When Understanding Isn't Enough

Why thinking about your experience and changing it are two different things

There's a particular kind of person who arrives at EMDR after years of thoughtful, earnest work in therapy. They can trace the origins of their patterns with precision. They understand the family dynamics, the formative experiences, the ways the past is showing up in the present. They are, in many ways, the ideal therapy client — curious, articulate, committed to the work.

And yet something hasn't moved.

This isn't a failure of intelligence or effort. It's often the opposite. The people most skilled at understanding their own experience are sometimes the least able to change it, because the very capacity that makes them good at insight — the ability to think clearly and analytically about their inner life — can become a kind of ceiling.

Three kinds of data

When I'm working with someone who has reached that ceiling, I find it useful to reframe what therapy is actually working with. Not feelings, not memories, not the past — but information. Specifically, three different kinds of information that we can access from the inside.

The first is cognitive: thoughts, interpretations, beliefs, the narrative we carry about who we are and what has happened to us. This is the layer that most people are most fluent in, and it's genuinely important. Context, meaning, and understanding all live here.

The second is emotional: the felt quality of experience, the layer that sits between mind and body. Emotions are information too — they're telling you something about how a situation is registering, what it means to you, whether something feels safe or threatening or right or wrong.

The third is somatic: the body's live response to experience. Sensations, tension, the physical signature of what's happening emotionally. This layer is often the least attended to, particularly by people whose professional and intellectual lives have rewarded them for living primarily from the neck up.

Thinking, feeling, sensing. All three are data. All three are necessary. And when one of them is missing from the picture, something essential gets lost.

Why the loop happens

The intellect is extraordinarily capable. It can construct a coherent account of almost any situation. It can find justification for almost any choice. And it can generate insights about the self indefinitely — which is part of why highly analytical people can spend years in talk therapy developing an increasingly sophisticated understanding of their patterns without those patterns actually changing.

Understanding something and metabolizing it are different processes. The first is primarily cognitive. The second requires all three layers working together.

When emotion and body sensation are missing from the picture, insight tends to remain abstract. You know something is true without it feeling true. You understand why you do something without being able to stop doing it. The gap between comprehension and change stays stubbornly in place.

This is where the body becomes important — not as a mystical repository of hidden wisdom, but as a practical source of information that thinking alone can't generate. The body registers things before the mind has caught up. It carries the residue of experiences that were never fully processed. And crucially, it's the place where a certain kind of knowing lives that is less about logic and more about value.

The felt sense of what matters

There's a concept from Jungian psychology that I return to often in this work — the idea that we have a feeling function that operates differently from emotion and differently from thought. It's the capacity to assign value to things. To know, in a felt rather than reasoned way, what matters more than something else. To navigate complex or morally ambiguous situations from something deeper than calculation.

Most people recognize this as gut instinct. The sense of something being right or wrong before you can explain why. The feeling of being pulled toward something or repelled by it in a way that precedes analysis.

This isn't irrational. It's a different kind of rationality — one that draws on the accumulated data of embodied experience rather than explicit reasoning. And for people who have learned to override or dismiss it in favor of more legible cognitive data, reconnecting with it can be genuinely disorienting at first, and then quietly transformative.

What EMDR does differently

EMDR doesn't bypass the cognitive layer — meaning, narrative, and understanding all have their place in the work. But it doesn't start there, and it doesn't stay there. It works at the level where experience is actually stored: in the body, in the nervous system, in the places where something happened that never got fully processed.

When all three layers are engaged together — when a memory or experience is held not just as a thought but as a felt, embodied reality — something becomes possible that wasn't possible before. Not just understanding what happened, but moving through it. The difference between knowing something and knowing it in your bones.

That's what integration actually means. Not a better story about your experience. A fuller contact with it.