You Know What’s Wrong. So Why Can’t You Move Forward?

Have you ever found yourself thinking, “I understand my problems, but I don't know how to move forward”?  You know why you struggle to trust yourself. You understand why you keep putting other people first. You can recognize the situations that leave you frustrated, overwhelmed, or feeling like you're going around in circles.  You've reflected on your past. You've thought about your choices. Maybe you've read the books, listened to the podcasts, and had countless conversations trying to understand yourself, and yet, somehow, you're still here.

You know what you want to change, but when the moment comes to do something differently, you find yourself falling back into the same habits, making the same choices, or responding in ways you promised yourself you wouldn't anymore.  It's frustrating. Especially when you feel like you should know better by now, but what if understanding your problems isn't the part you're missing?

Understanding Why You Do Something Doesn't Automatically Change It

When you understand why you behave a certain way, you gain awareness. You can begin to recognize where your reactions come from and how your past experiences have influenced your decisions. That awareness matters. But awareness and change are two different things.

You might understand that you learned to keep everyone happy because disagreement once felt unsafe. You might recognize that you avoid difficult conversations because you don't want to disappoint anyone. You might even know that you struggle to make decisions because you've spent years looking to other people for reassurance.

When someone gets upset with you, do you still feel compelled to make things right?

When you need to set a boundary, do you still feel guilty?

When you have to make an important decision, do you still question yourself and wonder whether you're making the wrong choice?

If the answer is yes, it doesn't mean you haven't learned enough about yourself. It means there's a difference between knowing where a behaviour came from and learning how to respond differently.

You can understand why you do something and still feel compelled to do it.

That's because many of our behaviours develop as ways of navigating the situations we experience. Over time, the responses we repeat can become familiar ways of thinking, reacting, and making decisions.  Eventually, we may stop questioning those responses. They simply become what we do, and when a familiar response has been part of your life for years, knowing that it no longer serves you doesn't necessarily make it easy to change.

You May Be Trying to Solve the Wrong Problem

When you want to move forward, it's natural to focus on the behaviour you want to stop.

You tell yourself:

• I need to stop overthinking.

• I need to be more confident.

• I need to stop people-pleasing.

• I need to trust myself.

• I need to stop letting my past affect my present.

These are understandable goals. But they describe the outcomes you want, not necessarily what's keeping you from achieving them. For example, imagine that you want to stop people-pleasing.  You know you need to say no more often. You understand that constantly putting other people first leaves you exhausted and resentful.  However, when someone asks you for something, you immediately worry about how they'll react if you refuse.  You say yes, even though you don't want to.

The problem isn't that you don't understand the importance of boundaries. The problem is that, in that moment, keeping the other person happy may feel more important than honouring your own needs.  Until you recognize what's influencing that decision, you may continue trying to change the behaviour while responding to the same underlying concerns.  This is why simply telling yourself to be more confident, stop worrying, or put yourself first may not be enough.

Moving forward requires more than knowing what you want to stop doing. It requires understanding what's influencing your choices and learning how to make different ones.

Stop Asking, “What's Wrong With Me?”

When you repeatedly struggle with something you understand intellectually, it's easy to turn your frustration inward. You may wonder why you can't seem to get it together. You may compare yourself to people who appear to move through life with greater confidence or ease. You may even start believing that you're the problem.  Struggling to change a familiar response doesn't mean something is wrong with you.  It means there's something worth understanding about how you've learned to navigate your life.

Instead of asking, “Why can't I just change?” try asking yourself:
“What is influencing the way I'm responding right now?”

Are you making this decision because it reflects what you genuinely want, or because you're worried about someone else's reaction?
Are you staying in a situation because it's right for you, or because leaving feels unfamiliar?
Are you saying yes because you want to, or because saying no brings up discomfort you would rather avoid?

These questions help you look beyond the behaviour itself and examine the choice you're making.  Once you can recognize what's influencing that choice, you have an opportunity to respond with greater awareness rather than automatically repeating what feels familiar.
You don't have to judge yourself for the response you've learned. You can understand it, recognize when it's no longer useful, and begin choosing how you want to respond instead.

Moving Forward Starts With a Different Kind of Awareness

You don't need to spend the rest of your life analyzing everything you've experienced.
You also don't need to wait until you've completely figured yourself out before you can make different choices.  What you need is a practical way to recognize the behaviours influencing your decisions, understand what keeps them in place, and create room for a different response.  Start small.  The next time you notice yourself reacting in a familiar way, pause before judging yourself or trying to force a change.

Ask yourself three questions:
1. What am I doing right now?
Identify the behaviour without criticizing yourself. Are you avoiding a conversation, seeking reassurance, agreeing when you want to refuse, or questioning a decision you've already made?
2. What's influencing my response?
Look at what you're trying to achieve or avoid in that moment. Are you trying to prevent conflict, gain approval, avoid disappointment, or protect yourself from uncertainty?
3. What would I choose if I weren't automatically responding this way?
You may not immediately know the answer. That's okay. The purpose isn't to force yourself into a perfect response. It's to begin recognizing that your familiar reaction isn't necessarily your only option.

Then, when it's appropriate and safe to do so, practice making one small choice that better reflects what you genuinely want or need.  Over time, these moments can help you build greater self-awareness, strengthen your decision-making, and develop new ways of responding to situations that once felt automatic. Progress doesn't require you to become an entirely different person. It requires you to become more conscious of the choices you're making.

You Don't Have to Keep Living the Same Way Just Because It's Familiar

Perhaps you've spent years trying to understand yourself. Perhaps you've made progress in recognizing your behaviours, but you're still struggling to turn that understanding into lasting change. You don't have to dismiss everything you've learned or start over. You may simply need to approach the next stage differently.  Instead of focusing only on what's happening in your life, begin exploring what's influencing the way you respond to it.  Your past may help explain how you learned to navigate the world, but it doesn't have to dictate every decision you make today.

You can learn to recognize the difference between a response you've become accustomed to and a choice that reflects who you want to be.  You can begin to question what you've always accepted as normal, and you can learn to make decisions based on what matters to you, rather than allowing familiar reactions to make those decisions for you.
Understanding yourself is an important beginning. Learning to live by conscious choice is how you begin moving forward.

Are You Ready to Move Forward?

If you understand your struggles but feel unsure how to change the behaviours keeping you stuck, you don't necessarily need more advice about what you should be doing.  You may need help understanding what's getting in the way of doing it.  As a Behavioural Conditioning Specialist, I help people recognize how learned behaviours and survival responses influence their decisions, relationships, and everyday lives.

Together, we work toward moving beyond automatic responses and developing the ability to make more conscious choices.  You don't have to keep repeating what you've always known.
You can learn a different way forward. If you're ready to explore what that could look like for you, reach out to learn more about working with me.

By Dr. Laurie Williams D.Ms

https://lauriewilliamswellness.com/

Every Pattern Has a Story. Find the Story, and the Pattern Falls Apart.

 

Every Pattern Has a Story.

Find the Story, and the Pattern Falls Apart.

Have you ever found yourself doing something you know doesn't make sense anymore, but you keep doing it anyway?

• You keep overexplaining.
• You keep saying yes when you want to say no.
• You keep choosing people who make you question your worth.
• You keep avoiding the things you actually want.
• You keep trying to control everything because letting go feels impossible.

Each time you catch yourself reacting the same way you always have, you wonder why you continue to keep doing the same thing even if you know better. Maybe the problem isn't the pattern itself, but the story underneath the pattern is the issue. Somewhere along the way, you were taught how you needed to behave, who you needed to be, or what you needed to believe in order to feel safe, accepted, loved, or valued. Until you recognize the pattern and change the story that has been running the pattern, you will continue to repeat the pattern, even when you consciously want something different.

Think about some of the behaviours you repeat. Maybe you constantly need reassurance, or maybe you struggle to say no. You may put others' needs before your own or believe that you are responsible for everyone's emotions. You may even struggle to trust people or feel like you have to be perfect to be loved. These behaviours did not appear out of nowhere. They are all part of your survival patterns that have been running your life, whether you know it or not.

Here are some examples of different stories you may believe about yourself or others and where they come from.

• Story - If I disappoint people, they will leave me.
• Pattern - So you become someone who struggles to say no and feels guilty anytime you do say no.

• Story - If I don't stay in control, something bad will happen.
• Pattern - So you become the person who plans, anticipates, worries, and tries to control every possible outcome.

• Story - I have to be useful to be valued.
• Pattern - So you became the person who is always doing, fixing, helping, and giving.

The behaviour you repeat is the pattern, but it's the story that keeps the patterns alive and running. Your story may have made sense at some point in your life when you were still learning how the world worked and your place in it. Maybe being responsible got you approval. Maybe anticipating other people's needs helped you avoid conflict. Maybe keeping others happy allowed you to maintain connection. At the time, these responses may have made sense. They helped you navigate your perception of the world you were living in, but just because the story helped you once doesn't mean you need to keep living by it forever. Most of your stories have outlived the situation that created them. When a story was created in the past, and you no longer live there, does it make sense to keep repeating that outdated story in this chapter of your life?

The next time you catch yourself repeating a pattern, don't immediately try to fix it. Get curious. Ask yourself these questions. "What am I afraid would happen if I didn't do this?" and then "What story would make this make sense?" You may find that you fear losing people if you do something wrong or that you aren't safe if you can't control the outcome. These stories can become so familiar that we stop recognizing them as stories and we experience them as truth. However, there is a big difference between truth and something you have been taught to believe as truth.

You don't have to continue living by outdated stories. The one thing we often forget as adults is that we have a choice in everything that we experience in this life. You are not every story you have learned. One of the biggest shifts you can make is realizing that some of the things you call your personality may actually be things you learned to do. This doesn't mean that there is something within you that needs to be fixed. This doesn't mean that you need to eliminate every pattern or become some perfectly healed version of yourself who never reacts automatically. You are human after all.

The goal is to become aware of what is influencing your choices and to recognize the stories you have been living from. This way, you can decide which ones still serve you in this era of your life and which ones no longer fit. This is the difference between living from survival and living from conscious choice.

By: Dr. Laurie Williams D.Ms

https://lauriewilliamswellness.com/

 

The Difference Between Who You Are and Who You Learned To Be

Most people are not living as their true selves.  They learned from an early age that being themselves was not safe for one reason or another.  Maybe you have never felt safe because of needs not being met or because you were sent the message that being you was too much or not lovable.  So you create a version of you that feels cared for, loved, seen, heard and valued because in receiving these needs also receive the safety that being you didn't allow.  This is your survival self.

People then grow up thinking that this survival identity is actually who they truly are at their core, but it isn't.  There is a difference between adaptation and identity.  Many people mistake people-pleasing, coping mechanisms, performance, hyper-independence, emotional shutdown, overachievement, or perfectionism for their true identity.  The issue isn't that these patterns formed; the issue is that they become your entire identity until you are able to recognize and release them.  If you continue to hold onto these patterns, they will continue to run your life unconsciously, and the truth is that as an adult, you don't need them to keep you safe anymore.  You no longer live in your childhood, and the adult you is more than capable of keeping you safe without these survival tactics.

The Person You Learned To Be Was Built For Protection

Survival patterns are learned responses to environments, relationships, expectations, and emotional consequences.  Children learn very quickly who they have to become to receive safety, love, approval, or stability.  A child may have to become the "responsible one" in order to gain the praise and love of their parents.  Or maybe a child learns that trying to express their needs isn't safe because they get yelled at when they do so, they become the "easy one", the one who does what they are told to not upset anyone.  The overachiever quickly realizes that their parents are only happy with them when they bring home A's on their report card.  These are just a few of the identities that we develop early in life, and they often begin as protection, not truth.  What once felt like it protected you will eventually disconnect you from yourself in adulthood.

High-Functioning Does Not Mean Aligned

Once we become adults, many people build their entire lives around survival patterns.  Many people may look successful on the outside while being internally disconnected from themselves.  Functioning is not the same thing as knowing who you truly are.  With this functioning usually comes burnout.  The internal can never seem to get enough rest, soul-tired, type of burnout.  This affects your career, relationships, parenting style and even social identities.  This exhaustion comes from working overtime to maintain an identity built around survival rather than self-truth.  Your nervous system can become addicted to performance, predictability, and external validation, so the loop continues even without you being aware of it.

Signs You Are Living As Who You Learned To Be

Self-awareness is the key to realizing what a survival pattern is and what your true identity is.  Here are some signs that you are living as the person you needed to be to survive and not your true self:

• Chronic overthinking and/or struggling to make decisions
• Feeling as though you are stuck in your life
• Not knowing who you are outside of the roles you play
• Struggling to trust yourself without needing outside validation
• Feeling like your life is "fine" but knowing that something internally feels off
• Feeling emotionally numb or emotionally overloaded
• Feeling guilty for resting, saying no, or putting yourself first

The True Self Is Usually Quieter Than The Survival Self

The survival self was built on fear.  It's urgent, reactive and loud.  The true self is the quiet whisper that you hear when you silence the survival self.  So much of what people believe is their intuition is actually their true self having its voice heard.  It feels foreign when you can finally hear the true self after years of conditioning and believing that the identity you have come to know is not actually who you are.  This is extremely uncomfortable and unfamiliar.  Your nervous system often interprets truth as being unsafe at first because it threatens the old survival patterns.  In time, your nervous system will recalibrate itself to the true self, so it's imperative that you stick with the releasing process, but also have patience and compassion for the process that you are going through.  

Being your true self is not about becoming someone new.  It's not about learning how to regulate your nervous system (your nervous system is built to regulate itself).  It's about having the self-awareness to see the survival patterns as they come up and reprogram your response to them in real time.  You can not journal or meditate your way through releasing your survival self.  Becoming your true self will require honest self-reflection, awareness of how your nervous system is programmed, what triggers you, and where you are abandoning yourself.  These are all part of the survival roles that need to be released.

You Are Not Broken

You simply became who you needed to be, but there comes a point where survival will start to cost you yourself and your truth.  The goal is not to hate the version of yourself that adapted, but to recognize where adaptation is not imprisonment.  The real work begins when you stop asking yourself, "Who do others need me to be?" and start asking, "Who am I underneath everything I learned to become?"  This is the point when you can begin to uncover the authentic you in all your glory and truth.

Dr. Laurie Williams

https://lauriewilliamswellness.com/