"Now I understand why I do this": the aha moments of looking into the past

There is a moment that happens at almost every genogram session, and I always recognise it by three signs: the person falls silent, leans forward towards the sheet of paper and says something short. “Wait.” Or: “You’re kidding me.” Or simply: “Ah.”

A few seconds later comes the sentence that this session exists for in the first place. “All three women in this line were on their own with three children.” “My mother was exactly the age I am now when she did that.” “This anger isn’t even mine.” And then, often, tears — not from sadness, but from relief.

In this piece I write about those moments: what insight is, why it brings such powerful relief, which insights come up most often and — just as importantly — why insight on its own does not change everything. Because that is precisely the trap that is easiest to fall into when you leave a session feeling that you have resolved something.

Insight is a shift of view, not new information

The first thing to understand: insight is almost never about a fact you didn’t already have.

Almost always you knew all the necessary pieces beforehand. You knew your grandmother was left on her own. You knew you were nine when your parents separated. You knew when your mother had her first child. None of that is new. What is new is that these pieces are suddenly on the same sheet and within the same timeline — and when that happens, they assemble themselves into a shape that wasn’t there before.

This is exactly what cognitive scientists who have studied insight in the laboratory describe. Kounios and Beeman (2014) describe insight as a sudden restructuring: the solution doesn’t creep up gradually, it appears whole, once existing information is rearranged into a new structure. What is characteristic is the suddenness, and the sense of certainty that accompanies it — after an aha moment people rarely say “maybe”. They say “that’s it”.

That is why the genogram is such an effective tool. It doesn’t bring you new facts about your family. It brings a different arrangement of the ones you already have — and the arrangement is everything.

Why insight brings such relief

When people describe what they felt in that moment, the same word almost always comes up: relief. Let’s look at where it comes from.

First, because it lifts the personal blame. As long as a pattern looks like a personal flaw, you carry it alone. “I’m too sensitive.” “I don’t know how to be in a relationship.” “There’s something wrong with me.” When you see that same pattern as a line running across three generations, the description changes: this isn’t a flaw, it’s a strategy that once saved someone’s life. Blame gives way to context. The sentence I hear most often in those minutes goes roughly like this: “So I’m not mad — this has a history.”

Second, because naming settles the body. This isn’t a metaphor. Research on labelling emotions shows that the simple act of putting a feeling into words lowers the amygdala response and increases activity in the regions that regulate emotion (Lieberman et al., 2007). Unnamed anxiety is diffuse and therefore boundless. Anxiety that has a name, a year and an origin has a shape — and what has a shape can be carried.

Third, because the story becomes connected. Psychologists who study narrative identity find that the coherence of a personal narrative — the sense that things in your life meaningfully connect to one another — is linked to better wellbeing, and that this coherence increases over the course of therapy (Adler, 2012). Insight is really the moment when a seam that had been missing gets stitched into your story.

And fourth, because you are no longer alone. This is the aspect research finds harder to measure, but in the room it is very obvious. As long as the pattern is your personal problem, you are alone with it by definition. When it turns out that several people carried it before you — some of them in considerably harder circumstances — the sense of loneliness changes. Suddenly you are part of a line. The line isn’t always pleasant company, but it is company.

The aha moments I hear most often

Every family is its own story, yet a few insights recur so often that I can describe them as families of insight.

“My anxiety has a name and a year.” Someone lives their whole life with the sense that they have to be ready for the worst. On the sheet a year appears in which the family lost everything — the house, the income, a person — and the generation after that grew up in a household where safety was in question every single day. Suddenly the anxiety is no longer their personal defect. It is the continuation of a response that was once necessary. I have written about how this is passed on psychologically and also biologically in the piece on intergenerational transmission.

“I’m repeating my grandmother’s decision.” Coincidences of life stages are among the most surprising things a genogram reveals. The same age at marriage, at separation, at moving house, at the decision to stop visiting someone. Many people resist this at first — “surely that’s just a coincidence” — and then fall silent for a long while.

“My role in the family prepared me for my profession.” This one is often the most moving. People who were the comforters, the mediators, the reasonable ones in their family often end up in professions where they care for others. That isn’t a bad thing — often it is a gift. It becomes a burden when it is the only way you are allowed to exist. More on this in the piece on roles in the family.

“This anger isn’t even mine.” Sometimes it turns out that someone is carrying an emotion that had no owner in the family. Anger that no one was allowed to express often settles in the person who is most sensitive — and they carry it as their own. Once it has an address, it can be set down. I look at a related theme in the piece on emotional inheritance.

“Now I understand why my partner and I always get stuck at the same point.” When two patterns meet, a third one is created. This insight often comes to people who came for their own sake and leave with a better understanding of the relationship — which I write about in the piece on why a partner resembles a parent.

What all these insights have in common is their shape: something you experienced as a personal characteristic turns out to be a response to something that came before you. This is not an escape from responsibility — responsibility for what you do with the pattern now remains entirely yours. But it does lift the weight of the past, and lifting that weight releases energy you have until now been spending on blaming yourself.

When the insight touches your parents

What happens to the relationship with parents at the moment of insight deserves a chapter of its own — because it almost always goes in a direction people do not expect.

Many people arrive with a reservation: “I don’t want to go looking for someone to blame among my parents.” I understand that, and I tell them a genogram is not an indictment. And then almost always the opposite of what was expected happens: judgement softens. When you see on paper how much your mother had lost before she turned twenty-five, or what your father was watching as a ten-year-old, a good many things you experienced as a lack of love turn out to be a lack of capacity. These two are not the same, and the difference is not a small one.

What matters, though, is what this insight is not. It is not a demand that you must now forgive. Understanding and forgiveness are not the same thing and they do not necessarily arrive together; some things can be understood and still leave you angry, and that is legitimate. I have written about this difference in the piece on apology and forgiveness.

For some people a third thing happens: the insight first releases anger that had not been possible to feel at all before. Only when you see what should have been yours can you feel what was missing. That too is a step forward, even if at first it doesn’t seem like one.

Why insight on its own does not change everything

And now to the most important part of this piece, which I am writing precisely because honesty here seems essential to me.

Insight is wonderful, but it is not a cure. Many people leave a session with the strong sense that they have finally resolved something — and three weeks later ask, disappointed, why exactly the same thing is still happening in their relationship, even though they now know where it comes from.

The answer is simple and uncomfortable at the same time: knowing and being able to do are two different things. A pattern that took three generations to build and that your nervous system has been rehearsing for forty years does not dissolve at the moment of recognition. Recognition is a map; the walking is still walking.

Research into insight in psychotherapy confirms this too. A meta-analysis reviewing the link between insight and therapy outcome found a moderate but reliable association (Jennissen et al., 2018) — moderate, not complete. Insight contributes to change, but it is not a sufficient condition for it.

Why not? Because emotional learning is not overwritten by argument. Researchers connecting psychotherapy with the mechanisms of memory point out that deeply inscribed emotional expectations change only when the old experience is reactivated and you have a different experience alongside it — not when you merely think about it (Lane et al., 2015). That is exactly why therapy is not a lesson. And it is why the point of working on yourself is not to know more about yourself, but to act differently in familiar situations.

On top of that, the relief after an insight has a shelf life. The first few days are often light — you feel unburdened, things are clear, everything seems in order. Then life comes back, the pattern happens live for the first time and there is a moment many people experience as disappointment: “But I understood it — why is this still happening?” At this point it is important to know that nothing has gone wrong. Insight never promised it wouldn’t happen again. It promised that this time you would know what you were looking at — and that is precisely the condition for everything that follows.

There is even a particular trap I call intellectualisation: a person can explain their pattern brilliantly, with their ancestors’ names and dates, and that very explanation becomes a new form of avoidance. As long as you are talking about the pattern, you don’t have to be in it.

How to turn insight into change

So what do you do with what you have learned? Three steps, always the same and always simple — which does not mean easy.

• Notice the pattern live. Not while thinking about the past, but in the moment it is happening. “There, I’ve taken on all the responsibility again.” “There, I’ve withdrawn again instead of speaking up.” For the first few weeks after an insight the only task is observing — with no requirement that anything be different.
• Run one small, concrete experiment. Not “from now on I’ll be different”, but “on Friday at the meeting I’ll be the first to give my opinion”. Research on planning behaviour shows that concrete plans of the form “when X happens, I will do Y” are considerably more effective than general intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999). When it comes to setting boundaries and voicing an opinion, the piece on how to speak your mind also helps.
• Repeat it often enough. A new response becomes the default only through repetition, and along the way there will be plenty of falling back into the old one. Falling back is not proof that the insight wasn’t real. It is part of the process — which I write about in the piece on breaking the cycle of patterns.

What happens in the weeks and months after a session — including when it makes sense to talk to your family about an insight and when it doesn’t — I have described in detail in the piece on life after insight.

What if there is no insight

Some sessions do not end with an aha moment. A person leaves with a perfectly good map, without any dramatic shift, feeling somewhat disappointed. Let me say three things.

First, insight is often late. Very often it arrives three days later, while driving, while washing up, on waking. The mind keeps working on the pieces even when you are not.

Second, sometimes instead of insight something quieter and equally valuable happens: a change of tone. People often notice that they no longer speak about their mother in the same voice as before. That is a shift, even if it has no dramatic moment.

Third, sometimes the map shows that the theme is deeper than a single session can hold. That too is useful information — at that point we talk about what comes next, which I write about in the piece on the genogram as an introduction or a standalone experience.

Where this happens

Aha moments are not a matter of technique and I cannot force anyone into them. What I can do is create the conditions: enough time, enough safety, enough questions and enough silence after them. That is really all I do.

You will find the ninety-minute session “A Look into the Past” among my services, and we can arrange it through contact. If you would like to know how the session goes minute by minute, read the piece on how it unfolds.

And if at the end you say only “ah” and nothing else — know that this is entirely enough. Some of the deepest changes begin with a single word, spoken quietly, while looking at a sheet of paper.