JUDY EMERSON Author and Personal Coach

Want to change your life? Get out of a bad relationship, a depression, a dead-end job, a cycle of addiction you can’t break? Get off one track, on to another? Longing for a better life?

Years ago, I came across a Marcel Proust quote: “The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes”. Desperately wanting change, I depended on that idea for a long time. I was a chronic “overthinker”, compulsively trying to UNDERSTAND, coping by living in my head. It seemed to me that to be able to SEE previously unseen reasons for why things were as they had always been, lit up a whole world of better possibilities. “Understanding” felt like new eyes and allayed some old anxieties.

But life kept showing me the limits of those new eyes. Focusing through those lenses, seeing the world differently, thinking differently, were my relationships working better than before? The world, and the people in it, kept veering off in directions I hadn’t approved. Was the world ever going to change?

Change is rarely comfortable. Wanting something different, I’m frequently unsettled—will I revert to strategies I developed in the midst of old chaos and trauma? I’ve invested so much time, therapizing myself, analyzing, compulsively seeking to UNDERSTAND why things happened. I congratulated myself for my insight, which relieved anxiety for a while.

But the other day I heard the phrase: “hyper-awareness that never graduates to action”—DOH! That’s a perfect description of my default behavior, left to my own devices. 

 “When you pray, move your feet,” someone said. Oh. MY own feet. Get off your butt, take a step. My own steps are the only thing I’m in control of.

My insights didn’t keep me from falling into some pretty deep holes over the years. Insights didn’t stop my same old proneness to collapsing boundaries with people who pushed them, or overexplaining myself—people-pleasing or using food (my drug of choice) for comfort (a dopamine hit) addictively.

Addiction: using an ineffective tool to solve a problem, getting a predictably bad result, and persistently relying on the same strategy anyway. Oops, that’s also one of the definitions of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

For me, food was comfort as a kid, inside a chaotic, traumatizing environment. Overeating never stopped bad things from happening—only gave me a fleeting positive sensation as it blocked my attention to painful truths. Numbing my distress helped me survive back then. But my continuing use of that strategy kept me repeating the same cycles. It looks like I turned mental analysis into another addiction. Insights gave me a temporary dopamine hit, but I was still stuck. Insights weren’t enough.

Now I’m convinced that psychological insight is a staging ground—preparing me to act differently, to launch and sustain a healthier way of living. I still get uncomfortable when faced with circumstances that trigger familiar feelings—of being dismissed, disrespected, overruled, etc. Discomfort triggers the default response (the same old action) to shut down my discomfort by means of the preferred addiction. Repeating the use of that strategy reinforces my ancient (and mistaken) belief that a cookie—or insert drug-of-choice here—is the solution I need.

Relying on that “drug” was the best I could figure out back then, but my insights have been telling me for years I’m only repeating a lie—that “just this one time won’t matter”, even when I know that cookie, and the ones that follow, are only blocking the signal directing me to the off-ramp from craziness.

It’s insanity to keep on driving into the same familiar, self-destructive destination. Do I tell myself it’s only ME I’m hurting? Even if that were true, do I think hurting myself is a sane way to live? It’s insanity to lie to myself and then dislike the liar—who is me. I have plenty of experience with liars, and the outcome has never been good for me. This is a setup for self-loathing, which only prompts the next reach for a forbidden cookie.

For today, sanity means noticing that my very best thinking, left unsupervised, still gets me into the same old jams. After more than enough painful episodes, I’m humbled. I’m learning to listen to ideas wiser than my own (until I predictably forget again, as my ego tries to re-take the steering wheel). So, beyond those insights that I have treasured, I discover I need some kind of system for checking in with somebody smarter than me, to help me recognize when I’ve dropped back into that old rut again. For me, that’s my higher power, and the twelve step program.

And once I recognize the truth, I have to DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

Each of those moments when I’m unsettled, uncomfortable, and instantly jonesing for a cookie (or whatever)—is the gateway inviting me to an ACTION that initiates to the change I’ve needed all along.