When Self-Awareness Isn't Enough

Ok, so first, I'll address the elephant in the room. I totally neglected this blog since my first post!

Life, ya know?

But also, truthfully, something felt like it was missing. I wanted to get more focused in my work, but was lacking the motivation. Working strictly via telehealth can be lonely and a lack of peer support had me feeling stuck.

Until, I came across something that just made so much sense to me. Grad school teaches us basic counseling with an ethical and multicultural lens for therapy. It's definitely necessary, but it should not be, in my opinion, the stopping point for any of us. So I've joined consult groups and specialized trainings, and would like to share some updated approaches I am gaining confidence in.

Enter: Coherence Therapy, Experiential and Somatic Work

Hear me out - You’ve read the books. You’ve done the journaling. You’ve probably even had some great therapy sessions where you understood your patterns; why you people-please, why you shut down, why that one rejection hit so hard.

But somehow, even with all that insight, the same emotional reactions keep showing up.

You still second-guess yourself. You still feel a lump in your throat when someone is disappointed in you. You still walk away from hard conversations feeling like the bad one.

It’s not because you’re broken. And it’s not because you’re not trying hard enough.

It might be because you’re doing all the work in your head, and the part of you that’s hurting lives somewhere deeper.

Cognitive insight is powerful - but it has limits.

Many therapy approaches focus on helping you think differently about your problems. And sometimes, that’s exactly what’s needed. But for some people, especially those with attachment wounds, chronic self-doubt, or early emotional neglect, change doesn’t come just from understanding what’s happening. Because your emotional reactions weren’t formed logically - they were formed experientially.

You didn’t learn you were “too much” through reason. You felt it in a thousand subtle ways. In the silences, the tensions, the moments no one named.

So what does therapy look like when it goes deeper?

In my practice, I beginning to pull from an approach called Coherence Therapy, which focuses on process that helps you uncover and revise the emotional truths underneath your struggles.

We start by getting curious. Together, we explore the feeling beneath the reaction. The emotional logic of your symptoms.

For example, a client might say:

“I know I don’t need to apologize for everything... but I still feel like I have to.”

Instead of trying to override that behavior, Coherence Therapy asks: What deeper belief is driving that compulsion to apologize? When did it first make sense? Often, we uncover a powerful emotional memory: “If I don’t take the blame, people will leave.”

And then, crucially, we don’t argue with it. We feel it. We honor its roots. And over time, we help the nervous system update its expectations about what’s true now.

This is what makes Coherence Therapy feel different: it doesn’t fight your symptoms, it listens to them. It trusts that your mind is doing something meaningful, even if it no longer serves you.

If insight hasn’t been enough, you’re not alone.

So many of my clients come in thinking they should be able to “logic” their way out of pain.

They’ve been praised for their intelligence, their awareness, their emotional vocabulary.

But change doesn’t always happen at the level of words.

It happens when we turn toward the feelings that have been waiting to be heard. When we stop managing symptoms and start making sense of them.

If that’s the kind of work you’re ready for, I’d be honored to walk with you.