Why are we still doing the same thing?
So you’ve done the reading. You understand your attachment style, your patterns, why you react the way you do in relationships. You can name it, explain it, trace it back to where it started.
So why are you still doing the same thing?
Here’s what so many therapeutic approaches miss: your relationship patterns aren’t stored in your understanding. They’re stored in your body.
Think about learning to walk. You didn’t study anatomy or physics. Your body took in information from the environment – watched others move, felt gravity, received feedback from falling – and automated a response. By the time your cognitive brain was developed enough to think about it, walking was already programmed in.
Your relational patterns formed the same way, even earlier.
Deeper than thought
Before you had language, before conscious thought, your body was learning: When I express a need, what happens? Is the environment safe? Can I trust it to respond? Should I suppress this feeling because it’s dangerous?
These weren’t intellectual conclusions. They were pre-cognitive experiences that got automated into your nervous system, into your muscles, into how your body moves through the world.
Fast forward to today. You’re intellectually brilliant. You’ve mapped out exactly how you sabotage relationships, where it comes from, what healthier alternatives would look like.
But here’s the thing: your insight is running on new software, but your body is still running on the original operating system.
It’s like buying the latest Apple Watch and discovering your phone is too old to run it. The new software is sophisticated and perfect – but it won’t run on your hardware.
You can understand, cognitively, that it would be better to be vulnerable in your relationship. But your body has decades of automated responses that say: vulnerability = danger. That automation runs deeper than thought. It lives in your muscles tensing, your breath shortening, your stomach dropping.
This is why cognitive work can help you manage symptoms but often just redirects the underlying pattern. You might stop your angry outbursts in your relationship… and suddenly find yourself snapping at colleagues. You might overcome your alcohol addiction… and discover you’ve replaced it with work, or sugar, or compulsive reading.
The information hasn’t changed. It just found a new outlet.
Change in relationships requires change in the body.
The pain, the disappointment, the risk – these are experienced physically. Your body gives you feedback: “This hurts.” And depending on what your body learned decades ago about whether hurt is survivable, that feedback will either paralyze you or mobilize you.
This doesn’t mean your intellectual understanding is worthless. It’s essential. It’s the foundation.
But here’s where it gets complicated: unlike the Apple Watch situation, you can’t just buy new hardware. This body – with its old operating system, its deep automation, its pre-cognitive learning – is the only one you get.
And the work of rewiring it isn’t something you can do alone with a set of exercises.
You can’t think your way into a new nervous system. You can’t journal your way into muscles that relax instead of tense. You can’t visualize your way past the body’s memory of what felt dangerous thirty years ago.
This is work that happens in relationship.
Not in your existing relationships – those trigger the old patterns, activate the old system. Your partner, your family, your friends are already part of the field where your body learned its original responses. They can support you, but they can’t be the container for this exploration.
This work requires a different kind of presence. Someone who isn’t emotionally invested in your choices. Someone who won’t react from their own automated patterns when yours get activated. Someone trained to notice what’s happening in the body, in the space between you, in the moments when the old system takes over.
Because here’s what nobody tells you: the transformation doesn’t happen in understanding why you do what you do. It happens in the experience of doing something different and discovering – in your body, not your mind – that you survive it. That it’s possible. That the danger your nervous system anticipated doesn’t materialize.
And that discovery has to happen over and over, in relationship, until your body begins to learn a new pattern.
This is slow. Unglamorous. Often painful, and you might not understand why it hurts because the body remembers things the mind has forgotten.
I write this not to discourage you, but to honor the depth of what you’re actually attempting. To name why insight alone hasn’t been enough. To acknowledge that the hardware you’re working with is the only hardware you’ll ever have – and that it’s far more complex, more resilient, and more worthy of patience than any device you could replace.
The work is possible. But it’s not simple. And it’s not done alone. Keep seeking. The door to the new reality will open.
