Why Insight Isn’t Enough – The Missing Ingredient in Deep Therapeutic Change
- Brainz Magazine
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Sonia Skewes is a Trauma-Responsive Integrative Therapist (AASW, IICT) who helps women release inherited trauma, rewire limiting patterns, and regulate their nervous system using RI-EMDR, Brainspotting, Root Cause Therapy, and somatic-money healing methods.
For many people, the problem isn’t that they haven’t done enough therapeutic work. It’s that they’ve done a great deal of it, and nothing fundamentally changes. They can explain their patterns with clarity. They understand their history. They know where the wounds came from, how they formed, and why they repeat. And yet, the same loops persist. This isn’t a failure of insight. It’s insight saturation.
When knowing becomes a ceiling
Insight has become one of the most celebrated currencies in modern therapy and personal development. Awareness is often treated as the gateway to change. The assumption is simple. If a person can see the pattern clearly enough, it will loosen its grip.
For some people, this is true. For others, insight becomes a stabiliser rather than a disruptor. They don’t lack awareness, they are organised around it.
Clients in this category often say:
“I understand why this happens, but my body still reacts.”
“I’ve processed this many times, but nothing shifts.”
“I can talk about it calmly, but I’m still stuck.”
What’s happening here isn’t resistance or avoidance. It’s familiarity. The nervous system has learned how to coexist with the pattern rather than reorganise around something new. Insight explains the loop. It doesn’t interrupt it.
Interruption is felt before it is understood
Interruption is often felt before it is understood. A slowing of breath. A softening behind the eyes. Muscles release without instruction. For the first time, the system is no longer bracing for what comes next. This moment is not dramatic. It is quiet, and for many people, unfamiliar. Not because they have avoided it, but because the conditions rarely allowed it.
Why time and frequency are not the same as change
When progress plateaus, the most common response is to add more time. Weekly sessions continue for months or years, under the assumption that repetition creates depth. But depth is not created by frequency alone. It is created by conditions.
Neuroscience and trauma research increasingly highlight the role of memory reconsolidation and state-dependent learning in lasting change. For entrenched emotional and trauma-related patterns to reorganise, the nervous system must access the memory network while simultaneously experiencing enough safety and continuity for updating to occur.[5] [4]
Short, spaced sessions can be effective for many people. For others, they keep the system in a cycle of activation and restabilisation. The material is accessed, partially regulated, and then set aside again as the person returns to daily demands.
Nothing is wrong with this process. But for certain patterns, it simply isn’t sufficient. This is not therapeutic failure. It is a format mismatch.
What research shows about intensive approaches
Research on EMDR and trauma-focused therapies suggests that outcomes are influenced not only by the number of sessions but also by how processing is structured over time.
Clinical studies and outcome reviews have shown that EMDR delivered in intensive or condensed formats, sometimes over consecutive days rather than weekly sessions, can result in:
Faster symptom reduction
Sustained outcomes comparable to standard weekly therapy
Improved engagement for clients with complex or treatment-resistant presentations.[2] [1]
The proposed mechanism is not “doing more work,” but maintaining processing continuity.
When the nervous system does not have to repeatedly deactivate, return to daily stressors, and then reopen, memory reconsolidation can be completed more efficiently. In simple terms, interruption allows the system to finish what it starts.
The missing ingredient: Interruption
Deep change requires interruption.
Not disruption in the chaotic sense, but interruption that is:
Contained
Time-bound
Relationally held
Temporarily removed from daily reinforcement loops
When a person remains embedded in their usual environment, the nervous system stays oriented toward maintenance. Roles, expectations, and coping strategies remain intact. Insight is integrated only as far as it does not threaten stability.
When that context is altered for long enough, a different organising principle becomes possible. This is where intensity matters.
In therapeutic terms, intensity does not mean emotional pressure or flooding. It refers to density and coherence, fewer external demands, fewer exits, and sustained relational and somatic engagement.
Research on nervous system regulation supports this principle. Prolonged access to a stable therapeutic container reduces defensive cycling and increases the likelihood of deeper somatic and emotional integration.[8] [6]
Containment changes what becomes available
One of the most under-recognised variables in therapeutic change is containment. Containment is not simply safety. It is structured.
When time is extended, and the therapeutic frame is clear:
Defensive pacing naturally decreases
Cognitive narration loosens
Somatic information becomes more accessible
The nervous system no longer prepares for immediate re-entry into stress
Many people discover that what they previously interpreted as “not being ready” was actually a lack of sufficient containment. In other words, the system wasn’t resisting change. It was conserving itself.
When incremental work becomes maintenance
This raises an important ethical question. At what point does ongoing incremental work stop facilitating change and start maintaining a stable but limited system?
Weekly therapy remains essential and appropriate for many people. It provides continuity, support, and relational repair. But for individuals with high insight and minimal structural change, continuing the same format can unintentionally reinforce adaptation rather than transformation.
The marker is not a duration. It is movement.
When understanding deepens but life remains structurally unchanged, something else is required.
When money trauma reinforces therapeutic plateaus
One often-overlooked contributor to therapeutic stagnation is money trauma, not simply financial stress, but the nervous system’s learned relationship to value, safety, and exchange.
Money trauma often shows up subtly. People tolerate under-resourced arrangements, over-give emotionally, or remain in familiar but limiting structures because decisive change feels financially or morally unsafe. In these cases, therapy can become meaningful but structurally static.
Insight alone rarely shifts this. The person understands their patterns cognitively, but their nervous system remains organised around conservation rather than reorganisation.
Research on stress physiology and attachment shows that perceived resource threat activates the same survival circuits involved in early attachment and threat response, keeping the system oriented toward endurance rather than change.[6] [7]
Contained, time-bound therapeutic intensives can temporarily remove these daily reinforcement loops, allowing the nervous system to experience sufficiency without vigilance, often a prerequisite for lasting reorganisation.
Designing for interruption, not dependence
In my own work, this understanding has informed the design of short, contained, EMDR-informed intensives for individuals who have already engaged in substantial therapeutic work and require a different container.
These intensives are not crisis interventions or substitutes for ongoing care. They are designed specifically for interruption and reorganisation.
The nervous system responds to structure before it responds to explanation. When the container changes, what becomes possible changes with it.
For many individuals, this shift also interrupts long-standing money-related survival strategies, allowing value, safety, and agency to reorganise alongside emotional patterns.
A different question
Perhaps the question is no longer, “Why haven’t I understood this yet?” But instead, “What conditions would actually allow this to reorganise, emotionally, somatically, and structurally?”
When insight is paired with the right container, change no longer depends on effort or explanation. It emerges from coherence. Not every pattern needs more time. Some need a different container.
For readers interested in the intersection of nervous system regulation and money trauma, a free 30-minute educational webinar is available here.
Read more from Sonia Skewes
Sonia Skewes, Trauma-Responsive Integrative Therapist
Sonia Skewes is a Trauma-Responsive Integrative Therapist shaped by lived experiences of early money trauma, grief, and supporting family members living with mental illness, whom she now recognises were carrying their own unhealed wounds. Leaving school to become a hairdresser at fifteen, her lifelong passion for growth eventually led her into the healing professions. Today, she offers Relational Integrative EMDR, Brainspotting, and Root Cause Therapy to help women release inherited patterns, regulate their nervous systems, and reclaim calm, clarity, and confidence in both life and business.
References:
[1] Bongaerts, H., Van Minnen, A., & De Jongh, A. (2017). Intensive EMDR therapy for PTSD patients: A case series. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research, 11(2), 85–92.
[2] De Jongh, A., Amann, B. L., Hofmann, A., Farrell, D., & Lee, C. W. (2019). The status of EMDR therapy in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder 30 years after its introduction. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research, 13(4), 261–269.
[3] De Jongh, A., Resick, P. A., Zoellner, L. A., van Minnen, A., Lee, C. W., Monson, C. M., Foa, E. B., Wheeler, K., Broeke, E. T., Feeny, N., Rauch, S. A. M., Chard, K. M., Mueser, K. T., Sloan, D. M., & Rothbaum, B. O. (2016). Critical analysis of the current treatment guidelines for complex PTSD in adults. Depression and Anxiety, 33(5), 359–369.
[4] Ecker, B., Ticic, R., & Hulley, L. (2012). Unlocking the emotional brain: Eliminating symptoms at their roots using memory reconsolidation. New York, NY: Routledge.
[5] Nader, K., & Hardt, O. (2009). A single standard for memory: The case for reconsolidation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(3), 224–234.
[6] Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
[7] Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why zebras don’t get ulcers: The acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases, and coping. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.
[8] Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
