, not simply at the level of understanding it conceptually (Porges, 2011). In fact, sometimes more insight actually adds to the surplus and does not reach the territory where the pattern resides within the body and limbic system.

What actually bridges the gap

Neuroplasticity — the ability to change the grooves reflecting patterning in the mind — requires three things simultaneously: repetition, emotional salience, and embodied state. What neuroplasticity and pattern shifting does not tend to respond to strongly is intellectual engagement alone. Turning back to Siegel and his ideas on the window of tolerance, change resides within the window of regulation (Siegel, 1999). Both overwhelm and shutdown are outside of this window. Gentle, sustained, embodied practice is what helps keep us inside our own window of tolerance.

Additionally, what we are speaking to here is interoception — the brain's and awareness's capacity to sense the body's internal state. This is not theoretical. It is highly trainable. And paradoxically, it is also what the majority of psychologically literate people have the least reliable access to (Craig, 2003). When engaging in sustained, embodied practice, we engage also in the mechanism by which insight migrates from the cortex and the space of the analytical into the actual body — not as a new thought about our patterns, but as a true felt sense of reorganization of it. This work is slow. This work is unspectacular. It works.

A closing note

If at the beginning of this article you recognized yourself as someone who deeply understands your own patterns while simultaneously feeling the gap of living within the state of double consciousness, the pull you may feel toward authentic practice is highly reliable information and, in my humble opinion, takes precedence over the often seductive intellectual and analytical interest in the pattern itself.

That pull is worth following.

This summer I am running a small, live, eight-week cohort built around exactly this work — sustained, embodied practice drawn from Classical Tantra and informed by current nervous system science, held inside a structured progression that gives the practice somewhere to go. We meet on Saturday mornings, June 20 through August 8, 10:00 to 11:00 AM Pacific. The group is small by design.

If something in this article landed in the body rather than only in the mind, that is the signal. Enrollment is open now.

References

Craig, A. D. (2003). Interoception: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 13(4), 500–505.

Hebb, D. O. (1949). The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory. Wiley.

LeDoux, J. (1996). The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life. Simon & Schuster.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Siegel, D. J. (1999). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are. Guilford Press.

Siegel, D. J. (2010). Mindsight: The new science of personal transformation. Bantam Books.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.