You Know Why You Do It… So Why Are You Still Doing It?
Updated: Aug 26
There’s a moment I see happen with so many women when they first come into hypnotherapy. At first, they sit there trying to explain themselves logically.
“I don’t know why I do this.”
“I know it sounds stupid.”
“I already understand where it comes from.”
And most of them do understand it on some level.
They’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts, watched the TikToks while emotionally spiralling at 1am with a family-size Dairy Milk and a nervous system held together by caffeine and blind optimism.
They know they overthink. They know they chase reassurance, lose themselves in relationships, say yes when they mean no and apologise for things that don’t even require an apology. They can usually tell me where they think it started too.
The awareness is there. The problem is that awareness alone doesn’t always change the feeling underneath it.
Consciously, you can know someone or something is bad for you and still feel your chest tighten at the thought of not having it. Intellectually, you can know your worth and still find yourself becoming whatever version of you feels most likely to keep the connection intact.
You can understand your patterns completely and still feel emotionally trapped inside them.
Following The Thread Back
That’s why hypnotherapy feels different to me. We’re not only talking about what you do and trying to convince you to do something different. We’re stepping into your internal world and getting curious about how it came to make sense in the first place.
Your perspectives, experiences and beliefs are unique to you, and that’s one of the things I find so fascinating about this work.
Two people can experience something similar and walk away carrying completely different beliefs about themselves.
One woman may grow up feeling that she has to stay useful to feel valued. Another learns that expressing emotion creates conflict, so she becomes incredibly good at swallowing what she feels. Someone else becomes hyper-aware of everyone around her because reading a room once helped her prepare for what might happen next.
From the outside, we might call those things people-pleasing, emotional shutdown or overthinking.
Underneath them can be completely different stories.
And that’s the thread I’m interested in.
I want to understand what the behaviour is doing for you.
What does your mind believe it's protecting you from? What have you come to associate with rejection, conflict, love, being wanted or belonging? What evidence have you collected throughout your life that made those beliefs feel true?
Because there usually is evidence.
Maybe you learned that being easy kept the peace. Perhaps being useful got you attention. Maybe expressing what you needed resulted in distance, while putting everybody else first helped you feel secure in your place.
Once the mind has enough evidence for something, it starts looking for more of it. Experiences get filtered through what you already believe, and eventually something you learned through experience can start feeling like a fact about who you are.
This is why the journey becomes so personal.
One woman enters hypnosis and realises how much of her identity was built around keeping the peace. Another discovers she has spent years abandoning herself to avoid feeling abandoned by other people. Someone else suddenly recognises how deeply she learned to associate being wanted with being worthy.
On the surface, they might all tell me the same thing:
“I lose myself in relationships.” Three women, three completely different internal worlds.
When Things Finally Start Making Sense
There’s something incredibly intimate about watching someone understand herself from a completely different perspective.
Sometimes it starts with a memory she hasn’t thought about in years. Sometimes it’s a feeling sitting in her chest that finally finds words. Other times, we’re talking about something she has told herself a hundred times before and suddenly she hears it differently.
That’s when we can start questioning some of the evidence she has been carrying.
Does expressing what you need always make people leave?
Does somebody being disappointed in you mean you've done something wrong?
Does being needed actually make you more worthy of love?
Is another person’s change in mood always evidence that something has changed between you?
This is the part of my work I love, because I'm not there to hand somebody a shiny new belief and tell her to repeat it in the mirror until she believes me.
I want her to find the holes in the old one herself.
There are usually experiences she has forgotten, dismissed or never thought were important because her attention was so focused on finding evidence for what she already believed.
Once she starts seeing those too, the picture changes.
She isn’t trying to force herself to believe something new. She is beginning to realise that what she believed before was never the whole story.
And that can change the way she sees herself.
Watching Women Come Back To Themselves
I’ve watched women who built their whole personality around being “easy-going” recognise how disconnected they had become from their own wants. Women who thought they were incredibly intuitive realise how much time they actually spent monitoring everybody else's emotions. Women who were fiercely proud of their independence finally admit how exhausting it felt to never fully lean on anyone.
These weren't flaws in their character but ways of moving through life that had made sense for a very long time.
The problem comes when something that once helped you begins costing you pieces of yourself. You become so good at keeping the peace that you lose your voice. So good at understanding everybody else that you stop understanding yourself. So good at being the strong one that nobody, including you, notices how much you're carrying.
For years, a woman can live like this and still look completely “fine” from the outside. She works, loves people, gets things done, laughs, helps everybody else with their problems and carries on.
Yet underneath it, she can feel incredibly alone.
That’s often the woman sitting opposite me.
She doesn’t need me to tell her she’s broken, and she doesn’t need another list of things she should be doing better.
She needs somewhere she can finally stop performing
long enough to work out what is actually hers underneath everything she learned to be.
That moment, when something she has spent years blaming herself for finally makes sense, is difficult to put neatly into words.
You see it in her face before she even says anything.
Then the work becomes helping her build something different from what she now understands. A belief she can actually find evidence for. A relationship with herself that doesn’t depend on another person's mood, attention or approval. The ability to hear her own voice without immediately checking whether somebody else agrees with it.
And bit by bit, you start seeing her come back to life.
She speaks differently about herself.
She catches herself before automatically shrinking to keep a connection comfortable.
She makes a decision and doesn’t spend the next three days wondering whether she was allowed to make it.
She starts discovering what she likes, what she wants, what she will no longer accept and who she is when she isn't constantly trying to secure her place in somebody else's life.
I feel incredibly lucky to witness that.
To have women trust me with the fears they laugh off, the heartbreak they minimise and the parts of themselves they’ve hidden while trying to hold everything and everyone else together is something I will never take lightly.
And getting to walk beside them as they take their place back at the centre of their own lives?
That journey will never stop amazing me.
When You Understand The Pattern But Still Can't Change It
If you’ve done all the reading, had all the realisations and can explain exactly why you do what you do, yet something underneath still pulls you back into the same feelings and reactions, that’s the space I created my Gateway Hypnotherapy Session for.
It’s 75 minutes of individual work where we follow your thread rather than trying to fit you into a predetermined process. We look at what’s happening now, what sits underneath it and begin challenging the beliefs and evidence that have kept the pattern making sense.
You don't need to arrive knowing what the root is.
That's what we explore together.
Whatever you decide to do next, please give yourself some credit for the awareness you already have. Understanding yourself matters. It means you’ve already started asking different questions.
And if knowing why hasn’t changed everything yet, that doesn’t make all the work you’ve already done pointless.
Sometimes understanding the pattern is simply the point where you finally have enough information to start changing your relationship with it.
Sending Love,
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