The sophisticated distraction: How insight became your new defence

She could tell me everything.

The attachment style she developed because her mother was emotionally unavailable. The way her father's workaholism taught her that productivity equals worth. How her anxiety mirrored her grandmother's unspoken fear. She had traced every pattern back through generations, read all the books, done years of therapy.

"So when you think about your mother's emotional unavailability" I asked, "do you feel anything change in your body?"

Silence. Then: "I don't know. I just... I go blank."

This is the sophisticated distraction. And it's one of the most elegant defence mechanisms I see.

The intelligence of making sense

Making sense of your pain is brilliant protection.

Somewhere along the way, you learned that understanding is how healing works.

Your therapist asked you to explore the why. Books told you to trace the patterns back. Everyone said that insight is the path to freedom - understand it deeply enough, make sense of it fully, and the pain will finally release its grip.

So you did. You went deep. You mapped every connection, understood every pattern, explained every reaction with precision. And it might have worked, for a while.

You were getting close enough to see it, name it, explain it. But never quite touching it. Just endlessly circling the feeling. You thought you were doing the work. And you were - you were doing exactly what you'd been told would set you free.

But understanding how you got here doesn't always show your body the way out.

The relief you feel when something finally "makes sense" is real. That moment of clarity, of understanding why you are the way you are - it feels like progress. It feels like healing.

And your system breathes easier because you've found a way to be with your pain without actually being in it. This is great, it sophisticated intelligence.

However, if you keep looping around insights, your mind might have found a way to acknowledge the wound, while keeping you at a safe distance from the raw feeling of it.

The gap your mind can't bridge

Understanding lives in your thoughts. It's linear, logical, narrative.

The pain lives somewhere else entirely.

It lives in the tension you hold in your jaw. The shallow breath you don't notice anymore. The tightness in your chest when certain topics come up. The way your body goes numb or hot or frozen when you get too close to something real. In the patterns you keep repeating and the familiar pain it brings.

Your nervous system is holding something that explanation can't touch.

You can know, intellectually, that you carry your mother's unexpressed grief. You can trace exactly how your people-pleasing developed as a survival strategy. You can see with crystal clarity why you shut down in conflict.

And your body will still do all of it. Still hold all of it. Still react from all of it.

Because what your body needs isn't more clarity about the past. It needs something your mind can't give it.

How insight can keep you stuck

I watch this happen all the time. Someone sits across from me with an entire mental map of their trauma. They can explain their triggers, identify their patterns, articulate their attachment wounds with therapeutic precision.

They've done everything right. Read the books. Gone to therapy. Journaled. Reflected. Made sense of it all. And nothing has shifted.

The same anxiety still runs the show. The same shutdown in intimacy. The same pattern of pushing people away or holding too tight. The same heaviness that has no clear reason to still be there. That’s when I know that the story itself became another layer of protection.

As long as you're analysing it, explaining it, making sense of it, you're engaged with your pain in a way that feels productive. It feels like you're doing something. It feels like healing.

But you're still at a distance. Still safe from the actual feeling of it.

Your intelligence - the very thing that's helped you survive, the capacity that's carried you this far - might be the very thing keeping you from the transformation you're seeking.

The difference between knowing and completing

Knowing why you're anxious doesn't necessarily stop the anxiety.

Understanding your attachment style doesn't change how you show up in relationships.

Being able to explain exactly why you shut down in conflict doesn't prevent the shutdown from happening.

Because your body is holding something that needs to move, not be understood.

Emotional responses - especially ones that started in childhood, ones that got interrupted - they get stuck. Held. Stored. As unfinished cycles that never felt safe to be completed, and that now won’t dare to show their vulnerable side again.

Your mind can circle around them endlessly, explaining them, understanding them, making sense of them. But explanation doesn't complete what your body started and couldn't finish.

That incomplete response is still there, waiting. Not for understanding. For completion.

What it looks like to drop into feeling

There's a moment in somatic work when someone stops explaining and starts inhabiting.

The shift is palpable. The words stop. The breath changes. Something in the body softens or tightens or trembles.

The discomfort your intellectualisation has been protecting you from might feel insurmountable when you’re stuck in analysis. You’ve spent a lifetime avoiding it, of course it looms large. Of course your system resists. Every part of you has been organised around not going there.

But hear this: the discomfort is the threshold, not the destination.

When you meet what you've been circling - when you stop analysing the feeling and allow yourself to feel it, in your body, right now - something remarkable happens.

The body knows how to move through what the mind keeps trying to solve.

That tightness in your chest that you've been explaining for years? When you finally inhabit it, breathe with it, let it be exactly what it is without needing to understand it - it shifts. It moves. It completes.

The grief that's been there since childhood, the one you can trace back and explain perfectly? When you finally let your body feel it instead of your mind analysing it - it moves through. Maybe not all at once. But it moves, and it makes room for something else to emerge.

And what emerges on the other side isn't more understanding. It's something you've been seeking through all that insight: profound peace. Grounded-ness. Solidity. The felt sense of actually being in your body, instead of observing it from a safe distance.

The relief that comes from completion is different from the relief that comes from explanation. Explanation feels good in the moment but fades. Completion changes something fundamental in how you relate to yourself and the world.

Beyond analysis

Your capacity for insight, your ability to reflect deeply, your understanding of your patterns - these are gifts.

But they might be doing double duty as protection. And as long as they're protecting you from feeling, they're also protecting you from healing.

Somatic work bypasses the thinking mind entirely. It doesn't ask you to explain. It asks you to inhabit, to embody. To drop beneath the story and meet what your body has been holding.

This is why it can reach what years of insight couldn't touch.

Your mind has done its job beautifully. It's made sense of the pain, mapped the patterns, understood the origins.

Now it's time to let your body do what it knows how to do: complete what's been waiting beneath all that understanding.

If you're tired of understanding your pain without feeling it shift, my Somatic Release Intensive creates the container for your body to finally complete what your mind has been circling. This is embodied work that moves beyond analysis into transformation.