Why Knowing Isn't the Same as Feeling: Therapy & Neuroscience

One of the more frustrating experiences people describe in therapy is the feeling of knowing something intellectually whilst finding that another part of them remains unconvinced. They may understand why they struggle to trust other people, recognise where their inner critic first developed, or see how childhood experiences continue to influence the way they respond to relationships today. They might even notice these patterns unfolding in real time. Yet despite all of this awareness, the emotional pull can remain surprisingly familiar.

For many people, this becomes another reason to judge themselves. If they understand the pattern, surely they should be able to change it. If they know they are safe, why does their body continue to react as though they are not? It can feel as though insight has somehow failed, and self-frustration becomes the prevailing feeling.

I really do believe that awareness is often where change begins. It creates enough space to notice what was previously automatic, allowing us to pause before responding in familiar ways. It can help us recognise that what feels inevitable is often an old pattern rather than an objective truth. Yet, often, just awareness alone does not make the nervous system let go of everything it has learned through years of experience. Increasingly, neuroscience suggests there may be good reason for this.

In The Neurobiological Underpinnings of Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy, neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms brings together decades of research to argue that our minds are built differently from how many of us have been taught to believe. Rather than beginning as rational beings who occasionally become emotional, it appears that our capacity for thought has developed within far older systems concerned with feeling, motivation and survival.

The emotional brain

Emotions often feel like reactions to the world around us, but they are perhaps better understood as the brain's way of 'sorting out' our relationship to it. Fear draws our attention towards danger; curiosity invites us to explore; grief reflects the loss of something important; care pulls us towards those who matter to us. These feelings are not just secondary to thoughts, as they shape what we notice, what we remember, and where our attention naturally settles.

Solms draws on the work of neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, whose research suggested that these emotional systems form some of the oldest foundations of conscious experience. Rather than viewing emotions as irrational interruptions to clear thinking, he argued that they are what give our thinking purpose in the first place. Before we decide what to think about, our brains have already begun evaluating what feels significant, what seems threatening, and what deserves our attention.

This offers a different way of understanding emotional difficulties. Anxiety, shame, emotional withdrawal or relentless self-criticism are understandable responses of a nervous system that has spent years learning what it believes is necessary in order to remain safe, connected or accepted, and aren'tsimply symptoms that have appeared without rational reason.

This perspective does not diminish the distress these experiences can bring, nor does it suggest that they cannot change. If anything, it invites a more compassionate understanding of why they can feel so persistent. Our emotional lives are not random - they reflect countless moments of learning, many of which occurred long before we had the language or awareness to make sense of them.

When the past becomes the present

This understanding integrates well with attachment theory, which has long suggested that our earliest relationships become templates for later ones. A child who is consistently comforted when distressed gradually learns that closeness can bring relief. A child whose emotions are ignored, criticised or met with unpredictability may come to expect something quite different, or perhaps more painfully, not know what to expect at all.

Contemporary neuroscience describes the brain as constantly making predictions about the world. Rather than waiting for events to unfold before deciding how to respond, it continually anticipates what is likely to happen next, drawing upon previous experience to interpret the present. Most of the time this allows us to move through life with efficiency; we do not need to relearn how to recognise a friend's face each morning or wonder whether a staircase will support our weight.

Relationships are no different. Every interaction is understood, at least in part, through the lens of previous relationships. A delayed reply, a disagreement, an unexpected silence or an expression of warmth, may all carry meanings that extend beyond the present moment. We are responding not only to what is happening now, but also to what our brains have learned is likely to happen next.

This may help explain why emotional change often feels slower than intellectual understanding. We may know that our partner is unlikely to reject us after an argument, yet still find ourselves gripped by fear when conflict arises. We may understand that asking for help is reasonable whilst feeling deeply uncomfortable doing so. Awareness has created the possibility of responding differently, but our emotional world is still tending to predictions that once made sense, even if they no longer reflect our current reality.

What this means for therapy

If our emotional lives are shaped by prediction as much as perception, it becomes easier to understand why change rarely arrives simply because we have reached a new insight. Awareness is invaluable. It helps us recognise familiar patterns as they emerge and creates enough space for different choices to become possible. Yet those choices also need to become lived experiences before the brain begins to revise what it expects.

Perhaps this is why therapy can feel so different from simply gaining knowledge about ourselves. Making sense of our history matters, and finding language for experiences that once felt confusing or overwhelming can be profoundly relieving. Yet therapy is not only a process of reflection; it is also a relationship, and relationships are where many of our deepest expectations about ourselves and other people were first learned.

Within the therapeutic relationship, those expectations can gradually be questioned. Difficult feelings are met with curiosity rather than judgement. Misunderstandings can be repaired instead of becoming permanent distance. Vulnerability does not inevitably lead to shame, and boundaries need not threaten connection. None of these moments may seem extraordinary in themselves, yet together they provide the brain with repeated experiences that gently challenge what it has long assumed to be true.

This is one of the reasons I have written previously about the value of longer-term therapy. Lasting change often develops less through dramatic breakthroughs than through the steady accumulation of new relational experiences, allowing older predictions to soften and new possibilities to become believable. It also echoes what I explored in my recent blog on Jessica Benjamin's idea of thirdness. Benjamin suggests that healing is not simply a matter of being understood correctly, but of discovering a relationship in which two people can remain separate minds whilst staying connected. Rather than becoming trapped in familiar relational positions, a shared space begins to emerge where curiosity becomes more important than certainty, and where the relationship itself can be thought about rather than simply reacted to.

From a neuroscientific perspective, if the brain is continually updating its predictions through experience, then relationships in which we feel safe enough to think, reflect and remain emotionally present are gradually reshaping what we expect from connection itself, not just offering comfort.

Why Your Mind Doesn't Always Believe What You Know

Perhaps one of the most compassionate ways of understanding ourselves is to recognise that the gap between what we know and what we feel is not evidence that we are failing. The emotional predictions that shape our lives were rarely formed through a single event or conversation. More often, they developed gradually through hundreds, perhaps thousands, of experiences that taught us what to expect from ourselves, from other people, and from the world around us. It seems reasonable, then, that they are rarely revised all at once.

This is what I find so hopeful about Mark Solms' work. Rather than suggesting that emotions interfere with rational thought, he argues that they are fundamental to the way the mind interprets our experiences. If our emotional lives have been shaped through years of feeling, relationship and prediction, it follows that they remain open to further learning throughout life. The past continues to influence us, but it does not imprison us.

Perhaps this is what people are describing when they say, "I know it in my head, but I don't feel it yet." Rather than reflecting a failure of insight, it may just be that our emotional world is still catching up with what our thinking mind has already begun to understand.

Perhaps this is why change so often arrives so subtly as, over time, our emotional world begins to believe what our thinking mind has understood for a while. No 'big moments' of sudden clarity are necessary in therapy, just continued trust in your beautiful brain!

Further reading

Solms, M. (2018). The Neurobiological Underpinnings of Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 12, 294.

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions.

Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness.