Why Do I Know What to Do, But Still React Differently Under Pressure?

One of the more frustrating experiences people bring into therapy is knowing what they should do, but finding that knowledge remarkably difficult to access at precisely the moment they need it.

You might know that becoming defensive during an argument is unlikely to help, yet hear yourself becoming defensive anyway. You may understand perfectly well that the email you have just received is not a catastrophe, but still feel your body responding as though something significant has happened.

Perhaps you have learned strategies for managing anxiety, anger or stress. When you sit quietly and think about them, they make complete sense. But when pressure arrives, the strategies seem to disappear.

Then, afterwards, you look back and wonder: Why did I do that when I knew better?

I have encountered versions of this question throughout many years of working as a psychotherapist. What interests me increasingly is that we may sometimes be asking the wrong question. Instead of asking why we didn’t know what to do, perhaps we should ask:

Why wasn’t what we knew available to us when we needed it?

Knowing Something Is Not the Same as Being Able to Access It

We tend to think of our psychological capacities as relatively fixed possessions.

If I am an emotionally intelligent person, I possess emotional intelligence. If I am thoughtful, I possess the capacity to think things through. If I have good judgement, I possess good judgement.

But human beings don’t function quite like that. Our access to our own capacities changes.

Think about the difference between making a decision when you are rested and relaxed and making exactly the same decision when you are exhausted, frightened, angry or under considerable pressure.

You haven’t suddenly become a different person. Nor have you lost your intelligence. But the amount of yourself that is available to participate in the decision may have changed considerably.

This distinction has become increasingly important in my work because it helps explain something people often find confusing about themselves.

They are not necessarily lacking insight.

Sometimes they cannot access that insight under the conditions in which they most need it.

What Happens to Us Under Pressure?

When something feels threatening, uncertain or emotionally significant, our psychological world can narrow surprisingly quickly. Attention becomes more selective. The body becomes activated. We may become more sensitive to certain signals and less receptive to others. Old patterns can become compelling.

• Someone who ordinarily considers several perspectives may suddenly become certain there is only one explanation.
• Someone capable of expressing themselves thoughtfully may struggle to find words.
• Someone who understands their partner’s point of view may temporarily lose access to that understanding during an argument.
• And someone who knows perfectly well that they are safe may nevertheless experience a powerful bodily sense that they are not.

This is particularly relevant in trauma work.

Traumatic experiences are not simply historical facts that we remember. They can leave patterns of emotional, physiological and psychological responding that become activated by present circumstances.

This is one reason approaches such as EMDR therapy can involve working with more than conscious understanding alone. EMDR uses processes including bilateral stimulation as part of a structured therapeutic approach intended to help the processing of distressing memories and associated responses.

A person may intellectually understand that something happened years ago while part of their emotional or physiological system continues to respond as though the danger remains much closer.

Understanding matters.

But understanding alone does not always determine what becomes available to us in the moment.

The Difference Between Possessing a Capacity and Having Access to It

Over recent years, I have become increasingly interested in a distinction I describe as the difference between possession and access. There are psychological capacities that we may demonstrably possess but cannot always access equally.

Consider presence.

Most of us are capable of noticing what is happening around and within us. But under pressure, attention can contract. We can become captured by a thought, emotion, memory or anticipated outcome.

Or consider our relationship with emotion.

We may ordinarily be capable of experiencing emotion without being entirely governed by it. Yet under particular conditions an emotion can become so dominant that it begins organising perception, thought and behaviour.

Meaning can change too.

An unanswered message is simply an unanswered message until our mind turns it into evidence that someone is angry with us, rejecting us or that something has gone wrong.

And then there is coherence: our ability to hold different pieces of information together sufficiently well to make sense of what is happening and choose a considered response.

These capacities don’t necessarily disappear under pressure. They become more or less available. That distinction can be enormously useful because it moves us away from the rather unforgiving conclusion that we somehow “should have known better”.

Quite often, we did know better. The more interesting psychological question is what happened to our access to what we knew.

Why Therapy Is Not Simply About Learning More

This is also one reason psychotherapy cannot be reduced to giving people information.

Most clients I meet already know an extraordinary amount about themselves. Some have read extensively. Some understand the origins of their difficulties. Some can describe their attachment patterns, triggers, childhood experiences and coping strategies in considerable detail.

And all of that can be useful. But change often requires something more than accumulating further explanations.

It involves developing a different relationship with what happens inside us when our usual availability narrows.

• Can I notice that I am becoming activated before the activation completely determines what happens next?
• Can I experience an emotion without immediately having to obey it?
• Can I remain curious about what something means rather than accepting the first interpretation my mind produces?
• Can I hold enough of myself together under pressure to make a choice rather than simply enact a pattern?

These are very different questions from simply asking whether somebody understands themselves.

Psychological Availability

This distinction has also become part of work I have been developing outside my clinical practice through Psychernetics, which explores human intelligence and what happens to our ability to access it under changing conditions.

I use the term Available Intelligence to describe an important aspect of this.

The question is not simply how intelligent, self-aware or emotionally capable somebody is. It is how much of that intelligence remains available when it is actually required.

Within Psychernetics I explore this through four capacities: Presence, Embodied Emotion, Meaning and Coherence.

Presence concerns our capacity to remain sufficiently aware of what is actually happening.

Embodied Emotion concerns our ability to experience and use emotional information without either disconnecting from it or becoming completely governed by it.

Meaning concerns the interpretations, assumptions and significance through which we understand experience.

Coherence concerns our ability to bring information together into sufficiently integrated understanding and action.

None of these capacities is simply “good” or “bad”. More importantly, none of them is perfectly available all of the time.

Human beings fluctuate.

The interesting question is what happens to these capacities when circumstances change.

A Free Way to Explore Your Own Pattern

As part of this work, I developed the Psychernetic Inventory of Intelligence Availability, or PIIA-1.

It is a free 32-question self-assessment designed to explore the current availability of these four capacities.

It isn’t an IQ test and it doesn’t give you a personality “type”.

Instead, it looks at the particular configuration formed by your current levels of Presence, Embodied Emotion, Meaning and Coherence. Because each capacity can sit within one of four availability states, there are 256 possible configurations.

The purpose isn’t to put another label on you. It is to give you another way of asking:

What tends to remain available to me, and what becomes harder to access?

You can complete the free PIIA-1 assessment at Psychernetics here:

Take the free PIIA-1 psychological availability assessment

Becoming More Available to Ourselves

Perhaps the most useful thing about thinking in terms of availability is that it changes the question we ask after difficult moments.

Instead of:

Why am I like this?

or:

Why do I keep doing this when I know better?

we can become more curious.

• What happened to me in that moment?
• What became less available?
• What captured my attention?
• What happened in my body?
• What meaning did I give the situation?
• What did I lose access to that I normally possess?

Those questions don’t excuse behaviour or remove responsibility for our choices. Quite the opposite. They give us somewhere useful to begin. Because psychological change is not only about accumulating more insight.

Sometimes it is about becoming increasingly able to access what is already within us when life becomes difficult.

And, after nearly thirty years of working therapeutically with people, I think that distinction matters enormously.