I know why I'm like this but I can't seem to change

There is a particular frustration that comes up time and again in my work. Someone arrives with extraordinary self-awareness - a thorough understanding of their past, their patterns, their behaviours. Beautifully articulated. Psychologically literate. And then, almost without fail, the same sentence: "I know why I'm like this but I can't seem to change."

There is often a substantial gap between who someone aspires to be - the behaviours and qualities they value, the person they can clearly see themselves becoming - and how they are currently functioning. In that gap sits anxiety, shame, avoidance. And for someone who can run a team, build a business, raise a family, relocate, renovate, graduate - who holds extraordinary complexity in every other area of their life - that gap can produce enormous amounts of shame. 

What actually creates change

What I have seen create change, every time, is courage. Not insight. Not understanding. Not another framework or another book.

Courage. A willingness to take risks. To be seen. To experience relational tension without retreating. To risk being perceived differently. To disappoint someone. To say the thing that might not land well. To stay in the room when everything in you wants to leave. To risk an ending. To risk a beginning.

These are not dramatic acts. They are often small - a sentence said out loud for the first time, a boundary held when it would have been easier to yield, a need expressed rather than suppressed. But for a nervous system that learned early that relational risk leads to disapproval, rejection or loss, they are anything but small.

Why the nervous system plays it safe

The nervous system doesn't avoid relational risk out of weakness or stubbornness. It avoids it because of what it learned.

When early relationships were unpredictable - when closeness came with conditions, when vulnerability was met with withdrawal or criticism, when the people who were supposed to be safe weren't consistently safe - the nervous system adapted. It learned that unpredictability itself was the threat. That staying small, staying hidden, staying within the known was the way to survive. And survival instincts, once learned, don't update easily.

So the person stays in the dynamic they know is harmful because the unknown feels more dangerous. They don't say what they feel because the last time they did, it cost them something. They keep the peace, edit themselves, perform competence and self-sufficiency - and wonder why nothing changes.

This is not a character flaw. It is the entirely logical output of a nervous system doing what it learned to do. The problem is that what once kept someone safe is now keeping them stuck.

Courage gets you through the door. Capacity is what the work builds inside it.

Reaching out to a therapist is itself an act of courage. For someone whose nervous system has learned that vulnerability leads to harm, making that first contact - sending the message, turning up to the first session, saying something honest to a stranger - requires something significant. That is the relational risk that precedes everything else.

What therapy then builds, over time, is capacity. John Bowlby understood that the ability to explore, to risk, to move towards the unknown, depends on having a secure base to move from. Without that foundation, risk feels not just uncomfortable but genuinely dangerous. And as neuroscientist Louis Cozolino's research on neuroplasticity shows, the brain needs safety - alongside emotional activation, repetition and new relational experience - to change at all.

Therapy, in this sense, is a practice ground for relational risk. A place where you can say the unsayable, feel the unfeelable, risk being known - and find out that the world doesn't end. Where the conversation that always derails can be had differently. Where the pattern can be interrupted, slowly, in real time, through the experience of doing something differently and surviving it.

What this asks of you

Change of this kind asks something significant. It is not comfortable. It does not happen quickly. And it cannot be achieved through understanding alone, however sophisticated that understanding may be. But it is possible.

Written by Layla Eissa MBACP

Further Reading

• John Bowlby - Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment (1969)

• Louis Cozolino - The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain (2002, 3rd ed. 2017)

• Rollo May - The Courage to Create (1975)

• Bessel van der Kolk - The Body Keeps the Score (2014)

• Stephen Porges - The Polyvagal Theory (2011)