Breaking Patterns in Midlife: Why Knowing Better Isn't Enough

You've done the therapy. You've journalled. You can explain your patterns with real precision — where they came from, what they're protecting, why they formed.

And yet. There you are. Doing it again.

This episode is about the gap between knowing something and actually being free of it. Insight is a beginning. It's not the destination. And once you really accept that — not as a defeat, but as genuinely useful information — it completely changes where you look.

What we cover:

• Why self-awareness isn't the destination (and what is)
• The intention-behaviour gap — why 75% of behaviour change has nothing to do with conscious thought
• Where patterns actually live in the brain and body
• The verbal mind's blind spot — and why you literally cannot see it from inside your own head
• What actually reaches the parts that words can't

This one is for you if you're in midlife, you've done serious inner work, and something still feels stuck. You haven't failed. You've just hit the ceiling of one particular approach.

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→ Colour Signature (€37): jenniferwalter.me/aura-soma-colour-signature

The Scenic Route — weekly episodes on midlife transitions, burnout, and mental health. No shortcuts to the truth. Just slowing down enough to see what's going on.

Transcript

The Kitchen Table Realization

Jennifer Walter 0:00

Hi. So, okay, I wanna tell you about a moment I had recently that I've been sitting with ever since. And we're going into like personal shit story territory, so be warned. So I have to give you a bit of a backstory, but it will be worth it. So hang on. My partner and I, we have a household budget. We had one for years, right? And separately, we each had our own personal budgets. So those two systems were running alongside each other. And it basically just because I needed it to be that to be that way. I needed to know that my money was mine, that I was in control of it, that I was dependent on anyone and wasn't answerable to anyone. We'd done it that way from the beginning because, well, issues, right? And basically I insisted on it quietly but completely due to my story. And the thing is, I knew and I've known for years that one shared budget would actually be so much easier. Not saying like I don't have access to a bank account or anything. Like that's not a story here. We're not going trad-wiv. But like I have known for years that a one-shared budget would probably be simpler, less friction, more clarity. Like the math on this is not really complicated, if we're like brutally honest. My partner knew it, I knew it. We both just sort of moved around it the way you move around furniture that's been in the same place so long, you kind of stopped seeing it, I guess. And then one evening where we're sitting at the kitchen table going through expenses, the usual thing, like a bit tedious, a bit strained, but budget. And I had this moment where I looked at both kind of like spreadsheets open in our laptops and like household personal one. Here's an F1. I am working so much fucking harder than I need to. And I've been for years, and I know it. I'm very well aware of it, and I still can't make it fucking stop. So so that's the moment I've kind of like been sitting with. And because it wasn't news, right? Like I have journaled about money, money stories, and I've talked about it and tend to be close friends with myself in a car on this podcast. Like I know where it comes from. I could give you a very coherent account of exactly why financial economy became so load-bearing for me and when that happened and what it was protecting. And like, I've done that work. And there I was at the fucking kitchen table, doing it anyway. And because I decided to. Just because that's what I do. And the thing that stopped me in my tracks wasn't really the pattern itself. I know that pattern like the back of my hand. I've done it for years, like I said, right? I've turned about it and so on. Stopped me was realizing I was doing it anyway. And I think that's the question I want you to sit with today. Because here's the thing: you didn't think your way into any pattern. You behaved to rigid, right? Over years for a lot of us, hello, midlife, decades, for repeated responses that got encoded so deeply that they now run without you. So why do we assume then that thinking, more insight, more analysis, more naming the thing is the way back out. There's a different way to think about mental health. And it starts with slowing down. Sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home. And that's exactly where we're taking the scenic rout. Hi, I'm Jennifer Walter, host of the Scenic Rad Podcast. Think of me as your sociologist, sister in arms, and rebel with many causes. Together, we're blending critical thinking with compassion, mental health with a dash of rebellion, and personal healing with collective change. We're trading perfectionism for possibility and toxic positivity for messy growth. Each week, we're exploring the path to better mental health and social transformation. And yes, by the way, pretty crystals are totally optional. You ready to take the scenic route? Let's walk this path together. So, hi, welcome back to the scenic rounds. I'm Jennifer Walter, your host for today, and so let's settle in. Okay, so I want you to know this thing about self-awareness, right? We treat like I think one of the big misconceptions is that we treat it like it's a destination. If you can just can name that thing, um, understand where it came from, trace it back to some formative childhood experience or a particularly formative relationship, then you've done the work you can give yourself a check mark, and you should be free for it now, from it now. Yeah, well, no, like newsflash. And of course, most of us have discovered, usually in a very hard way, that it does not work anything like that. And there's actually a term psychology for the gap between knowing something and doing something. I've done an an older episode on it, I will link it. Um, and it's called like intention behavior gap or knowledge doing gap. And there have been lots of studies on this, they have done meta-analysis of this. Um I think they um one uh particular meta-analysis uh synthesized hundreds of studies, and they found that conscious intention, like me really saying I'm doing this well aware and conscious, only accounts for about a quarter, like roughly 28% of whether someone actually changes their behavior. A quarter. The rest, on the three fucking quarters, it's being driven by something that doesn't respond necessarily to insight. So, which you can imagine if that's a bit of a conundrum, if the main tool we're using is insight, and insight is not really that like magic bullet, we think it would be. So statistically, slightly, I don't know, I think this is both slightly devastating and enormously relieving, right? Devastating because it means all that knowing, all the years of freighting and therapy and honest conversations and stuff isn't as powerful as we've been led to believe. But relieving because it means that if you've done the work and you're still stuck, you haven't failed. It's just you kind of like have to switch things up. And again, I mean, 28 is not not like a quarter is not nothing. It's still important, but it's just a piece of the puzzle. So I've been thinking kind of like about what why that is, and the more I sit with it, kind of the more I think it comes down to one thing. We're kind of like we're mixing tools that were not really intended for this purpose, right? We're trying to see something with the same part of the mind that's kind of producing the whole shit show to begin with. So, like, think about it for a second. The mind that created a pattern is the same mind you're using to examine it, and I mean, so we'll probably run into structural limitations there. I think the reason your patterns don't just dissolve the moment you understand them has nothing to do with willpower or commitment or trying hard enough. I think that's that's another big fat capitalistic lie. It has to do with where they live in the brain. So your brain's primary job above anything else, above creativity, about logic is efficiency and safekeeping. It wants to predict what's coming so it can respond as quickly as possible, using as little energy as possible. That's cool, right? It's like it got us to where we are today. And the way it does that is by turning repeated experiences into kind of like automatic programs, grooves, stereotypes. The more you repeat something, the deeper it gets encoded. And the further it moves from the conscious thinking part of your brain into the automatic, instinctive part, that part runs beneath like the awareness. So I mean, it's good, right? Otherwise, we would need to think um about everything we're doing the whole day, all day. It's a slightly different case for um for my not non-neurotypical friends. They're like, yeah. Like, I mean, I'm 41 now and still not really have fully habitualized brushing my teeth every night. So that's that. But anyway, so like this is a brilliant design, right? It's how you can drive a car while like talking to your passenger. It's a how to know, kind of like how the body your body knows to catch like something in the meeting room or something before you kind of like before your mind has decided to like process it. And of course, the other sign of the coin is it's also how you end up in an argument you've had before. Literally, before you kind of knew you were in it, you say yes to something before you've consciously chosen to, you snap back at your partner, child, whoever, before you're like actually processed. You're like, eh. So for me, at that kitchen table, it was the automatic refusal to simplify. Like I hadn't sat down that evening and thought, I will now protect my financial independence. No, that was not, that was not consciously on the menu. That was no decision. Two spreadsheet system just was the way, I don't know. Yeah, exactly on the furniture. It's just there, and I kind of like moved around it because that's what I've always done. So that pattern wasn't stored in my thoughts, it was in my body, in my automatic responses in the daily, in the quality of the feeling that arrives before the language does. Um, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent decades making the case that our deepest behavioral patterns are encoded not as narratives or memories we can access, access and examine, but as bodily signals, felt senses, physiological responses that guide our behavior beneath the level of conscious thought. And I can tell you exactly what that kind of like felt like in my body when the money pattern gets activated. It's it's this particular kind of tightening and the lower belly, abdomen, like a pull, a version of me that gets that almost kind of like gets like it looks calm on the outset, but it's kind of like statuesque, immovable on the inside. Of course, it could look totally different for you, but I'm sure you know what I'm relating to. So I have behaved my way into this pattern, and I was not able to think myself out of it. Right? So my verbal mind has its blind spot. Of course, like we live in a culture that prizes articulation. If you can explain it, think clearly, analyze it, build a concern account of where it comes from and how it functions. We tend to treat that as a mastery of it. But is it like the whole, uh it's not the whole picture though, right? And that's what therapy learning does. And that's great, like not to diminish that or devalue that like absolutely not. But what most of self-development work asks of you is to put it into words, examine the words, find the insight to be free. Psychologist Chris Arguiris had a name for what happens when this kind of like logical consequence doesn't work. You've wrote about a difference between your espouse theory, what you consciously believe about yourself and how you behave, and your theory in use, which is like what your actual behavior reveals, like walking the talk, right? These two things can be in direct contradiction. And the troubling part is that you generally cannot really see that gap from inside your own vertical analytical mind. Again, because the gap is produced by the same system that you're using to look for it. So it's kind of like trying to see the back of your own head without any tools or anything, or different different, you need a mirror, you need a different angle, you need a different mirror. So my spouse's theory around money was something feel it was something like I'm financially capable and independent, I manage my own resources with confidence. I'm true, even. And my theory news, like it turns out if I was closer to financial entanglement with anyone else when someone I completely trust is thread. Those are not the same thing, not even close, right? And I could not have told you the second one directly. I had to watch my own behavior from a slight distance. Kind of like you're a researcher looking at yourself and like a field research experiment and be like, this is interesting. Just kind of like noting what you're doing without like giving it meaning because you don't really know the meaning because you're an observer. So yeah, a blind kind of like, and then fill in that blind spot later. I mean, I talked about money issues and money wounds, money things so many times, and I had great conversations on the podcast here too. And I built such a complete and satisfying narrative around it that the narrative itself had become its shelter, right? I understood it so well, I kind of stopped questioning it. The very fluency of the story was keeping me from seeing what the story was actually doing. Does it make sense? But to that goes, okay, what actually reaches then the parts that words can't? And this is where it's like currently getting really interesting for me because there's actually a pretty existential body of thought on this. Like there is a body of work from therapy, neuroscience, or from Jungian psychology, our therapy somatic work, like there's a huge body of work on that. And they all point in the same general direction. The unconscious doesn't communicate in prose, it communicates in images and symbols and felt senses and metaphor. Anything that kind of like can be processed before a verbal mind. Carl Jung wrote about this extensively, the idea that deeper layers of the psyche, the stuff that's actually running the show, speak a completely different language to the verbal, rational mind. And that you have to meet it in its own language to access it, right? Like, I mean, if you same as traveling, if you go to a place where they have a completely unique native language, they will not understand you in your English or in your German. So somatic approaches, for example, do just show the body, right? Expressive arts, images, movement, narrative approaches. Maybe you've heard of internal internal family systems, kind of like you give a pattern, a character, a voice, a figure, like a figurine or a lego, and you position it on a table, and then you can like examine it. That's kind of like that's the like the the method behind that. And one thing that I personally found very interesting and very useful because I'm a very visual person, that's also probably hello ADHD, is color. Yes, like color psychology is a field, but we know it more usually in the context of consumer psychology, like branding and advertising, how you know, like red is meaning something, and usually, I don't know, wellness bases are green or blue coated, and they're not red, orange, or purple. So, in that sense. Um, there is also um other kind of like work that has been done. We have, for example, Mox Luischer, he's a Swiss psychologist. He developed uh very an early framework of using color preference diagnostically. Um not beyond any doubt, right? Like, I would not like again, humans are too complex to have just one tool to be like, you're this way. So, but what was interesting that his argument was our color choices reveal things we would not have access to through direct verbal self-examination. Because the response when rec like when reacting to a color is too quick, too preconscious for the performative self to intercept it. So you don't have time to pick the right answer, which is kind of the whole point. Your verbal mind is very good at presenting you, at curating, and knowing which answer should sound like the person you're trying to be, right? And that's also, especially if you're neurodiverse and smart, that's why masking is like a piece of cake for you. And color responses doesn't really give you that option that much. Like it it kind of steps in between. And this is what actually brought me to arazoma, the modality of arasoma of color work. I think now I'm really bad at math. I like when I was, I think 20, 30 years, dear lord, 30 years ago, um, when I first heard it, um, I I came about a bit slightly sideways. Like I wasn't really looking for a self-development tool when I was like fucking 12, but I worked, I wasn't I was in therapy at the time, and my therapist, who later became my teacher, she had these really colorful bottles at the wall, and they were just always kind of like speaking to me, and I was just mesmerized, and she kind of caught up on that because I was always staring at the wall instead of her. And uh, so she was like, Well, pick pick three, pick the one you like most. And it was just really interesting what she revealed through the colors, and that kind of stuck with me for years. Um, alongside that, I mean, I've been doing good verbal work. I got gold stars from my therapist. Like I knew my patterns, I could describe them with real precision and accurate like, and yet I was still at a kitchen table with two spreadsheets opening, still doing a thing, still doing a thing, right? Until I kind of like came back and was like, no, okay, we're just gonna really do this differently this time. Because if you always do the same shit and expect a different result, that's not very smart, is it? We're smart. So like I just really came back to looking at my patterns in a way that my verbal mind couldn't interfere. And I also got back to the Arisoma bottles. I remembered them again of like, you know, it's let's let's look at them for this particular pattern. Just kind of like get insight on this before I can kind of like step back into it, like before my mind can step step into it again. So the way it kind of works if you're doing a session, you work with these dual-colored bottles and you really kind of like pick the ones that that I don't know, that you're attracted to. That's really it. You don't know beforehand, you just really choose the one that pulls you. That's kind of like the difference between maybe if you when you have like a modality like taro cards, for example, where someone pulls them for you, like it's really you pick the one you like, the one that pulls you. There is no right or wrong, right? There's really not no way to perform your way to a better result. Like, even if you would know basic color psychology of like red is, I don't know, energetic. Yeah, okay, you could pick that one and then kind of like defeat the system, but again, it's just not like red is energetic at all. So kind of like, you fear me? So uh when I came back to me in mine was not what I would have said about myself, right? Like, what no? There was something in the poll about caring about a particular quantity of self-sufficiency that had become so total it had started to function less as a strength and more like a wall. And the word that kept surfacing from from working with with the colors was trust, not competence, capability, just kind of like the willingness to let something be held by more than just me, and just to really also accept support. And I hadn't said that. I would never say that. You can rather be dead than say that. That's such a big thing to be acceptive of help. So my verbal account of myself has much better PR than that. But when I heard it, something in my chest like kind of did that thing, the quietly unwilling recognition, where you're like, Yeah, bitch, that's true. You just got read. A kind where you know immediately that something true has been said, like before, yeah, before I've decided to agree with it. I've been sitting there with ever since. And yeah, like that's just one of the examples where I came back to it again and again and again. Because I'm like, you know, sometimes, yeah, you can say all the smart things, but it doesn't mean we're actually gonna do the shit. So and I've been doing this work with pe also with clients for a while now, and I've turned it into something I call the color signature. Um, to kind of like that's a great way into it. It's personalized e-magazine based on your birth colours. It's not like a personality test. It's not. It's somewhat like, I mean, it's a modality that when you've tried your your birth chart or your human design, it kind of goes into that category. I it's I always just found it really helpful that you have to kind of like you have a mirror at a slightly different angle, and that it's not a framework you have to fit yourself into. Like you're not operating with labels of any kind. You would never in Aerosoma, you never hear anyone say, Oh, I'm such a color so-and-so, as you would hear maybe in like other modalities, oh, like I'm such a projector, I'm such a man generator. And like that's fine. There's nothing with that, but that aerosoma just doesn't do that at all. So it's much more open, which again makes it harder to access it. That makes it me like you to make meaning out of it. So I, for closing that down, I really want you to leave you with something practical, not just kind of like a list, just one thing, right? The next time you catch yourself in a familiar pattern, before you analyze it, before you explain it to yourself, before you start building up the story of why you're doing this, just pause for a second and notice where it sits in your body, not what it means, just where, where physically where it is, what like what it feels like, the texture of it. Maybe maybe you even get a color for it, right? For me, the money thing, that was a tightening in the like in the abdomen, abdomen going into my chest. And once I could feel that, feel it as a physical sensation happening in my body, that really helped me to shift it. Not everything I fucking wants, like no illusions here, still not a magic bullet. But for me, it really helped me visualize that this pattern lived there and that I could bring conscious thought to this area and kind of like dissolve it. And that's the part of you that actually needs to be met. Like not explained to, not fixed, just kind of like seen. And then maybe you get curious about what it's trying to protect. You from most patterns that look like some form of self-sabotage are actually protection strategies. I would also go so far as that there are actually no self-sabotage patterns, but they're all protection strategies. Some are dated, surely. There were other at the core protection strategies. And of course, once once upon a time, there were a completely rational response to something. Mine was like the two spreadsheet system, white knuckling through final of final independence. It was once exactly the right response to exactly the right circumstances. It was smart, it was necessary, it kept me safe at that point in time. I just kind of kept that pattern running past its use by date. So you don't have to dismantle a pattern to understand it. Sometimes you just need to acknowledge that it's been working very hard on your behalf for a long time and meet it there. And that maybe now there is another way. Maybe now the thing that was protecting you from isn't quite as present as it used to be. And this is not a small thing to recognize. Even if nothing else changes immediately, and it might not. There is something important about finally turning toward the pattern with something other than frustration or shame. To finally acknowledge, okay, it was doing the job. And now we kind of like need new instructions. So all of this to say, I've been thinking a lot lately about the difference between understanding a pattern and actually being free of it. And I'm increasingly convinced that they're not the same thing at all. And understanding is the beginning and really not the destination. We kind of like have to do our scenic ground way of approaching this and sick and zag. Um so if you've spent years doing the work, the reading, the therapy, the journaling, the workshop, and some things still feel stuck, you still do the thing, please don't conclude that you haven't tried hard enough, right? That's no. So I managed my finances into parallel system for years while knowing cognitively that one would be indeed simpler. Knowing wasn't never the problem. The knowing was fine, the pattern just left somewhere knowing couldn't reach. And you didn't think your way into this pattern, you're not going to think your way out of it either. And once you really accept that, not as a defeat, but as a genuinely use for inflammation, it changes where you look for new instructions for next steps and finding a different way in through the body, through symbols, through something that bypasses a verbal mind entirely. Whatever it is for you, that's not giving up on the work you've already done. It builds on it. It's the part the other work was always pointing towards, the place that was waiting just on the other side of things where the actual shift happens, right? So thank you for being here on a scenic road with me to let me share this with you. I still can't really believe that I shared part of my money story because I thought I never fucking will. But now that I'm done, it wasn't really as scary as I thought it was gonna be. So that's another story to learn, another lesson to learn. So if any part of this landed where you share it with one person, you might also need to hear it. Hear it. And if you're interested in your color signature, in your Arizona birth colors, it's kind of like your undercurrent pattern. And for a lot of my lot of customers who bought it was kind of like, oh, that's why I keep doing the thing I'm doing. The link is in the show notes. I would love to do one, customize one for you. And I'll be back soon on a CineGrad with you. Take care. And just like that, we've reached the end of another journey together on the Scenicroot Podcast. Thank you for spending time with us. Curious for more stories or in search of the resources mentioned in today's episode? Visit us at scenigrootpodcast.com for everything you need. And if you're ready to embrace your scenic root, I have got something special for you. Step off the beaten path with my scenic root affirmation card deck. It's crafted for those moments when you're seeking courage, yearning to trust your inner voice, and eager to carve out a path authentically, unmistakably yours. Pick your scenic root affirmation today and let it support you. Excited about where your journey might lead? I certainly am. Remember, the scenic road is not just about a destination, but the experiences, learnings, and joy we discover along the way. Thank you for being here, and I look forward to seeing you on the scenic route again.