Understanding Is Not Always Enough to Change

I understand it, and yet it keeps happening

Sometimes a person can explain with considerable clarity where a response they keep repeating comes from. They know when they began to recognize it, remember experiences that may have helped shape it, and may even be able to identify it while it is happening.

And yet, it happens again.

They may know why they postpone something important, why they make themselves small when they are being evaluated, or why they avoid a conversation they want to have. The explanation may be coherent and may have helped them understand part of their history. But when a concrete situation arises, the familiar response appears again.

A particular frustration emerges there: “if I already understand why this happens to me, why do I keep doing the same thing?”

The question makes sense. The problem appears when we assume that understanding how a response began should also explain why it continues to appear today.

They are related questions, but they are not the same question.

Origin and maintenance are not the same

Asking where a response comes from directs attention toward its history. It can help identify experiences, relationships, and meanings that participated in its formation.

Asking what contributes today to maintaining that response directs attention to something else: what is happening now when it reappears, what the situation means to the person, and under what concrete conditions it occurs.

An explanation of origin can provide important information without fully describing what is happening in the present.

What a person has lived through can continue to give meaning to a current situation. At the same time, the current situation has conditions of its own that also need to be understood.

That is why knowing how something began does not automatically answer what participates today in keeping it going.

The response occurs under concrete conditions

When a response repeats, it is easy to treat it as though it were a stable characteristic of the person: “this is just how I am,” “I always do this,” “this is my pattern.”

Naming it that way can hide important information.

The response does not appear in the abstract. It occurs in concrete moments, relationships, and situations. What is happening means something to the person and takes place under conditions that also contribute to how that response appears and is maintained.

Looking at the present means observing with enough precision what is happening now.

In what situations does it appear most strongly?

What does what is happening mean to the person?

What real conditions surround that response?

What changes when those conditions are different?

These questions can broaden the understanding of what is happening now without erasing what has already been understood about its history.

An example: understanding why you postpone does not end the question

Imagine a person who postpones showing work that will be evaluated.

After thinking about it for a long time, they understand that for years making mistakes was associated for them with shame or loss of approval. That understanding may be relevant. It allows them to recognize a history and understand why certain situations involving evaluation carry particular weight.

In their current job, they receive assignments whose evaluation criteria change without notice. As the deadline approaches, they keep reviewing the document because they do not know what will be required this time, and they end up postponing sending it.

Their history helps explain why being evaluated carries that weight. The uncertainty of the current criteria also contributes to what happens when they prepare a submission.

The explanation of origin helps answer one question: how a way of responding may have formed.

The question of current maintenance opens another: what contributes today to that response continuing under these conditions.

An explanation can be relevant and still be insufficient

When an explanation fits our history well, it can create the feeling that we have gotten to the bottom of the problem.

Then, if the response returns, it is easy to think that there must still be something more to understand: another memory, another cause, a deeper explanation.

Sometimes it may be necessary to continue trying to understand the history. At other times, accumulating more details about the origin does not change what we need to distinguish in the present.

An explanation can be relevant and still fail to answer every question that needs to be answered.

In MAT, understanding does not mean producing a total explanation of the person. Understanding serves a purpose: it helps distinguish what is happening and what needs attention at that moment.

Understanding where a response comes from is not the same as having changed what contributes today to maintaining it.

Changing the question

“Where does this come from?” can be an important question.

When a person already understands part of their history and the response keeps appearing, it may be useful to open another question:

What participates today in keeping this happening under these conditions?

That shift broadens the focus of understanding: in addition to how a response was formed, it makes it possible to observe how the experience in which it appears is organized now.

Understanding better does not always mean finding a deeper cause.

Sometimes it means looking more precisely at what is happening now.