I know why I do it. Why am I still doing it?

When you already know

There can be something particularly frustrating about recognising a pattern in yourself and still finding yourself doing it.

Maybe you know you overthink. You know you ask other people what they think because you struggle to trust your own judgement, or that you can put other people's needs ahead of your own.

You may even have a good idea of where some of it came from. You can look back after a difficult moment and explain what happened, what you were worried about and why you reacted the way you did.

And then another situation comes along.

Someone seems disappointed with you. You need to make a decision. You realise you may have made a mistake. Suddenly, the pattern you can describe so clearly afterwards feels much harder to do differently when it is actually happening.

That can leave you wondering what you are missing. If you can see the pattern, why do you keep finding yourself doing the same thing again?

The fog can clear and you can still get caught

Sometimes understanding can feel like gradually clearing your way through fog.

Things that once seemed confusing start to make more sense. You can see the situation more clearly. You might recognise what you were frightened of, why another person's reaction mattered so much, or why a particular mistake had such an impact on you.

You may even be able to see what you would rather do differently next time.

And yet, when next time arrives, it can feel as though you are snagged by an invisible hook you cannot quite see.

You know you do not need to apologise, but something keeps pulling you towards saying sorry.

You know you are allowed to say no, but the fear of disappointing someone still catches you.

You know one mistake does not define you, but the familiar conclusion about yourself still seems to arrive with force.

The fog may have lifted. That does not necessarily mean the pull has gone with it.

This is one reason it can be so unhelpful to tell yourself that you should know better by now. You may genuinely know better. The difficult part is having enough room, in the moment, for that knowledge to matter.

What if the old response feels like part of the structure?

One reason familiar patterns can be difficult to change is that they may not feel like extra pieces you can simply throw away. They can feel as though they are doing something important.

Being hard on yourself might feel tied to staying motivated. Asking for reassurance might be what settles uncertainty enough for you to move on. Keeping other people happy might feel connected with avoiding conflict or staying close to them.

A familiar response can be a little like a brick that does not quite fit, but the rest of the house has been built around it. You can see the problem with the brick, but simply pulling it out can still feel frightening because other parts of the structure may now be resting against it.

If I stop being so hard on myself, will I still push myself?

If I stop checking what everybody else thinks, what if I make the wrong choice?

If I let someone be disappointed with me, what happens to the relationship?

Those fears do not have to be literally true for the risk to feel real.

So the work is not necessarily to pull the brick out and hope the house stays standing. It can be about building another brick that can take its place and do the job in a way that works better for you.

Sometimes the difficult part is what happens when you do something different

It is easy to imagine change as a moment of clarity followed by relief.

Sometimes it is nothing like that.

You decide not to ask for another opinion and now you are left with the uncertainty the reassurance usually settles.

You say no instead of automatically agreeing and then spend the evening wondering whether you were selfish.

You hand something in without checking it for the tenth time and part of you feels careless rather than free.

In those moments, the old response can start to look attractive again. Not because you have forgotten everything you learned about yourself, but because it offers something familiar: certainty, relief, or a sense that you are doing what you are supposed to do.

That is where the gap between knowing and changing can become much easier to see.

The question is no longer only, 'Why do I do this?' It may also be, 'What happens when I don't?'

Change does not have to mean the old reaction disappears

If you expect change to mean never having the familiar reaction again, it can be easy to miss the places where something is already shifting.

You might still want reassurance, but notice the urge before you send the message.

You might still feel guilty after saying no, but be less convinced that the guilt means you did something wrong.

Or perhaps you do follow the old pattern and recognise it more quickly afterwards, with less need to attack yourself for having fallen into it again.

None of those shifts sounds dramatic. But they can create something important: a little more room between the pull of the familiar pattern and the response.

Sometimes, when you try something different, you discover that the fear was worse than the reality. Sometimes you do not — someone may be disappointed, uncertainty may hang around, or the new response may simply feel uncomfortable for a while. Change does not always feel reassuring straight away. But trying something different gives you the chance to find out what actually happens, rather than letting the feared outcome decide for you in advance.

What therapy can offer when another explanation is not what you need

There may be times in therapy when you already have a very good idea of why something happens.

At that point, finding a more sophisticated explanation is not necessarily the most useful thing we can do.

We might become more interested in the point where the pattern starts to take over. What is happening just before you ask for reassurance? What makes it so difficult to hold onto your own view when somebody disagrees? What feels at stake if you do not immediately apologise or adapt?

Sometimes we can slow one of those moments down and look at it much more closely. At other times we might play with a conversation, try out a different response, use imagery or metaphor, or look together at what happened when you experimented with something different between sessions.

This is not about proving that the old response was foolish. If it has been carrying something important for you, simply taking it away may not feel possible or useful.

Instead, we can become curious about what job it has been doing and begin building another way of meeting that need - one that gives you more choice and fits the life and relationships you want now.

That can involve taking small risks and then having somewhere to think about what actually happened. Did the relationship crumble because you said no? Did the mistake become catastrophic because you stopped punishing yourself? Were you able to tolerate not knowing what somebody else thought for a little longer than usual?

The answers will not always be neat. But they give us something more concrete to work with: what actually happens when you try a different response, rather than another explanation of why the old one exists.

Knowing still matters

None of this means insight is pointless.

Being able to recognise a pattern, understand some of what shaped it and see the situations that bring it to life can be enormously useful. It can make something that once felt confusing much easier to name.

But you do not have to keep searching for the perfect explanation until the pattern finally disappears.

Sometimes the work moves from 'Why do I do this?' towards 'What happens when it starts?' and 'What else could be available to me here?'

The old response may still show up. The hook may still catch for a while. But over time, you may find that you have more than one way to respond when it does.

Owen Shiels is a BACP-registered counsellor offering therapy in Morpeth, Berwick-upon-Tweed and online across the UK.