The Missing Link Between Insight and Lasting Change: A Personal and Professional Perspective
I grew up in Dublin, Ireland, in a home affected by my parents’ alcoholism. Much of my childhood was chaotic and unpredictable, and I don’t remember a lot of it.
As a child, reading and writing were an escape. Later, I found other ways to avoid things I didn’t know how to deal with. I spent years travelling, socialising and abusing alcohol and drugs.
From the outside, I was doing well. I had a successful career and was capable of working hard and achieving my goals. But personally, I was struggling in ways I didn’t understand.
I experienced a lot of anger, yet often felt emotionally numb. During arguments with my partner, I would shut down and react in ways that felt much younger than my actual age.
I became fixated on ambition and success, convinced that money and external achievements would eventually bring me the happiness I desperately wanted.
I constantly told myself, “I’ll be happy when…”
I hadn’t yet understood how much of my happiness I was attaching to things outside myself, or how my early experiences might be influencing the way I navigated my adult life.
For a long time, I thought I was a bad person. I didn’t understand why I behaved the way I did or why I struggled to change patterns I wasn’t proud of.
When I was 26, my long-term relationship ended, and I began a new relationship with the person who is now my husband.
As we built a life together, he witnessed behaviours I hadn’t fully recognised in myself, including patterns that were hurting our relationship. Eventually, I had to confront the reality that something needed to change.
With his support, and through my own commitment to understanding myself, I began making different choices. I stopped partying and taking drugs, confronted things I had spent years avoiding and gradually built a different life.
Over time, I started to experience happiness that wasn’t dependent on achieving something, buying something or escaping my reality, and I also began to understand how my childhood was influencing my adult responses.
I began to understand why certain situations brought out responses I didn’t recognise or know how to manage.
Conflict in my childhood home was frightening and unpredictable. It could involve anger and unpredictability, and it wasn’t expressed or resolved in a way that felt safe.
As an adult, an argument with my partner could trigger a familiar response: I would shut down, almost as though I had become that child again.
Understanding this connection changed how I viewed myself. I wasn’t simply dealing with behaviours I needed to stop.
I was beginning to recognise the survival responses beneath them, and how those responses continued to influence my life long after my circumstances had changed.
This became a turning point in how I understood change.
It led me to a question that now underpins my work: How do we stop our past from controlling our future, and develop the capacity to respond differently when old patterns are activated?
I began to understand why certain situations brought out responses I didn’t recognise or know how to manage.
Understanding the survival response
Growing up in a home affected by parental drinking can mean learning to navigate uncertainty from an early age. A child may become highly alert to other people’s moods, anticipate conflict, prioritise others’ needs or withdraw when things feel overwhelming.
These responses can develop as ways of navigating an environment in which a child has limited control. The nervous system plays an important role in how we detect and respond to potential threat, and earlier experiences can influence what feels threatening or familiar to us.
The difficulty is that responses learned in one environment can continue to arise in another.
A disagreement with a partner in adulthood may not be the same as conflict in a childhood home. Yet if conflict was repeatedly associated with fear or unpredictability, a present-day disagreement may activate a familiar response before we have time to consider what is happening.
We might become defensive, try to regain control, appease the other person or shut down completely.
The circumstances may have changed, but our responses can still be influenced by what we learned when those circumstances were different.
This doesn’t mean everyone who grows up with an alcoholic parent develops the same patterns.
But understanding the role of survival responses can help explain why some behaviours persist, even when someone genuinely wants to change.
Why insight alone isn’t enough
Insight can be transformative. Understanding where a pattern came from can reduce shame and help us see that our behaviour developed for a reason.
But understanding the origin of a response doesn’t automatically change what happens when it is activated.
A client may recognise that they people-please because they learned to prioritise others’ needs.
They may understand why boundaries are difficult or why conflict feels threatening. Yet when those situations arise, they may still find themselves responding in familiar ways.
This is the gap between insight and lasting change.
When a survival response is activated, it can become harder to access the reflection, perspective and considered judgement available to us when we feel more settled. Knowing how we would ideally like to respond is not the same as being able to access that response in the moment.
This is why telling someone to think differently, set better boundaries or stop repeating a pattern may not be enough. They may already understand what needs to change. The missing piece may be developing the capacity to respond differently when the familiar response arises.
For practitioners, this invites us to look beyond what a client understands about their behaviour and consider what happens when that behaviour is activated, and what might help them regain access to choice.
The aim isn’t to eliminate survival responses or remain calm in every difficult situation. It is to develop the awareness and capacity to recognise these responses, navigate them and respond with greater intention.
Understanding where a pattern came from can reduce shame and help us see that our behaviour developed for a reason.
From insight to lasting change
Our nervous systems are designed to respond to our surroundings, and there will be times, maybe even daily, when stress, uncertainty or perceived threat influence how we feel and behave.
The work is about developing greater awareness of these responses and building the capacity to navigate them differently.
My lived experience and professional work have shaped the way I approach this through AEQUUS.
I believe lasting change involves more than identifying patterns or understanding the past. It involves developing the capacity to navigate familiar survival responses, alongside building a foundation that supports a different way of living.
For me, this wasn’t one moment of realisation that changed everything. It was a process of understanding myself, accepting support and gradually making different choices. My past didn’t disappear, but my relationship with it changed. I began to feel less defined by the behaviours and responses I had once struggled to understand.
Adult children of alcoholics do not have to be defined by their childhoods. The responses they developed made sense in the context of their experiences, but those responses do not have to determine every future choice.
We cannot change what happened to us. But we can work towards changing how those experiences continue to influence our lives.
For me, that is the missing link between insight and lasting change: developing the capacity to move beyond familiar survival responses and access more of who we are capable of being.
Explore the white paper
In The Missing Link Between Insight and Lasting Change, I explore the connection between early experiences, nervous system responses and the patterns we carry into adulthood.
The white paper examines why insight alone may not be enough to create lasting change, and how practitioners can support clients in moving beyond awareness towards meaningful, lasting change.
Read the white paper: The Missing Link Between Insight and Lasting Change.
