You Know Why You Do It. So Why Can't You Stop?
Episode 60 · Laurie Groh, MS LPC SAS with Kristen Holmes, MS, LPC · 2026-08-19
You can explain your patterns better than most people explain their commute — and you still can't stop. Laurie talks with Kristen Holmes, MS, LPC about EMDR, stuckness, and why insight alone stalls out.
Show notes
You know why you do it. So why can't you stop?
You've been in therapy. Maybe for years. You can explain your patterns better than most people can explain their commute. You know where it started, you know what it costs you, you can name it in real time — there I go again — and you still can't stop doing it.
That's not a failure of effort. And it's almost never a failure of insight.
Here's the part that reframed it for me. In this week's episode, my colleague Kristen Holmes, MS, LPC, described stuckness like this: somewhere back there, something happened that you needed and didn't get. And a part of you is still standing in that spot, trying to get it. Over and over. In new relationships, in new jobs, with new people who have nothing to do with the original moment.
So when you set a boundary and your whole body floods with they're going to leave — your logical brain knows better. It genuinely does. It can list the evidence. But your nervous system isn't consulting the evidence. It isn't consulting anything. As Kristen put it: your nervous system doesn't think. It just kicks in. If it thought, we wouldn't have made it this far as a species.
That's why insight alone stalls out. You cannot think your way out of a system that doesn't think.
The back row of the movie theater
This is where EMDR comes in, and Kristen gave the clearest description of it I've heard.
EMDR uses bilateral stimulation — alternating taps, tones, or pulses in your hands — which lets your brain do something close to what it does during REM sleep. Sorting. Connecting. Filing. The thing your brain is already built to do overnight, done on purpose while you're awake.
And what that makes possible is distance. Kristen calls it sitting in the back row of a movie theater. You're watching the film. You can see all of it. But you're not in it. One foot in the present, one foot in the past — and crucially, you're not stranded in the past while it happens.
That distance is not avoidance. It's the opposite. It's what makes it possible to go toward something instead of around it.
Most people don't walk in saying "trauma"
I want to name this because I think a lot of people rule themselves out.
Kristen said most of the clients who come to her for EMDR don't present with trauma at all. They come in with anxiety. Burnout. "We keep having the same fight." I don't feel seen. They're thinkers. Problem-solvers. People who manage everything and everyone. A lot of them are women carrying far more of their household than the household would admit.
Nothing dramatic happened. They just can't put it down.
If you've been waiting to have something bad enough to qualify — that's not how this works.
The forty-five minute problem
Then Kristen said the thing every therapist has felt and almost none of us say out loud.
You're forty, forty-five minutes into a fifty-minute session. And there it is — the real thing, the one underneath. And the part of her brain that's a clinician goes: that was big. And the part that's watching the clock goes: I have five minutes to get this person safely back out the door.
So you put a pin in it. See you next week. Or in two weeks. And by then you're not standing in the same place anymore.
That's the argument for an intensive. Not that it's better therapy — it's a different container. A single block of hours, or a few days, aimed at one thing you've picked in advance, with time to actually finish a thought.
Kristen structures it with a session beforehand to set the intention and take some baseline measures, the working block itself, and a session afterward where you look at the numbers together. And I think that last part matters more than it sounds like it does. When you're doing this work it is genuinely hard to feel that you've moved. Being able to see it is not a small thing.
She also made a point I want to underline: an intensive doesn't replace your therapist. You go do the deep block, and then you take what came up back to the person who already knows you.
What I actually see
Kristen asked me a question near the end — what do I notice when a client of mine comes back from working with her?
Lightness. That's the word that comes out every time. There's an airiness to how they talk.
But the thing I don't say often enough is that I see it in their body before they open their mouth. Distress has a posture. Shoulders drawn up, everything held in tight, or the opposite — flattened, depleted, taking up as little space as possible. When the tension actually releases, you can see it from across the room. They sit differently. I've watched it happen more times than I can count, and it still gets me every time.
If you take one thing
You don't have to book anything to start. Try this instead, this week: the next time your reaction is bigger than the thing in front of you — and you'll know, because some part of you will clock it — don't analyze it. Just note it. That was bigger than this.
That's it. Not why. Not what it means. Just noticing that the size didn't match.
That noticing is the beginning of the distance. It's the back row of the theater, and you can find it on your own.