Insight Is Useless
I used to view therapy as the search for the cognitive holy grail - that perfect insight or historical revelation that would put everything in context and finally liberate me. But this pursuit is futile for a simple reason: insight is dependent on level of consciousness, and level of consciousness is basically static.
Healing and growth are not linear, but imagine for a moment that your degree of consciousness (your feeling of joy, expansion and presence) was represented by a building with ten floors. Perhaps you live most of your life on Floor 3, but during a week-long meditation retreat you enjoyed a long stay at Floor 6, or you experienced a sudden loss and descended to your Ground Floor. Each floor comes with its own lens to view the world through and brings its own content, both positive and negative. That groundbreaking insight you’ve just had about your mother is not a miracle, you’ve simply climbed high enough that this is what the terrain looks like.
If you look around and don’t like what you see there is hope, but the answer is not deeper exploration of the floor you’re on. Instead, focus on transcendence of that floor. It’s worth noting that you cannot think your way into higher levels, or imagine what they’re like. In fact, you cannot even really remember a past experience at a higher level. The memory will be flattened and downgraded to fit your current level of consciousness, like a 4K video being displayed on a 1080p television.
Human beings contain an extremely strong homeostatic balance, physically and psychologically. We will fight tooth and nail to defend our cherished beliefs, even if they torture us. This is because they are the building blocks of our reality - of absolutely critical importance to our survival. The fantasy that a sudden insight can save us imagines that we can, with relative effortlessness, vault into a totally foreign way of processing reality - usually through willpower and the cunning of the thinking mind. This is not possible.
However, healing modalities like somatic psychotherapy and psychedelic therapy offer an opportunity to shift your state before you have a new insight. This approach relies on the body and spirit to affect the mind, rather than the other way around. This has been personally groundbreaking for me and many of my clients.
