How Therapy Works
Understanding a pattern and changing it are two different skills.
A lot of clients arrive already able to explain their pattern in detail: where it came from, what triggers it, why it happens. That understanding is genuinely useful, and it's also common for it to coexist with the pattern continuing anyway.
Most patterns worth addressing in therapy live in the nervous system, not just in thought. Insight lives in the thinking brain, while the reaction itself often gets triggered faster than thought can intervene. Knowing why you do something doesn't automatically install a different response in the moment it matters.
Change tends to come from repeated, felt experience, not just explanation, which is part of why the relationship between client and therapist matters so much in this kind of work. Practicing a different response in a real relationship, including the therapeutic one, tends to do what insight alone can't.